Boy Scouts of America -- Juvenile fiction; Camps -- Juvenile fiction; Children's stories; Hiking -- Juvenile fiction
Honest, I’d rather run the whole Silver Fox Patrol than try to run
Hervey Willetts. But as we sculled around I could see that even that
other fellow was kind of getting to like him.
Hervey sat perched up on the little three-cornered seat in the bow with
his legs dangling out into the water on either side and Sandwich lying
on the bottom near him. He looked, I don’t know,—I just had to laugh
when I looked at him.
I said, “Herve, after all this you’re not going to spoil everything, are
you? We had a good time to-day and we’re going to have a whole lot more.
You’ve got a medal coming to you for what you did to-night. You were
called a liar and now a couple of hours after that you can have the
whole camp eating out of your hand, Mr. Arnoldson and all. This fellow,
you’ve captured him too, and he’ll go the limit to help you. Won’t you?”
I said.
“Nobody can say I have a streak of yellow and get away with it,” the
fellow said.
“For goodness’ sake don’t mix things up now when everything’s coming
your way,” I said to Hervey. “They’ll wrap Temple Camp up for you and
send it home prepaid. Will you let _me_ see Mr. Arnoldson and tell him?”
He said, “Blakeley, I’m through with this outfit for good. I beat it
to-night.”
“While everybody’s shouting for you?” I asked him.
“Precisely, exactly,” he said. “I might have joined a circus this
summer——”
“Goodnight!” I laughed.
“Instead of hanging around here and being insulted,” he said.
“You should worry about being insulted,” I told him. “If you care as
little about being insulted as you care about most things, especially
risking your life, it won’t take you long to forget it. Besides when you
threw an old tomato at the bulletin board so you wouldn’t be able to
read one of the rules on it, wasn’t that insulting the camp? If you’d
only forget insults as easy as you forget rules, gee, I’d be satisfied,”
I told him.
He just said, “Insults I can never forget, Blakeley.” All the while he
was trying to balance the boat hook on his nose.
“You make me tired,” I told him.
When we got to the landing he said, “Come on if you want to see the
grand finale; come on, Wilkins.”
The sharpy kind of hung back. He said, “My name is Tripler.”
“I knew it would be something about tripping,” Hervey said.
“Believe me, you’re the one that’s going to trip,” I told him.
He just said, “Come on, finalehopper, if you want to see the grand
finale. Absolutely nothing can happen to you. Come ahead, Blakeley, if
you want to see me wind up in a blaze of glory.”
I knew he was going to do some crazy fool thing, how could I stop him? I
could see that Tripler, or whatever his name was, was kind of nervous,
but Hervey had him following like a little dog. That’s Hervey. He went
sauntering up through Cabin Lane, swinging his stick and shouting:
“Early to bed and early to rise,
And you’ll never meet any regular guys.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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