This was Holman Sharpe, a pioneer scout from a farm in New Hampshire. He was not summering away from his troop; he had no troop. Nor was he, as so many of those boys were, the single remaining member of a disintegrated troop. He was a registered pioneer. In the lonely section where he lived there were no boys to form a troop. So he had sent to National Headquarters for blanks and had been enrolled as a pioneer scout, which was a very different thing from the unattached scouts of Pioneer Row. This boy went in for scouting with both hands and feet and the easy-going Danny was greatly amused by him. He was one of those boys who take themselves very seriously. Such boys are found in schools and colleges, wrestling with their studies to the exclusion of everything else, forgetting life in the interest of learning. Scouting is not a good field in which to do this. There is nothing about scouting to study; it is just a form of life. But this boy conceived it as a sort of curriculum and the Handbook as a sort of text book. He was certainly born to be a student. It is not so certain that he was born to be a scout. To this serious New England boy, Temple Camp was a sort of university, the merit badges all representing study courses. He was out for promotion; he did not care so much about fun. His Handbook was all marked up with memorandums of his progress and notes of his plans. He was a canny boy and did not forget about the future. He even took into consideration the time when he would be too old for scouting and had his plans all made for joining the _Veteran Scout Association_. In an envelope he had three dollars laid away with which to buy the veteran pin several years hence. Everything in the Handbook was law and gospel to him and he had set about the strenuous labor of squeezing it dry. He would get his money's worth at Temple Camp by doing every single thing that was even casually suggested in the scouting program. He had never had any give and take with other boys and he could not conceive of scouting being carried lightly and airily, as Roy Blakeley of the Silver Foxes, carried it. He went in for scouting with a vengeance. What Danny did, he did easily, and he was highly entertained by the way Holman would come in carrying his Handbook and some maps and papers, and sit down on his cot, which was next to Danny's, to go over them and enter notes in his field book. "Busy with your homework?" Danny would quiz. "I've just hiked fourteen miles," Holman answered him one day. "I'm going to write it up to-night, and there's test four all finished on the first class badge. If you took all the miles you've used up flopping around in the woods to-day, I bet they'd run over fourteen and you'd have a seven mile double to lay up on your first class tests. I mixed some dough and cooked my dinner, too, while I was off, so I'm claiming the cooking badge on that. I don't know whether I'll get it or not."