"I mean a boy scout," explained the other, kindly. "Like my troop there"--with a jerk of the head toward the khaki-clad column, now halted a block away on the edge of the sidewalk. Now that radiant, sunlit look--the glowing eyes and the flashing teeth adding to the shine of hair and brows and lashes. "_Boy_ scout!" cried Johnnie. Hawkeye was gone. Another vision stood in his place. It was Johnnie himself, gloriously transformed. "Oh, gee! Oh, my goodness! Oh, Mister! Oh, _could_ I? I'm crazy to! _Crazy!_" The usual crowd of the curious--boys mostly--was now pressing about the leader and Johnnie, the two or three grown people in it peeping over the heads of the younger ones. But the young man seemed not to mind; and as for Johnnie, if honors were coming his way on the open street, what could be better than to have a few onlookers? "Of course you'll be one," declared the leader, heartily. He produced a pencil and a businesslike notebook. There was a pair of glasses hanging against his coat on a round, black cord. These he adjusted. "Name and address?" he asked; "--then I'll drop in to see you, and we'll talk it all over with your father." Johnnie gave the information. "Only I ain't got a father," he corrected, as the pencil traveled. "But y' can tell the boy scouts, if y' want t', that I got a cowboy friend named One-Eye, and he lives in a garden that's down in a terrible big cellar, and wears fur all up his pants in front, and a bigger hat'n yours, and spurs. And I got five books--_Aladdin_, and _The Mohicans_, and _Treasure Island_, and _King Arthur_ and _Crusoe_!" The crowd listened, ready to laugh if the young man did, which was what the young man did not. On the contrary, what Johnnie had said seemed to have wrought the considerable effect Johnnie had desired. For the young man opened his eyes so big at Johnnie that the glasses fell off, and hit a button of his tunic with a clear ring. "You--you read?" he inquired. "I should say so!" returned Johnnie, cheeks going red with pride. "Most all the time! But I'm goin' t' write a lot next--goin' t' copy all my books out, 'cause Cis says that's the way I can learn t' spell the big words. And lookee!--the handkerchief One-Eye give me!" "Did you say One-Eye or Hawkeye?" asked the young man, feeling of the handkerchief with evident respect for its appearance and quality. "Oh, One-Eye!" declared Johnnie. "'Cause that's all the eyes he's got. But he owns miles and miles of land, and hunderds of cattle, and he's so rich that he rides ev'rywheres he goes in the city in a taxi, all the time!" "Well! well!" exclaimed the leader. There was just the flicker of a smile in his eyes now (Johnnie noted that those eyes were exactly the color of ground coffee). "I've got a dog, too,"--talking as fast as possible in order to get a great deal said. "But I jus' think him, like I do Mister Buckle, and Mister Astor, and Mister Rockefeller, and Mister Carnegie, and the Prince of Wales, and Mister Van----"