“I’ll keep my promise as long as you don’t tell,” said the boy in a kind of spirited impulse. “But don’t you tell them I’m—I’ve—got heart failure—don’t you tell them that and I’ll keep my promise. Do you promise—do you?” “I think I can keep a promise as well as you can,” Tom laughed, a little uneasy to observe this odd phase of his young friend’s character. He hardly knew how to take Wilfred. It occurred to him that the boy was going to have a pretty hard time of it with this odd mixture of sensitiveness and high spirit. He was afraid that his new recruit, so charmingly delicate and elusive in nature, was going to bunk his pride in one place while trying to save it in another. But all he said was, “All right, Billy, you’re the doctor.” CHAPTER VI THE LONE FIGURE Wilfred Cowell saw Temple Camp for the first time as no other boy had ever seen it, for he went there not as a scout, but to become a scout. It was not only new but strange to him. He saw it first as the Ford emerged out of the woods road which ran from the highway to the clearing. No car but a Ford (which is the boy scout among cars) ever approached the remote camp site. And there about him were the buildings—cabins and rustic pavilions and tents for the overflow. If the invincible little flivver had rolled twenty feet more it would have taken an evening dip in the lake. Wilfred had not supposed that the camp would break so suddenly upon him. He would have preferred to see it from a distance, to have had an opportunity of preparing for the ordeal of introduction. But he might have saved himself the fear of public presentation, for Temple Camp was eating. And when Temple Camp ate it presented a lesson in concentration which could not be excelled. Not a scout was to be seen save one lonely figure paddling idly in a canoe out in the middle of the lake. Wilfred wondered why he was not at supper. He felt that he would like to approach his new life via this lonely figure, to be out there with him first, before the crowd beheld him. Then he remembered that he was not to go upon this lake—except as an idle passenger. Might he not paddle? He might not row or dive or—but might he not paddle? Well, not vigorously—as the others did. But as that figure silhouetted by the background of the mountain was doing? No, he would not get himself into a position where he might be expected to exert himself more than he should. He would eschew the lake and stick to the stalking, and the birch bark work. He was in the hands of the powers that be and he would keep his promise _to the letter_. One thing Wilfred was glad of and that was that he and Tom had stopped for a little supper in Kingston. He would not have to enter that great shack whence emanated the sound of what seemed like ten billion knives and forks and plates. “Sure you don’t want to eat?” Tom asked. “No, I had plenty.” “All right, come ahead then.”