For a moment Edgar Coleman paused; then, all too late for his dignity, he saw that half-closed, quivering eye, loaded with a kind of cold concentration. He felt of his bleeding ear and glanced down at his mud-smeared clothes. He was about to make an issue of this incidental damage, but a good discretion (prompted by that quivering eye) deterred him from debate or comment. “What do you say?” asked Wilfred grimly. “I suppose you’re going to tell everybody,” Edgar Coleman ventured. “I’m not going to tell anybody about this,” said Wilfred, “and I’m sorry about your clothes. I’m not so sorry about your ear; you’d better put some iodine on it,” he added. “Everybody’ll know that you apologized to me and that’s all they need to know. All _you_ have to know is that I do things just when I happen to want to do them. I just as soon be good friends with you after this. If your patrol doesn’t tell, I won’t. Here’s another piece of paper and you might as well make the apology so everybody’ll understand it; just tack it on the board. If it leaves everybody guessing I don’t care. Have you got some iodine?” CHAPTER XXVIII VOICES When Wilfred mentioned to Tom Slade that there were “two of them” whom he blamed, he referred, of course, to Edgar Coleman. The other was Charlie O’Conner. He bitterly resented Charlie’s origination of the nickname Abandon Duty Cowell, because it seemed to involve his sister. But he realized that from the standpoint of the Elks he _had_ abandoned his duty and he could not (indeed he did not have it in his heart) subject Charlie to the same bizarre style of discipline that the astonished Coleman had suffered. So he kept away from the Elks. Wilfred had no desire to win prestige through the vulgar medium of fighting and he loyally refrained from mentioning the little episode in Tent Lane to any one. In this, he was as characteristically faithful as he had been in keeping that harder promise to his mother. If any one had put this and that together and found a connection between Edgar’s ear and the respectful notice that appeared upon the bulletin board, no one mentioned it. The apology was skilfully couched in such terms as to make it seem voluntary, as if a scout’s conscience (or perchance an autocratic scoutmaster) rather than a scout’s fist, had been at work. So Wilfred, as usual, achieved no prestige from his triumph, and was still Wandering Willie, a misfit and a joke in camp. But he kept his promise to Edgar Coleman. All that day it rained and the auspicious date in Wilfred’s life passed, leaving him only a secret triumph. Among the trustees and scoutmasters and “parlor scouts” it was thought that Edgar Coleman was a very nice boy to prostrate himself in expiation of a harsh word thoughtlessly uttered. And so on, and so on.