Ohio with the Bengal
Tigers, and Brent Gaylong, leader of the Church Mice from Newburgh. He
was a sort of scoutmaster and patrol leader rolled into one, was Brent,
a lanky, slow moving fellow with a funny squint to his face, and a quiet
way of seeing the funny side of things. You had only to look at him to
laugh.

"Tickets purchased from speculators not good," he was saying.

Inside, the place was half filled with scouts, with a sprinkling of
scoutmasters. The members of the resident Court of Honor were already
seated behind a table and business was going forward. Much had already
been despatched.

After a little while Mr. Denny came in and sat down. Other scoutmasters
sauntered in, and scouts singly and in groups. One proud scout went out
with three new merit badges and was vociferously cheered outside.

Another didn't quite make the pathfinder's badge; another the camp honor
flag for good turns. Still another got the Life Scout badge, and so it
went. Honor jobs for the ensuing week were given out. There were many
strictly camp awards, not found in the handbook. The Temple Paddle was
awarded to a proud canoeist. Scouts came and went. Sometimes the
interest was keen and sometimes it lagged.

Hervey Willetts came sauntering up from the boat landing, his hat at a
rakish angle, and trying to balance an oar-lock on his nose. He had an
air of wandering aimlessly so that his arrival at the pavilion seemed
quite a matter of chance. A morning song was on his lips:

The life of a scout is sweet,
is sweet,
The rubbish he throws in the street,
the street.
He uses soft words,
And he shoots all the birds;
The life of a scout is sweet.

Being a lone, blithe spirit, a kind of scout skylark as one might say,
he had not many friends in camp. The rank and file laughed at him, were
amused at his naive independence, and regarded him, not as a poor scout,
but rather as not exactly a scout at all. They did not see enough of
him; he flew too high. He was his own best companion.

Consequently when he sauntered with a kind of whimsical assurance into
that exalted official conclave most of them thought that he had dropped
in as he might have dropped into the lake. There was a little touch of
pathos, too, in the fact that the loiterers outside did not speak to him
as he passed in. It was just that they did not know him well enough; he
was not one of them.