But a trail is a funny thing. It is full of surprises and hard to
follow. For one thing, you can never tell just where it is going to
bring you out. There is the main trail and there are branch trails, and
it is often puzzling to determine which is the main trail and which the
branch.

Yet you must determine this somehow, for the one may lead you to food
and shelter, to triumph and honor perhaps; while the other, which may be
ever so clear and inviting, will lead you into bog and mire; so you have
to be careful.

Of one thing you may be certain: there are not often two trails to the
same place. You must pick one branch or the other. You must know where
you want to go, and then hit the right trail. You must not be fooled by
a side trail just because it happens to be broad and easy and pleasant.
There are ways of telling which is the right trail, and you must learn
those ways; otherwise you are not a good scout.

Upon the sleeve of Tom Slade's khaki jacket was seen the profile of an
Indian. It was the scouts' merit badge for pathfinding. It meant that he
knew every trail and byway for miles about Temple Camp. It meant that he
had picked his way where there was no trail, through a dense and tangled
wilderness; that he had found his way by night to a deserted hunting
shack on the summit of a lonely wooded mountain in the neighborhood of
Temple Camp and that he had later blazed a trail to that isolated spot.

Even Rossie Bent had opened his eyes at Tom's simple, unboastful
narrative of this exploit, and had followed Tom's finger on the office
map as he traced that blazed trail from the wood's edge near the camp up
through the forest and along the brook to the very summit of the
frowning height, from which the nickering lights of Temple Camp could be
seen in the distance.

"I'll bet not many people go up there," Roscoe had said.

So it was natural that when Tom looked back and thought of his career as
a scout, of his rise from squalor and vicious mischief to this level of
manliness and deserved honor, he should think of it as a trail--a good
scout trail which he had picked up and followed. Down there in the mud
of Barrel Alley it had begun, and see where it had led! To the platform
of the Bridgeboro Lyceum where he, Tom Slade, would wear his Gold Cross,
which every citizen at that patriotic Registration Day celebration might
see, and would represent the First Bridgeboro Troop, B. S. A. in the
town's welcome to the gover