a scout, pass through the several ranks of
scouting, grow up, go to war, and come back to be assistant at the camp
where he had spent so many happy hours when he was a young boy.

And now there was not one thing down there, nor shack nor cabin nor
shooting range nor boat nor canoe, nor hero's elm (as they called it),
nor Gold Cross Rock, which had the same romantic interest as had this
young fellow to the scouts who came in droves and watched him and
listened to the talk about him and dreamed of being just such a real
scout as he. He moved about unconsciously among them, simple,
childlike, stolid, but with a kind of assurance and serenity which he
may have learned from the woods.

He was singularly oblivious to the superficial appurtenances of
scouting. He had passed through that stage. The pomp and vanity of the
tenderfoot he knew not. The bespangled dignity of the second-class and
first-class scout, these things he had known and outgrown. His medals
were home somewhere. And out of all this alluring rigmarole and romantic
glory were left the deeper marks of scout training, burned into his soul
as the mark is burned into the skin of a broncho. The woods, the trees,
were his. That, after all, is the highest award in scouting. It is a
medal that one does not lose, and it lasts forever.

As Tom Slade stood there looking down upon the camp, one might have seen
in him the last and fullest accomplishment of scouting, stripped of all
else. His face was the color of a mulatto. He wore no scout hat, he wore
no hat at all. It would have been quite superfluous for him to have worn
any of his thirty or forty merit badges of fond memory on his sleeves,
for his sleeves were rolled up to his shoulders. He wore a pongee
shirt, this being a sort of compromise between a shirt and nothing at
all. He wore moccasins, but not Indian moccasins. He was still partial
to khaki trousers, and these were worn with a strange contraption for a
belt; it was a kind of braided fiber of his own manufacture, the
material of which was said to have been taken from a string tree.

As he resumed his way through the woods he presently heard a cheery, but
rather exhausted, voice behind him.

"Have a heart, Slady, and wait a minute, will you?" Tom's pursuer
called. "I'm nearly dead climbing up through all this jungle after you.
Old Mother Nature's got herself into a fine mess of a tangle through
here, hey? Don't mind if I come along with you, do you? Look d