"Hello, Betty, glad to see you!"

"Why, goodness me!" exclaimed Betty. "You seem to know me, but I don't
know who you are--unless you are one of those Boy Scouts Bob is so crazy
to join?"

"Not exactly _Boy_ Scouts," chuckled Sure Pop with a wink at Bob,
"unless you count us boys till we're ninety-nine years old! Girls are
scouts, too, in _my_ regiment."

"Now, Betty," warned Bob, "sit down here and don't you dare interrupt,
for Sure Pop's right in the middle of a story--and I think he's come to
stay a while, haven't you, Sure Pop?"

"Sure pop! I'll stay as long as the King will let me," laughed the merry
little scout.

"Well, after I got away from the crowd," he went on, "my eyes must
suddenly have been opened to the thousand-and-one things that might
happen even in Borderland to folks who didn't look sharp on the street,
for on my way home I saved several others from getting hurt.

"The first was a careless little cabin boy, who went along whistling
with his hands in his pockets. He slipped and fell plump in front of a
chariot, and of course he couldn't jerk his hands out of his pockets in
time to save himself. I grabbed him up in the very nick of time, or he'd
have been smashed flatter than a pancake.

"And only a block farther on, I met a carpenter hurrying through the
crowd with a ladder on his shoulder. Some one shouted to him, and he
whirled around with never a thought of his ladder. The end of it would
have hit a fat old banker squarely between the eyes if I hadn't been
watching for that very thing and caught it as it swung. I went home and
thought no more about all this, till that night, at midnight, I was
summoned before the King."

"The King!" cried Betty. "My, weren't you scared?"

"I was, sure pop! When I marched into the throne room it was crowded
with richly dressed people. The King and Queen sat on their thrones,
and as I went toward them I had to pass between two long lines of
trumpeters.

"Suddenly up went the silver trumpets, and the trumpeters blew a mighty
blast. Let me tell you, it was enough to send the shivers down your
spine, that trumpet call was! It seemed as if I never had climbed a
longer flight of steps. But at last I found myself bowing before the
King and Queen. The King, who wore a brand new uniform, just like this
one I have on, beckoned a herald to his side.

"'Now hark to his words,' he said to me, 'and say if he speaks the
truth.' And then the herald read aloud from a