"Great!" whispered Roy, gleefully.

Eddie Ingram laid his end of the ridgepole on the ground and stealing cautiously over among the sleeping Ravens, removed the post card from the sapling and put the other card in its place. Then, stealing back to where the others were waiting, he resumed his end of the pole. This was restored to its place in the forked uprights, the ropes were fastened to the pegs along either side and the Silver Foxes bore Esther Blakeley's memento of their own disgrace triumphantly to their stronghold.

"Can you beat it?" said Roy, releasing himself with a sense of refreshment from the imposition of silence.

"A scout is stealthy," remarked Westy.

In the morning Pee-wee sauntered over and paused outside the Silver Foxes' tent, not saying a word, though.

"Well," said Roy, "what can we do for you?"

"I see you've got the card," said Pee-wee.

"Yes," said Westy, pulling on his blouse. "We're going to frame it and send it to National Headquarters, too, for an exhibition of scout stealth and silence."

"I suppose you think we walked in and took it," said Roy, adjusting his belt. "We didn't. We never entered your tent. A scout is honorable."

"No," said Pee-wee, "you took the tent down and put it up wrong end to.

A scout is observant. Are we going fishing to-day?"

CHAPTER XII

"UP AGAINST IT FOR FAIR"

When the telegraph and the telephone and the speeding autos and the bullying of the hapless village constable failed to reveal any clue to the burglar at Five Oaks, John Temple proceeded to pooh-pooh the whole business and say that there had never been any burglar, but that in all probability the maid had been exploring Mary's trinkets just as Mrs.

Temple returned and that the "frightful-looking man" whom she had met on the stairs was a myth.

It was then that the maid, groping for any straw in her extremity, said that a boy in khaki had darted out from the pantry and across the private rear lawn into the woods beyond while she stood at the window.

If she had stuck to the plain truth and not permitted Mr. Temple to beat her down as to the man she actually did see on the stairs, a great deal of suffering might have been saved. But the loss of only one trinket, and that one of small intrinsic value, seemed to lend color to the theory that it was the work of a boy rather than of a professional adult burglar, and the master of Five Oaks, thinking this matter worth inquiring into, called up the constable and laid the thing before him in this new light.

Mr. John Temple had no particular grudge against the Boy Scouts. He was a rational, hard-headed business man, decisive and practical and without much imagination. His lack of imagination was, indeed, his main trouble. He was not silly enough and he was extremely too busy to bear any active malice toward an organization having to do with boys, and except when the scouts were mentioned to him he never gave them a thought one way or the other. He was not the archenemy of the movement (as some of the boys themselves thought): he simply had no use for it.

So far as the scout idea had been explained to him by the Bridgeboro Local Council (to whom he had granted five minutes of his time) he thought it consisted of a sort of poetical theory and that money put into it was simply thrown away. He believed, and he told the Council so, that ample provision had been made for boys in the form of circuses and movie plays and baseball games for good ones and reformatories and prisons for bad ones, and he referred, as the successful man is so apt to do, to his own poor boyhood and how he had attended to business and done what was right and so on, and so on, and so on.

Nor had this king of finance cherished any particular resentment toward the poor creature who had thrown a stone at him. John Temple was a big man and he was not petty, but he was intensely practical, and he had no patience with Mr. Ellsworth's notions for the making of good citizens.

He had known two generations of Slades; he had never known any of them to amount to anything, and he believed that the proper place for a hoodlum and a truant and an orphan was in an inst.i.tution. He paid his taxes for the support of these inst.i.tutions regularly and he believed they ought to be used for what they were intended for. He thought it was little less than criminal that the son of Bill Slade should be wandering over the face of the earth when he might be legally placed in a dormitory, eating his three meals a day in a white-washed corridor.

For Mr. Ellsworth, John Temple had only contempt. He looked down upon him as the man without imagination always looks down upon the man with imagination. Meanwhile the new subtle spirit was working in Tom Slade and the capitalist had neither the time nor the interest to stoop and watch the wonderful transformation which was going on.

He was not prompted by any feeling of spite or resentment toward Tom and the scouts when he told the constable about "young Slade." He believed that he was acting wisely and even in Tom's best interests, and it was in vain that his young daughter tried to pull him away from the telephone. Mrs. Temple weepingly implored him to remember the hospitality and the courtesy which she and Mary had just enjoyed at the hands of the scouts, but it was of no use. If no one had mentioned Tom he would never have thought of him, but since Mary had mentioned him he believed it was a good time to have Mr. Ellsworth's experiment with Tom looked into before "all the houses in the neighborhood were robbed." He did not mean that, of course; it was simply his way of talking.

It was the second morning after the Silver Foxes' proud recovery of Esther Blakeley's card that a loose-jointed personage from Salmon River Village sauntered into camp, his face screwed up as if he were studying the sun, and surveyed the camp with that frank and leisurely scrutiny which bespeaks the "Rube." Concealed beneath his coat he wore a badge which he had fished out of an unused cooky-jar just before starting, and it swelled his rural pride to feel the weight of it on his suspender.

"Wha'ose boss here?" he asked Pee-wee, who was about his customary duty of spearing loose papers with a pointed stick.

"No boss," said Pee-wee.

"Wha'ose runnin' the shebang?"

Pee-wee pointed to Mr. Ellsworth's little tent just inside which the scoutmaster sat on an onion-crate stool, writing.

The official personage sauntered over, watched by several boys, paused to inspect the wireless apparatus in its little leanto. His inquisitive manner was rather jarring. By the time he reached Mr. Ellsworth's tent a little group had formed about him.

"Ya'ou the boss here?"

"Good-morning," said Mr. Ellsworth.

"Ya'ou the boss?"

"No; the boys are boss; anything we can do for you?"

The stranger looked about curiously. "Got permission t' camp here, I s'pose."

"There's the owner of the property," said Mr. Ellsworth, laughingly, indicating Roy.

"Hmmm; ye got a young feller here by th' name o' Slade?"

"That's what we have," said the scoutmaster with his usual breezy pleasantry.

"Well, I reckon I'll hev ter see him."

"Certainly; what for?" Mr. Ellsworth asked rather more interested.

"He's got hisself into a leetle mite o' trouble," the stranger drawled; "leastways, mebbe he has." He seemed to enjoy being mysterious.

So Tom was called. Roy came with him, and all who were in camp at the moment cl.u.s.tered about the scoutmaster's tent. Mr. Ellsworth's manner was one of perfect confidence in Tom and half-amus.e.m.e.nt at the stranger's relish of his own authority.

"You don't wish to see him privately, I suppose?"

"Na-o--leastways not 'less he does. Seems you was trespa.s.sing araound Five Oaks t'other day," he said to Tom in his exasperating drawl, and with deliberate hesitation.

"Good heavens, man!" said Mr. Ellsworth, nettled. "You don't mean to tell me this boy is charged with trespa.s.sing! Why, half a dozen of these boys accompanied Mrs. Temple and her daughter home--they were invited into the house." He looked at the stranger, half angry and half amused. "Mrs. Temple and her daughter were our guests here. We might as well say _they_ were trespa.s.sing!"

"Leastways they din't take nuthin'."

"What do you mean by that?" said the scoutmaster, sharply.

"Ye know a pin was missin' thar?"

"Yes," said Mr. Ellsworth, impatiently.

"An' one o' these youngsters was seen sneakin'--"