“It’s Miss Phyllis Forsythe, isn’t it, that I have come home to find masquerading as my own grandmother?” he said, in a warm voice so like Roxanne’s that the scarlatina on my face began to subside and my knees stopped trembling.  “You don’t know how indebted to you I am for coming over to make Roxy take a playtime.”

Playtime, with all that pattern and darned aprons and my gingham dress in a pile on the ancestral sofa in the corner with the scissors and needle and thread gaping at Roxanne and me from the table!  Women ought to be very thankful at times for men’s stupidity.

It was all very well for the red on my face to pale and my breath to come easier again; but no fifteen-year-old girl has an answer ready for a remark of a man who is as great and wonderful and famous as Mr. Douglass Byrd is going to be soon.  I was just getting so loose-jointed from mortification that my mind had fainted away at the very time I needed it, when Tony and Pink Chadwell came and broke into the situation with the Raccoon whistle for the palefaces.  They also broke through the side window with their “Tip-hist-toe” signal that always gives the girls cold creeps even in daytime.  Mamie Sue calls it goose-flesh and Tony reproves Belle for telling her that was what she had all the time.  I don’t know what we would do with Belle if it wasn’t for Tony’s powerful disposition.  And one thing I am sure of, never were there in this world such grand boys as Anthony Wayne Luttrell and Matthew Foster Chadwell—­that’s Pink’s whole name—­for they didn’t any more notice that old flowered dress than if it had been the blue gingham, or either Roxanne or me, but they gave the scout-master salute to Mr. Douglass and began their business right away.

[Illustration:  He stood there in the doorway and laughed until his big shoulders shook]

“Raccoon Chief,” said Tony, “the patrol awaits you in the Crotch, at your call.”

“On my way,” answered Mr. Douglass with just as much seriousness as Tony had in his voice.  Tony had told me how Mr. Douglass had organized the Raccoon Patrol and taught it all it knows and was just the guiding star of all their young lives, only Tony didn’t put it that way; he called him their “jolly old peace-maker.”  That means that all the Raccoons look up to him and adore him and try to be exactly like him.  In the Bible if David had been eight years older than Jonathan, there would have been the same situation in Jerusalem as in Byrdsville, Tennessee.

“I wonder what is the matter with the Scouts,” said Roxanne, as we both began to rip on the dress so I could help her cut the aprons.  “Douglass didn’t say what he came home for in the middle of the afternoon and Tony was so serious that I hardly knew him.  Pink was speechless from excitement.  They all acted that way when they found out about the queer man who hung around selling patent medicine, trying to find out where Miss Prissy kept the Talbot emerald necklace that came from England before the Revolution.”