Doctor Joe agreed with Andy, and Peter Sparks was declared elected.  Then Seth nominated Andy for scribe.

“Because,” Seth explained, “Andy’ll be right handy to Doctor Joe all the time and Doctor Joe can help he to do the writin’, and he needs help.”

When the election was completed Doctor Joe explained the duties of the officers and the necessity of obedience to them in the performance of scout duties.

“Our troop is a team,” said Doctor Joe.

“We must pull together.  We are like a team of dogs hauling a komatik.  If the dogs all follow the leader and pull together the best that ever they can they get somewhere.  If they don’t follow the leader, and one pulls in one direction and another pulls in a different direction and some don’t pull at all, they never get anywhere and aren’t of much use.  Our troop is going to be the best we can make it, by all pulling together and doing the very best we know how.

“We must always be ready to help other people at all times, as we promise to do in our oath.  If we live up to that we’ll do a great deal of good, first and last, up and down the Bay.  If some one’s life is in danger and we can help them even at the risk of our own we must help them.  Everybody wants to be happy.  There’s nothing that will make us so happy as to do some fine thing every day that will make someone else happy.

“We must train our brains and our hands so that we shall always be prepared to do the right thing and do it quickly.  We must learn to keep our temper and not get angry.  Let us take the hard knocks that come to us with a smile.”

The remainder of the evening was spent in playing some rollicking games that the lads had never heard of before, and which Doctor Joe taught them.  There was the one-legged chicken fight, and one or two others, as well as hand wrestling, though that they had seen the Indians play and had practised themselves.  They all declared that they had never in their lives had so much fun.

An early start the following morning brought them to Hollow Cove at ten o’clock.  Hollow Cove was a fine natural harbour.  A brook poured down through a gulch to empty into the Bay, and near its mouth was an excellent landing-place.  Not far from the brook, and a hundred feet back from the shore, they pitched their tents in the shelter of the spruce forest where the camp would be well protected from winds and storms.

While the others set up the sheet-iron stoves in the three tents and broke spruce boughs and laid the bough beds, David, Micah, and Lige volunteered to cut wood.

“There’s some fine dry wood just to the east’ard and close to shore,” suggested David, as they picked up their axes.  “It’s right handy.”

A dozen yards from the camp David suddenly stopped and exclaimed: 

“What’s that now?”

On a great sloping rock close to the shore, but hidden by a jutting point from the place where they had landed, was a recently made cairn of boulders capped by a large flat stone.