“Oh, I didn’t exactly commit a murder,” the other laughed, “but I fell down, Sla—­you don’t mind my calling you Slady, do you?”

“That’s what most everybody calls me,” Tom said, “except the troop I was in.  They call me Tomasso.”

“Sounds like tomato, hey?” Hervey laughed.  “No, my troubles are about merit badges.  I’ve bungled the whole thing up.  When a fellow goes after the Eagle award, he ought to have a manager, that’s what I say.  He ought to have a manager to plan things out for him.  I tried to manage my own campaign and now I’m stuck—­with a capital S.”

“How many merits have you got?” Tom asked him.

“Twenty,” Hervey said, “twenty and two-thirds.  Just a fraction more and I’d have gone over the top.”

“You mean a sub-division?” Tom asked.

“That’s where the little but comes in,” Hervey said.  “B-u-t, but.  It’s a big word, all right, just as you said.”

“Is it architecture or cooking or interpreting or one of those?” Tom asked.

Hervey glanced at Tom in frank surprise.

“Maybe it’s leather work, or machinery, or taxidermy or marksmanship,” Tom continued, with no thought further from his mind than that of showing off.

“Guess again,” Hervey laughed.

“Then it must be either music or stalking,” Tom said, dully.

His companion paused in his steps, contemplating Tom with unconcealed amazement.  “Right-o,” he said; “it’s stalking.  What are you?  A mind reader?”

“Those are the only ones that have three tests,” Tom said.  “So if you have twenty merits and two-thirds of a merit, why, you must be trying for one of those.  Maybe they’ve changed it since I looked at the handbook.”

Hervey Willetts stood just where he had stopped, looking at Tom with admiration.  In his astonishment he glanced at Tom’s arm as if he expected to see upon it the tangible evidences of his companion’s feats and accomplishments.  But the only signs of scouting which he saw there were the brown skin and the firm muscles.

“They change that book every now and then,” Tom said.

Still Hervey continued to look.  “What’s that belt made out of?” he asked.

“It’s fiber from a string tree,” Tom said; “they grow in Lorraine in France.”

“Were you in France?”

“Two years,” Tom said.

“How many merit badges have you got, anyway, Mr.—­Slady?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Tom said; “about thirty or thirty-five, I guess.”

“You guess? I bet you’ve got the Gold Cross.  Where is it?” Hervey made a quick inspection of Tom’s pongee shirt, but all he saw there was the front with buttons gone and the brown chest showing.

“I couldn’t pin it on there very well, could I?” Tom said, lured by his companion’s eagerness into a little show of amusement.

“Where is it?” Hervey demanded.

“I’m letting a girl wear it,” Tom said.