“Oh, what I know about you!” Hervey said, teasingly.  “You can bet if I ever get the Gold Cross or the Eagle Badge (which I won’t this trip) no girl will ever wear them.”

“You can’t be so sure about that,” said Tom, out of his larger worldly experience, “sometimes they take them away from you.”

“You’re a funny fellow,” Hervey said, while his gaze still expressed his generous impulse of hero-worship.  “I guess I seem like just a sort of kid to you with my twenty merits—­twenty and two-thirds.  Maybe some girl is wearing your Distinguished Service Cross, for all I know.  But we fellows are crazy to have the Eagle award in our troop.  I suppose of course you’re an Eagle Scout?”

“I guess that was about three or four years ago,” Tom said.

“Once a scout, always a scout, hey?”

“That’s it,” Tom said.

They strolled along in silence for a few minutes, Hervey occasionally stealing a side glimpse at his elder, who ambled on, apparently unconscious of these admiring glances.  Now and again Tom paused to examine a patch of moss or some little tell-tale mark upon the ground, as if he had no knowledge of his companion’s presence.  But Hervey appeared quite satisfied.

“I’ll tell you how it is,” he finally said, selecting what seemed an appropriate moment to speak; “I was elected as the one in our troop to go after the Eagle award.  We want an Eagle Scout in our troop.  We haven’t even got one in the city where I live.”

“Hear that?” Tom said.  “That’s a thrush.”

“A thrush?”

“Yop; go on,” Tom said.

“So they elected me to win the Eagle award.  Some choice, hey?  I had seven badges to begin with; maybe that’s why they wished it onto me.  I had camping, cooking, athletics, pioneering, angling, that’s a cinch, that’s easy, and, let’s see—­carpentry and bugling.  That’s the easiest one of the lot, just blow through the cornet and claim the badge.  It’s a shame to take it.”

“You mean you’ve won thirteen more since you’ve been here?” Tom asked.

“That’s it,” said Hervey.  “First I got my fists on the eleven that have got to be included in the twenty-one, and then I made up a list of ten others and went to it.  I chose easy ones, but some of them didn’t turn out to be so easy.  Music—­oh, boy!  And when I started to play the piano, they said I wasn’t playing at all, but that I really meant it.  Can you beat that?”

Tom could not help smiling.

“So you see I’ve been pretty busy since I’ve been here, too busy to talk to interviewers, hey?  I’ve piled up thirteen since I’ve been here; that’s a little over six weeks.  That isn’t so bad, is it?”

“It’s good,” Tom said, by no means carried away by enthusiasm.

“I thought you’d say so.  So now I’ve got twenty and I know them all by heart.  Want to hear me stand up in front of the class and say them?”

“All right,” Tom said.