He said, “It’s appropriate anyway. I’d like to see a camp like that Temple Camp; it must be great. Trouble with us is we’ve had such plaguey hard luck. I guess there’s only one thing harder than our luck and that’s the biscuits we make.”
Then he said, “You see, first our scoutmaster had to go to war. We were just starting then. It hit us a good whack. We tried to get another, but scoutmasters were pretty scarce; they were scarcer than coal and sugar. They were all in France. So I took the job. I suppose we could get one now, but since we’ve worried along all this time without one, we decided to wait till our scoutmaster gets back. He’ll be back in a couple of weeks, I understand, and we want to give him a welcome. We’ve got two dollars and fourteen cents toward it so far—two dollars and four cents, really, because there’s a Canadian dime. If there are any Canadian dimes around, we’re sure to get them. Then our little shanty burned down. It was about the best camp-fire I ever saw, only it left us without a meeting-place. We still have our scout smiles; they don’t cost anything. If they did, we couldn’t afford them.”
I said, “That’s one thing about scout smiles; they’re the only things that haven’t gone up.”
“So here we are,” he said, “hiking back home after one of our fool enterprises. We intended to go down on the train, but we went to the circus instead.”
“It’s about thirty miles down to Newburgh,” I said; “you’ll have to bivouac twice anyway.”
He said, “I guess we’ve got eats enough.”
“We might as well all hike that far together,” I told him.
“Good idea,” he said, “if you don’t mind chumming up with a travelling poor-house.”
“We should worry about being poor,” I said; “I know a man that’s rich and he can’t hike at all. He goes on crutches. How would you like to be him? Anyway, don’t you fellows get discouraged.”
“Don’t worry,” he said; “first it was hard, but now we’ve come to like it. You can get a lot of fun out of hard luck. And all we need is time, I suppose. This winter we’re all going to work on Saturdays. Trouble is that isn’t going to help us give our scoutmaster a _welcome home_. We’ve done more crazy things this summer trying to get a little money together! I guess it would have been better if we’d all knuckled down to jobs. But I wanted these poor kids to get a taste of scouting. Too late now, anyway. Why if I told you why we hiked up to Elm Center, you’d just laugh in my face. You’d say we were crazy. But we’ve had a good time anyway.”