Joey Fellowes, who with his brother Ted made up the Lenape bugle corps, sounded Reveille on his muted instrument. The curtains parted to reveal a morning scene in Tent Fifteen. A great fuss was made by Ollie Steffins, dressed in a scout uniform with many medals and much gold braid, who in the person of Mr. Colby himself, went about getting the snoring sleepers to waken for morning drill. The drowsy boys were finally put on their feet and each armed with a broom-stick gun, with which they went through a series of clumsy maneuvers, knocking each other over the head, facing the wrong way, and otherwise tangling themselves in a travesty of a squad of rookies at drill. The concluding evolution brought them into line facing the audience, singing off key their rallying song:
“_We are Mr. Colby’s army, Mr. Colby’s army we, We cannot shoot, we won’t salute, What earthly good are we?_”
The curtains closed amid cheers, boos, and stamping of feet, during which Mr. Colby sat with a self-conscious smile on his disciplinarian’s face.
The acts followed swiftly after that. Tent Twelve put on a pirate play, Tent Three showed to advantage in a lady-like game of basketball, in which each side begged the other to kindly accept the ball on pain of being slapped on the wrist. Tent Four gave a ventriloquist act, with Peanut Westover as the talking dummy.
“The Mysterious Mandarin Magician,” with an all-star cast from Tents Eight and Ten, was the next to the last number on the evening’s program. At the parting of the curtain, Wild Willie Sanders in a high, battered black silk hat, wearing the curling mustache of a circus ringmaster, pointed out the main attraction to a gaping crowd of boys from the participating tents, dressed in wild garbs of every description. “Laydeez and gen-tul-men! The _one_ and _only_ Chinese magician, brought at great expense from the Flowery Kingdom to mystify you to-night!” Chink Towner, his naturally oriental cast of countenance exaggerated by a line of grease-paint above each slanting eye, and dressed in a pair of colorful silk pajamas borrowed from Councilor Lane, sat cross-legged above the crowd on a blanket-draped table, his features masked in Chinese calm. “Step right up, laydeez and gen-tul-men, and see the _one_ and _only_!”