were still kicking their heels in the arena he had, as one might say, passed outside it.

But his love for the boys and their splendid scoutmaster who had given him a lift, was founded upon a rock. The camp and the troop room had been his home, the scouts had been his brothers, and all the simple associations of his new life were bound up with these three patrols.

Perhaps it was for this reason that among these boys, all younger than himself, and with whom he had always mingled on such familiar terms, he showed but few, and those not often, of the distressing symptoms which bespoke his shattered nerves. Among them he found refuge and was at peace with himself.

And the boys, intent upon their own pursuits, knew nothing of the brave struggle he was making at the office where his days were spent, and in the poor little shabbily furnished room where he would lie down on his iron bed and try to rest and forget the war and not hear the noises outside.

How he longed for Friday nights when the troop met, and when he could forget himself in those diverting games!

Since the first few days of his return from France, he had seen but little of the troop, except upon those gala nights. The boys were in school and he at the office, and it seemed as if their two ways had parted, after all his hopes that his return might find them reunited and more intimate than ever before. But after the first joyous welcome, it had not been so. It could not be so.

Of course, if they had known how he loved to just sit and listen to them jolly the life out of Peewee Harris, they would doubtless have arranged to do this every night for his amusement, for it made no difference to them how much they jollied Peewee. If they had had the slightest inkling that it helped him just to listen to Roy Blakeley's nonsense, they would probably have arranged with Roy for a continuous performance, for so far as Roy was concerned, there was no danger of a shortage of nonsense. But you see they did not think of these things.

They did much for wounded soldiers, but Tom Slade was not a wounded soldier. And so it befell that the very thing which he most needed was the thing he did not have, and that was just the riot of banter and absurdity which they called their meetings. At all this he would just sit and smile and forget to interlace his fingers and jerk his head. And sometimes he would even laugh outright.

I am afraid that everything was managed wrong from the first. It would have been better if Mr. Burton or Mr. Ellsworth or somebody or other had told the troop the full truth about Tom's condition. I suppose they refrained for fear the boys would stare at him and treat him as one stricken, and thereby, perhaps make his struggle harder.

At all events, it was hard enough. And little they knew of this new and frightful war that he was struggling through with all the power of his brave, dogged nature. Little they knew how he lay awake night after night, starting at every chime of the city's clock, of how he did the best he could each day, waiting and longing for Friday night, hoping, hoping that Peewee and Roy would surely be there. Poor, distracted, shell-shocked fighter that he was, he was fighting still, and they were his only hope and they did not know it. No one knew it. He would not let them know.

For that was Tom Slade.

Next morning Tom had his breakfast in a dingy little restaurant and then started along Terrace Avenue for the bank building, in which was the Temple Camp office.

He still wore the shabby khaki uniform which had seen service at the front. He was of that physique called thick-set and his face was of the square type, denoting doggedness and endurance, and a stolid temperament.

There had never been anything suggestive of the natty or agile about him when he had been a scout, and army life, contrary to its reputation, had not spruced and straightened him up at all. He was about as awkward looking as a piece of field artillery, and he was just about as reliable and effective. He was not built on the lines of a rifle, but rather on the lines of a cannon, or perhaps of a tank. His mouth was long and his lips set tight, but it twitched nervously at one end, especially when he waited at the street crossing just before he reached the bank building, watching the traffic with a kind of fearful, bewildered look.

Twice, thrice, he made the effort to cross and returned to his place on the curb, interlacing his fingers distractedly. And yet this young fellow had pushed through barbed wire entanglements and gone across No Man's Land, without so much as a shudder in the very face of hostile fire.

He always dreaded this street corner in the mornings and was thankful when he was safe up in his beloved Temple Camp office. If he had been on crutches some grateful citizen would have helped him across, and patriotic young ladies would have paused to watch the returned hero and some one might even have removed his hat in the soldier's presence; for they did those things—for a while.

But such honors were only for those who were fortunate enough to have had a leg or an arm shot off or to have been paralyzed. For the hero who had had his nerves all shot to pieces there were no such spontaneous tributes.

And that was the way it had always been with Tom Slade. He had always made good, but somehow, the applause and the grateful tributes had gone to others. Nature had not made him prepossessing and he did not know how to talk; he was just slow and dogged and stolid, like a British tank, as I said, and just about as homely. You could hardly expect a girl to make much fuss over a young fellow who is like a British tank, when there are young fellows like shining machine guns, and soaring airplanes—to say nothing of poison gas.

And after two years of service in the thick of danger, with bombs and bullets flying all about him; after four months' detention in an enemy prison camp and six weeks of trench fever, to say nothing of frightful risks, stolidly ignored, in perilous secret missions, this young chunk of the old rock of Gibraltar had come home with his life, just because it had pleased God not to accept the proffer of it, and because Fritzie shot wild where Tom was concerned. He couldn't help coming back with his life—it wasn't his fault. It was just because he was the same old Lucky Luke, that's all.

That had been Roy Blakeley's name for him—Lucky Luke; and he had been known as Lucky Luke to all of his scout comrades.

You see it was this way: if Tom was going to win a scout award by finding a certain bird's nest in a certain tree, when he got to the place he would find that the tree had been chopped down. Once he was going to win the pathfinder's badge by trailing a burglar, and he trailed him seven miles through the woods and found that the burglar was his own good-for-nothing father. So he did not go back and claim the award. You see? Lucky Luke.

Once (oh, this happened several years before) he helped a boy in his patrol to become an Eagle Scout. It was the talk of Temple Camp how, one more merit badge (astronomy) and Will O'Connor would be an Eagle Scout and Tom Slade, leader of the Elks, would have the only Eagle Scout at Camp in his patrol. He didn't care so much about being an Eagle Scout himself, but he wanted Will O'Connor to be an Eagle Scout; he wanted to have an Eagle Scout in his patrol.

Then, just before Will O'Connor qualified for the