knew he was sitting squarely in a puddle with both arms around the child, whose grip on the deadly wire he had broken.

Instantly the hitherto inactive group was roused to life and movement, and amidst a Babel of talk and advice they surged around the unconscious lad and his rescuer. Before the latter realized what had happened, some one had snatched the little chap from him and started swiftly toward one of the near-by houses. After and around them streamed a throng of men, women, and children, pitying, anxious, or merely curious, but, now that the danger was past, all equally voluble with suggestions or advice.

Dale rose slowly to his feet, and stood for a moment staring after them with a troubled frown. “Why don’t they give him air?” he said. “If only they wouldn’t bunch around him like that–”

He paused hesitatingly, watching the procession mount the steps and cross a wide veranda. The stress and excitement that had dominated him till now seemed to have vanished, and a reaction set in. He wondered whether folks wouldn’t think him too “fresh” for thrusting himself forward as he had done. The remembrance of the man to whom he had talked back made him wriggle uncomfortably; it was one of his oldest customers. “Gee!” he muttered, with a touch of uneasiness; “I reckon I must have sassed him pretty well, too!”

Dusk had given place to night. Under a flaring gas-light at the curb two early arrivals, who had stayed behind to guard the deadly, dangling wire, were busy explaining the situation to several wide-eyed later comers. They formed an animated group, and Dale, standing in the shadow behind them, felt curiously out of it and alone. The wind, sweeping up the street, struck through his wet clothes and made him shiver.

“Time I was getting started,” he thought. “It must be awful late.”

As he bent over to pick up his bag, the movement set his head to throbbing afresh. His exploring fingers encountered a lump, where he had hit the curb, that felt about the size of an ostrich-egg. Dale’s forehead wrinkled, and he opened the bag mechanically, only to find the remaining papers were soaked through and ruined. Those he had wrapped around his hands lay in the mud at his feet, soggy masses of pulp. And he had delivered only four out of the lot!

Dale tried to smile, but his lips only quivered. With a second, more determined, effort, he clenched his teeth tightly, slung the empty bag over his shoulder, and started back toward the news-stand. But he went in silence. Somehow the usual whistle was impossible.

CHAPTER II
THE NEW TENDERFOOT

It was close to half past seven before Dale delivered his last paper. He had been delayed in the beginning by old Jed Hathaway’s having to know all about it, and insisting on hearing every little detail before he could be induced to provide a second supply. Dale tried to be patient under the cross-examination of the garrulous old newsdealer, but it wasn’t easy when he knew that each minute wasted now was going to make it harder to get through in time for the scout meeting. When he was released at last, he hurried all he could, but the minute-hand of the old town-clock was perilously close to the perpendicular when he got back to the square again.

Clearly, there was no time to go home even for that “hurry up” snack he had been thinking about. There wasn’t even time to get a sandwich from the lunch-wagon, two blocks away. “Have to pull in my belt and forget about it till I get home after meeting, I reckon,” he thought.

In suiting the action to the word he realized that his hurried efforts at the news-stand to clean off the mud had been far from successful. It plastered his person, if not from head to foot, at least from the waist down, and now that it was beginning to dry, it seemed to show up more distinctly each moment. He couldn’t present himself before Scoutmaster Curtis in such a plight, so he raced across the square to his friend Joe Banta’s shoe-cleaning establishment, borrowed a stiff brush, and went to work vigorously.

Brief as was the delay, it sufficed to make him late. Though not at all sectarian, Troop Five held its weekly meetings in the parish-house of the Episcopal church, whose rector was intensely interested in the movement. These were scheduled for seven-thirty on Monday evenings. There was usually a brief delay for belated scouts, but by twenty minutes of eight, at latest, the shrill blast of the scoutmaster’s whistle brought the fellows at attention, ready for the salute to the flag and the other simple exercises that opened the meeting.

Precisely one minute later Dale Tompkins burst hastily into the vestibule and pulled up abruptly. Through the open door a long line of khaki-clad backs confronted him, trim, erect, efficient-looking. Each figure stood rigidly at attention, shoulders back, eyes set straight ahead, three fingers pressed against the forehead in the scout salute, and lips moving in unison over the last words of the scout oath.

“... To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.”

“Colors post!” came crisply from the scoutmaster facing the line.

From the shadows of the entry Dale felt a sort of thrill at the precision of the movement and the neatness with which the slim color-bearer, who had faced the line just in front of Mr. Curtis and his assistant, pivoted on his heel and bore the flag, its silken folds gently rippling, past the scouts still standing at attention and on out of sight toward the farther end of the room.

Of course it was only Courtlandt Parker, who was in Dale’s grade at school and a very familiar person indeed. But somehow, in this rôle, he did not seem nearly so familiar and intimate. To the watching tenderfoot it was almost as if he had ceased for the moment to be the airy, volatile, harum-scarum “Court,” whose pranks and witticisms so often kept the whole grade stirred up and amused, and had become solely the sober, earnest, serious color-bearer of the troop.

“A lot of it’s the uniform, of course,” thought Dale. “It does make a whopping difference in a fellow’s looks.” He glanced down at his own worn, still disheveled garments with sudden distaste. “I wish I had mine!” he sighed.

A moment later, still hesitating in the background, reluctant to face that trim, immaculate line, he caught the scoutmaster’s glance,–that level, friendly, smiling glance, which was at once a salutation and a welcome,–and his head went up abruptly. What did looks matter, after all–at least the sort of looks one couldn’t help? He was none the worse a scout because he had not yet saved up enough money for that coveted suit of khaki. Nor was it his fault that he had lacked the time to go home and brush up thoroughly for the meeting. He smiled back a little at Mr. Curtis, and then, with shoulders square and head erect, he obeyed the leader’s silent summons.

There was a faint stir and a sense of curious, shifting eyes when he appeared around the end of the line of waiting scouts. As he passed Sherman Ward’s patrol some one even whispered an airy greeting, “Aye, Tommy.” Though Dale did not glance that way, he knew it to be the irrepressible Courtlandt, now returned to his position as assistant patrol-leader. Court was the only one who ever called him that, and the boy’s heart warmed at this touch of friendliness. Then he paused before the scoutmaster and promptly, though perhaps a little awkwardly, returned the man’s salute.

“I’m glad to see you, Dale,” the