th and find me in everything, didn't you?"

"Yes; everything that is necessary to living," Reade assented.

"Well, cigarettes are necessary to me," continued the boy.

"They are?" asked Tom, opening his eyes wider. "Why, how does
that happen?"

"Just because I am a smoker," returned the boy, with a sickly
grin.

"You are?" gasped Tom. "At your age? Why, you little wretch!"

"That's all right, but please don't go on stringing me," pleaded
the younger American. "Just pass over the papers and the tobacco
pouch, and I'll get busy. I'm suffering for a smoke."

"Then you have my heartfelt sympathy," Tom assured him. "I hate
to see any boy with that low-down habit, and I'm glad that I'm
not in position to be able to encourage you in it. How long have
you been smoking, Drew?"

Alf Drew shifted once more on his feet.

"'Bouter year," he answered.

"You began poisoning yourself at the age of thirteen, and you've
lived a whole year? No; I won't say 'lived,' but you've kept
pretty nearly alive. There isn't much real life in you, Drew,
I'll be bound. Come here."

"Do I get the makings?" whined the boy.

"Come here!"

Drew advanced, rather timidly, into the tent.

"Don't shrink so," ordered Tom. "I'm not going to spank you,
though some one ought to. Give me your wrist."

Reade took the thin little wrist between his thumb and finger,
feeling for the pulse.

"Are you a doctor?" sneered Drew.

"No; but generally I've intelligence enough to know whether a
pulse is slow or fast, full or weak."

"But-----"

"Keep quiet," Tom commanded, as he drew out his watch. His face
expressed nothing in particular as he kept the tip of his forefinger
against the radial artery at the boy's wrist.

"Fine," commented the young engineer, a few moments later, as
he let go the captive wrist.

"Good pulse, eh?" questioned Alf Drew.

"Great!" quoth Tom. "Fine and wiry, and almost skips some beats.
I'm not much of an authority on such subjects, but I believe
a boy of your age ought to have a normal pulse. Where do you
expect to wind up with your 'makings' and your cigarettes?"

"They don't hurt me," whined Alf.

"They don't, eh?" demanded Reade, rising and drawing himself up
to his full height of five-feet-eleven. "Drew, do you think you
look as healthy as I do?"

As he stood there, erect as a soldier, with his fine athletic
figure revealed, and the bronze on his face seemingly inches deep,
Tom Reade looked wh