onkers."

Chapter 8. THE BOY WHO CRIED WOLF

Before he finally arrested him, "Jimmie" Sniffen had seen the man with
the golf-cap, and the blue eyes that laughed at you, three times. Twice,
unexpectedly, he had come upon him in a wood road and once on Round
Hill where the stranger was pretending to watch the sunset. Jimmie
knew people do not climb hills merely to look at sunsets, so he was not
deceived. He guessed the man was a German spy seeking gun sites, and
secretly vowed to "stalk" him. From that moment, had the stranger known
it, he was as good as dead. For a boy scout with badges on his
sleeve for "stalking" and "path-finding," not to boast of others
for "gardening" and "cooking," can outwit any spy. Even had, General
Baden-Powell remained in Mafeking and not invented the boy scout, Jimmie
Sniffen would have been one. Because, by birth he was a boy, and by
inheritance, a scout. In Westchester County the Sniffens are one of
the county families. If it isn't a Sarles, it's a Sniffen; and with
Brundages, Platts, and Jays, the Sniffens date back to when the acres of
the first Charles Ferris ran from the Boston post road to the coach
road to Albany, and when the first Gouverneur Morris stood on one of
his hills and saw the Indian canoes in the Hudson and in the Sound and
rejoiced that all the land between belonged to him.

If you do not believe in heredity, the fact that Jimmie's
great-great-grandfather was a scout for General Washington and hunted
deer, and even bear, over exactly the same hills where Jimmie hunted
weasles will count for nothing. It will not explain why to Jimmie, from
Tarrytown to Port Chester, the hills, the roads, the woods, and the
cow-paths, caves, streams, and springs hidden in the woods were as
familiar as his own kitchen garden, nor explain why, when you could not
see a Pease and Elliman "For Sale" sign nailed to a tree, Jimmie could
see in the highest branches a last year's bird's nest.

Or why, when he was out alone playing Indians and had sunk his scout's
axe into a fallen log and then scalped the log, he felt that once before
in those same woods he had trailed that same Indian, and with his own
tomahawk split open his skull. Sometimes when he knelt to drink at a
secret spring in the forest, the autumn leaves would crackle and he
would raise his eyes fearing to see a panther facing him.

"But there ain't no panthers in Westchester," Jimmie would reassure
himself. And in the distance