racing-car at the rate of forty miles an
hour, and within a hundred feet of Jimmie suddenly stopped and backed
toward him. The Good Samaritan was a young man with white hair. He wore
a suit of blue, a golf cap; the hands that held the wheel were disguised
in large yellow gloves. He brought the car to a halt and surveyed the
dripping figure in the road with tired and uncurious eyes.

[Illustration: Jimmie dropped the valise, forced his cramped fingers
into straight lines, and saluted.]

"You a Boy Scout?" he asked.

With alacrity for the twenty-first time Jimmie dropped the valise,
forced his cramped fingers into straight lines, and saluted.

The young man in the car nodded toward the seat beside him.

"Get in," he commanded.

When James sat panting happily at his elbow the old young man, to
Jimmie's disappointment, did not continue to shatter the speed limit.
Instead, he seemed inclined for conversation, and the car, growling
indignantly, crawled.

"I never saw a Boy Scout before," announced the old young man. "Tell me
about it. First, tell me what you do when you're not scouting."

Jimmie explained volubly. When not in uniform he was an office-boy and
from pedlers and beggars guarded the gates of Carroll and Hastings,
stock-brokers. He spoke the names of his employers with awe. It was a
firm distinguished, conservative, and long-established. The white-haired
young man seemed to nod in assent.

"Do you know them?" demanded Jimmie suspiciously. "Are you a customer of
ours?"

"I know them," said the young man. "They are customers of mine."

Jimmie wondered in what way Carroll and Hastings were customers of the
white-haired young man. Judging him by his outer garments, Jimmie
guessed he was a Fifth Avenue tailor; he might be even a haberdasher.
Jimmie continued. He lived, he explained, with his mother at One Hundred
and Forty-sixth Street; Sadie, his sister, attended the public school;
he helped support them both, and he now was about to enjoy a well-earned
vacation camping out on Hunter's Island, where he would cook his own
meals and, if the mosquitoes permitted, sleep in a tent.

"And you like that?" demanded the young man. "You call that fun?"

"Sure!" protested Jimmie. "Don't _you_ go camping out?"

"I go camping out," said the Good Samaritan, "whenever I leave New
York."

Jimmie had not for three years lived in Wall Street not to understand
that the young man spoke in metaphor.

"You don't look," o