nd_. It comes from
Shakespeare or one of those old ginks; it means a kind of a moral guide,
I suppose."

"Oh," said Tom.

"But I need, I need, I need, I need a friend," Hervey said.

"You seem to have lots of friends down there," Tom said.

"A scout is observant, hey?" Willetts laughed.

"I mean you always seem to have a lot of fellows with you," Tom said,
ignoring the compliment. "Everybody likes your troop, that's sure. And
your troop seems to be stuck on _you_."

"_Good night!_" Hervey laughed. "They won't be stuck on me after
Saturday. That'll be the end of my glorious career."

"What did you do?" Tom asked, after his customary fashion of construing
talk literally.

"Oh, I didn't exactly commit a murder," the other laughed, "but I fell
down, Sla--you don't mind my calling you Slady, do you?"

"That's what most everybody calls me," Tom said, "except the troop I was
in. They call me Tomasso."

"Sounds like tomato, hey?" Hervey laughed. "No, my troubles are about
merit badges. I've bungled the whole thing up. When a fellow goes after
the Eagle award, he ought to have a manager, that's what I say. He ought
to have a manager to plan things out for him. I tried to manage my own
campaign and now I'm stuck--with a capital S."

"How many merits have you got?" Tom asked him.

"Twenty," Hervey said, "twenty and two-thirds. Just a fraction more and
I'd have gone over the top."

"You mean a sub-division?" Tom asked.

"That's where the little _but_ comes in," Hervey said. "B-u-t, but. It's
a big word, all right, just as you said."

"Is it architecture or cooking or interpreting or one of those?" Tom
asked.

Hervey glanced at Tom in frank surprise.

"Maybe it's leather work, or machinery, or taxidermy or marksmanship,"
Tom continued, with no thought further from his mind than that of
showing off.

"Guess again," Hervey laughed.

"Then it must be either music or stalking," Tom said, dully.

His companion paused in his steps, contemplating Tom with unconcealed
amazement. "Right-o," he said; "it's stalking. What are you? A mind
reader?"

"Those are the only ones that have three tests," Tom said. "So if you
have twenty merits and two-thirds of a merit, why, you must be trying
for one of those. Maybe they've changed it since I looked at the
handbook."

Hervey Willetts stood just where he had stopped, looking at Tom with
admiration. In his astonishment he glanced at Tom's arm as if he
expected to see upon