ised Mr. Burton he would do; he went home and lay
down and rested. It was not much of a home, but it was better than a
dugout. That is, it was cleaner though not very much larger. But there
were no lieutenants.

It was a tiny hall-room in a boarding house, and the single window
afforded a beautiful view of back fences. It was all the home that Tom
Slade knew. He had no family, no relations, nothing.

He had been born in a tenement in Barrel Alley, where his mother had
died and from which his good-for-nothing father had disappeared. For a
while he had been a waif and a hoodlum, and by strict attention to the
code of Barrel Alley's gang, he had risen to be king of the hoodlums.
No one, not even Blokey Mattenburg himself, could throw a rock into a
trolley car with the precision of Tom Slade.

Then, on an evil day, he was tempted to watch the scouts and it proved
fatal. He was drawn head over ears into scouting, and became leader of
the new Elk Patrol in the First Bridgeboro Troop. For three seasons he
was a familiar, if rather odd figure, at Temple Camp, which Mr. John
Temple of Bridgeboro had founded in the Catskills, and when he was old
enough to work it seemed natural that these kindly gentlemen who had his
welfare at heart, should put him into the city office of the camp, which
he left to go to war, and to which he had but lately returned, suffering
from shell-shock.

He was now eighteen years old, and though no longer a scout in the
ordinary sense, he retained his connection with the troop in capacity of
assistant to Mr. Ellsworth, the troop's scoutmaster.

He had been rather older than the members of this troop when he made his
spectacular leap from hoodlumism to scouting, and hence while they were
still kicking their heels in the arena he had, as one might say, passed
outside it.

But his love for the boys and their splendid scoutmaster who had given
him a lift, was founded upon a rock. The camp and the troop room had
been his home, the scouts had been his brothers, and all the simple
associations of his new life were bound up with these three patrols.

Perhaps it was for this reason that among these boys, all younger than
himself, and with whom he had always mingled on such familiar terms, he
showed but few, and those not often, of the distressing symptoms which
bespoke his shattered nerves. Among them he found refuge and was at
peace with himself.

And the boys, intent upon their own pursuits, knew nothin