6.
_Good night!_"

"Daniel Boone is already dead!" shouted Peewee.

"Take a demerit and stay after school," Roy continued. "So I vote that
we buy some paint and see if we can't paint the heads of our three
patrol animals on the three cabins. Then we'll feel more like scouts and
not so much like convicts. If we do that, it will be thirty cents each
instead of twenty-five."

Before Roy was through speaking, a scout hat was going around and the
goodly jingle of coins within it, testified to the troops' enthusiasm
for what he had been saying. Tom dropped in three quarters, but no one
noticed that. He seemed abstracted and unusually nervous. The hat was
not passed to little Alfred McCord. Perhaps that was because he was
mascot....

[Illustration: TOM'S HAND CLUNG TO THE BACK OF THE BENCH. Tom Slade at
Black Lake--Page 44]

CHAPTER VIII

FIVE, SIX, AND SEVEN

Then Tom Slade stood up. Any one observing him carefully would have
noticed that his hand which clung to the back of the bench moved
nervously, but otherwise he seemed stolid and dull as usual. For just a
second he breathed almost audibly and bit his lip, then he spoke. They
listened, a kind of balm of soothing silence pervaded the room, because
he spoke so seldom these days. They seemed ready enough to pay him the
tribute of their attention when he really seemed to take an interest.

"I got to tell you something," he said, "and maybe you won't like it.
Those three cabins are already taken by a troop in Ohio."

"Which three?" Westy Martin asked, apparently dumbfounded.

"Oh boy, suppose that was true!" Roy said, amused at the very thought of
such a possibility.

"Which three?" Westy repeated, still apparently in some suspense.

"Tomasso has Westy's goat," Roy laughed.

"Look at the straight face he's keeping," Doc laughed, referring to Tom.

"I might as well tell you the truth," Tom said. "I forget things
sometimes; maybe you don't understand. Maybe it was because I wasn't
here last year--maybe. But I didn't stop to think about those numbers
being your--our--numbers. Now I can remember. I assigned those cabins to
a troop in Ohio. They wanted three that were kind of separate from the
others and--and--I--I didn't remember."

He seemed a pathetic spectacle as he stood there facing them, jerking
his head nervously in the interval of silence and staring amazement that
followed. There was no joking about it and they knew it. It was not in
Tom's natu