let's get acquainted. I'd send you a photo, only
I gave my girl the last one I had.

So long,
BILLY BARNARD,
Scoutmaster.

CHAPTER XVI

THE EPISODE IN FRANCE

Uncle Jeb smoked his pipe leisurely, listening to this letter. "Kind of
a comic, hey?" he said. "I reckon ye'd like to hev 'em come. Hain't
never seed each other, hey?"

Tom was silent. The letter meant more to him than Uncle Jeb imagined. It
touched one of the springs of his simple, stolid nature, and his eyes
glistened as he glanced over it again, drinking in its genial, friendly,
familiar tone. So he had at least one friend after all. Cut of all that
turmoil of war, with its dangers and sufferings, had come at least one
friend. The bursting of that shell which had seemed to shake the earth,
and which had shattered his nerves and lost him Roy and all those
treasured friends and comrades of his boyhood, had at least brought him
one true friend. He had never felt the need of a friend more than at
that very moment. The cheery letter seemed for the moment, to wipe out
the memory of Roy's last words to him, that he was a liar. And it
aroused his memories of France.

"Maybe you might like to hear about it," he said to Uncle Jeb, in his
simple way. "Kind of, now it makes me think about France. I wouldn't
blame the scouts for not having any use for me--I wouldn't blame
Roy--but anyway, it was that shell that did it. If you say so I'll start
a camp-fire. That's what always makes me think about the
scouts--camp-fire. Maybe you'll say I was to blame. Anyway, they won't
lose anything. And when they come I'll go back home, if they want me to.
That's only fair. Anyway, I like Temple Camp best of all."

"Kinder like home, Tommy," Uncle Jeb said.

The sun was going down beyond the hills across the lake and flickering
up the water and casting a crimson glow upon the wooded summits. The
empty cabins, and the boarded-up cooking shack, shone clear and sharp
in the gathering twilight. High above, a great bird soared through the
dusk, hastening to its home in the mountains, where Silver Fox trail
wound its way up through the fastness, and where Tom and Roy had often
gone. And the memory of all these fond associations gripped Tom now, and
he had to tighten his big ugly mouth to keep it from showing any tremor
of weakness