unobstructed, he turned and looked down upon the camp. Perhaps in that
brief glimpse the whole panorama of his adventurous life spread before
him in his mind's eye, and he saw the vicious little hoodlum that he had
once been transformed into a scout, pass through the several ranks of
scouting, grow up, go to war, and come back to be assistant at the camp
where he had spent so many happy hours when he was a young boy.

And now there was not one thing down there, nor shack nor cabin nor
shooting range nor boat nor canoe, nor hero's elm (as they called it),
nor Gold Cross Rock, which had the same romantic interest as had this
young fellow to the scouts who came in droves and watched him and
listened to the talk about him and dreamed of being just such a real
scout as he. He moved about unconsciously among them, simple,
childlike, stolid, but with a kind of assurance and serenity which he
may have learned from the woods.

He was singularly oblivious to the superficial appurtenances of
scouting. He had passed through that stage. The pomp and vanity of the
tenderfoot he knew not. The bespangled dignity of the second-class and
first-class scout, these things he had known and outgrown. His medals
were home somewhere. And out of all this alluring rigmarole and romantic
glory were left the deeper marks of scout training, burned into his soul
as the mark is burned into the skin of a broncho. The woods, the trees,
were his. That, after all, is the highest award in scouting. It is a
medal that one does not lose, and it lasts forever.

As Tom Slade stood there looking down upon the camp, one might have seen
in him the last and fullest accomplishment of scouting, stripped of all
else. His face was the color of a mulatto. He wore no scout hat, he wore
no hat at all. It would have been quite superfluous for him to have worn