He didn’t belong to any patrol—he wasn’t a real scout at all, but it wasn’t Davy’s fault. He was only nine and a half, you see, and that meant two years and six months of waiting—oh, such long waiting it seemed to Davy—before he could wear the coveted arrow-head badge of the tenderfoot scout and go hiking and camping like big Cousin Fred.

That is how the figures stood late in December. It was the summer before, at Grandfather’s, that Davy had first begun counting the time until he should be twelve. There, at the farm, he had met Cousin[8] Fred. Fred was sixteen years old, a first-class scout, patrol leader in his home town, and a winner of the life-saving merit badge. 

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