To ward off further expressions of gratitude he hurriedly advised Sadie to take in “The Curse of Cain” rather than “The Mohawk’s Last Stand,” and fled down the front steps.

He wore his khaki uniform.  On his shoulders was his knapsack, from his hands swung his suitcase, and between his heavy stockings and his “shorts” his kneecaps, unkissed by the sun, as yet unscathed by blackberry vines, showed as white and fragile as the wrists of a girl.  As he moved toward the “L” station at the corner, Sadie and his mother waved to him; in the street, boys too small to be Scouts hailed him enviously; even the policeman glancing over the newspapers on the news-stand nodded approval.

“You a Scout, Jimmie?” he asked.

“No,” retorted Jimmie, for was not he also in uniform?  “I’m Santa Claus out filling Christmas stockings.”

The patrolman also possessed a ready wit.

“Then get yourself a pair,” he advised.  “If a dog was to see your legs—­”

Jimmie escaped the insult by fleeing up the steps of the Elevated.

* * * * *

An hour later, with his valise in one hand and staff in the other, he was tramping up the Boston Post Road and breathing heavily.  The day was cruelly hot.  Before his eyes, over an interminable stretch of asphalt, the heat waves danced and flickered.  Already the knapsack on his shoulders pressed upon him like an Old Man of the Sea; the linen in the valise had turned to pig iron, his pipe-stem legs were wabbling, his eyes smarted with salt sweat, and the fingers supporting the valise belonged to some other boy, and were giving that boy much pain.  But as the motor-cars flashed past with raucous warnings, or, that those who rode might better see the boy with bare knees, passed at “half speed,” Jimmie stiffened his shoulders and stepped jauntily forward.  Even when the joy-riders mocked with “Oh, you Scout!” he smiled at them.  He was willing to admit to those who rode that the laugh was on the one who walked.  And he regretted—­oh, so bitterly—­having left the train.  He was indignant that for his “one good turn a day” he had not selected one less strenuous—­that, for instance, he had not assisted a frightened old lady through the traffic.  To refuse the dime she might have offered, as all true scouts refuse all tips, would have been easier than to earn it by walking five miles, with the sun at ninety-nine degrees, and carrying excess baggage.  Twenty times James shifted the valise to the other hand, twenty times he let it drop and sat upon it.

And then, as again he took up his burden, the good Samaritan drew near.  He drew near in a low gray racing-car at the rate of forty miles an hour, and within a hundred feet of Jimmie suddenly stopped and backed toward him.  The good Samaritan was a young man with white hair.  He wore a suit of blue, a golf cap; the hands that held the wheel were disguised in large yellow gloves.  He brought the car to a halt and surveyed the dripping figure in the road with tired and uncurious eyes.