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The Boy Scout
by
“Not at all,” protested the young man. “You’ve got it wrong. What good will it do your sister to have you sunstruck? I think you are sunstruck. You’re crazy with the heat. You get in here, and we’ll talk it over as we go along.”
Hastily Jimmie backed away. “I’d rather walk,” he said.
The young man shifted his legs irritably.
“Then how’ll this suit you?” he called. “We’ll declare that first ‘one good turn’ a failure and start afresh. Do me a good turn.”
Jimmie halted in his tracks and looked back suspiciously.
“I’m going to Hunter’s Island Inn,” called the young man, “and I’ve lost my way. You get in here and guide me. That’ll be doing me a good turn.”
On either side of the road, blotting out the landscape, giant hands picked out in electric-light bulbs pointed the way to Hunter’s Island Inn. Jimmie grinned and nodded toward them.
“Much obliged,” he called. “I got ter walk.” Turning his back upon temptation, he waddled forward into the flickering heat waves.
The young man did not attempt to pursue. At the side of the road, under the shade of a giant elm, he had brought the car to a halt and with his arms crossed upon the wheel sat motionless, following with frowning eyes the retreating figure of Jimmie. But the narrow-chested and knock-kneed boy staggering over the sun-baked asphalt no longer concerned him. It was not Jimmie, but the code preached by Jimmie, and not only preached but before his eyes put into practice, that interested him. The young man with white hair had been running away from temptation. At forty miles an hour he had been running away from the temptation to do a fellow mortal “a good turn.” That morning, to the appeal of a drowning Caesar to “Help me, Cassius, or I sink,” he had answered: “Sink!” That answer he had no wish to reconsider. That he might not reconsider he had sought to escape. It was his experience that a sixty-horse-power racing-machine is a jealous mistress. For retrospective, sentimental, or philanthropic thoughts she grants no leave of absence. But he had not escaped. Jimmie had halted him, tripped him by the heels, and set him again to thinking. Within the half-hour that followed those who rolled past saw at the side of the road a car with her engine running, and leaning upon the wheel, as unconscious of his surroundings as though he sat at his own fireplace, a young man who frowned and stared at nothing. The half-hour passed and the young man swung his car back toward the city. But at the first road-house that showed a blue-and-white telephone sign he left it, and into the iron box at the end of the bar dropped a nickel. He wished to communicate with Mr. Carroll, of Carroll and Hastings; and when he learned Mr. Carroll had just issued orders that he must not be disturbed, the young man gave his name.
The effect upon the barkeeper was instantaneous. With the aggrieved air of one who feels he is the victim of a jest he laughed scornfully.
“What are you putting over?” he demanded.
The young man smiled reassuringly. He had begun to speak and, though apparently engaged with the beer-glass he was polishing, the barkeeper listened.
Down in Wall Street the senior member of Carroll and Hastings also listened. He was alone in the most private of all his private offices, and when interrupted had been engaged in what, of all undertakings, is the most momentous. On the desk before him lay letters to his lawyer, to the coroner, to his wife; and hidden by a mass of papers, but within reach of his hand, was an automatic pistol. The promise it offered of swift release had made the writing of the letters simple, had given him a feeling of complete detachment, had released him, at least in thought, from all responsibilities. And when at his elbow the telephone coughed discreetly, it was as though some one had called him from a world from which already he had made his exit.