It was soon apparent to the scouts that their coming had saved the enterprise for Blythe. He would not have been able to superintend the job with other helpers and even with the scouts he was rather their companion than their leader.

His attempts at sustained labor were pitiful. Yet he was never idle. But he moved from one unfinished task to another, never realizing apparently that each job he started was left undone. He was quite unequal to the harder part of the work, and the scouts, both kind and observant, could see that, and were content to let him gather and pile the fallen lumber and sometimes to rake up the smaller pieces for their evening fire, which he looked forward to with keen delight. What was the matter with him, they did not know. But this they did know, that he was their friend and that he took a kind of childish delight in their camping. He became excited easily and would sometimes seem almost at the point of crying. He would throw down his saw or hammer in a kind of despair.

But these traits were not noticeable except in the working hours and not always then. The boys kept up the fiction of his leadership, conferring with him and consulting him about everything. And with open hearts they took him into their scout life and liked him immensely.

The nearest they could get to a solution of his peculiarities was that he was not well and that a long course of unemployment and privation had resulted in his losing his grip. They took him as they found him, like the good scouts that they were, and their enterprise to earn a little money for improving their picturesque meeting-place at home seemed transformed into a collective, splendid good turn in which their scout loyalty shone like a light.

And so the days of strenuous, cheerful toil, and the nights around the companionable blaze, passed, and Blythe who seemed always fearful and apprehensive of something appeared to be haunted with a kind of dread that this remote and pleasant rustic life would come to an end.“We won’t be finished next week?” he would say with a kind of simple air of wishing to put off that evil time. “You don’t think so, do you?” And Pee-wee would answer, “That’s all right, you leave it to me. I’ll fix it.”

And evidently he did succeed in fixing it, for it rained steadily for three days.