near the river. He hasn’t got any father and he lives all alone with his mother. They’re awful poor, but Skinny should worry, because how he’s in our troop.

He’s a funny kid, Skinny is. All the fellows like him, but he’s kind of queer. His hair is sort of streaky like, and he’s awful white in his face. There’s one funny thing about him and that is that he can pass most any merit badge test, but he can’t seem to get out of the tenderfoot class. When he gets to be a first class scout, he’ll have about a dozen merit badges waiting for him. He’s kind of different from the rest of us and we call him our mascot, but anyway, all the fellows like him a lot.

So now you know about all four of us and about Harry Donnelle. You should worry about the rest of the troop.

The next day we went to the library and got a big book about trees. We couldn’t find Dahadinee in the index, but anyway, we found something about another tree. This is what the book said about it, and I read it in a whisper to the other fellows:

“The Mackenzie or Balsam poplar sometimes attains in the forest a height of one hundred and fifty feet and a trunk diameter of five or six feet. When isolated from other trees it develops a rather narrow irregular pyramidal open top and its parti-colored leaves, as their dark green upper surfaces and light under surfaces show successively as moved by the wind, make it a handsome object.

“It is distinctly a northern tree, thriving along the banks which are tributary to the Mackenzie River, in a climate too severe for the existence of most other trees. In those cold regions it is far the largest and most graceful of all trees.”

“I know where the Mackenzie River is!” Pee-wee shouted. “It rises in the northwestern part of Canada, takes a northerly course and flows into Beaufort Sea.”

“Correct, be seated,” I told him.

“That’s up near Alaska,” he said.

“Right as usual,” Grove said; “let’s hunt it up.”

“You don’t need to hunt it up,” Pee-wee said; “it’s there. I had it in exams, in the third grade.”

“Maybe it was there then,” Grove said; “but how do we know it’s there now? Safety first.”

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