initial commit of ebook 38540HEADmain

1 files changed, 7128 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/38540-8.txt b/38540-8.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..99a9a09
--- /dev/null
+++ b/38540-8.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,7128 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Scout of To-day, by Isabel Hornibrook
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: A Scout of To-day
+
+Author: Isabel Hornibrook
+
+Release Date: January 10, 2012 [EBook #38540]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A SCOUT OF TO-DAY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Paul Fernandez and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+ +------------------------------------------+
+ |                                          |
+ | Transcriber's Note                       |
+ |                                          |
+ | Both "Ne'er-do-weel" and "Ne'er-do-well" |
+ | are used, so both spellings have been    |
+ | preserved.                               |
+ |                                          |
+ +------------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: "WHAT IS IT? WHAT IS IT?"]
+
+
+
+
+A SCOUT OF TO-DAY
+
+BY
+
+ISABEL HORNIBROOK
+
+_Author of "Camp and Trail," "Lost in Maine Woods,"
+"Captain Curly's Boy," etc., etc._
+
+WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+[Illustration]
+
+    BOSTON AND NEW YORK
+   HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+  The Riverside Press Cambridge 1913
+
+    COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY ISABEL HORNIBROOK
+   ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+ _Published June 1913_
+
+AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED TO "NED"
+
+
+The Author expresses her indebtedness to Edmund Richard Cummins for the
+song, "THE SCOUTS OF THE U.S.A."
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+     I.  THE GREAT WOODS                  1
+
+    II.  ONLY A CHIP'                    17
+
+   III.  RACCOON JUNIOR                  34
+
+    IV.  VARNEY'S PAINTPOT               55
+
+     V.  "YOU MUST LOOK OUT!"            70
+
+    VI.  THE FRICTION FIRE               82
+
+   VII.  MEMBERS OF THE LOCAL COUNCIL   104
+
+  VIII.  THE BOWLINE KNOT               121
+
+    IX.  GODEY PECK                     145
+
+     X.  THE BALDFACED HOUSE            159
+
+    XI.  ESTU PRETA!                    178
+
+   XII.  THE CHRISTMAS BRIGADE          196
+
+  XIII.  THE BIG MINUTE                 207
+
+   XIV.  A RIVER DUEL                   215
+
+    XV.  THE CAMP ON THE DUNES          230
+
+   XVI.  THE PUP-SEAL'S CREEK           244
+
+  XVII.  THE SIGNALMAN                  262
+
+ XVIII.  THE LOG SHANTY AGAIN           271
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+ "WHAT IS IT? WHAT IS IT?" (page 99) _Colored Frontispiece_
+
+ "HELP! _HELP!_"                                         56
+
+ "MAK' YOU S-SILENT! W'AT FOR YOU SPIK LAK DAT?"        150
+
+ IN CAMP                                                238
+
+ "CAN'T YOU SEE THE TIDE IS LEAVING YOU?"               252
+
+ _From drawings by J. Reading_
+
+
+
+
+A SCOUT OF TO-DAY
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE GREAT WOODS
+
+
+"Well! this would be the very day for a long tramp up into the woods.
+Tooraloo! I feel just in the humor for that."
+
+Colin Estey stretched his well-developed fourteen-year-old body among
+the tall feathery grasses of the broad salt-marsh whereon he lay,
+kicking his heels in the September sunshine, and gazed longingly off
+toward the grand expanse of New England woodland that bordered the
+marshes and, rising into tree-clad hills, stretched away much farther
+than the eye could reach in apparently illimitable majesty.
+
+Those woods were the most imposing and mysterious feature in Colin's
+world. They bounded it in a way. Beyond a certain shallow point in them
+lay the Unknown, the Woodland Wonder, whereof he had heard much, but
+which he had never explored for himself. And this reminded him
+unpleasantly that he was barely fourteen, in stature measuring five
+feet three _and_ three eighths, facts which never obtruded themselves
+baldly upon his memory when he romped about the salt-marshes, or rowed a
+boat--or if no boat was forthcoming, paddled a washtub--on the broad
+tidal river that wound in and out between the marshes.
+
+Yet though the unprobed mystery of the dense woods vexed him with the
+feeling of being immature and young--woodland distances look vaster at
+fourteen than at eighteen--it fascinated him, too, more than did any
+riddle of the salt-marshes or lunar enigma of the ebb and flow of tide
+in the silvery, brackish river formed by an arm of sea that coursed
+inland for many a mile to meet a freshwater stream near the town where
+Colin was born.
+
+Any daring boy above the age of ten could learn pretty nearly all there
+was to know about that tidal river: of the mammal and fish wherewith it
+teemed, from the great harbor seal, once the despot of the river, to the
+tiny brit that frolicked in the eddies; and about the graceful bird-life
+that soared above its brackish current.
+
+He could bathe, shrieking with excitement, as wild from delight as any
+young water-bird, in the foam of the rocky bar where fresh stream and
+salt stream met with a great crowing of waters and laughter of spray.
+
+He could imitate the triple whistle, the shrill "Wheu! Wheu! Wheu!" of
+the greater yellow-legs so cleverly as to beguile that noisy bird, which
+is said to warn every other feathered thing within hearing, into
+forgetting its panic and alighting near him.
+
+He could give the drawn-out, plaintive "Ter-lee-ee!" call of the
+black-breasted plover, and find the crude nest of the spotted sandpiper
+nestling beneath a tall clump of candle-grass.
+
+All these secrets and many more were within easy reach and could be
+studied in his unwritten Nature Primer whose pages were traced in the
+flight of each bird and the spawn of every fish.
+
+But the Heart of the Woods was a closed book to most fourteen-year-old
+boys born and brought up in the little tidal town of Exmouth.
+
+Colin had often longed to turn the pages of that book--to penetrate
+farther into the woods than he had dared to do yet. This longing was
+fanned by the tales of men who had hunted, trapped or felled trees in
+them, who could spell out each syllable of the woodlore to be studied in
+their golden twilight; and who, as they roved and read, could put a
+finger on many a colored illustration of Nature's methods set against a
+green background of branches or fluttering underbrush, like the flitting
+foliage of moving pictures.
+
+To-day the wood-longing possessed Colin so strongly that it actually
+stung him all over, from his neck to his drumming, purposeless heels.
+
+He glanced up into the brilliant September sky arching the salt-marshes,
+questioning it as to what might be going on in the woods at this moment
+under its imperial canopy.
+
+And the blue eye of the sky winked back at him, hinting that it knew of
+forest secrets to be discovered to-day--of fascinating woodland
+creatures to be seen for a moment at their whisking gambols.
+
+The sunlight's energy raced through him. The briny ozone of the
+salt-marshes was a tickling feather in his nostrils, teasing him with a
+desire to find an outlet for that energy in some new and unprecedented
+form of activity.
+
+He sprang to his feet, spurning the plumy grass.
+
+"Gee whiz! I'm not going to lie here any longer, smelling marsh-hay," he
+cried half articulately, his eye taking in the figures of two hay-makers
+who were mowing the tall marsh-grass and letting it lie in fragrant
+swathes to dry into the salt hay that forms such juicy fodder for
+cattle. "It's me for the woods to-day! I want to go farther into those
+old woods than I've ever gone before--far enough to find Varney's
+Paintpot and the Bear's Den--and the coon's hole that Toiney Leduc saw
+among the alders an' ledges near Big Swamp!"
+
+He halted on the first footstep, whistling blithely to a gray-winged
+yellow-legs that skimmed above his head. The curly, boyish whistle,
+ascending in spirals, carried the musical challenge aloft: "I'm glad I'm
+alive and athirst for adventure; aren't you?"
+
+To which the bird's noisy three-syllabled cry responded like three
+cheers!
+
+"It's me for the woods to-day!" Colin set off at an easy lope across the
+marshes. "I'm going to look up Coombsie and Starrie Chase--and Kenjo
+Red! Us boys won't have much more time for fun before school reopens!"
+grammar capsizing in the sudden, boisterous eddy within him.
+
+That eddy of excitement carried him like a feather up an earthy
+embankment that ascended from the low-lying marshes, over a fence, and
+out onto the drab highroad which a little farther on blossomed out into
+houses on either side and became the quiet main street of Exmouth.
+
+Colin turned his face westward toward the home of "Coombsie," otherwise
+Mark Coombs--also shortened into "Marcoo" by nickname-loving boydom.
+
+He had not gone far when his loping speed slackened abruptly to a
+contemplative trot. The trot sobered down to a crestfallen walk. The
+walk dwindled into a halt right in the middle of the sunny road.
+
+"Tooraloo! here comes Coombsie now," he ejaculated behind his twitching
+lips. "And some one with him! Oh, I forgot all about that!" Dismay stole
+over his face at the thought. "Of course it's the strange boy, Marcoo's
+cousin, who came from Philadelphia yesterday and is going to stay here
+for ever so long--six months or so--while his parents travel in Europe.
+This spoils our fun. Probably _he_ won't want to start off on a long
+hike through the woods," rigidly scanning the approaching stranger as a
+stiffened terrier might size up a dog of a different breed. "His folks
+are rich, so Marcoo said; I suppose he's been brought up in a city
+flowerpot--and isn't much of a fellow anyhow!" with a disgruntled grin.
+
+But as the oncoming pair drew within twenty yards of the youthful critic
+the latter's tense face-muscles relaxed. Reassurance crept into his
+expression.
+
+"Gee! he looks all right, this city boy. He's not dolled-up much anyway!
+And he doesn't look 'Willified' either!" was Colin's complacent comment.
+
+No, the stranger's dress was certainly not patterned after the fashion
+of the boy-doll which Colin Estey had seen simpering in store-windows.
+He wore a khaki shirt stained with service, rough tweed knickerbockers
+and a soft broad-brimmed hat. He carried his coat; the ends of his blue
+necktie dangled outside his shirt, one was looped up into a careless
+knot. His gray eye was rather more than usually alert and bright, his
+general appearance certainly not suggestive of a flowerpot plant; his
+step, quick and springy, embodied the saline breeze that skipped over
+the salt-marshes.
+
+So much Colin took in before criticism was blown out of his mind by a
+shout from Coombsie.
+
+"Hullo! Col," exclaimed Marcoo. "Say, this is fine! We were just
+starting off to hunt you up--Nix and I! This is my cousin, Nixon Warren,
+who popped up here from Philadelphia late last night. Nix, this is my
+chum, Colin Estey!"
+
+The two boys acknowledged the introduction with gruff shyness.
+
+"Nixon and I settled on going down the river to-day in Captain Andy's
+power-boat, and Mother put us up a corking good luncheon," Marcoo
+significantly swung a basket pendant from his right hand. "But we've
+just been talking to Captain Andy," glancing backward over his shoulder
+at the receding figure of an elderly man who limped as he walked, "and
+he says he can't take us to-day. He won't even loan us the Pill."
+Coombsie gesticulated with the basket toward the broad tidal river
+gleaming in the sunshine, on which rode a trim gasolene launch with a
+little rowboat, so tubby that it was almost round and aptly named the
+Pill, lying as tender beside it.
+
+"Pshaw! the Pill isn't much of a boat. One might as well put to sea in a
+shoebox!" Colin chuckled.
+
+"I know! Well, we can't go on the river anyhow, so we've determined to
+take the basket along and spend the whole day in the woods. Nix is--"
+
+"Great O!" whooped Colin, breaking in. "That's what I've been planning
+on doing too. I want to go _far_ into the woods to-day,"--his hands
+doubled and opened excitedly, as if grasping at something hitherto out
+of reach,--"farther than I've ever been before,--far enough to see
+Varney's Paintpot and the old Bear's Den--and some of the other wonders
+that the men tell about!"
+
+"But there aren't any bears in these Massachusetts woods now?" It was
+the strange boy, Nixon Warren, who eagerly spoke.
+
+"Not that we know of!" Coombsie answered. "If one should stray over the
+border from New Hampshire he manages to lie low. Apparently there's
+nothing bigger than a deer traveling in our woods to-day--together with
+foxes in plenty and an occasional coon. The last bear seen in this
+region, Nix, had his den in the cave of a great rock in the thickest
+part o' the woods. He was such an everlasting nuisance, killing calves
+and lambs, that a hunter tracked him into the cave and killed him with
+his knife. Ever since it has been called the Bear's Den. I've never seen
+it; nor you, Col!"
+
+"No, but Starrie Chase has! I was going to hunt him up too, and Kenjo
+Red: they're a team if you want to go into the woods; they know more
+about them than any other boy in Exmouth."
+
+"Kenjo has gone to Salem to-day. And Leon Chase?" Coombsie's expression
+was doubtful. "I guess Leon makes a bluff of knowing the woods better
+than he does. He'll scare everything away with his dog and shotgun.
+Captain Andy is hunting for him now," with another backward glance to
+where the massive figure of the old sea-captain was melting from view.
+"He's threatening to shake Starrie until his heels change places with
+his head for fixing the Doctor's doorbell last night, wedging a pin into
+it so that it kept on ringing until the electricity gave out--and for
+teasing old Ma'am Baldwin again."
+
+"'Mom Baldwin,' who lives in that old baldfaced house 'way over on the
+salt-marshes!" Colin hooted. "Pshaw! she ought to wash her clothes at
+the Witch Rock, where Dark Tammy was made to wash hers, over a hundred
+years ago. I guess Leon knows the way to Varney's Paintpot anyhow," he
+advanced clinchingly.
+
+"What sort of queer Paintpot is that?" Nixon Warren spoke; his
+stranger's part in the conversation was limited to putting excited
+questions.
+
+"It's a red-ochre swamp--a bed of moist red clay--that's hidden
+somewhere in the woods," Colin explained. "The Indians used it for
+making paint. So did the farmers, hereabouts, until a few years ago. I
+believe it's mostly dried up now."
+
+"Whoopee! if we could only find it, we might paint ourselves to our
+waists, make believe we were Indians and go yelling through the woods!"
+Nixon's eye sparkled like sun-touched granite, and Colin parted with the
+last lingering suspicion of his being a flowerpot fellow.
+
+This suggestion settled it. Starrie Chase, otherwise Leon, might let his
+boyish energy leak off as waste steam in planting another thorn in the
+side of the hard-worked doctor who bore the burdens of half the
+community, and in persecuting lonely old women, but--he was supposed to
+know the way to Varney's Paintpot!
+
+And the three started along the road to find him.
+
+The quest did not lead them far. Rounding a bend in the highroad, they
+came abruptly upon Leon Starr Chase, familiarly called Starrie, almost a
+fifteen-year-old boy, of Nixon's age.
+
+He was leaning against a low fence above the marshes, holding a dead
+bird high above the head of a very lively fox-terrier whose tan ears
+gesticulated like tiny signal flags as he jumped into the air to capture
+it, with a short one-syllabled bark.
+
+"Ha! _you_ can't catch it, Blink--and you shan't have it till you do,"
+teased his master, lowering its limp yellow legs a little.
+
+The dog's nose touched them. The next instant he had the bird in his
+mouth.
+
+With equal swiftness he dropped it on the sidewalk, growling and gagging
+at the warm feathers which almost choked him. "Ugh-r-r!" He spurned it
+with his black nose along the ground, the tiny yellow claws raking up
+minute spirals of dust.
+
+"There! I knew you wouldn't eat it," remarked his master indifferently.
+"You're a spoiled pup!" Simultaneously Leon caught sight of the three
+boys making toward him and burst into a complacent shout of recognition.
+
+"Hullo, Colin! Hullo, Coombsie!" he cried. "See what I've got! Six
+_yellow-legs_! I fired into a flock; the first I've seen this year. They
+were going from me and I dropped half a dozen of them together, with
+this old 'fuzzee'!" He touched an ancient shotgun propped beside him.
+"I've shot quite a number one at a time this week."
+
+His left hand went out to a huddle of still quivering feathers on top of
+the fence in which five pairs of yellow spindle-legs were tangled like
+slim twigs.
+
+Colin, as was expected of him, burst into an exclamation of wonder at
+this destructive skill. Coombsie's admiration was more forced.
+
+Blink, the terrier, scornfully rolled over the feathered thing in the
+dust. He snapped angrily at the stranger, Nixon Warren, who tried to
+pick it up and examine it.
+
+"That bird won't be fit to eat now, after the dog has played with it,"
+suggested the latter, addressing Leon without the benefit of an
+introduction.
+
+"I don't care. Probably I'll give the whole bunch of yellow-legs away,
+anyhow--Mother doesn't like their sedgy flavor. She'd rather I'd let the
+birds alone, I guess!"
+
+"Why do you shoot so many if you don't want them?"
+
+"Oh! partly for the sport and partly because these 'Greater Yellow-legs'
+are such telltales that they warn every duck and other bird within
+hearing by their noisy whistle."
+
+Impulsively Nixon put out a finger and touched one slim leg with its
+limp claw that protruded from the fence. At the same moment he glanced
+upward.
+
+Over the boys' heads, having just risen from the feathery marshes,
+skimmed a feathered telltale, live counterpart of the one he touched,
+its legs golden spindles in the sunshine, its shrill joy-whistle: "Wheu!
+Wheu! _Whe-eu!_" proclaiming the thanksgiving which had rioted through
+Colin's mind on the fragrant salt-marshes: "Glad I'm alive! Glad I'm
+alive! _Glad_--I'm alive!"
+
+A smothered exclamation broke from Coombsie as he followed the finger
+and the flight.
+
+Leon snatched up the gun.
+
+"One can't have too much of a good thing: I guess I could drop that
+'telltale,' too!"
+
+But Marcoo's hand fastened upon his arm with an impulsive cry.
+
+"Eh! What's the matter with you--Flutter-budget?" Lowering the pointed
+shotgun, Leon whisked round; his restless brown eyes had a lightning
+trick of shutting and opening, as if he were taking a photograph of the
+person addressed, which was in general highly disconcerting to the boy
+who differed from him. "No need to make a fuss! I wouldn't let her off
+here, anyhow," he added, fondling the gun. "Father would be fined if I
+should fire a shot on the highroad."
+
+"_We're_ starting off on a hike--for a long tramp into the woods, Leon,"
+began Coombsie hurriedly, anxious to create a diversion. "We want you to
+come with us, as leader; Colin says that _you_ know the way to Varney's
+Paintpot!"
+
+The other's expression changed like a rocket: Starrie Chase enjoyed
+leading other boys, even more than he reveled in "popping
+yellow-legs"--for the former Nature had intended him.
+
+"All right!" he responded with swift eagerness. "Just, you fellows, keep
+an eye on my gun while I run home with the birds; I'll be back in a
+minute!"
+
+"Oh! you're not going to take your gun into the woods?"
+
+"Sure--I am! I might get a chance at a fox!"
+
+"Won't it be an awful nuisance carrying it all the way through the thick
+undergrowth--we want to go as far into the woods as the Bear's Den?"
+suggested Marcoo tactfully.
+
+"Well, perhaps it would. I'll just scoot home then, and be back in no
+time!"
+
+He snatched the dead birds from the fence, raced away and reappeared in
+three minutes, with the terrier barking at his heels.
+
+"I'm going to let Blink come anyhow; he'll have a great time chasing
+things--eh, Blinkie?" Leon made a hurdle of his outstretched arm for the
+scampering dog to jump over it.
+
+And the terrier replied in a volley of excited barks, saying in doggy
+talk: "Fellows! if there's fun ahead, I'm in with you. The woods are a
+grand old playground!"
+
+He led the way, and the four boys followed, jostling each other merrily,
+rubbing their high spirits together and bringing sparks from the
+contact--bound for that mysterious forest Paintpot.
+
+But the stranger, Nixon Warren, could not forbear throwing one backward
+glance from under his wide-brimmed hat at the poor dog-scorned
+yellow-legs, its joy-whistle silenced, stiffening in the dust.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+ONLY A CHIP'
+
+
+"Oh! I wish I had worn my tramping togs," exclaimed Nixon Warren as the
+four boys, after covering an easy mile along the highroad and over the
+uplands that lay between marsh and woodland, plunged, whooping, in amid
+the forest shadows roofed by the meeting branches of pines, hemlocks,
+oaks, and birches, with here and there a maple already turning ruddy,
+that formed the outposts of the dense woods.
+
+A dwarf counterpart of the same trees laced with vines and prickly
+brambles made an undergrowth so thick that they parted with shreds of
+their clothing as they went threshing through it, in a fascinating
+gold-misted twilight, through which the slender sunbeams flashed like
+fairy knitting-needles weaving a scarf of light and shade around each
+tall trunk.
+
+"Why! you're better 'togged' for the woods than the rest of us are,"
+answered Leon Starr Chase, looking askance at the new boy. "That's a
+dandy hat; must shade your eyes a whole lot when you're tramping on
+open ground! I guess ours don't need any shading!"
+
+A wandering sunbeam kindled a brassy spark in Leon's brown eye which
+looked as if it could face anything unabashed. In his mind lurked the
+same suspicion that had hovered over Colin's at first sight of Nixon,
+that this newcomer from a distant city might be somewhat of a flowerpot
+fellow, delicately reared and coddled, not a hardy plant that could
+revel and rough it in the wilderness atmosphere of the thick woods.
+
+Nothing about the boy-stranger supported such an idea for a moment,
+except to Leon, as the party progressed, the interest which he took in
+the floral life of the woodland: in objects which Starrie Chase who
+invariably "hit the woods" as he phrased it, with destruction in the
+forefront of his thoughts, generally overlooked, and therefore did not
+consider worth a second glance.
+
+He stood and gaped as Nixon, with a shout of delight, pounced upon some
+rosy pepper-grass, stooped to pick a wood aster or gentian, or pointed
+out to Coombsie the green sarsaparilla plant flaunting and prolific
+between the trees.
+
+"What do you call this, Marcoo?" the strange boy would exclaim
+delightedly, finding novel treasure trove in the rare white blossoms of
+Labrador tea. "I don't remember to have seen this flower on any of our
+hikes through the Pennsylvania woods!"
+
+To which Coombsie would make answer:--
+
+"Don't ask me, Nix; I know a little about birds, but when it comes to
+knowing anything of flowers or plants--excepting those that are under
+our feet every day--I 'fall down flunk!' Hullo! though, here are some
+devil's pitchforks--or stick-tight--I do know them!"
+
+"So do I!" Nixon stooped over the tall bristly flower-heads, rusty green
+in color, and gathered a few of the two-pronged seed-vessels that cling
+so readily to the fur of an animal or the clothing of a boy. "It's funny
+to think how they have to depend upon some passing animal to propagate
+the seeds. Say! but they do stick tight, don't they?" And he slyly
+slipped a few of the russet pitchforks inside Leon's collar--whereupon a
+whooping scuffle ensued.
+
+"It looks to me as if _some_ lightfooted animal were in the habit of
+passing here that might carry the seeds along," said the perpetrator of
+the prank presently, dropping upon his hands and knees to examine
+breathlessly the leaves and brambles pressed down into a trail so light
+that it seemed the mere shadow of a pathway leading off into the woods
+at right angles from where the boys stood.
+
+"You're right. It's a fox-path!" Leon was examining the shadow-tracks
+too. "A fox trots along here to his hunting-ground where he catches
+shrews an' mice or grasshoppers even, when he can't get hold of a plump
+quail or partridge. Whew! I wish I'd brought my gun."
+
+Dead silence for two minutes, while each ear was intently strained to
+catch the sound of a sly footfall and heard nothing but the noisy
+shrilling of the cicada, or seventeen-year locust, with the pipe of
+kindred insects.
+
+"Look! there's been a partridge at work here," cried Nixon by and by,
+when the still game was over and the boys were forging ahead again.
+
+He pointed to a decayed log whose flaky wood, garnished here and there
+with a tiny buff feather, was mostly pecked away and reduced to brown
+powder by the busy bird which had wallowed there.
+
+"He's been trying to get at some insects in the wood. See how he has
+dusted it all up with his claws an' feathers!" went on the excited
+speaker. "Oh--but I tell you what makes you feel happy!" He drew a long
+breath, turning suddenly, impulsively, to the boys behind him. "It's
+when you're out on a hike an' a partridge rises right in front of
+you--and you hear his wings sing!"
+
+Colin and Coombsie stared. The strange boy's look flashed with such
+frank gladness, doubled and trebled by sharing sympathetically, in so
+far as he could, each bounding thrill that animated the wild, free life
+about him! They had often been moved by the liquid notes from a
+songster's throat, but had not come enough into loving touch with Nature
+to hear music in a bird's wings.
+
+If Leon had heard it, his one idea would have been to silence it with a
+shot. He stood still in his tracks, bristling like his dog.
+
+"Ughr-r! 'Singing wings'!" he sneered. "Aw! take that talk home to
+Mamma."
+
+"Say that once again, and I'll lick you!" The stranger's gaze became,
+now, very straight and inviting from under his broad-brimmed hat.
+
+The atmosphere felt highly charged--unpleasantly so for the other two
+boys. But at that critical moment an extraordinary sound of other
+singing--human singing--was borne to them in faint merriment upon the
+woodland breeze, so primitive, so unlike anything modern, that it might
+have been Robin Hood himself or one of his green-coated Merry Men
+singing a roundelay in the woods to the accompaniment of a
+woodchopper's axe.
+
+  "Rond! Rond! Rond! peti' pie pon' ton'!
+  Rond! rond! rond! peti' pie pon' ton'!"
+
+"_What is it?_ Who is--it?" Nixon's stiffening fists unclosed. His eye
+was bright with bewilderment.
+
+"Houp-la! it's Toiney--Toiney Leduc." Colin broke into an exultant
+whoop. "Now we'll have fun! Toiney is a funny one, for sure!"
+
+"He's more fun than a circus," corroborated Coombsie. "We're coming to a
+little farm-clearing in the woods now, Nix," he explained, falling in by
+his cousin's side as the four boys moved hastily ahead, challenges
+forgotten. "There's a house on it, the last for miles. It's owned by a
+man called Greer, and Toiney Leduc works for him during the summer an'
+fall. Toiney is a French-Canadian who came here about a year ago; his
+brother is employed in one of the shipbuilding yards on the river."
+
+The merry, oft-repeated strain came to them more distinctly now, rolling
+among the trees:--
+
+  "Rond, rond, rond, peti' pie pon' ton'!
+    C'éta't une bonne femme,
+    Qui garda't sex moutons,
+  Rond', rond', rond, peti' pie pon' ton'!"
+
+"He's singing about the woman who was taking care of her sheep and how
+the lamb got his chin in the milk! He translated it for me," said Colin.
+
+"'Translate!' He doesn't know enough English to say 'Boo!' straight,"
+threw back Leon, as he gained the edge of the clearing. "It is Toiney!"
+he cried exultingly. "Toiney--and the _Hare_!"
+
+"The--what? My word! there are surprises enough in these woods--what
+with forest paintpots--and the rest." Nixon, as he spoke, was bounding
+out into the open too, thrilled by expectation: a musical woodchopper
+attended by a tame rodent would certainly be a unique item upon the
+forest playbill which promised a variety of attractions already.
+
+But he saw no skipping hare upon the green patch of clearing--nothing
+but a boy of twelve whose full forehead and pointed face was very
+slightly rodent-like in shape, but whose eyes, which at this startled
+moment showed little save their whites, were as shy and frightened as a
+rabbit's, while he shrank close to Toiney's side.
+
+"My brother says that whenever he sees that boy he feels like offering
+him a bunch of clover or a lettuce leaf!" laughed Leon, repeating the
+thoughtless speech of an adult. He stooped suddenly, picked some of the
+shaded clover leaves and a pink blossom: "Eh! want some clover, 'Hare'?"
+he asked teasingly, thrusting the green stuff close to the face of the
+abnormally frightened boy.
+
+The hapless, human Hare sought to efface himself behind Toiney's back.
+And the woodchopper began to execute an excited war-dance, flourishing
+the axe wherewith he had been musically felling a young birch tree for
+fuel.
+
+"Ha! you Leon, you _coquin_, _gamin_--rogue--you'll say dat one time
+more, den I go lick you, me!" he cried in his imperfect English eked out
+with indignant French.
+
+"No, you won't go lick me--you!" Nevertheless Starrie Chase and his
+mocking face retreated a little; he had no fancy for tackling Toiney and
+the axe.
+
+"That boy's name is Harold Greer; it's too bad about him," Coombsie was
+whispering in Nix Warren's ear. "The doctor says he's 'all there,'
+nothing wrong with him mentally. But he was born frightened--abnormally
+timid--and he seems to get worse instead o' better. He's afraid of
+everything, of his own shadow, I think, and more still of the shadows of
+others: I mean he's so shy that he won't speak to anybody--if he can
+help it--except his grandfather and Toiney and the old woman who keeps
+house for them."
+
+Nixon looked pityingly at the boy who lived thus in his own shadow--the
+shadow of a baseless fear.
+
+"Whew! it must be bad to be born scared!" he gasped. "I wish we could
+get Toiney to sing some more."
+
+At this moment there came a wild shout from Colin who had been exploring
+the clearing and stumbled upon something near the outhouses.
+
+"Gracious! what is it--a wildcat?" he cried. "It isn't a fox--though it
+has a bushy tail! It's as big as half a dozen squirrels. Hulloo-oo!" in
+yelling excitement, "it must be a coon--a young coon."
+
+There was a general stampede for the hen-house, amid the squawking
+cackle of its rightful inhabitants.
+
+Toiney followed, so did the human Hare, keeping always behind his back
+and casting nervous glances in Leon's direction.
+
+"Ha! _le petit raton_--de littal coon!" gasped the woodchopper. "W'en I
+go on top of hen-house dis morning w'at you t'ink I fin' dere, engh? I
+fin' heem littal coon! I'll t'ink he kill two, t'ree poulets--littal
+chick!" gesticulating fiercely at the dead marauder and at the bodies of
+some slain chickens. "Dog he kill heem; but, _sapré_! he fight lak
+_diable_! Engh?"
+
+The last exclamation was a grunt of inquiry as to whether the boys
+understood how that young raccoon, about two-thirds grown, had fought.
+Toiney shruggingly rubbed his hands on his blue shirt-sleeves while he
+pointed to a mongrel dog, the other participant in that early-morning
+battle, with whom Leon's terrier had been exchanging canine courtesies.
+
+Blink forsook his scarred brother now and sniffed eagerly at the coon's
+dead body as he had sniffed at the poor yellow-legs in the dust.
+
+"Where did he come from, Toiney? Do you suppose he strayed from the
+coon's hole that you found in the woods, among some ledges near Big
+Swamp?" Colin, together with the other boys, was stooping down to
+examine the dead body of the wild animal which measured nearly a foot
+and a half from the tip of its sharp nose to the beginning of the bushy
+tail that was handsomely ringed with black and a shading buff-color.
+
+"Yaas, he'll com' out f'om de forêt--f'om among heem beeg tree." Toiney
+Leduc, letting his axe fall to the ground, waved an eloquent right arm
+in its flannel shirt-sleeve toward the woods beyond the clearing.
+
+"Isn't his fur long and thick--more like coarse gray hair than fur?"
+Nixon stroked the raccoon's shaggy coat.
+
+"Tell us how to find those ledges where the hole is? There may be some
+live ones in it. I'd give anything to see a live coon," urged Coombsie.
+
+"Ah! la! la! You no fin' dat ledge en dat swamp. Eet's littal black in
+dere, in gran' forêt--in dem big ole hood," came the dissuading answer.
+
+"He always says 'hood' for 'wood,'" explained Marcoo _sotto voce_.
+
+"Ciel! w'en you go for fin' dat hole, dat's de time you get los'--engh?"
+urged Toiney, suddenly very earnest. "You walkee, walkee--lak wit' eye
+shut--den you haf so tire' en so lonesam' you go--_deaded_."
+
+He flung out his hands with an eloquent gesture of blind despair upon
+the last word, which shot a warning thrill to the boys' hearts. Three of
+them looked rather apprehensively toward the dense woods that stretched
+away interminably beyond the clearing.
+
+But the fourth, Leon, was not to be intimidated by anything short of
+Toiney brandishing the woodchopper's axe.
+
+He paused in his gesture of slyly offering more clover to the boy with
+the frightened eyes.
+
+"Oh! I know the woods pretty well, Toiney," he said. "I've been far into
+them with my father. I can find the way to Big Swamp."
+
+"I'll bet me you' head you get los'--hein?"
+
+"Why don't you bet your own seal-head, Toiney? You can't say 'Boo!'
+straight." Leon scathingly pointed to the Canadian's bare, closely
+cropped head, dark and shiny as sealskin.
+
+"_Sapré!_ I'll no bet yous head--you Leon--for nobodee want heem, axcep'
+for play ping-pong," screamed the enraged Toiney.
+
+There was a general mirthful roar. Leon reddened.
+
+"Oh, come; let's 'beat it'!" he cried. "We'll never find that coon's
+burrow, or anything else, if we stand here chattering with a Canuck.
+Look at Blink! He's after something on the edge of the woods. A red
+squirrel, I think!"
+
+He set off in the wake of the terrier, and his companions followed,
+disregarding further protests in Toiney's ragged English.
+
+Once more they were immersed in the woods beyond the clearing. The
+terrier was barking furiously up a pine tree, on whose lowest branch sat
+the squirrel getting off an angry patter of "Quek-Quik!
+Quek-quek-quek-quik!" punctuated with shrill little cries.
+
+"Hear him chittering an' chattering! There's some fire to that
+conversation. See! the squirrel looks all red mouth," laughed Nixon.
+
+The mouth of the little tree-climbing fury yawned, indeed, like a tiny
+coral cave decorated with minute ivories as he sat bolt upright on the
+dry branch, scolding the dog.
+
+"Oh! come on, Blink, you can't get at him. You can chase a woodchuck or
+something else that isn't quite so quick, and kill it!" cried his
+master.
+
+The "something else" was presently started in the form of a little
+chipmunk, ground brother to the squirrel, which had been holding
+solitary revel with a sunbeam on a rock.
+
+With a frightened flick of its gold-brown tail it sought shelter in a
+cleft of a low, natural wall where some large stones were piled one upon
+another.
+
+Instantly it discovered that this shallow refuge offered no sure shelter
+from the dog following hot upon its trail. Forth it popped again, with
+a plaintive, chirping "Chip! Chip! Chir-r-r!" of extreme terror and
+fled, like a tuft of fur wafted by the breeze, to its real fortress, the
+deep, narrow hole which it had tunneled in under a rock, and which it
+was so shy of revealing to strangers that it would never have sought
+shelter there save in dire extremity.
+
+It was such a very small hole as regards the round entrance through
+which the chipmunk had squeezed, which did not measure three inches in
+circumference--and such a touchingly neat little hole, for there was no
+trace of the earth which the little creature had scattered in burrowing
+it--that it might well have moved any heart to pity.
+
+The terrier finding himself baffled, sat down before it, and pointed his
+ears at his master, inquiring about the prospects of a successful siege.
+
+"He was too quick for you that time, Blinkie. But you'll get another
+chance at him, pup," guaranteed Leon, while his companions were
+endeavoring to solve the riddle--one of the minor charming mysteries of
+the woods--namely, what the ground-squirrel does with the earth which he
+scatters in tunneling his grass-fringed hole.
+
+No such marvel appealed to Leon Chase! With lightning rapidity he was
+wrenching a thin, rodlike stick from a near-by white birch, and tearing
+the leaves off. Before one of the other boys could stop him, he had
+inserted this as a long probe in the hole, working the cruel goad
+ruthlessly from side to side, scattering earth enough now and torn grass
+on either side of the spic-and-span entrance.
+
+"Ha! you haven't seen the last of him, Blink!" he cried. "I'll soon
+'podge' him out of that! This hole runs in under a rock; so there can't
+be a sharp turn in it, as is the case with the chip-squirrel's hole
+generally! I guess I can reach him with the stick; then he'll be so
+frightened that he'll pop out right in your face," forming a quick
+deduction that did credit to his powers of observation and made it seem
+a bruising pity as well for persecutor as persecuted that such boyish
+ingenuity should be turned to miserable ends.
+
+Leon's eyes were beady with malicious triumph. His breath came in short
+excited puffs. So did the terrier's. It boded ill for the tormented
+chipmunk cowering at the farthest end of the desecrated hole.
+
+"Hullo! that's two against one and it isn't fair play. _Quit it!_"
+suddenly burst forth a ringing boyish voice. "The chip' was faster than
+the dog--he ought to have an even chance for his life, anyhow!"
+
+Leon, crouching by the hole, looked up in petrified amazement. It was
+Nixon Warren, the stranger to these woods, who spoke. The tormentor
+broke into an insulting laugh.
+
+"Eh--what's the matter with _you_, Chicken-heart?" he sneered. "None o'
+your business whether it's fair or not!"
+
+A flash leaped from the gray eyes under Nixon's broad hat that defied
+the sneer applied to him. His chest heaved under the Khaki shirt with
+whose metal buttons a sunbeam played winsomely, while with defiant
+vehemence Leon worked his probing stick deeper, deeper into the hole
+where the mite of a chipmunk shrank before the cruel goad that would
+ultimately force it forth to meet the whirlwind of the dog's attack.
+
+Colin and Coombsie held their breath, feeling as if they could see the
+trembling "chipping" fugitive pressed against the farthest wall of its
+enlarged retreat.
+
+Another minute, and out it must pop to death.
+
+But upon the dragging, prodding seconds of that minute broke again the
+voice of the chipmunk's champion--hot and ringing.
+
+"_Quit that!_" it exploded. "Stop wiggling the stick in the hole--or
+I'll make you!"
+
+"You'll make me, eh? Oh! run along home to Mamma--that's where your
+place is!" But right upon the heels of the sneer a sharp question rushed
+from Leon's lips: "Who are you--anyhow--to tell me to stop?"
+
+And the tall trees bowed their noble heads, the grasses ceased their
+whispering, even the seventeen-year locust, shrilling in the distance,
+seemed to suspend its piping note to listen to the answer that rushed
+bravely forth:--
+
+"I'm a Boy Scout! A Boy Scout of America! I've promised to do a good
+turn to somebody--or something--every day. I'm going to do it to that
+chipmunk! Stop working that stick in the hole!"
+
+"Gee whiz! I thought there was something queer about you from the
+first."
+
+The mouth of Starrie Chase yawned until it rivaled the enlarged hole.
+Sitting on his heels, his cruel probing momentarily suspended, he gazed
+up, as at a newfangled sort of animal, at this daring Boy Scout of
+America--this Scout of the U.S.A.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+RACCOON JUNIOR
+
+
+"Scout or no scout, you are not going to boss me!"
+
+Thus Starrie Chase broke the breathless silence that reigned for half a
+minute in the woods, following upon Nixon's declaration that he was a
+boy scout, bound by the scout law to protect the weak among human beings
+and animals.
+
+For the space of that half-minute the tormenting stick had ceased to
+probe the hole. The wretched chipmunk, cowering in the farthest corner
+of its once neat retreat, had a respite.
+
+But Leon--who was not inherently cruel so much as thoughtlessly teasing
+and the victim of a destructive habit of mind, now felt that should he
+yield a point to this fifteen-year-old lad from a distant city, the
+leadership which he so prized, among the boys of Exmouth, would be
+endangered. He was the recognized head of a certain youthful male gang,
+of which Colin and Coombsie--though the latter occasionally deplored his
+methods--were leading representatives.
+
+"Go ahead, scout, prevent my doing anything I want to do--if you can!"
+he flung out, his brown eyes winking upward with that snapshot quickness
+as if he were photographing on their retina the figure of that new
+species of animal, the scout of the U.S.A. "I've heard of your kind
+before; you know a lot of things that nobody else knows--or wants to
+know either!"
+
+The last words were to the accompaniment of the goading stick which
+began to move vehemently to and fro in the hole again. That neat little
+hole, which had been one of the humbler miracles of the woods, now gaped
+as an ugly, torn fissure beneath its roof of rock.
+
+Before it was a defacing débris of torn grass and earth in which Blink
+scratched impatiently, whining over the delay in the chip-squirrel's
+exit.
+
+"Oh! give it up, Leon; I believe I can hear him stirring in the hole!"
+pleaded Colin Estey.
+
+Simultaneously the scout flung himself on his knees before the
+chipmunk's fortress, well-nigh captured, and seized the cruel goad.
+
+"Let go of this stick or I'll lick you with it! I can; I'm as old--older
+than you are!" Leon was now a red-eyed savage.
+
+"That would be like your notion of fair play! Oh! drop the stick an'
+come on with your fists! I'm not afraid of you."
+
+The probable result of such a duel remains a problem; any slight
+advantage in age was on Leon's side, but each alert movement of the boy
+scout showed that he possessed eye, mind, and muscle trained to the
+fullest to cope with any situation that might arise. Whoever might prove
+victor, the expedition to Varney's Paintpot would have been abruptly
+frustrated by a fight among the exploring party, had not Marcoo the
+tactful interfered.
+
+"Oh! what's the use of fighting about a chip'?" he cried, thrusting a
+plump shoulder between the bristling combatants. "It's just this way,
+Leon: Nix is right; it's a mean business, trying to force that chipmunk
+out of its hole for the dog to catch it! You can withdraw the stick
+right now, come with us an' share our luncheon; or you can go off on
+your own hook--and you don't get a crumb out of the basket--we'll find
+the Paintpot without you!"
+
+Leon drew a long wavering breath, looking at Colin for support.
+
+But Public Opinion as represented by the two younger boys, was by this
+time entirely with the scout. For it is the genius among boys, as among
+grown-ups, who voices what lies hidden and unexpressed, in the hearts of
+others; we are always moved by the bold utterance of that which we have
+surreptitiously felt ourselves.
+
+Both Colin Estey and Marcoo had known what it was to feel their sense of
+pity and justice outraged by Leon's persecuting methods. But it needed
+the trained boldness of the boy scout to put the sentiment into words;
+to be ready to fight for his knightly principles and win. For he had
+won.
+
+Leon Chase fairly writhed at the choice set before him--at the necessity
+of yielding a point to the stranger! But he felt that it would be still
+more obnoxious to his feelings to be deserted by his companions, left to
+beat a solitary retreat homeward with his dog or wander--alone and
+fasting--through the woods, a boy hermit!
+
+"All right! Have your way! Come along," he cried crossly. "We'll never
+get anywhere--that's sure--if we waste any more time on a chipmunk!"
+
+Withdrawing the stick from the enlarged aperture, he flung it away and
+scrambled to his feet, whistling to the dog.
+
+It needed much moral suasion on the part of all four boys to lure the
+terrier away from the raided hole with whose earth his slim white legs
+were coated. But he presently consented to explore the woods further in
+search of diversion.
+
+And the incident ended without any torn fur flying its flag of pain on
+the summer air.
+
+The flag of feud between the two boys, Starrie Chase and Nixon, was not,
+however, immediately lowered. Coombsie--a studious, thoughtful lad--had
+the unhappy feeling of having brought two strange fires together which
+might at any moment result in an explosion that would be especially
+disastrous on this the first day of his cousin's visit to him.
+
+But as one lad has remarked: "Two boys cannot remain mad with each other
+long: there's always too much doing!"
+
+And everybody knows that sawdust smothers smouldering fire! It did in
+this instance. After about ten minutes of "grouchy" but uneventful
+tramping, the forest explorers came to a logging camp, a rude shanty,
+flanked by a yellow mountain of sawdust where a portable sawmill had
+been set up during the preceding winter and taken down in spring.
+
+In spite of the fact that so much lay before them to be seen in the
+woods--if haply they might arrive at the various points of heart's
+desire--it was not in boy-nature to refrain from scaling that unstable,
+shelving sawdust peak for a better view onward into those shadowy woods.
+And a lusty sham battle ensued, in the midst of which Leon found
+occasion to repay the trick played on him with the pitchfork seeds by
+slipping a handful of sawdust inside the scout's khaki collar.
+
+"Whew! that's worse than the devil's pitchforks," groaned the latter,
+writhing and squirming in his tan shirt.
+
+But does not a trifling discomfort under such circumstances enhance
+while curbing the enjoyment of a boy, tying him to earth, when his young
+spirit like an aeroplane, winged with sheer joy of life and youthful
+daring, feels as if it could spurn that earth sphere as too limited,
+and, riding on the breeze of heaven, seek adventure among the clouds?
+
+In such a mood the four boys, drinking in the odor of the pine-trees as
+a fillip to delight, were presently exploring the loggers' shanty, with
+its rude bunks, oilcloth-covered table, here an old magazine, there a
+worn-out stocking, relics of human habitation.
+
+"Nobody occupies this camp during the summer," said Leon. "I think
+Toiney Leduc and another man worked up here last winter."
+
+"I'm pretty sure that Toiney did! Look there!" The scout was unfolding a
+piece of charred paper pinioned in a corner by a tomato can; it was a
+printed fragment of a French-Canadian _voyageur_ song, at sight of which
+the boys made the shanty ring with:--
+
+  "Rond! rond! rond! peti' pie pon' ton'!"
+
+"But I'm not so sure that nobody is using the shanty now," remarked
+Nixon presently. "See that tobacco ash and the stains on the white
+oilcloth!" pointing to the dingy table. "Both look fresh; the ash
+couldn't possibly have remained here since last winter; 'twould have
+been blown away long ago by the wind sweeping through the open shanty.
+There's some more of it on the mattress in this bunk," drawing himself
+up to look over the side of the rude crib built into the wall. "I guess
+somebody _does_ occupy the camp now--at night anyway!"
+
+"Oh! so you set up to be a sort of Sherlock Holmes, do you?" jeered
+Leon.
+
+"I don't set up to be anything! But I can tell that the men ground their
+axes right here." The scout was now kicking over a small wooden trough
+that had reposed, bottom uppermost, amid the long grass before the
+shanty.
+
+"How can you make that out?" It was Colin who spoke.
+
+"Because, look! there's rust on the inside of the trough, showing that
+there are steely particles mixed with the dust of the interior and that
+water has dripped into it from the revolving grindstone."
+
+"Pshaw! anybody could find that out who set to work to think about it,"
+came in a chorus from his three companions.
+
+But that "thinking" was just the point: the others would have passed by
+that topsy-turvy wooden vessel, which might have been used for sundry
+purposes, with its dusty interior exactly the hue of the yellow sawdust,
+without stopping to reason out the story of the patient axe-grinding
+which had gone on there during winter's bitter days.
+
+"But, I say, what good does it do you to find out things like that?"
+questioned Starrie Chase, kicking over the trough, his shrewd young face
+a star of speculation. "If one should go about poking his nose into
+everything that had happened, why! he'd find stories in most things, I
+guess! The woods would be full of them."
+
+"So they are!" replied the scout quickly. "That's just what we're
+taught: that every bird and animal, as well as everything which is done
+by men, leaves its 'sign!' We must try to read that 'sign' and store up
+in our minds what we learn, as a squirrel stores his nuts for winter, so
+that often we may find out things of importance to ourselves or others.
+And I'll tell you it makes life a jolly lot more interesting than when
+one goes about 'lak wit' eye shut'! as Toiney says. I've never had such
+good times as since I've been a scout:--
+
+  Then hurrah for the woods, hurrah for the fields,
+    Hurrah for the life that's free,
+  With a heart and mind both clean and kind,
+    The Scout's is the life for me!
+
+    And we'll shout, shout, shout,
+    For the Scout, Scout, Scout,
+      For the Scouts of the U.S.A.!"
+
+The speaker exploded suddenly in a burst of song, throwing his broad hat
+into the air with a yell on the refrain that woke the echoes of the log
+shanty, while the breezy orchestra in the tree-tops, like noisy reed
+instruments, came in on the last line:--
+
+  "For the Scouts of the U.S.A.!"
+
+Colin and Coombsie were enthusiastically shouting it too.
+
+"Say! Col, that fellow suits me all right," whispered Marcoo, nudging
+his chum and pointing toward the excited scout.
+
+"Me, too!" returned Colin.
+
+"Pshaw! he thinks he's It, but I think the opposite," murmured Leon
+truculently.
+
+"To what troop or patrol do you belong, Nix?" questioned his cousin.
+
+"Peewit Patrol, troop six, of Philadelphia! I was a tenderfoot for six
+months; now I'm a second-degree scout--with hope of becoming a
+first-class one soon. Want to see my badge?" pointing to his coat. "Each
+patrol is named after a bird or animal. We use the peewit's whistle for
+signaling to each other: Tewitt! Tewitt!"
+
+Again the woods rang with a fairly good imitation of the peewit's--or
+European lapwing's--whistling note.
+
+"Oh! I'd put a patent on that whistle if I were you," snapped Leon
+sarcastically: "I'm sure nothing like it was ever heard in these--or any
+other--woods! We'd better be moving on or the mosquitoes will eat us
+up," he added hastily. "There hasn't been any frost to get rid of them
+yet."
+
+But as the quartette of boys left the log-camp behind and, with the
+terrier in erratic attendance, plunged again into the thick woods, it
+by and by became apparent to each that, so far as a knowledge of their
+exact whereabouts went or an ability to locate any point of destination,
+they were approaching the truth of Toiney's words and wandering "lak
+wit' eye shut!"
+
+For a time they kept to a logging-road that branched off from the
+shanty, a mere grass-grown, root-obstructed pathway, over which, when
+that great white leveler, Winter, evened things up with his mantle of
+snow, the felled trees were drawn on a rough sled to some point where
+stood the movable sawmill.
+
+The dense woods were intersected at long intervals by such
+half-obliterated paths; in their remote recesses lurked other rough
+shanties where a scout might read the "sign" that told of the hard life
+of the lumbermen.
+
+But neither vine-laced road nor shanty was easy of discovery for the
+uninitiated.
+
+"Whew! it kind o' brings the gooseflesh to be so far in the woods as
+this without having the least idea whether we're getting anywhere or
+not." Thus spoke Coombsie at the end of half an hour's steady tramping
+and plowing through the underbrush. "Are you sure that you know in which
+direction lies the cave called the Bear's Den, Leon? A logging-road
+runs past that, so I've heard."
+
+"Oh, we'll arrive there in time, I guess; Varney's Paintpot is somewhere
+in the same direction as the cave," replied the pseudo-leader evasively.
+"They're some distance apart, but we've made a bee-line from one to the
+other when I've been in the woods with my father or brother Jim."
+
+But these woods were a different proposition now, without an older head
+and more experienced woodlore to rely upon: Leon, who had never before
+posed as a guide through their mazes, secretly acknowledged this.
+
+He had not imagined that it would be so difficult to find one's way,
+unaided, in this wilderness of endless trees and underbrush, through
+whose changing aspects ran the same mystifying thread as if the
+gold-brown gloom of a shadowy hill-slope,--where only the sunbeams
+waltzing on dry pine-needles seemed alive,--or the jeweled twilight of a
+grassy alley bound a gossamer handkerchief about one's eyes, so that one
+groped blindfold against a blank wall of uncertainty.
+
+"Say! but I wish I had brought my pocket compass with me," groaned the
+scout. "Guess I didn't live up to our scout motto: BE PREPARED! But
+then--" he looked at his cousin--"we started out with the intention of
+going down the river and you objected to my trotting back for it,
+Marcoo, when we determined on a hike through the woods."
+
+"I was afraid that if the men knew what we were planning, they'd have
+headed us off as Toiney tried to do," confessed Marcoo candidly.
+
+"Well, I wish now that I had gone back; I could have packed the luncheon
+into my knapsack; it would have been much more easily carried than in
+this basket. I miss my staff too!" Nixon deposited the lunch-basket,
+with which he was now impeded, on the ground in a green woodland glade
+where the noble forest trees, red oak, cedar, maple, interspersed with
+an occasional pine, hemlock, or balsam fir, rose to a height of from
+sixty to a hundred feet, bordering a patch of open ground, starred with
+wildflowers, dotted with berries.
+
+Delicate queen's lace, purple gentians, starry wood-asters, waxen Indian
+pipes, made it seem as if this must be the wood-fairies' dancing-ground,
+where at night they rode a moonbeam from flower to flower, and sipped
+juice from the milk-berries, bunch-berries or scarlet fox-berries that
+strayed at intervals along the ground.
+
+"I'd like to stay _here_ forever." Colin stretched himself upon a bank
+of moss, his mind going back to the explorer's longing, to the
+wood-hunger which had consumed him, as he lay upon the fragrant
+marsh-grass some hours before. He was getting his wish now--and not
+everybody gets that without having to pay for it. "The trees look kind
+o' fatherly an' protecting; don't they?" he murmured lazily.
+
+Yes, here one felt admitted to the companionship of those noble
+trees,--the greatest story-tellers that ever were, when one listens and
+interprets their conversations with the breeze. A "Hurrah for the
+woods!" was on every tongue as the boys chewed a berry or smoked a
+pearly orchid pipe.
+
+Moods changed a little as they took up their wandering again and
+presently waded, single file, through a jungle of bushes, scrub oak,
+dwarf pine, pigmy cedar and birch, laced with brambles. Here the trees
+overhead were of less magnitude and the tall leafy undergrowth foamed
+about their ears, giving them somewhat the distracted feeling of being
+cast away on a trackless sea--each sequestered in his own little
+boat--with emerald billows shutting out all view of port.
+
+"Three cheers! We're almost through with this jungle. I guess we're
+coming to more open ground again--none too soon, either!" cried Leon who
+led, with his dog. "Shouldn't wonder if we were approaching a swamp: it
+may be Big Swamp, as the men call that great alder-swamp that's all
+spongy in parts and dotted with deep bog-holes, where one might sink out
+of sight quick!
+
+"For goodness' sake! look at the crows," he whooped three minutes later,
+as, leaving the wavy undergrowth behind, he plunged out on a mossy slope
+strewn with an occasional boulder. "_The crows!_ What do you suppose
+they're after? They're teasing something! 'Hollering' at something!"
+
+The same amazed exclamation broke from his companions' lips. Halfway
+down the slope was an old and leafy chestnut tree. Around this the crows
+were circling, now alighting on the branches, now fluttering off again
+on sloping sable wing, their yellow beaks gleaming.
+
+A cawing din filled the air, with an occasional loud "Quock!" of alarm
+or indignation.
+
+"They're teasing something--perhaps it's a squirrel! I've seen them do
+that before; they're regular pests!" exclaimed Leon, inconsistently
+finding fault with the crows for being birds of the same feather with
+himself.
+
+"Whew! there's something doing here. Let's see what it is!" Nixon was
+equally excited.
+
+With the terrier scampering ahead, the four boys set off at a run toward
+the crow-infested tree.
+
+"I believe there's something--some animal--hidden in the hollow between
+the branches!" Leon gave vent to a low shout, his brown eyes yellow with
+excitement. "It's round that the crows are hovering!"
+
+"There is! There is! I see the end of a big, bushy tail. It isn't a
+squirrel's tail either!" returned the scout in a fever of mystification.
+"Let's go softly, so that we won't frighten the thing whatever it
+is--then we can have a good look at it!"
+
+"Suppose it should be a wildcat, then we'd 'scat'!" gasped Colin,
+feeling his wildest hopes and tremors fulfilled. "I see its nose--a
+black nose--over the edge of the hollow! It's like--Gee! it can't be
+another coon from the swamp--like the dead one that Toiney found in the
+hencoop?"
+
+Simultaneously the terrier, Blink, was launching himself like a white
+arrow toward the spreading nut-tree, which stood upon a grassy knoll,
+while the woods rang with his fusillade of barking.
+
+And from the hollow in the tree came a shrill whimpering cry, remarkably
+like that of a small and frightened child.
+
+Starrie Chase fairly gambolled with excitement: "That's where you're
+right, Col," he panted. "If it isn't a coon--another young coon--I'm a
+Dutchman! I hunted one in the woods, by night, with my brother, last
+year!"
+
+"He keeps on singing," breathed Coombsie. "Isn't his cry like a
+two-year-old child's?"
+
+"Oh! if we only had my brother's coon dog here--and could get him down
+from the tree--the dog might finish him!" Leon seemed emitting sparks of
+excitement from his pointed elbows and other quivering joints. "Go for
+him, Blink!" he raved, hardly knowing what he said. "You're not afraid
+of anything--you feel like a mastiff! Oh! we _must_ get him out of that
+tree-hollow on to the ground."
+
+"Caw! Caw!... Caw!... Quock! Quock!" At the approach of the boys and dog
+the crows set up a wilder din, describing broader circles round the tree
+or fluttering upward to its loftier branches.
+
+Again came that petulant whimpering cry from the hollow of the
+chestnut, where a young raccoon (probably brother to the intruder which
+had made a short bee-line through the woods, guided by instinct and its
+nose, to Toiney's hencoop) now wailed and quailed, finding himself
+between two sets of enemies: the barking dog and excited boys below, the
+pestering crows above.
+
+Abandoning the wise nocturnal habits of his forefathers, with the
+rashness of youth, he too had strayed at sunrise from that secluded hole
+among the ledges on the borders of Big Swamp, filled with dreams of
+juicy cornfields and other delicacies.
+
+Not readily finding such a land of milk and honey, he climbed into the
+hollow of this chestnut tree, flanked by a young ash upon the knoll, and
+there composed himself to sleep.
+
+But thither the crows, flocking, found him; and recognizing in him an
+hereditary enemy of their eggs and nestlings, set to work to make his
+life a burden.
+
+Nevertheless Raccoon Junior preferred their society to that of the boys
+and dog which instinct warned him to dread above all other foes.
+
+As the well-bred terrier--game enough to face any foe, though it might
+prove a sorry day for him if he should tackle that young
+raccoon--reared on his hind legs, and clawed the bark of the trunk in
+his excitement, the rash Junior climbed swiftly out of the hollow and
+fled up among the branches of the tall chestnut tree, seeking to hide
+himself among the long thick leaves amid a stormy "Quock!" and "Caw!
+Caw! Caw!" from the crows.
+
+"Oh! there--there he goes! See his stout body and funny little legs!"
+
+"And his long gray hair and the black patch over his eyes--makes him
+look as if he wore spectacles!"
+
+"And his bushy tail! Huh! there's some class to that tail--all ringed
+with buff and black."
+
+Such cries broke from three wildly excited throats. Leon spent no breath
+in admiration. Like lightning, he had snatched up a stone and sent it
+flying up the tree after the fugitive with such good aim that it struck
+one of the short, climbing legs.
+
+Another whimpering cry--sharp and shrill as that of a wounded
+child--rang down among the thick leaves.
+
+"What did you do that for? You've broken one of his legs, I think!"
+exclaimed the scout.
+
+"So much the better! If he should light down from the tree, he can't run
+so fast! I want that dandy tail of his--and his skin!" Starrie Chase
+was now beside himself with the greedy feeling, that possessed him
+whenever he saw a wild animal, that its own skin did not belong to it,
+but to him.
+
+"Say, fellows!" he cried wildly, "if you'll stay right here by the tree
+and prevent his coming down, I--I'll run all the way back to that
+farm-clearing--I guess I can find my way--and bring back Toiney's gun,
+and shoot him. Say--will you?"
+
+No such promise was forthcoming.
+
+"Well, I know what I'll do!" Leon tore off his jacket. "I'll tie the
+sleeves of my coat round the trunk of the tree; that will prevent his
+coming down, so I've heard my father say. Bother! they won't meet. I'll
+have to use your coat too, Nix!"
+
+He snatched up the scout's Norfolk jacket, thrown down beside the basket
+at the foot of the tree, and was knotting it to his own, when there was
+a wild shriek from Colin:--
+
+"Look! Look! He's jumped over into the other tree. Oh! he's come down;
+he's on the ground now--there beyond the ash tree--rolling over like a
+ball! Oh, he's going--going like a slate sliding downhill!"
+
+While Leon had been so cleverly knotting the coats round the
+tree-trunk, and his terrier barking up it, the young coon had outwitted
+them and dropped like an acrobat to the ground, having gained the odds
+of a dozen yards in his race for safety.
+
+Off went the terrier after him, now! Off went the four boys, hot on the
+trail too, madly rushing down the hill clear to the edge of the
+alder-swamp toward which it sloped--yes! and into its quagmire borders
+too, while the crows, raving like a foghorn, supplied music for the
+chase.
+
+But the speed of the limping wild animal enabled it, having gained its
+short legs--despite the injury of the stone--to reach the shelter of a
+quivering clump of alders where Blink worried in and out in vain, nose
+to the ground--sniffing and baffled.
+
+"Oh, we've lost sight of him now! He's given us the slip," cried Colin,
+recklessly dashing for the alders.
+
+Suddenly the air cracked with his cry that raved with terror like the
+crows: "Help! _Help!_ I'm into it now--into it plunk--into Big Swamp!
+I'm sinking--s-sinking above my waist! Help! Help!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+VARNEY'S PAINTPOT
+
+
+"I'm 'plunk' into it! I'm sinking in the swamp mud! I can't--can't get
+out! Oh--h-help--help!"
+
+Colin's wild cries as he found himself sinking in the oozing,
+olive-green mud of the vast alder-swamp, struck his comrades with a
+momentary blind horror.
+
+The half-immersed boy was indeed "plunk" into it; he was submerged to
+his waist and slowly sinking inch by inch farther, now fairly gibbering
+in his frantic terror of being swallowed bodily by one of the many
+sucking throats of Big Swamp.
+
+He writhed and struggled madly, snatching at the rank grass whose slimy
+roots came away in his hand--at the bushes--even at the brilliant poison
+sumac, already ruddy as a swamp lamp--with the clutch of a drowning man;
+Leon's remembered words stinging his ears like noisome insects: "There
+are _live_ spots in that swamp where one might go out of
+sight--_quick_!"
+
+The hideous slimy life of the spongy bog, half water, half mud!
+
+Leon's sharp-featured face at that moment seemed to be carved out of
+pale wood as his snapping eyes took in the swamp, with its groves of
+whispering alders, its margin of scattered birch-trees and swamp cedars,
+the lamplike sumac burning maliciously--the sinking boyish figure amid
+the moist green dreariness!
+
+Now, Starrie Chase was by Nature's gift more quick-witted than his
+companions, even than the trained boy scout.
+
+"If we try to wade in toward him, we'll sink ourselves!" he cried. "I'll
+try to haul him out with that birch-tree."
+
+A leaping, plunging run, sinking to his ankles, and with the long bound
+of a gray squirrel he alighted upon the supple trunk of a tall
+white-birch sapling that grew within the borders of the swamp!
+
+No squirrel ever climbed more rapidly than did he to its middle
+branches.
+
+And the yellow flame in his eyes, now, was not a spark from
+persecution's fire.
+
+[Illustration: "HELP! _HELP!_"]
+
+"Hold on, Col! Keep up! The tree'll pull you out. I'll bend it down to
+you. When it comes within reach of your arms catch hold of the trunk!
+Hang on for your life! I'll shin down, and 'twill hoist you up--you're
+lighter than I am!"
+
+He was bending the tall, supple trunk, with its leafy crown,
+down--down--as he spoke. It creaked beneath his fifteen-year-old weight.
+The strained roots groaned in the swampy soil.
+
+"Gee! if the roots should give way _I'll_ land in the soup too," was his
+piercing thought; and a shudder ran down his spine as he saw the pools
+of olive-green bog-soup beneath him--bottomless pools--in which floated
+slimy, stagnant things, leaves and dead insects.
+
+Pools more horrible even than the patch of liquidescent mud in which
+Colin was sinking!
+
+But Starrie Chase would never have attained to the leadership that was
+his among the boys of Exmouth if there had been nothing in him but the
+savage--the petty, not the primitive savage--that persecuted chipmunks
+and old women. Now the hero who slept in the shadow of the savage was
+aroused and there was "something doing"!
+
+Lying flat upon the pliant sapling he forced it down with his heaving
+chest, with every ounce of will and weight in his strong body.
+
+The silvery trunk bent to the sinking boy like a white angel.
+
+With a cry he flung his arms upward and grasped it. At the same moment
+Leon slid down and jumped to a comparatively firm spot of the quagmire.
+
+The flexible young tree rebounded slowly with the weight lighter than
+his pendant from it--like a stone attached to the boom of a derrick.
+
+In a few seconds it was almost upright, with Colin Estey, mud-plastered
+to his arm-pits, hanging on like an olive-green bough, his dilated eyes
+starting from his head, his face blanched to the gray-white of the
+friendly trunk.
+
+"Slide down now, Col, an' jump--I'll stand by to give you a hand!" cried
+Leon, the daring rescuer.
+
+And in another minute the victim was safe on _terra firma_--out of the
+slimy throat of Big Swamp.
+
+"Oh! I thought I was going--to sink down--out of sight!" he gasped
+between lips that did not seem to move, so tightly was the skin of his
+face stretched by terror. "That I'd be swallowed by the mud! I would
+have been--but for Leon!"
+
+"You surely were quick! Quick as a flash!" The two boys who had been
+spectators gazed open-mouthed at Starrie Chase as if they saw the hero
+who for three brief minutes had flashed out into the open.
+
+"Whew! I got such a fright that I'll never forget it; I declare I feel
+weak still," mumbled Coombsie.
+
+"Pooh! your fright--was nothing to mine," Colin's stiff lips began to
+tremble now with recovering life. "And I'm plastered with mud to my
+shoulder-blades--wet too! But I don't care, as I'm out of it!" He
+glanced nervously toward Big Swamp, and at the clump of restless alders
+which probably still sheltered Raccoon Junior.
+
+"The sun is quite hot here; let's move back up the hill and sit down!"
+Nixon pointed to the grassy slope behind them where the crows still
+flapped their wings around the chestnut-tree with an occasional relieved
+"Caw!" "We'll roll you over there, Col, and hang you out to dry!"
+
+"Well! suppose we eat our lunch during the process, eh?" suggested
+Marcoo. "Goodness! wouldn't it be 'one on us' if a fox had sneaked out
+of the woods and run off with the lunch-basket? We left it under the
+chestnut-tree."
+
+They made their way back to that nut-tree, whose hoary trunk was still
+swathed with Leon's coat and the scout's Norfolk jacket, knotted round
+it to prevent the young coon which had signally outwitted them from
+"lighting down."
+
+"Whew! I feel as if 'twas low tide inside me. A scare always makes me
+hungry," remarked Leon, not at all like a hero, but a very prosaic boy.
+"I think eating in the woods is the best part of the business!"
+
+"I say! You'd make a jolly good scout; do you know it?" put forth Nixon.
+
+But the other only hunched his shoulders with the grin of a
+contortionist as he bit into a ham sandwich, richly flavored with peanut
+butter and quince jelly from the shaking which the basket had undergone
+on its passage through the woods.
+
+The troop of hungry crows which had pecked unavailingly at the wicker
+cover, had retired to some distance and watched the picnic in croaking
+envy.
+
+Colin lay out in the sun, being rolled over at intervals by the scout,
+to dislodge the caking mud from his clothes, and to knead up his "soggy"
+spirits.
+
+"Well! if we had carried out our first intention this morning, Nix, if
+we had gone down the river to the Sugarloaf Sand-Dunes near its mouth,
+we might _all_ have stuck high and dry, in the river mud, if the tide
+forsook us," said Coombsie by and by, as he dispensed a limited amount
+of cold coffee from a pint bottle. "That's a pleasure in store, whenever
+we can get Captain Andy to take us in his motor-boat. Say! he's great;
+he was skipper of a Gloucester fishing schooner until a year ago, when
+he lost his vessel in a fog; the main-boom fell on him and broke his
+leg; he's lame still. He stays in Exmouth with his daughter most o' the
+time now. He was one o' the Gloucester crackerjacks: he saved so many
+lives at sea that he used to be called the Ocean Patrol!"
+
+"Why, he must be a regular sea-scout," Nixon's eye watered; he had the
+bump of hero-worship strongly developed.
+
+"Captain Andy's laying for you, Leon," remarked Coombsie, passing round
+some jelly-roll.
+
+"Oh, I guess I know why!" came the nonchalant answer. "It's for tying a
+wooden shingle to a long branch of the apple-tree near old Ma'am
+Baldwin's house, so that it would keep tapping on her door through the
+night. If the wind is in the right direction it works finely--keeps her
+guessing all the time! I've lain low among the marsh-grass and seen her
+come to the door, in the dark, a dozen times, gruntin' like a grizzly!
+I hate solitary cranks!"
+
+"Captain Andy says that she was never peculiar as she is now, until her
+youngest son ran wild and was sent to a reformatory," suggested Marcoo
+gravely.
+
+"I'd cut out that trick, if I were you!" growled the scout.
+
+"Oh! I don't know; there are times when a fellow must paint the town
+red--or something--or 'he'd bust'! That reminds me, we were going to
+daub ourselves with red from Varney's Paintpot. If we're to find it
+to-day, we'd better be moving on pretty soon. It must be after two
+o'clock now."
+
+"I haven't got my watch on, but it's quite that, or later," the scout
+glanced upward at the brilliant afternoon sun.
+
+"Hadn't we better give up all idea of visiting the Paintpot or the
+Bear's Den," Marcoo suggested rather nervously, "and begin tramping
+homeward--if we can discover in which direction home lies? I think we
+ought to try and find some outlet from the woods."
+
+"So do I. Col will have a peck of swamp mud to carry round with him. His
+clothes are heavy and damp. If I only had my compass we could steer a
+fairly straight course, for these woods lie to the southeast of the
+town; don't they? Anybody got a watch on? I left mine at home." Nixon
+looked eagerly at his companions.
+
+"Our boy-scout handbook tells us how to use the watch as a compass by
+pointing the hour-hand to the sun and reckoning back halfway to noon, at
+which point the south would be."
+
+"My 'timer' is out of commission," regretted Marcoo.
+
+Neither of the other two boys possessed a watch.
+
+"In that case we might trust to the dog to lead us out of the woods.
+We'd better just tell Blink to go home, and follow him; he'll find his
+way out some time; won't you, pup?" Nix stooped to fondle the tan ears
+of the terrier which had taken to him from the first, having never
+harbored the ghost of a suspicion of his being a "flowerpot fellow."
+
+The little dog stretched his jaws in a tired yawn. The pink pads of his
+paws were sore from much running, following up rabbit trails, and the
+rest. But the purple lights in his faithful brown eyes said plainly:
+"Leave it to me, fellows! Instinct can put it all over reason, just
+now!"
+
+But Blink's master started an opposition movement. He had been invited
+to guide the expedition; he was averse to resigning such leadership to
+his terrier; in that case his supposed knowledge of the woods, of which
+he had boasted aforetime to the Exmouth boys, would henceforth be
+regarded as a "windy joke."
+
+"Follow Blink!" Thus he flouted the idea. "If we do, we won't get out of
+these woods before midnight! He'll dodge round after every live thing he
+sees, from a weasel to a grasshopper--like a regular will-o'-the-wisp.
+The sensible thing to do is to search for a logging-road--we're sure to
+come to one in time--and follow that on. Or a stream--a stream would
+lead out on to the salt-marshes, to join the river."
+
+"There don't appear to be any streams in these woods; they seem as dry
+as an attic!" Nixon, the scout, knew that the proposal now adopted by
+the majority was all wrong, contrary to the advice derived through his
+book from the great Chief Scout, Grand Master of Woodlore, but he hated
+to raise another fuss or make a split in the camp.
+
+So the quartette of boys filed slowly up the slope and back into the
+woods, Coombsie carrying the almost empty basket, containing sparse
+remnants of the feast: "We may be hungry before we arrive home!" he
+remarked, with involuntary foreboding in his tone.
+
+That foreboding increased as they pressed on. Each one now became
+depressingly sure that he was wandering in the woods "lak wit' eye
+shut"; without any knowledge of his bearings, or of how to retrace his
+steps to the log shanty flanked by the mountain of sawdust, whence he
+might be able to find his way back to the farm-clearing where he had
+encountered the musical woodchopper, frightened boy and dead raccoon.
+
+The boy scout was silently reproaching himself for having fallen short
+of the prudent standard inculcated by his scout training. Carried away
+by the novelty of these strange woods and his equally strange
+companions, he had lowered the foresail of prudence--just tramped along
+blindly with the others--taking no note of landmarks, nor leaving any
+trace behind him that would serve to guide him back along the course by
+which he had come.
+
+But, then, he had trusted to Leon's leadership; and the latter's boasted
+knowledge of the woods proved, as Coombsie had suspected, to consist of
+bluff as a chief ingredient!
+
+"I wish I had kept my eyes open and noticed things as I came along, or
+that I had thought of notching the trees at intervals with my
+penknife--blazing a trail--which we could have followed back," lamented
+the scout. "I guess we're only wandering round in a circle now; we're
+not hitting a logging-road or trail of any kind. Tck! puppie,"--emitting
+an inarticulate summons between his tongue and palate,--"let's see
+what's the matter with those forepaws of yours! Blood, is it? Have you
+scratched them?"
+
+He stooped to examine Blink's slim white forelegs.
+
+"_Gee whiz!_ it isn't blood--it's clay--red clay: we must be on the
+trail of Varney's Paintpot, fellows!"
+
+So they were! They presently found it, that red-ochre bed, lying in
+obscurity among the bushes, scrub oak, dwarf pine and cedar, together
+with tall ferns, that stood guard over it jealously, in a particularly
+dense portion of the woods.
+
+Once the clay had been vivid and valuable, with wonderful painting
+properties. Many an Indian had stained his arrow blood-red with it. Many
+a white man, an early settler, had painted the rude furniture of his
+home from that forest paintpot--then a moist tank of Nature's pigment.
+
+Later on it had been used too, as civilization progressed, and was
+claimed by the man whose name it bore.
+
+Now, it was for the most part caked and dried up, its coloring power
+weakened; yet there were still moist and vivid spots such as that in
+which Blink, with the dog's unerring instinct for scenting out the
+unusual, had smeared himself.
+
+And those spots the boys promptly turned into a rouge-pot. They painted
+their own faces and each other's, until more savage-looking red men
+these woods had never seen.
+
+They forbore from delaying to smear their bodies, as Nixon had
+suggested, for one word was now booming in each tired brain like a
+foghorn through a mist: "Lost! Lost! _Lost!_" And they could not quite
+escape from it in this new diversion.
+
+Still they tried to dye hope a fresh rose-color at this forest paintpot
+too: to silence with whooping yells and fantastic capers, and in
+flitting war-dances in and out among the trees, the grim raving of that
+word in their ears.
+
+They painted Blink likewise in zebra-like stripes across his back,
+whereupon he promptly rolled on the ground, blurring his markings,
+until he was a mottled and grotesque red-and-white object.
+
+"He looks like a clown's dog," said Coombsie. "If any one should meet us
+in the woods, they'd think we were a troop of painted guys escaped from
+a circus! We'll create a sensation in the town when we get home--if we
+ever do?" _sotto voce_. "Hadn't we better stop 'training on' now, and
+try to get somewhere?"
+
+So, controlling the training-on, capering savage now rampant in each one
+corresponding to his painted face, they toiled on again, while the
+afternoon shadows lengthened in the woods--until they stood transfixed,
+their war-whoops silenced, before another surprise of the woods on which
+they had tumbled, unprepared.
+
+It was a lengthy gray cairn of stones with a rude wooden marker at the
+top bearing the date 1790, and at the foot a modern granite slab
+inscribed with the words: "Bishop's Grave," and the date of the stone's
+erection.
+
+"_Bishop's Grave!_" Coombsie ejaculated, while the empty basket drooped
+heavily from his hand as if "the grasshopper had suddenly become a
+burden." "I've heard of the grave, but I've never seen it before. Bishop
+was lost in these woods about a hundred and twenty-one years ago; he
+couldn't find his way out and wandered round till he died. His body was
+discovered months afterwards and they buried it here."
+
+Awe fell upon the four boys. Their faces were drawn under the smearing
+of paint. Their eyes gleamed strangely, like sunken islands, from out
+their ruddy setting. The mottled terrier, with that sympathetic
+perception which dogs have of their masters' moods, pointed one ear
+sharply and drooped the other, like a flag at half-mast, while he stared
+at the rude cairn.
+
+The scout impulsively lifted his broad-brimmed hat as he was in the
+habit of doing if, when marching with his troop, he encountered a
+funeral.
+
+In the mind of each lad tolled like a slow bell the menacing echo of
+Toiney's words: "You walkee--walkee--en you haf so tire' en so lonesam
+you _go deaded_!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+"YOU MUST LOOK OUT!"
+
+
+The four boys did not linger long before that lonely grave; the fears it
+evoked were too unpleasant. They pushed on again through the woods, each
+one clearing his throat of a husky tickling that was third cousin to a
+weary sob.
+
+The scout was inwardly combating the depressing memory of Toiney Leduc's
+warning with the advice of the Chief Scout that if he should ever find
+himself lost in the woods, Fear, not hunger or cold, would prove his
+worst enemy.
+
+"I mustn't lose my grip! I must keep my head--not be fogged by fear! I'm
+a boy scout of America," he reminded himself.
+
+Still the shadow of that gray cairn stalked him as well as the others.
+Even Leon was subdued by it. His manner had lost the last trace of its
+shallow cocksureness. The mantle of bluff had melted from him, leaving
+him a distracted, temper-tried boy like his three companions.
+
+"I know that the cave called the Bear's Den is not quite a mile from
+Bishop's grave, but I haven't the least idea of how to go about
+reaching it," he admitted. "A logging-road passes the cave; that might
+lead us somewhere. I wish we could strike a stream."
+
+"So do I! My mouth is dry as dust; I'm parched with thirst." Nixon, as
+he spoke, stooped, picked up a round pebble, inserted it between his dry
+palate and tongue and began sucking on it, as on a gum-drop.
+
+"What on earth are you doing that for?" questioned Leon sharply; the
+nerves in his tired body were now jangling like an instrument out of
+tune; together with his three companions he was cross as a thorn--ready
+to quarrel with his own shadow.
+
+"'What am I doing it for?' Why! to start the saliva," quavered the
+scout, sucking hard; "to prevent me from feeling the thirst so much."
+
+"_Blamed_ rubbish!" Starrie Chase snorted. "As if sucking a stone like a
+baby would do you any good!"
+
+"Everything is 'rubbish,' except what you know yourself; and _that's_
+next to nothing!" Nixon was now equally cross. "You don't know half as
+much about the woods as your dog does. If it hadn't been for you, we'd
+have been out of this place long ago!"
+
+"Oh! you think you're It, because you're a boy scout, but I think the
+opposite!"
+
+"Shut up! Don't give me any of your 'jaw'!"
+
+But there was a sudden, queer contortion of the scout's face on the last
+word.
+
+Abruptly he stalked on, humming to himself--a curious-looking being,
+with his painted face and dazed eyes under the broad-brimmed hat.
+
+"What's that you're singing, Nix?" Coombsie was catching at a straw to
+divert thought from Bishop's grave.
+
+"Oh! go on, let's hear it. Sounds lively!" urged Leon, whose temper had
+sunk beneath the realization of their plight, a quenched flash.
+
+The scout sidetracked his pebble between right cheek and gums and began
+to sing with what cheerfulness he could muster, as much for his own
+encouragement as that of his companions, a patrol song, the gift of a
+poet to the boy scouts of the world:--
+
+  "Look out when your temper goes
+    At the end of a losing game;
+  And your boots are too tight for your toes,
+    And you answer and argue and blame!
+  It's the hardest part of the law,
+    But it's got to be learned by the scout,
+  For whining and shirking and 'jaw,'
+    All patrols look out!
+  These are our regulations,
+    There's just one law for the scout,
+  And the first and the last, and the present and the past,
+    And the future and the perfect is look out!"
+
+Before Nixon had finished the chorus his three companions were shouting
+it with him as a spur to their jaded spirits.
+
+"Ours is a losing game in earnest--all because we didn't look out and
+take proper precautions so that we might have some chance of returning
+by the way that we came," remarked the soloist with a grim laugh. "Now,
+we 'jolly well must look out!' as the song says. I'm going to climb the
+next tree that's good an' tall, and see whether I can discover any
+faraway smoke that would show us where a house might be,--or a gap in
+the woods,--or anything."
+
+"Good idea! I'll climb too," seconded Leon. "You choose one tree; I'll
+take another, and see what we can make out!"
+
+But they were toiling through a comparatively insignificant part of the
+fine woods now, where the foamy undergrowth billowed about their ears.
+Here the birch-trees, hickories, and maples, with an occasional pine and
+hemlock, only averaged from thirty-five to forty feet in stature. Not
+for another half-mile or so did Nixon sight a tall stately trunk
+towering above its forest brethren, its many-pointed leaves proclaiming
+it to be a fine red oak.
+
+"Whoo'! Whoo'! It's me for that oak-tree!" he cried. "I'll shin up that,
+right to the top and scour the horizon. 'Twill be easily climbed too!"
+
+"See that freak pine with the divided trunk a little farther on? I'm
+going to climb that," announced Leon Chase. "It's a fine tree, if it is
+a freak--like the Siamese Twins."
+
+In another minute with the agility of a cat he had climbed to the crotch
+of the freak tree where its twin trunks divided.
+
+"Look out! those lower branches are brown an' rotten, Starrie. I
+wouldn't trust to them if I were you!" shouted Colin, indicating the
+drooping pine-boughs about ten feet from the ground; he kicked a similar
+large drab branch, as he spoke, which had fallen and lay decaying at the
+foot of the freak tree.
+
+"Right you are! I won't." Leon was a wonderful climber; twining his arms
+and legs round one olive-green trunk of the divided pine he managed to
+reach the firm boughs above through whose needles the late afternoon
+breeze crooned a sonorous warning.
+
+The scout, meanwhile, had clambered like a squirrel nearly to the top
+of the splendid oak-tree. Presently the two boys upon the ground heard a
+shrill "Tewitt! Tewitt!" the signal-whistle of his peewit patrol, fully
+sixty feet above their heads, followed by Nixon's voice shouting: "Can't
+see smoke anywhere, fellows--or any sign of a real break in the woods.
+But there seems to be some sort of little clearing about two hundred
+yards from here, I should say!" He was carefully scanning the space over
+intervening tree-tops with his eye, knowing that if he could judge this
+distance in the woods with approximate accuracy it would count as a
+point in his favor toward realizing the height of his ambition and
+graduating into a first-class scout.
+
+Leon, a moment later, was singing out blithely from the pine-tree's top:
+"I see that gap between the trees too, just a little way farther on. I
+guess it's a logging-road at last--probably a shanty as well--the road
+will lead somewhere anyhow. Hurrah! We'll be out o' the misery in time.
+Race you down, Nix?" he challenged exuberantly at the top of his voice.
+
+Then began a swift, racing descent, marked on Leon's part by the touch
+of recklessness that often characterized his movements; he was
+determined that though the boy scout might excel him in certain points
+of knowledge, he should not outdo him in athletic activity.
+
+"There! I knew I could 'trim' you anywhere--in a tree or on the ground,"
+he cried all in one gasping breath as--caution to the winds--he stepped
+on one of the lower dead boughs which he had avoided going up.
+
+It snapped under his hundred and twenty-five pounds of sturdy weight,
+like a breaking twig. He crashed to the ground, alighting in a huddle
+upon the decayed branch, the crumbling wind-fall, at the foot of the
+tree.
+
+"Gracious! are you hurt, Starrie?" Coombsie and Colin rushed to him.
+
+"I--think--not! I guess I'm all here." Leon made a desperate attempt to
+rise, and instantly sank back, clutching at the grass around him with
+such a sound as nobody had ever heard before from the lips of Leon Starr
+Chase--the moan of a maimed creature.
+
+"My ankle! My right ankle!" he groaned. "I twisted it, coming down on
+that rotten branch. It feels as if every tree in the woods had fallen on
+it together! Ouch! I--can't--stand." Drops of agony stole out upon his
+forehead.
+
+"You've sprained it, I guess!" Nixon was now bending over the victim.
+"Here, let me take your shoe off, before the foot swells! Perhaps, with
+Col and me helping you, you can limp along to that clearing?"
+
+Leon made another attempt, with the leather pressure removed, but sank
+down again and began to relieve himself of his stocking too, in order to
+examine the injury.
+
+"Ou-ouch!" he groaned savagely. "My ankle is as black as a thundercloud
+already. It feels just like a thunderstorm, too--all heavy throbs an'
+lightning shoots of pain!"
+
+The trail of those fiery darts could be traced in the livid blue and
+yellow streaks that were turning the rapidly swelling ankle, in which
+the ligaments were badly torn, to as many hues as Joseph's coat, against
+a background of sullen black.
+
+"Well! this is the--limit!" Coombsie dropped the lunch-basket, to which
+he had clung faithfully, into a nest of underbrush: with a probable
+logging-road within reach that might serve as a clue to lead them
+somewhere, here was one of their number with a thunderstorm in his
+ankle!
+
+And then the hero that dwelt in the shadow of the savage in that
+contradictory breast of Leon Chase flashed awake again in a moment, as
+at Big Swamp; the real plucky boyhood in him shone out like a star!
+
+"'Twill be dark--in the woods--before very long," he said, his voice
+sprained too by pain, while his clammy face, still coated with the
+red-ochre pigment of Varney's Paintpot, smeared by the drops of agony
+and his coat-sleeve, was a lurid sight. "You fellows will have to hustle
+if you want to reach that road--if it is a logging-road--and get out of
+the woods before night! I can hardly--hobble. I'd better stay here:
+Blink will stay with me; won't you, pup? When you boys get home--let my
+father know--he and Jim will come out an' find me; they know every inch
+of the woods."
+
+"And leave you alone in the woods for hours? Not I, for one!" The
+scout's answer was decisive, so were the loyal protests of the other two
+lads.
+
+Blink, with a shrewd comprehension that something was wrong with his
+master, had been alternately licking Leon's ear and the inflamed pads of
+his own paws. At the mention of his name he pressed so close to the
+victim's side, sitting bolt upright on his haunches, that their two
+bodies might have been joined at one point like the trunks of the freak
+tree. And the purple fidelity lights in his brown eyes said plainly
+that not hunger, thirst, or lonely death itself, could separate him from
+the being who was a greater fellow in his eyes than any scout of the
+U.S.A.
+
+The other three boys were at that stage of fatigue and discomfiture when
+the well of emotion is easily pumped; their eyes grew moist at the dog's
+steadfast look.
+
+But the scout shook himself brusquely as if trying to awake something
+within.
+
+"We ought to be able to fix you up so that you can get along to that
+little clearing, anyhow!" he said, his mind busy with the sixth point of
+the scout law and how under these circumstances he could best live up to
+it and help an injured comrade. "We might form a chair-carry, Col and I,
+but the undergrowth ahead is too thick; we couldn't wrestle
+through--three abreast. Ha! we'd better make a crutch for you; that's
+the idea! There's a birch sapling, neat an' handy, as an Irishman would
+say!"
+
+And the ubiquitous white birch, the wood-man's friend, came into play
+again. Its slim trunk, being wrenched from the ground, roots and all,
+and trimmed off with Nixon's knife, formed a fair prop.
+
+"Chuck me your handkerchiefs!" said the crutch-maker to the other two
+uninjured boys. "We'll pad the top of it, so that it won't dig into his
+armpit. Now then, Leon! get this under your right arm and put your left
+one round my neck--that will fix you up to hobble a short distance."
+
+A half-reluctant grin, distorted by agony, convulsed Leon's face as,
+leaning hard upon the white-birch prop, he arose and limped a few steps;
+he recollected how at odd moments in the woods--whenever there wasn't
+too much doing--he had believed that he held a grudge against the scout
+for making him yield one sharply contested point and that about such an
+infinitesimal thing in his eyes as the brief life of a chipmunk.
+
+"Oh! I guess I can limp along with the crutch," he said, smearing the
+dew of pain over his bedaubed face, now ghastly under the paint.
+
+"Go on; you're only wasting time!" Nixon drew the other's left arm with
+its moist cold hand around his neck--all the heat in Leon's body had
+gone to swell the thunderstorm in his ankle.
+
+And thus plowing, stumbling through the undergrowth, the scout's right
+hand keeping the impudent twigs from poking his companion's eyes out,
+they reached the narrow clearing along which the ambient light of a
+September sunset flowed like a golden river.
+
+No coveted log shanty, where at least they could encamp for the night,
+decorated it.
+
+But on its opposite side there loomed before the boys' eyes as they
+issued from the woods a great, lichen-covered rock, over twenty feet
+high, with a deep cavernous opening that yawned like a sleepy mouth at
+sunset as it swallowed the rays streaming into it.
+
+"Glory halleluiah! it's the Bear's Den--at last," ejaculated Leon, pain
+momentarily eclipsed. "Thanks, Nix: you're a horse!" as he withdrew his
+arm from his comrade's shoulders. "But that cave is about five miles
+from anywhere--from any opening in the woods! What on earth are we going
+to do now?"
+
+"Why! light a fire the first thing, I guess," returned the boy scout
+practically.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE FRICTION FIRE
+
+
+"We haven't got any matches to start a fire with!" Coombsie sat down in
+a pool of gold with the well-nigh empty basket beside him, and turned
+baffled eyes upon the others.
+
+"I have a few in a safety box in my pocket. Thank goodness! I didn't go
+back on our scout motto: 'Be Prepared!' so far as matches are concerned,
+anyway." Nixon felt in each pocket of his Norfolk jacket with a face
+that lengthened dismally under the smears of Varney's Paintpot.
+"_Gone!_" he ejaculated despairingly. "I must have lost the box!"
+
+"It probably dropped out of your pocket into the grass when I tied our
+coats round the chest-nut-tree, to prevent that young coon from
+'lighting down,'" suggested Leon, and _his_ face grew pinched; it was
+not a refreshing memory that conjured up a picture of Raccoon Junior
+limping back to the hole among the ledges near Big Swamp, with a leg
+broken by his stone, at the moment when a fellow had a whole
+thunderstorm in his ankle.
+
+"Well! we're up against it now," gasped the scout. "We can't get out
+of the woods to-night; that's sure! We could sleep in the cave and be
+jolly comfortable too"--he stooped down and examined its wide
+interior--"if we only had a fire. But, without a camp-fire or a single
+blanket, we'll be uncomfortable enough when it comes on dark; these
+September nights are chilly."
+
+He threw his hat on the ground, drew his coat-sleeve across his ruddy
+forehead, rendering his bedaubed countenance slightly more grotesque
+than before. He had forgotten that it was smeared, forgotten paint and
+frolic. An old look descended upon his face.
+
+He was desperately tired. Every muscle of his body ached. His head was
+confused too from long wandering among the trees; his thoughts seemed to
+skip back into the woods away from him; he felt himself stalking them as
+Blink would stalk a rabbit. But there was one thing more alive in him at
+that moment than ever before, a sense of protective responsibility.
+
+With Leon disabled and the two younger boys completely worn out, it
+rested with him alone to turn a night in the Bear's Den into a mere
+"corking" adventure, or to let it drag by as a dark age of discomfort
+with certainly bad results for two of the party. Nixon had felt Leon's
+hand as it slipped from his neck at the edge of the clearing, it was
+clammy as ice; his first-aid training as a scout told him that the
+injured lad would feel the cold bitterly during the night.
+
+Starrie Chase would probably "stick it out without squealing," as in
+such circumstances he would try to do himself. But it would be a hard
+experience. And young Colin's clothing was still sodden from his partial
+immersion in Big Swamp. It was one of those moments for the Scout of the
+U.S.A. when the potential father in the boy is awake.
+
+"I've _got_ to fix things up for the night, somehow," he wearily told
+himself aloud. "I wonder--I wonder if I could manage to start a fire
+without matches--with 'rubbing-sticks'? I did it once when we were
+camping out with our scoutmaster. But he helped me. If I could only get
+the fire, now, 'twould be a--great--stunt!"
+
+"'Start a fire without matches!' You're crazy!" Colin and Coombsie
+looked sideways at him; they had heard of people being "turned round" in
+their heads by much woodland wandering.
+
+"Shut up, you two!" commanded Leon, suddenly imperious. "He knows what
+he's about. He did a good stunt in helping me along here."
+
+"If I could only find the right kinds of wood to start a friction
+fire--balsam fir for the fireboard and drill, and a little chunk of
+cedarwood to be shredded into tinder!" The boy scout was eagerly
+scanning the trees on either side of the grass-grown logging-road, trees
+which at this moment seemed to have their roots in the forest soil and
+their heads in Heaven's own glory.
+
+"_There's_ a fir-tree! Among those pines--a little way along the road!"
+Leon spoke in that slow, stiff voice, sprained by pain. "Perhaps I can
+help you--Nix?"
+
+"No, you lie still, but chuck me your knife, it's stronger than mine! I
+ought to have two tools for preparing the 'rubbing-sticks,' so the Chief
+Scout tells us in our book, but I'll have to get along somehow with our
+pocketknives."
+
+Nix Warren was off up the road as he spoke; hope, responsibility, and
+ambition toward the performance of a "great stunt," forming a fighting
+trio to get the better of weariness.
+
+The glory was waning from the tree-tops when he returned, bearing with
+him one sizeable chunk of balsamic fir-wood and a long stick from the
+same tree.
+
+"Any sort of stick will do for the bent bow which is attached to the
+drill and works it; that's what our book says," he murmured, as if
+conning over a lesson. "Who's got a leather shoe-lace? You have--cowhide
+laces--in those high boots of yours, Colin! Mind letting me have one?"
+
+The speaker was excitedly setting to work, now, fashioning the flat
+fireboard from the chunk of fir-wood, carving a deep notch in its side,
+and scooping out a shallow hole at the inner end of the notch into which
+the point of the upright drill would fit.
+
+In feeling, he was the primitive man again, this modern boy scout: he
+was that grand old savage ancestor of prehistoric times into whose ear
+God whispered the secret, unknown to beast or bird, of creating light
+and warmth for himself and those dependent on him, when the sun forsook
+them.
+
+"Say! can't you fellows get busy and collect some materials for a fire,
+dry chips and pine-splinters--fat pine-splinters--and dead branches?
+There's plenty of good fuel around! You wood-finders'll have a cinch!"
+
+It certainly was a signal act of faith in Colin and Coombsie when they
+bestirred their weary limbs to obey this command from the wizard who was
+to try and evoke the mysterious fire-element latent in the combustible
+wood he handled, but hard to get at without the aids which civilization
+places at man's disposal.
+
+They each kept a corner of their inquisitive eyes upon him while they
+collected the fuel, watching the shaping of the notched fireboard, of
+the upright pointed drill, over a dozen inches in length, and the
+construction of a rude bow out of a supple stick found on the clearing,
+with Colin's cowhide shoe-lace made fast to each end as the cord or
+strap that bent the bow.
+
+This cord was twisted once round the upper part of the drill whose lower
+point fitted into the shallow hole in the fireboard.
+
+"Whew! I must find a piece of pine-wood with a knot in it and scoop that
+knot out, so that it will form a disc for the top of the drill in which
+it will turn easily," said the perspiring scout. "Oh, sugarloons! I've
+forgotten all about the _tinder_; we may have to trot a long way into
+the woods to find a cedar-tree."
+
+"I'll go with you, Nix," proffered Marcoo, while Leon, lying on the
+ground near the cave, with his dog pressing close to him, undertook the
+task of scooping that soft knot out of the pine-disk.
+
+"All right; bring along the tin mug out of your basket; perhaps we may
+find water!"
+
+And they did! Oh, blessed find! Wearily they trudged back about sixty
+yards into the woods, in an opposite direction from that in which they
+had traveled before--Nixon taking the precaution of breaking off a twig
+from every second or third tree so as to mark the trail--before they lit
+on a grove of young cedars through which ran a sound, now a purling sob,
+now a tinkling laugh; softer, more angel-like, than the wind's mirth!
+
+"_Water!_ A spring! Oh--tooraloo!" And they drank their fill, bringing
+back, along with the cedar-wood for tinder--water, as much as their tin
+vessel would hold, for the two boys and dog keeping watch over the
+fire-sticks on the old bear's camping-ground.
+
+The soft cedar was shredded into tinder between two stones. The drill
+was set up with its lower point resting in the notched hole of the
+fire-board, its upper point fitting into the pine-disk which Nixon
+steadied with his hand.
+
+Then the boy scout began to work the bent bow which passed through a
+hole in the upper part of the drill, steadily to and fro, slowly turning
+that drill, grinding its lower point into the punky wood of the
+fireboard.
+
+In the eye of each of the four boys the coveted spark already glowed,
+drilled by excitement out of the dead wood of his fatigue.
+
+Even the dog, his jaws gaping, his tongue lolling out, lay stretched at
+attention, his gaze intent upon the central figure of the boy scout
+working the strapped bow backward and forward, turning the pointed drill
+that bored into the fireboard.
+
+Ground-up wood began to fall through the notch in the fireboard adjacent
+to the hole upon another slab of wood which Nixon had placed as a tray
+beneath it.
+
+This powdered wood was brown. Slowly it turned black. Was that smoke?
+
+It was a strange tableau, the four disheveled boys with their
+red-smeared faces, the painted clown's dog, all holding their breath
+intent upon the primitive miracle of the fire-birth.
+
+Smoke it was! _Increasing smoke!_ And in its tiny cloud suddenly
+appeared the miracle--a dull red spark at the heart of the black wood
+dust.
+
+"What do you know about that?" Marcoo's voice was thick.
+
+"Gee! that's a--wonderful--stunt. I guess you could light a fire with a
+piece of damp bark and a snowball!" Leon looked up at the panting scout.
+
+Colin's mind was telegraphing back to the moment when he lay on the
+salt-marshes that morning, hungry for the woods. If any one had told him
+that, before night, he would assist at a forest drama like this!
+
+"Hush! Don't speak for fear you'd hoodoo it! We haven't got it yet--the
+fire! Perhaps--perhaps--I can't make it burn." It was the most wonderful
+moment of his life for the boy scout as he now took a pinch of the
+cedar-wood tinder, half-enclosed in a piece of paper-like birch-bark and
+held it down upon the red fire-germ--in all following the teaching of
+the great Chief Scout.
+
+Then he lifted the slab of wood that served as tray, bearing the ruddy
+fire-embryo and tinder, and blew upon it evenly, gently. It blazed. The
+miracle was complete.
+
+"_Wonderful stunt!_" murmured Starrie Chase again. His hand in its
+restless uneasiness had been plucking large flakes of moss from the gray
+rock behind him and turning them over, revealing the medicinal gold
+thread that embroidered the earthy underside of the sod; he was sucking
+that bitter fibre--supposed to be good for a sore mouth, but no panacea
+for a sprained ankle--while a like gold thread of fascinated speculation
+embroidered the ruddy mask of his face.
+
+"Hurrah! we'll have a fire right away now, that will talk to us all
+night long." The triumphant scout lowered the flame-bud to the ground,
+piled over it some of the resinous pine-splinters and strips of
+inflammatory bark, fanning it steadily with his hat. In a few minutes a
+rollicking camp-fire was roaring in front of the old Bear's Den.
+
+"Now! we must gather some big chunks, dry roots and stumps, to keep the
+fire going through the night, cut sods to put round it and prevent its
+spreading into the woods, and break up some pine-tips to strew in the
+cave for a bed. There's lots of work ahead still, fellows, before we can
+be snug for the night!"
+
+The scout, having got his second breath with his great achievement, was
+working hard as he spoke; Marcoo and Colin followed his example in
+renewed spirits. Leon, chafing at his own inactivity, tried to stand and
+sank down with a groan.
+
+"How's the thunderstorm sprain?" they asked him.
+
+"Worse--ugh-h! And I'm parched with thirst--still!"
+
+"Well, we'll lope off into the woods and bring you back some more water.
+If you'll leave a little in the bottom of the mug I'll soak our
+handkerchiefs in it and wrap them round your ankle; cold applications
+may relieve the pain;" the scout was recalling what he had learned about
+first aid to the injured.
+
+Darkness descended upon the old bear's stamping-ground. But the
+camp-fire burned gloriously, throwing off now and again a foam of flame
+whose rosy clots lit in the crevices of the tall rock and bloomed there
+for an instant like scarlet flowers.
+
+The work necessary in making camp for the night done, the four boys
+gathered round it, dividing their scanty rations, the scraps of food
+left in Coombsie's basket, and speculating as to how early in the
+morning a search-party would come out and find them.
+
+"Toiney Leduc will certainly be one of the party. Toiney is a regular
+scout; he's only been here a year, but he knows the woods well,"
+remarked Leon, then was silent a minute, gazing wistfully into the heart
+of the flames which filled the pause with snappy conversational
+fire-works.
+
+"Tell us something about this boy scout business, bo'!" he spoke again
+in the slow, sprained voice, his feverish eyes burning into the fire,
+his tone making the slangy little abbreviation stand for brother, as he
+addressed Nixon. "It seems as if it might be The Thing--starting that
+fire was a great stunt--and if it's The Thing--every fellow wants to be
+in it!"
+
+"Oh! you don't know what good times we have," began the scout.
+
+And briefly skimming from one point to another, he told of the origin of
+the Boy Scout Movement far away in Africa during the defense of a
+besieged city, and of the great English general, the friend of boys, who
+had fathered that movement.
+
+Leon's eyes narrowed as he still gazed into the camp-fire: it was a long
+descent from the defense of a beleaguered city to the championship of a
+besieged chipmunk, but his quick mind grasped the principle of fiery
+chivalry underlying both--one and the same.
+
+"Can you sing some more of that U.S.A. song which you were shouting in
+the woods near the log camp?" Marcoo broke in, as the narrator dwelt on
+those good times spent in hiking, trailing, camping with the
+scoutmaster.
+
+"Perhaps I can--a verse or two! That's the latest for the Boy Scouts of
+America--the Scouts of the old U.S. Don't know whether I have a pinch of
+breath left, though!"
+
+And the flagging voice began, gathering gusto from the camp-fire, glee
+from the stars now winking through the pine-tops:--
+
+  "Mile after mile in rank or file,
+    We tramp through field and wood:
+  Or off we hike down path or pike,
+    One glorious brotherhood.
+      Hurrah for the woods, hurrah for the fields,
+        Hurrah for the life that's free!
+      With a body and mind both clean and kind,
+        The Scout's is the life for me!"
+
+"Chorus, fellows!" he cried:--
+
+  We will fight, fight, fight, for the right, right, right,
+   "Be prepared" both night and day;
+  And we'll shout, shout, shout,
+  For the Scout, Scout, Scout,
+   For the Scouts of the U.S.A.
+
+The rolling music in the pine-trees, the reedy whistle of the breeze
+among beeches and birches, soft cluck of rocking branches, the bagpipe
+skirling of the flames leaping high, fluted and green-edged, all came in
+on that chorus; together with the four boyish voices and the bark of the
+dog as he bayed the blaze: the night woods rang for the Scouts of the
+U.S.A.
+
+  "If when night comes down we are far from town,
+    Both tired and happy too,
+  Camp-fires we light and by embers bright
+    We sleep the whole night through.
+      Hurrah for the sun, hurrah for the storm,
+        Hurrah for the stars above!
+      We feel secure, safe, sane and sure,
+        For we know that God is Love."
+
+"Why have you that knot in your tie?" asked Leon after the last note had
+died away in forest-echo, while the scout was wetting the bandages round
+his inflamed ankle before they crept into the cave to sleep.
+
+"To remind me to do one good turn to somebody every day."
+
+"Well, you can untie it now; I guess you've done good turns by the bunch
+to-day!"
+
+Lying presently upon the fragrant pine-tips with which they had strewn
+the interior of the cave, the scout's tired fingers fumbled for that
+knot and drowsily undid it. He had lost both way and temper in the
+woods. But he had tried, at least, to obey the scout law of kindness.
+
+As he lay on guard, nearest to the cave's entrance, winking back at the
+stars, this brought him a happy sense of that wide brotherhood whose
+cradle is God's Everlasting Arms.
+
+From the well of his sleepy excitement two words bubbled up: "Our
+Father!" Rolling over until his nose burrowed among the fragrant
+evergreens, he repeated the Lord's Prayer, adding--because this had been
+an eventful day--a brief petition which had been put into his lips by
+his scoutmaster and was uttered under unusual stress of feeling, or when
+he remembered it: That in helpfulness to others and loyalty to good he
+might be a follower of the Lord of Chivalry, Jesus Christ, and continue
+his faithful soldier and servant "until the scout's last trail is done!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was almost morning when he awoke for the second time, having stirred
+his tired limbs once already to replenish the camp-fire.
+
+Now that hard-won fire had waned to a dull red shading on the undersides
+of velvety logs, the remainder of whose surface was of a chilly gray
+from which each passing breeze flicked the white flakes of ash like
+half-shriveled moths.
+
+"Whew! I must punch up the fire again--but it's hard to get the kinks
+out o' my backbone;" he straightened his curled-up spine with difficulty
+and stumbled out on the camping-ground.
+
+It was that darkest hour before dawn. The stars were waning as well as
+the fire. The trees which had been friends in the daytime were
+spectators now. Each wrapped in its dark mantle, they seemed to stand
+curiously aloof, watching him.
+
+He attacked the logs with a stick, poking them together and thrusting a
+dry branch into the ruddy nest where the fire still hatched.
+
+Snip! Snap! Crackle! the flames awoke. Mingling with their reviving
+laughter, came a low, strange cluck that was not the voice of the fire,
+immediately followed by a long shrill cry with a wavering trill in it,
+not unlike human mirth.
+
+It hailed from some point in the scout's rear.
+
+"For heaven's sake!" The stick shook in his fingers. "Can it be a
+wildcat--or another coon?"
+
+Stiffly he wheeled round. His eyes traveled up the great rock--in whose
+cave his companions lay sleeping; as they gained the top of that old
+grayback, they were confronted by two other eyes--mere twinkling points
+of flame!
+
+The scout's scalp seemed to lift like a blown-off roof. His throat grew
+very dry.
+
+At the same moment there was a noiseless flitting as of a shadow from
+the rock's crest to a near-by tree whence came the weird cry again.
+
+"_An owl!_ Well, forevermore! And my hair is standing straight still!"
+
+"_What is it?_ _What is it, Nix?_" came in muffled cries from the cave.
+
+"Only a screech owl; it's unusual to find one so far in the woods as
+this!"
+
+As it happened two ruddy screech owls, faithful lovers and monogamists,
+which had dwelt together as Darby and Joan in the hollow of an old
+apple-tree in a distant orchard, being persecuted both by boys and blue
+jays, had eschewed civilization, isolating themselves, at least from the
+former, in the woods.
+
+As dawn broke between the tall pines and a pale river of daylight flowed
+along the logging-road, they were seen, both together, upon a low bough,
+with the dawn breeze fluffing their thick, rufous plumage, making them
+look larger than they really were, and their heads slowly turning from
+side to side, trying to discover the meaning of a camp-fire and other
+strange doings in this their retreat.
+
+"Oo-oo! look at them," hooted Colin softly, creeping out of the cave and
+stealthily approaching their birch-tree. "They have yellow eyes and
+faces like kittens. Huh! they're more comical than a basket of monkeys.
+Oh, there they go."
+
+For even as his hand was put forth to touch them, they vanished
+silently as the ebbing shadows in the train of night.
+
+"This must be a great place for owls," said Leon, blinking like
+one--not until far on in the night had he slept owing to the
+wrenching pain in his ankle. "Listen! there goes the big old
+hooter--the great horned owl--the Grand Duke we call him. Hear
+him 'way off: 'Whoo-whoo-hoo-doo-whoo!' Sounds almost like a wolf
+howling! _Ou-ouch!_"
+
+"Is your ankle hurting badly, Starrie?"
+
+"It's--fierce."
+
+"Daylight is coming fast now; I'll be able to find the spring and wet
+those bandages again--and bring you a drink too"; this from the scout.
+
+"Thanks. You're the boy, Nix!"
+
+The brotherly act accomplished, there was silence in the cave where the
+four boys had again stretched themselves while young Day crept up over
+the woods.
+
+Suddenly Leon's voice was heard ambiguously muttering in the cave's
+recess: "If it's The Thing, every fellow wants to be in it!"
+
+"Say! fellows, I've got an idea," he put forth aloud.
+
+"Out with it, if it's worth anything!" from Colin.
+
+"Oh, for heaven's sake, Leon! get it out quick, and let us go to sleep
+again!" pleaded Coombsie, who knew that if Starrie Chase was oppressed
+by an idea, other boys would hear it in his time, not in theirs.
+
+"I propose that after we get home--when my ankle is better--we start a
+boy scout patrol in our town and call it the Owl Patrol! I guess we've
+heard the owls--different kinds--often enough to-night, to be able to
+imitate one or other of them."
+
+"Good enough! The Scout's is the life for me!" sang out Colin.
+
+"The motion is seconded and carried--now let's go to sleep!" from
+Marcoo.
+
+"As I expect to stay in these parts for six months, or longer, I'll get
+transferred from the Philadelphia Peewits to the new patrol!" decided
+Nixon.
+
+"Bully for you! We'll ask Kenjo Red and Sweetsie to come in; they're
+dandy fellows--and who else?" Leon hesitated.
+
+"Why don't you get hold of that frightened boy who was with Toiney on
+the edge of the woods? We had a boy like him in our Philadelphia troop,"
+went on Nixon hurriedly, ignoring a surge of protest. "Scared of his own
+shadow he was! Abnormal timidity--with a long Latin name--due to
+pre-natal influences, according to the doctors! Well, our scoutmaster
+managed somehow to enlist him as a tenderfoot. When he got out into the
+woods with us and found that every other scout was trying to help him to
+become a 'fellow,' why! he began to crawl out of his shell. He's getting
+to be quite a boy now!"
+
+"But the '_Hare_'! he'd spoil--_Ouch!_" A sudden wrench of agony as Leon
+moved restlessly put the pointed question as to whether the mental pain
+which Harold Greer suffered might not be as hard to drag round as a
+thunderstorm ankle.
+
+"All right, Nix! Enlist him if you can! I guess you'll have to pass on
+who comes into the new patrol."
+
+Colin dug his nose into the pine-tips with a skeptical chuckle: that new
+patrol would have a big contract on hand, he thought, if it was to
+gather up the wild, waste energy of Leon,--that element in him which
+parents and teachers sought to eradicate,--turn it to good account, and
+take the fright out of the Hare.
+
+But from the woods came a deep bass whoop that sounded encouraging: the
+Whoo-whoo-hoo-doo-whoo! of the Grand Duke bidding the world
+good-morning ere he went into retreat for the day.
+
+It was answered by the Whoo-whoo-whooah-whoo! of a brother owl, also
+lifting up his voice before sunrise.
+
+"Listen, fellows!" cried Leon excitedly. "_Listen!_ The feathered owls
+themselves are cheering the Owl Patrol."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+MEMBERS OF THE LOCAL COUNCIL
+
+
+And thus the new patrol was started.
+
+Three weeks after the September morning when an anxious search-party led
+by Asa Chase, Leon's father, and by that clever woodsman Toiney Leduc,
+had started out at dawn to search the dense woods for four missing boys,
+and found a grotesque-looking quartette with faces piebald from the
+half-effaced smears of Varney's Paintpot, breakfasting on blueberries
+and water by a still ruddy camp-fire,--three weeks after those morning
+woods had rung with Toiney's shrill "Hôlà!" the first meeting for the
+formation of the Owl Patrol was held.
+
+In virtue of his being already a boy scout with a year's training behind
+him, Nixon Warren was elected patrol leader; and Leon Starr Chase who
+still limped as a result of his reckless descent of that freak
+pine-tree, was made second in rank with the title of corporal--or
+assistant patrol leader.
+
+Among the half-dozen spectators, leading men of the small town, who had
+assembled to witness the inaugural doings at this first meeting and to
+lend their approval to the new movement for the boys, there appeared one
+who was lamer than Leon, his halting step being due to a year-old injury
+which condemned him to limp somewhat for the remainder of his life.
+
+This was Captain Andrew Davis, popularly known as Captain Andy, who had
+been for thirty years a Gloucester fishing-skipper, one of the
+present-day Vikings who sail forth from the Queen Fishing City at the
+head of its blue harbor.
+
+He had commanded one fine fishing-vessel after another, was known along
+the water-front and among the fishing-fleet as a "crackerjack" and
+"driver," with other more complimentary titles. He had got the better of
+the sea in a hundred raging battles on behalf of himself and others. But
+it partially worsted him at last by wrecking his vessel in what he
+mildly termed a "November breeze"--in reality a howling hurricane--and
+by laming him for life when at the height of the storm the schooner's
+main-boom fell on him.
+
+He was dragged forth from under it, half-dead, but, "game to the last,"
+refused to be carried below. Lashed to the weather main-bitt--one of
+the sawed-off posts rising from the vessel's deck to which the
+main-sheet was made fast--in order to prevent his being swept overboard
+by the great seas washing over that deck, he had kept barking out orders
+and fighting for the lives of his crew so long as he could command a
+breath.
+
+"And I didn't lose a man, Doc!" he said long afterwards to his friend
+and admirer, the Exmouth doctor, the hard-working physician with whose
+long-suffering bell Leon had mischievously tampered. "I didn't lose a
+man--only the vessel. When the gale blew down we had to take to the
+dories, for she was just washing to pieces under us. Too bad: she was an
+able vessel too! But I guess I'll have to 'take my medicine' for the
+rest of my life--an' take it limping!"--with a rueful smile.
+
+But the many waters through which he had passed had not quenched in
+Captain Andy the chivalrous love for his human brothers. Rather did they
+baptize and freshen it until it sprouted anew, after he took up his
+residence ashore, in a paternal love for boys which kept his great heart
+youthful in his massive, sixty-year-old body; and which kept him
+hopefully dreaming, too, of deeds that shall be done by the sons now
+being reared for Uncle Sam, that shall rival or outshine the knightly
+feats of their fathers both on land and sea.
+
+So he smiled happily, this grand old sea-scout, as, on the occasion of
+the first meeting for the inauguration of the Boy Scout Movement, he
+heaved his powerful frame into a seat beside his friend the doctor who
+was equally interested in the new doings.
+
+"Hi there, Doc!" said Captain Andy joyously, laying his hand, big and
+warm as a tea-kettle, on the doctor's arm, "we're launching a new boat
+for the boys to-night, eh? Seems to me that it's an able craft too--this
+new movement--intended to keep the lads goin' ahead under all the sail
+they can carry, and on a course where they'll get the benefit of the
+best breezes, too."
+
+"That's how it strikes me," returned the doctor. "If it will only keep
+Starrie Chase, as they call him, sailing in an opposite direction to my
+doorbell, I'm sure I shall bless it! D'you know, Andy," the gray-bearded
+physician addressed the weatherbeaten sea-fighter beside him as he had
+done when they were schoolboys together, "when I heard how that boy Leon
+had sprained his ankle badly in the woods and that the family had sent
+for me, I said: 'Serve him right! _Let_ him be tied by the leg for a
+while and meditate on the mischief of his ways; I'm not going to see
+him!' Of course, before the words were well out, I had picked up my bag
+and was on my way to the Chase homestead!"
+
+"Of course you were!" Captain Andy beamed upon his friend until his
+large face with its coating of ruddy tan flamed like an aurora borealis
+under the electric lights of the little town hall in which the first boy
+scout meeting was held. "Trust you, Doc!"
+
+The ex-skipper knew that no man of his acquaintance lived up to the
+twelve points of the scout law in more thorough fashion than did this
+country doctor, who never by day or night closed his ears against the
+call of distress.
+
+"I'll say this much for the young rascal, he was ashamed to see me bring
+out my bandages"; the doctor now nodded humorously in the direction of
+Leon Chase, who made one of a semicircle composed of Nixon, himself and
+six other boys, at present seated round the young scoutmaster whom they
+had chosen to be leader of the new movement in their town.
+
+"But by and by his tongue loosened somewhat," went on the grizzled
+medical man, "and he began to take me into his confidence about the
+formation of this boy scout patrol; he seemed more taken up with that
+than with what he called 'the thunderstorm in his ankle.' Leon isn't one
+to knuckle under much to pain, anyhow! Somehow, as he talked, I began to
+feel as if we hadn't been properly facing the problem of our boys in and
+about this town, Andy."
+
+"I see what you mean!" Captain Andrew nodded. "Leon is as full of tricks
+as a tide rip in a gale o' wind. An' that's the most mischievous thing I
+know!" with a reminiscent chuckle. "But what can you do? If a boy is
+chockfull o' bubbling energy that's going round an' round in a whirl
+inside him, like the rip, it's bound to boil over in mischief, if there
+ain't a deep channel to draw it off."
+
+"That's just it! Ours is a slow little town--not much doing for the
+boys! Not even a male teacher in our graded schools to organize hikes
+and athletics for them! I am afraid that more than one lad with no
+natural criminal tendency, has got into trouble, been ultimately sent to
+a reformatory, owing to a lack in the beginning of some outlet safe and
+exciting for that surplus energy of which you speak. Take the case of
+Dave Baldwin, for instance, son of that old Ma'am Baldwin who lives over
+on the salt-marshes!" The doctor's face took on a sorry expression.
+"There was nothing really bad in him, I think! Just too much tide rip!
+He was the counterpart of this boy Leon, with a craving for excitement,
+a wild energy in him that boiled over at times in irregular pranks--like
+the rip--as you say."
+
+"And you know what makes _that_ so dangerous?" Captain Andy's sigh was
+heaved from the depths of past experience. "Well! with certain shoals
+an' ledges in the ocean there's too much water crowded onto 'em at low
+tide, so it just boils chock up from the bottom like a pot, goes round
+and round in a whirl, strings out, foamy an' irregular, for miles. It's
+'day, day!' to the vessel that once gets well into it, for you never
+know where 'twill strike you.
+
+"And it's pretty much the same with a lively boy, Doc: at low tide, when
+there's nothing doing, too much o' something is crowded onto the ledges
+in him, an' when it froths over, it gets himself and others into
+trouble. Keep him interested--swinging ahead on a high tide of activity
+under all the sail he can carry, and there's no danger of the rip
+forming. That's what this Boy Scout Movement aims at, I guess! It looks
+to me--my word! it _does_ look to me--as if Leon was already 'deepening
+the water some,' to-night," wound up Captain Andy with a gratified
+smile, scrutinizing the face of Starrie Chase, which was at this moment
+marked by a new and purposeful eagerness as he discussed the various
+requirements of the tenderfoot test, the elementary knowledge to be
+mastered before the next meeting, ere he could take the scout oath, be
+invested with the tenderfoot scout badge and be enrolled among the Boy
+Scouts of America.
+
+"A movement such as this might have been the saving of Dave Baldwin,"
+sighed the Doctor. "He was always playing such wild tricks. People kept
+warning him to 'cut it out' or he would surely get into trouble. But the
+'tide rip' within seemed too much for him. No foghorn warnings made any
+impression. I've been thinking lately of the saying of one wise man:
+'Hitherto there has been too much foghorn and too little bugle in our
+treatment of the boys!' Too much croaking at them: too little challenge
+to advance! So I said to the new scoutmaster, Harry Estey, Colin's
+brother," nodding toward a tall young man who was the centre of the
+eager ring of boys, "I said, 'give Leon the _bugle_: give it to him
+literally and figuratively: you'll need a bugler in your boy scout camp
+and I'll pay for the lessons; it will be a better pastime for him than
+fixing my doorbell.'"
+
+"I hope 'twill keep him from tormenting that lonely old woman over on
+the marshes; the boys of this town have made her life a burden to her,"
+said Captain Andy, thinking of that female recluse "Ma'am Baldwin," to
+whom allusion had been made by Colin and Coombsie on the memorable day
+which witnessed their headstrong expedition into the woods. "She has
+been regarded as fair game by them because she's a grain cranky an'
+peculiar, owing to the trouble she's had about her son. He was the
+youngest, born when she was middle-aged--perhaps she spoiled him a
+little. Come to think of it, Doc, I saw the young scape-grace a few days
+ago when I was down the river in my power-boat! He was skulking like a
+fox round those Sugar-loaf Sand-Dunes near the bay."
+
+"How did he look?"
+
+"Oh, shrunken an' dirty, like a winter's day!" Captain Andy was
+accustomed to the rough murkiness of a winter day on mid-ocean
+fishing-grounds. "He made off when he saw me heading for him. He's
+nothing but an idle vagrant now, who spends his time loafing between
+those white dunes and the woods on t' other side o' the river. He got
+work on a farm after he was discharged from the reformatory, but didn't
+stick to it. Other fellows shunned him, I guess! Folks say that he's
+been mixed up in some petty thefts of lumber from the shipyards lately,
+others that he keeps a row-boat stowed away in the pocket of a little
+creek near the dunes, and occasionally does smuggling in a small way
+from a vessel lying out in the bay. But that's only a yarn! He couldn't
+dodge the revenue officers. Anyhow, it's too bad that Dave should have
+gone the way he has! He's only 'a boy of a man' yet, not more'n
+twenty-three. When I was about that age I shipped on the same vessel
+with Dave's father--she was a trawler bound for Gran' Banks--we made
+more than one trip together on her. He was a white man; and--"
+
+"_Captain Andy!_" A voice ringing and eager, the voice of the
+scoutmaster of the new patrol who had just received his certificate from
+headquarters, interrupted the captain's recollections of Dave Baldwin's
+father. "Captain Andy, will you undertake to instruct these boys in
+knot-tying, before our next meeting, so that they may be able to tie the
+four knots which form part of the tenderfoot test, and be enrolled as
+scouts two weeks from now?"
+
+"Sakes! yes; I'll teach 'em. And if any one of 'em is such a lubber that
+he won't set himself to learn, why, I'll spank him with a dried codfish
+as if I had him aboard a fishing-vessel. Belay that!"
+
+And the ex-skipper's eye roved challengingly toward the scout recruits
+from under the heavy lid and short bristling eyelashes which overhung
+its blue like a fringed cloud-bank.
+
+The threat was welcomed with an outburst of laughter.
+
+"And, Doctor, will you give us some talks on first-aid to the injured,
+after we get the new patrol fairly started?" Scoutmaster Estey, Colin's
+elder brother, looked now at the busy physician, who, with Captain Andy
+and other prominent townsmen, including the clergymen of diverse creeds,
+was a member of the local council of the Boy Scouts of America which had
+been recently formed in the little town.
+
+"Yes; you may rely on me for that. But"--here the doctor turned
+questioningly toward the weather beaten sea-captain, his neighbor--"I
+thought the new patrol, the Owl Patrol as they have named it, was to
+consist of eight boys, and I see only seven present to-night. There's
+that tall boy, Nixon Warren, who's visiting here, and Mark Coombs, his
+cousin; then there's Leon Chase, Colin Estey, Kenjo Red, otherwise
+Kenneth Jordan," the doctor smiled at the red head of a sturdy-looking
+lad of fourteen, "Joe Sweet, commonly called Sweetsie, and Evan Macduff.
+But where's the eighth Owl, Andy? Isn't he fledged yet?"
+
+"I guess not! I think they'll have to tackle him in private before they
+can enlist him." The narrow rift of blue which represented Captain
+Andy's eye under the cloud-bank glistened. "You'll never guess who they
+have fixed upon for the eighth Owl, Doc. Why! that frightened boy, Ben
+Greer's son, who lives on the little farm-clearing in the woods with his
+gran'father and a Canadian farmhand whom Old Man Greer hires for the
+summer an' fall."
+
+"Not Harold Greer? You don't mean that abnormally shy an' timid boy whom
+the children nickname the 'Hare'? Why! I had to supply a certificate for
+him so that he could be kept out of school. It made him worse to go,
+because the other boys teased him so cruelly."
+
+"Jus' so! But that brand o' teasing is ruled out under the scout law. A
+scout is a brother to every other scout. I guess the idea of trying to
+get Harold enlisted in the Boy Scouts and thereby waking him up a
+little an' gradually showing him what 'bugaboos' his fears are,
+originated with that lad from Philadelphia, Nix Warren, who, as I
+understand, showed himself to be quite a fellow in the woods, starting a
+friction fire with rubbing-sticks an' doing other stunts which caused
+his companions to become head over heels interested in this new
+movement."
+
+"But how did _he_ get interested in Harold Greer?" inquired the doctor.
+
+"Well, as they trudged through the woods on that day when they made
+circus guys of themselves at Varney's Paintpot, and subsequently got
+lost, they passed the Greer farm and saw Harold who hid behind that
+French-Canadian, Toiney, when he saw them coming. Apparently it struck
+Nix, seeing him for the first time, what a miserable thing it must be
+for the boy himself to be afraid of everything an' nothing. So he set
+his heart on enlisting Harold in the new patrol. He, Nix, wants to pass
+the test for becoming a first-class scout: to do this he must enlist a
+recruit trained by himself in the requirements of a tenderfoot; and he
+is going to try an' get near to Harold an' train him--Nixon's cousin,
+Mark Coombs, Marcoo, as they call him, told me all about it."
+
+"Well, I like that!" The doctor's face glowed. "Though I'm afraid
+they'll have difficulty in getting the eighth Owl sufficiently fledged
+to show any plumage but the white feather!" with a sorry smile. "I pity
+that boy Harold," went on the medical man, "because he has been hampered
+by heredity and in a way by environment too. His mother was a very
+delicate, nervous creature, Andy. She was a prey to certain fears, the
+worst of which was one which we doctors call 'cloister fobia,' which
+means that she had a strange dread of a crowd, or even of mingling with
+a small group of individuals. As you know, her husband, like Dave
+Baldwin's father, was a Gloucester fisherman, whose home was in these
+parts. During his long absences at sea, she lived alone with her
+father-in-law, her little boy Harold and one old woman in that little
+farmhouse on the clearing. And I suppose every time that the wind howled
+through the woods she had a fresh fit of the quakes, thinking of her
+husband away on the foggy fishing-grounds."
+
+"Yes! I guess at such times the women suffer more than we do," muttered
+Captain Andy, thinking of his dead wife.
+
+"Well!" the doctor cleared his throat, "after Harold's mother received
+the news that her husband's vessel was lost with all hands, on Quero
+Bank, when her little boy was about five years old, she became more
+unbalanced; she wouldn't see any of her relatives even, if she could
+avoid it, save those who lived in the house with her. I attended her
+when she was ill and begged her to try and get the better of her
+foolishness for her boy's sake--or to let me send him away to a school
+of some kind. Both Harold's grandfather and she opposed the latter idea.
+She lived until her son was nine years old; by that time she had
+communicated all her queer dread of people--and a hundred other scares
+as well--to him. But in my opinion there's nothing to prevent his
+becoming in time a normal boy under favorable conditions where his
+companions would help him to fight his fears, instead of fastening them
+on him--conditions under which what we call his 'inhibitory power of
+self-control' would be strengthened, so that he could command his
+terrified impulses. And if the Boy Scout Movement can, under God, do
+this, Andy, why then I'll say--I'll say that knighthood has surely in
+our day come again--that Scout Nixon Warren has sallied forth into the
+woods and slain a dragon more truly, perhaps, than ever did Knight of
+the Round Table by whose rules the boy scouts of to-day are governed!"
+
+The doctor's last words were more to himself than to his companion, and
+full of the ardor of one who was a dragon-fighter "from way back": day
+by day, for years, he had grappled with the many-clawed dragons of pain
+and disease, often taking no reward for his labors.
+
+As his glance studied one and another of the seven boyish faces now
+forming an eager ring round the tall scoutmaster, while the date of the
+next meeting--the great meeting at which eight new recruits were to take
+the scout oath--was being discussed, he was beset by the same feeling
+which had possessed Colin Estey on that September morning in the Bear's
+Den. Namely, that the Owl Patrol would have a big contract on hand if it
+was to get the better of that mischievous "tide rip" in Leon and prove
+to the handicapped "Hare" what imaginary bugaboos were his fears!
+
+But Leon's face in its purposeful interest plainly showed that,
+according to Captain Andy's breezy metaphor, to-night he was really
+deepening the water in which his boyish bark floated, drawing out from
+the shoals among which he had drifted after a manner too trifling for
+his age and endowment.
+
+And so the doctor felt that there _might_ be hope for the eighth Owl
+chosen, and not present, being still a scared fledgling on that little
+farm-clearing in the woods, having never yet shaken a free wing, but
+only the craven white feather.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE BOWLINE KNOT
+
+
+Scout Nixon Warren, henceforth to be known as the patrol leader of the
+Owls, was himself possessed by the excited feeling that he was faring
+forth, into the October woods to tackle a dragon--the obstinate
+Hobgoblin of confirmed Fear--when on the day following that first boy
+scout meeting in Exmouth he took his way, accompanied by Coombsie, over
+the heaving uplands that lay between the salt-marshes and the woodland.
+
+Thence, through thick grove and undergrowth, they tramped to the little
+farm-clearing, where they had come upon Toiney and the dead raccoon.
+
+Nixon had arrayed himself in the full bravery of his scout uniform
+to-day, hoping that it might attract the attention of the frightened boy
+whose interest he wished to capture.
+
+The October sun burnished his metal buttons, with the oxidized silver
+badge upon his left arm beneath the white bars of the patrol leader,
+and the white stripe at his wrist recording his one year's service as a
+scout.
+
+Because of the impression they hoped to produce, Marcoo too had donned
+the uniform, minus stripes and badge--the latter he would not be
+entitled to wear until after the all-important next meeting when, on his
+passing the tenderfoot test, the scoutmaster would pin it on his shirt,
+but reversed until he should have proved his right to wear that badge of
+chivalry by the doing of some initial good turn.
+
+But Marcoo, like his companion, carried the long scout staff and was
+loud in his appreciation of its usefulness on a woodland hike.
+
+And thus, a knightly-looking pair of pilgrims, they issued forth into
+the forest clearing, bathed in the early afternoon sun.
+
+As before, their ears were tickled afar off by the sound of a tuneful
+voice alternately whistling and singing, though to-day it was
+unaccompanied by the woodchopper's axe.
+
+"That's Toiney!" said Marcoo. "Listen to him! He's just 'full of it';
+isn't he?"
+
+Toiney was indeed full to the brim and bubbling over with the primitive,
+zestful joy of life as he toiled upon the little woodland farm, cutting
+off withered cornstalks from a patch which earlier in the season had
+been golden with fine yellow maize of his planting. His lithe, energetic
+figure focused the sun rays which loved to play over his knitted cap of
+dingy red, with a bobbing tassel, over the rough blue shirt of homespun
+flannel, and upon the queer heelless high boots of rough unfinished
+leather, with puckered moccasin-like feet, in which he could steal
+through the woods well-nigh as noiselessly as the dog-fox himself.
+
+As the two scouts emerged into the open he was singing to the sunbeams
+and to the timid human "Hare" who basked in his brightness, a funny
+little fragment of song which he illustrated as though he had a sling in
+his hand and were letting fly a missile:--
+
+  "Gaston Guè, si j'avais ma fron-de,
+  Gaston Guè, je te l'aurais fron-dé!"
+
+This he translated for Harold's benefit:--
+
+  "Gaston Guè, if I haf ma sling,
+  Gaston Guè, at you I vould fling!"
+
+"Well! you needn't 'fling' at us, Toiney," laughed Nixon, stepping
+forward with a bold front. "Hullo! Harold!" he added in what he meant to
+be a most winning tone.
+
+"Hullo, Harold! How are _you_?" supplemented Marcoo in accents equally
+sugared.
+
+But the abnormally timid boy, with the pointed chin and slightly
+rodent-like face, only made an indistinguishable sound in his throat and
+slunk behind some bushes on the edge of the corn-patch.
+
+Toiney, on the other hand, was never backward in responding vivaciously
+to a friendly greeting.
+
+"Houp-e-là!" he explained in bantering astonishment as he surveyed the
+two scouts in the uniform which was strange to him. "_Houp-e-là!_ We
+arre de boy! We arre de stuff, I guess, engh?" He pointed an earthy
+forefinger at the figures in khaki, his black eyes sparkling with
+whimsical flattery. "But, _comment_, you'll no come for go in gran'
+forêt agen, dat's de tam' you'll get los' agen--hein?"
+
+"No, we're not going any farther into the woods to-day. We came to see
+_him_." Nixon nodded in the direction of Harold skulking timidly behind
+the berry bushes. "We want to speak to him about something."
+
+"Ah--miséricorde--he'll no speak on you; he's a _poltron_, a scaree:
+some tam' I'll be so shame for heem I'll feel lak' cry!" returned
+Toiney, moved to voluble frankness, his eye glistening like a moist
+bead, now, with mortified pity. "Son gran'père--hees gran'fader--he's
+go on town dis day: he's try ver' hard for get heem to go also--for to
+see! Mais, _non_! He's too scaree!" And the speaker, glancing toward the
+screen of bushes, shrugged his shoulders despairingly, as if asking what
+could possibly be done for such a craven.
+
+Scout Nixon was not baffled. Persistent by nature, he had worked well
+into the fibre of his being the tenth point of the scout law: that
+defeat, or the semblance thereof, must not down the true scout.
+
+"Then I'll talk to you first, Toiney," he said, "and tell you about
+something that we think might help him."
+
+And in the simplest English that he could choose, eked out at intervals
+with freshman French, he made clear to Toiney's quick understanding the
+aim and methods of the Boy Scout Movement.
+
+The Canadian, a born son of the woods, was quick to grasp and commend
+the return to Nature.
+
+"_Ça c'est b'en!_" he murmured with an approving nod. "I'll t'ink dat
+iss good for boy to go in gran' forêt--w'en he know how fin' de way--for
+see heem beeg tree en de littal wil' an-ni-mal, engh? Mais,
+miséri-corde,"--his shrugging shoulders pumped up a huge sigh as he
+turned toward Harold,--"mis-éri-corde! _he'll_ no marche as
+_éclaireur_--w'at-you-call-eet--scoutee--hein? He'll no go on meetin' or
+on school, engh?"
+
+And Toiney set to work cutting down cornstalks again as if the subject
+were unhappily disposed of.
+
+Such was not the case, however. At one word which he, the blue-shirted
+woodsman, had used in his harangue, Nixon started, and a strange look
+shot across his face. He knew enough of French to translate literally
+that word _éclaireur_, the French military term for scout. He knew that
+it meant figuratively a light-spreader: one who marches ahead of his
+comrades to enlighten the others.
+
+Could any term be more applicable to the peace scout of to-day who is
+striving to bring in an advanced era of progress and good will?
+
+Somehow, it stimulated in Scout Warren the desire to be an _éclaireur_
+in earnest to the darkened boy overshadowed by his bugbear fears, now
+skulking behind the berry-bushes.
+
+"I guess it's no use our trying to get hold of him," Coombsie was saying
+meanwhile in his cousin's ear. "See that old dame over there, Nix?" he
+pointed to a portly, elderly woman with an immense straw hat tied down,
+sunbonnet fashion, over her head. "Well! she took care of Harold's
+mother before she died; now she keeps house for his grandfather, and
+she, that old woman, told my mother that up to the time Harold was seven
+years old he would often run and hide his head in her lap of an evening
+as it was coming on dark. And when she asked what frightened him he said
+that he was 'afraid of the stars'! Just fancy! Afraid of the stars as
+they came out above the clearing here!"
+
+"Gee whiz! What do you know about that?" exclaimed Nixon with a rueful
+whistle: that dark hobgoblin, Fear, was more absurdly entrenched than he
+had thought possible.
+
+Yet Harold's seemed more than ever a case in which the scout who could
+once break down the wall of shyness round him might prove a true
+_éclaireur_: so he advanced upon the timid boy and addressed him with a
+honeyed mildness which made Coombsie chuckle and gasp, "Oh, sugar!"
+under his breath; though Marcoo set himself to second his patrol
+leader's efforts to the best of his ability.
+
+Together they sought to decoy Harold into a conversation, asking him
+questions about his life, whether he ever went into the woods with
+Toiney or played solitary games on the clearing. They intimated that
+they knew he was "quite a boy" if he'd only make friends with them and
+not be so stand-offish; and they tried to inveigle him into a simple
+game of tag or hide-and-seek among the bushes as a prelude to some more
+exciting sport such as duck-on-a-rock or prisoner's base.
+
+But the hapless "_poltron_" only answered them in jerky monosyllables,
+cowering against the bushes, and finally slunk back to the side of the
+blue-shirted farmhand with whom he had become familiar--whose merry
+songs could charm away the dark spirit of fear--and there remained,
+hovering under Toiney's wing.
+
+"I knew that it would be hard to get round him," said Marcoo
+thoughtfully. "Until now all the boys whom he has met have picked on an'
+teased him. Suppose you turn your attention to _me_ for a while, Nix!
+Suppose you were to make a bluff of teaching me some of the things that
+a fellow must learn before he can enlist as a tenderfoot scout! Perhaps,
+then, he'd begin to listen an' take notice. I've got a toy flag in my
+pocket; let's start off with that!"
+
+"Good idea! You do use your head for something more than a hat-rack,
+Marcoo!" The patrol leader relapsed with a relieved sigh into his
+natural manner. "I brought an end of rope with me; I thought we might
+have got along to teaching him how to tie one or other of the four knots
+which form part of the tenderfoot test. You take charge of the rope-end.
+And don't lose it if you want to live!"
+
+He passed the little brown coil to his cousin and receiving in return
+the miniature Stars and Stripes, went through a formal flag-raising
+ceremony there on the sunny clearing. Tying the toy flag-staff to the
+top of his tall scout's staff, he planted the latter in some soft earth;
+then both scouts stood at attention and saluted Old Glory, after which
+they passed and repassed it at marching pace, each time removing their
+broad-brimmed hats with much respect and an eye on Harold to see if he
+was taking notice.
+
+Subsequently the patrol leader stationed himself by the impromptu
+flagstaff, and delivered a simple lecture to Coombsie upon the history
+and composition of the National Flag; a knowledge of which, together
+with the proper forms of respect due to that starry banner, would enter
+into his examination for tenderfoot scout.
+
+Both were hoping that some crumbs of information--some ray of patriotic
+enthusiasm--might be absorbed by Harold, the boy who had never been to
+school, and who had scantily profited by some elementary and
+intermittent lessons in reading and writing from his grandfather. His
+brown eyes, shy as any rodent's, watched this parade curiously. But
+though Toiney tried to encourage him by precept and gesticulation to
+follow the boy scouts' example and salute the Flag, plucking off his own
+tasseled cap and going through a dumb pantomime of respect to it, the
+"scaree" could not be moved from his shuffling stolidity.
+
+The starry flaglet waving from the scout's planted staff, might have
+been a gorgeous, drifting leaf from the surrounding woods for all the
+attention he paid to it!
+
+"Say! but it's hard to land him, isn't it?" Nixon suspended the parade
+with a sigh almost of despair. "Well, here goes, for one more attempt to
+get him interested! Chuck me that rope-end, Marcoo! I'll show you how to
+tie a bowline knot; perhaps, as his father was a sailor--a deep-sea
+fisherman--knot-tying may be more in his line than flag-raising."
+
+The next minute Coombsie's fingers were fumbling with the rope rather
+blunderingly, for Marcoo was by nature a bookworm and more efficient
+along lines of abstract study than at anything requiring manual skill.
+
+"Pass the end up through the bight," directed Scout Warren when the
+bight or loop had been formed upon the standing part of the rope. "I
+said _up_, not down, jackass! Now, pass it round the 'standing part';
+don't you know what that means? Why! the long end of the rope on which
+you're working. Oh! you're a dear donkey," nodding with good-humored
+scorn.
+
+Now both the donkey recruit and the instructing scout had become for the
+moment genuinely absorbed in the intricacies of that bowline knot, and
+forgot that this was not intended as a _bona-fide_ lesson, but as mere
+"show off" to awaken the interest of a third person.
+
+Their tail-end glances were no longer directed furtively at Harold to
+see whether or not he was beginning to "take notice."
+
+So they missed the first quiver of a peculiar change in him; they did
+not see that his sagging chin was suddenly reared a little as if by the
+application of an invisible bearing-rein.
+
+They missed the twitching face-muscles, the slowly dilating eye, the
+breath beginning to come in quick puffs through his spreading nostrils,
+like the smoke issuing from the punky wood, heralding the advent of the
+ruddy spark, when in the woods they started a fire with rubbing-sticks.
+And just as suddenly and mysteriously as that triumphant spark
+appeared--evolved by Nixon's fire-drill, from the dormant possibilities
+in the dull wood--did the first glitter of fascinated light appear and
+grow in the eye of Harold Greer, the prisoner of Fear, disparagingly
+nicknamed the "Hare"!
+
+"I--I can do that! I c-can do it--b-better than he can!" Stuttering and
+trembling in a strange paroxysm of eagerness, the _poltron_ addressed,
+in a nervous squawk, not the absorbed scouts, but Toiney, his friend and
+protector.
+
+"I can t-tie it better'n _he_ does! I know--I know I can!" The shrill
+boyish voice which seemed suddenly to dominate every other sound on the
+clearing was hoarse with derision as the abnormally shy and timid boy
+pointed a trembling finger at Marcoo still, like a "dear donkey,"
+blundering with the rope-end.
+
+Had the gray rabbit, which suddenly at that moment whisked out of the
+woods and across a distant corner, opened its mouth and addressed them,
+the surprise to the two scouts could scarcely have been greater.
+
+"Oh! _you can_, can you?" said Nixon thickly. "Let's see you try!" He
+placed the rope-end in Harold's hand, which received it with a fondling
+touch.
+
+"Here you make a small loop on this part of the rope, leaving a good
+long end," he began coolly, while his heart bounded, for the spark in
+the furtive eye of the twelve-year-old "scaree" was rapidly becoming a
+scintillation: the scouts had struck fire from him at last.
+
+A triumph beside which the signal achievement of their friction fire in
+the woods paled!
+
+The intangible dragon which held their brother boy a captive on this
+lonely clearing, not permitting him to mingle freely with his fellows
+for study or play, was weakening before them.
+
+"That's right, Harold! Go ahead: now pass the end up through the loop!
+Bravo, you're the boy! Now, around the standing part--the rope
+itself--and down again! Good: you have it. You can beat _him_ every time
+at tying a knot: he's just a blockhead, isn't he?"
+
+And Scout Warren pointed with much show of scorn at Marcoo, the normal
+recruit, who looked on delightedly. Never before did boy rejoice so
+unselfishly over being beaten at a test as Coombsie then! For right here
+on the little farm-clearing a strange thing had happened.
+
+In the gloom of every beclouded mind there is one chink by which light,
+more or less, may enter; and a skillful teacher can work an improvement
+by enlarging that chink.
+
+Harold's brain was not darkened in the sense of being defective. And the
+gray tent of fear in which he dwelt had its chink too; the scouts had
+found it in the frayed rope-end and knot.
+
+For while the timid boy watched Coombsie's bungling fingers, that drab
+knot, upon which they blundered, suddenly beckoned to him like a star.
+
+And, all in a moment, it was no longer his fear-stricken mother who
+lived in him, but his daring fisherman-father whose horny fingers could
+tie every sailor's knot that was ever heard of, and who had used that
+bowline noose in many an emergency at sea to save a ship-wrecked
+fellow-creature.
+
+The bowline was the means of saving the fisherman's son now from mental
+shipwreck, or something nearly as bad. Harold's eager thoughts became
+entangled in it, while his fingers worked under Nixon's directions; he
+forgot, for once, to be afraid.
+
+Presently the noose was complete, and Nixon was showing him how to
+tighten it by pulling on the standing part of the rope.
+
+This achieved, the timid human "Hare" raised his brown eyes from the
+rope in his hand and looked from one to another of his three companions
+as in a dream, a bright one.
+
+For half a minute a rainbowed--almost awed--silence held the three upon
+the clearing. Toiney was the first to break it. He flung his arms
+rapturously round the hitherto fear-bound boy.
+
+"Bravo! mo' fin," he cried, embracing Harold as his "cute one." "Bravo!
+mo' smarty. Grace à bon Dieu, you ain' so scare anny longere! You go for
+be de boy--de brave boy--you go for be de scout--engh?" His eyes were
+wet and winking as if, now indeed, he felt "lak' cry"!
+
+"Certainly, you're going to be a scout, Harold," corroborated Nixon,
+equally if not so eloquently moved. "Now! don't you want to learn how to
+tie another knot, the fisherman's bend? You ought to be able to tie
+that, you know, because your father was a great fisherman."
+
+Harold was nothing loath. More and more his father's spirit flashed
+awake in him. Through the rest of that afternoon, which marked a new era
+in his life, he seemed to work with his father's fingers, while the
+October sky glowed in radiant tints of saffron and blue, and a light
+breeze skipped through the pine-trees and the brilliant maples that
+flamed at intervals like lamps around the clearing.
+
+"We'll come again to-morrow or the day after, Harold, and teach you more
+'stunts'; I mean some other things, besides knot-tying, that a boy ought
+to know how to do," said Nixon as a filmy haze hovering over the edges
+of the woods warned them that it bore evening on its dull blue wings.
+
+"Aw right!" docilely agreed Harold; and though he shuffled his feet
+timidly, like the "poltron" or craven, which Toiney had in sorrow called
+him, there was a shy longing in his face which said that he was sorry
+the afternoon was over, that he would look for the return of his new
+friends, the only boys who had ever racked their brains to help and not
+to hurt him.
+
+Before their departure he had learned how to tie three knots, square or
+reef, bowline and the fisherman's bend. He had likewise admitted two
+more persons within the narrow enclosure of his confidence--the two who
+were to liberate him, the _éclaireurs_, the peace scouts of to-day.
+
+And, for the first time in his life, he had awkwardly lifted his cap and
+saluted the flag of his country as it waved in miniature from the
+planted staff.
+
+That afternoon was the first of several spent by Scout Warren and his
+aide-de-camp, Coombsie, on the little farm-clearing in the woods, trying
+to foster a boyish spirit in Harold, to overcome his dread of mingling
+with other boys, to awaken in him the desire to become a boy scout and
+share the latter's good times at indoor meeting, on hike, or in camp.
+
+When the date of the second meeting drew near at which seven new
+recruits were to take the scout oath and be formally organized into the
+Owl Patrol, they had obtained the promise of this timid fledgling to be
+present under Toiney's wing, and enlist, too.
+
+"I wonder whether he'll keep his word or if he'll fight shy of coming at
+the last minute?" whispered Nixon to Coombsie on the all-important
+evening when the other recruits led by their scoutmaster marched into
+the modest town hall, a neutral ground where all of diverse creeds might
+meet, and where the members of the local council, including the doctor
+and Captain Andy, had already assembled.
+
+"If he doesn't show up, Nix, you won't be able to pass the twelfth point
+of test for becoming a first-class scout by producing a recruit trained
+by yourself in the requirements of a tenderfoot," suggested Marcoo.
+"You've passed all the active tests, haven't you?"
+
+Scout Warren nodded, keeping an anxious eye on the door. Having been
+duly transferred from his Philadelphia troop to the new patrol which had
+just been organized in this tide-lapped corner of Massachusetts--where
+it seemed probable now that he would spend a year at least, as his
+parents contemplated a longer stay in Europe--he had already passed the
+major part of his examination for first-class scout before the Scout
+Commissioner of the district.
+
+He was an expert in first-aid and primitive cooking. He had prepared a
+fair map of a certain section of the marshy country near the tidal
+river. He could state upon his honor that he had accurately judged with
+his eye a certain distance in the woods--namely, from the top of that
+towering red-oak-tree which, when lost, he had chosen as a lookout
+point, to the cave called the Bear's Den--on the never-to-be-forgotten
+day when four painted boys and a dog finally took refuge in that rocky
+cavern; the boy scout's judgment of the distance being subsequently
+confirmed by lumbermen who knew every important tree in that section of
+the woods.
+
+He had passed tests in swimming, tree-felling, map-reading, and so
+forth! But he would not be entitled to wear, instead of the second-class
+scout badge, the badge of the first-class rank, beneath the two white
+bars of the patrol leader upon his left arm, until he produced the
+tenderfoot whom he had trained.
+
+But would that timid recruit from the little woodland clearing--that
+half-fledged Owlet--appear?
+
+"Suppose he should 'funk it' at the last minute?" whispered Marcoo
+tragically to the patrol leader. "No! No! As I'm alive! here they
+come--Toiney, with Harold in tow. Blessings on that Canuck!" he added
+fervently.
+
+It was a strange-looking pair who now entered the little town hall:
+Toiney, in a rough gray sweater and those heelless high boots, removing
+his tasseled cap and depositing in a corner the lantern which had guided
+him with his charge through the woods, as facile to him by night as by
+day; and Harold, timidly clinging to his arm.
+
+The brown eyes of the latter rolled up in panic as he beheld the big
+lighted room wherein the boy scouts and those interested in them were
+assembled. All his mother's unbalanced fear of a crowd returning upon
+him in full force, he would have fled, but for Toiney's firm
+imprisonment of his trembling arm, and for Toiney's voice encouraging
+him gutturally with:--
+
+"Tiens! mo' beau. _Courage!_ Gard' donc de scout wit' de flag on she's
+hand! V'là! V'là!" pointing to Nixon, the patrol leader, supporting the
+Stars and Stripes. "Bon courage! you go for be de scout too--engh?"
+
+His country's flag, blooming into magnificence under the electric light,
+had, to-night, a smile for Harold, as he saw it the centre of saluting
+boys.
+
+Something of his brave father's love for that National Ensign, the
+"Color" as the fisherman called it, which had presided over so many
+crises of that father's life, as when on a gala day in harbor he ran it
+to the masthead, or twined it in the rigging, at sea, to speak another
+vessel, or sorrowfully hoisted it at half-mast for a shipmate
+drowned,--something of that loving reverence now began to blossom in
+Harold's heart like a many-tinted flower!
+
+"Well! here you are, Harold." Coombsie was promptly taking charge of the
+new arrival, piloting him, with Toiney, to a seat. "I knew you'd come;
+you've got the right stuff in you; eh?"
+
+It was feeble "stuff" at the moment, and in danger of melting into an
+open attempt at flight; for Harold's eyes had turned from the benignant
+flag to the figure of Leon Chase.
+
+But Leon had little opportunity, and less desire, to harass him
+to-night.
+
+For, as the kernel of the initiatory proceedings was reached, the first
+of the seven new recruits to hold up the three fingers of his right hand
+and take the scout oath was Starrie Chase:--
+
+     "On my honor I will do my best, to do my duty to God and my
+     country, and to obey the scout law: To help other people at all
+     times, to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally
+     straight."
+
+Captain Andy cleared his throat as he listened, and the doctor wiped his
+glasses.
+
+Then, as corporal or second in command of the new patrol, Leon stood
+holding aloft the brand-new flag of that patrol--a great, horned
+hoot-owl, the Grand Duke of the neighboring woods, embroidered on a blue
+ground by Colin's mother--while his brother recruits, having each passed
+the tenderfoot test, took the oath and were enrolled as duly fledged
+Owls.
+
+Harold, the timid fledgling, came last. Supported on either side by his
+sponsors, Nixon and Coombsie, he distinguished himself by tying the four
+knots which formed part of the test with swiftness and skill, and by
+"muddling" through the rest of the examination, consent having been
+obtained from headquarters that some leniency in the matter of answers
+might be shown to this handicapped boy who had never been to school and
+for whom--as for Leon--the Boy Scout Movement might prove The Thing.
+
+Captain Andy declared it to be "The Thing" when later that night he was
+called upon for a speech.
+
+"Boys!" he said, heaving his massive figure erect, the sky-blue rift of
+his eye twinkling under the cloudy lid. "Boys! it's an able craft, this
+new movement, if you'll only buckle to an' work it well. And it's a
+hearty motto you have: BE PREPARED. Prepared to help yourselves, so that
+you can stand by to help others! Lads,"--the voice of the old
+sea-fighter boomed blustrously,--"there comes a time to 'most every one
+who isn't a poor-hearted lubber, when he wants to help somebody else
+more than he ever wanted to help himself; and if he hasn't made the most
+o' what powers he has, why! when that Big Minute comes he won't be 'in
+it.' Belay that! Make it fast here!" tapping his forehead. "Live up to
+your able motto an' pretty soon you'll find yourselves going ahead under
+all the sail you can carry; an' you won't be trying to get a corner on
+the breeze either, or to blanket any other fellow's sails! Rather,
+you'll show him the road an' give him a tow when he needs it. God bless
+you! So long!"
+
+And when the wisdom of the grand old sea-scout had been cheered to the
+echo, the eight members of the new patrol, rallying round their Owl
+flag, broke into the first verse of their song, a part of which Nixon
+had sung to them by the camp-fire in the woods:--
+
+  "No loyal Scout gives place to doubt,
+    But action quick he shows!
+  Like a knight of old he is brave and bold,
+    And chivalry he knows.
+      Then hurrah for the brave, hurrah for the good!
+        Hurrah for the pure in heart!
+      At duty's call, with a smile for all,
+        The Scout will do his part!"
+
+"Sing! Harold. Do your part, and sing!" urged Nixon, the patrol leader.
+"Oh, go on: that isn't a scout's mouth, Harold!" looking at the weak
+brother's fear-tightened lips. "A scout's mouth turns up at the corners.
+Smile, Harold! Smile and sing."
+
+A minute later Scout Warren's own features were wreathed by a smile,
+humorous, moved, glad--more glad than any which had illumined his face
+hitherto--for by his side the boy who had once feared the stars as they
+stole out above the clearing, was singing after him:--
+
+  "Hurrah for the sun, hurrah for the storm!
+    Hurrah for the stars above!"
+
+"He's going to make a good scout, some time; don't you think so, Cap?"
+Nixon, glancing down at the timid "poltron," nudged Captain Andy's arm.
+
+"Aye, aye! lad, I guess he will, when you've put some more backbone into
+him," came the optimistic answer.
+
+But Captain Andy's gaze did not linger on Harold. The keen search-light
+of his glance was trained upon Leon--upon Corporal Chase, who, judging
+by the new and lively purpose in his face, had to-night, indeed, through
+the channel of his scout oath, "deepened the water in which he floated,"
+as he stood holding high the royal-blue banner of the Owl Patrol.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+GODEY PECK
+
+
+That stirring initiation meeting was the forerunner of others thereafter
+held weekly in the small town hall, when the members of the new patrol
+had their bodies developed, stiffened into manly erectness by a good
+drill and various rousing indoor games, while their minds were expanded
+by the practice of various new and exciting "stunts" as Leon called
+them.
+
+To Starrie Chase the most interesting of these in which he soon became
+surprisingly proficient was the flag-signaling, transmitting or
+receiving a message to or from a brother scout stationed at the other
+end of the long hall. Spelling out such a message swiftly, letter by
+letter, with the two little red and white flags, according to either the
+semaphore or American Morse code, had a splendid fascination for him.
+
+More exciting still was it when on some dark fall evening, at the end of
+the Saturday afternoon hike, he gathered with his brother scouts around
+a blazing camp-fire on the uplands, with the pale gray ribbon of the
+tidal river dimly unrolling itself beyond the low-lying marshes, and the
+scoutmaster would suggest that he should try some outdoor signaling to
+another scout stationed on a distant hillock, using torches, two red
+brands from the fire, one in each hand, instead of the regulation flags.
+
+"Oh! but this is in-ter-est-ing; makes a fellow feel as if he were
+'going some'!" Starrie would declare to himself in an ecstatic drawl,
+as, first his right arm, then his left, manipulated the rosy firebrands,
+while his keen eyes could barely discern the black silhouette of his
+brother Owl's figure on its distant mound, as he spelled out a brief
+message.
+
+It certainly was "going." There was progress here: exciting progress.
+Growth which made the excitement squeezed out of his former pranks seem
+tame and childish!
+
+And more than one resident of the neighborhood--including Dave Baldwin's
+old mother, who lived alone in her shallow, baldfaced house, almost
+denuded of paint by the elements, at a bleak point where upland and
+salt-marsh met--drew a free breath and thanked God for a respite.
+
+In addition to the indoor signaling there were talks on first-aid to
+the injured by the busy doctor and on seamanship by Captain Andy whose
+big voice had a storm-burr clinging to it in which, at exciting moments,
+an intent ear could almost catch the echo of the gale's roar, of raging
+seas, shrieking rigging and slatting sails--all the wild orchestra of
+the storm-king.
+
+Then there were the Saturday hikes, and once in a while the week-end
+camping-out in the woods from Friday evening to Saturday night, whenever
+Scoutmaster Estey, Colin's much-admired brother, could obtain a forenoon
+holiday, in addition to the customary Saturday afternoon, from the
+office where he worked as naval architect, or expert designer of
+fishing-vessels, in connection with a shipbuilding yard on the river.
+
+A notable figure in relation to the scouts' outdoor life was Toiney
+Leduc, the French-Canadian farmhand. As time progressed he became an
+inseparable part of it.
+
+For Harold, the abnormally timid boy, for whom it was hoped that the new
+movement would do much, was inseparable from him: Harold would not come
+to scout meeting or march on hike without Toiney, although with his
+brother Owls and their scoutmaster he was already beginning to emerge
+from his shadowy fears like a beetle from the grub.
+
+In time he would no doubt fully realize what impotent bugaboos were his
+vague terrors, and would be reconciled to the world at large through the
+medium of the Owl Patrol.
+
+Already there was such an improvement in his health and spirits that his
+grandfather raised Toiney's wages on condition that he would consent to
+work all the year round on the little farm-clearing, and no longer spend
+his winters at some loggers' camp, tree-felling, in the woods.
+
+Moreover Old Man Greer, to whom the abnormal condition of his only
+grandson had been a sore trial, was willing and glad to spare Toiney's
+services as woodland guide to the boy scouts, including Harold, whenever
+they were required for a week-end excursion.
+
+And so much did those eight scouts learn from this primitive woodsman,
+who could not command enough English to say "Boo!" straight, according
+to Leon, but who understood the language and track-prints of bird and
+animal as if they the shy ones had taught him, that by general petition
+of all members of the new patrol, Toiney was elected assistant
+scoutmaster, and duly received his emblazoned certificate from
+headquarters.
+
+His presence and songs lent a primitive charm to many a camp-fire
+gathering; no normal boy could feel temporarily dull in his company, for
+Toiney, besides being an expert in woodlore and a good trailer, was
+essentially a _bon enfant_, or jolly child, at heart, meeting every
+experience with the blithe faith that, somehow--somewhere--he would come
+out on top.
+
+In the woods his songs were generally inaudible, locked up in his heart
+or throat, though occasionally they escaped to his lips which would move
+silently in a preliminary canter, then part to emit a gay bar or two, a
+joyous "Tra la la ... la!" or:--
+
+  "Rond', Rond', Rond', peti' pie pon' ton'!"
+
+But on these occasions the strain rarely soared above a whisper and was
+promptly suspended lest it should startle any wild thing within hearing,
+while he led his boy scouts through the denser woods with the skill and
+stealth of the Indian whose wary blood mingled very slightly with the
+current in his veins.
+
+Those were mighty moments for the young scoutmaster and members of the
+Owl Patrol when they "lay low," crouching breathlessly in some thicket,
+with Toiney, prostrate on his face and hands, a little in advance of
+them, his black eyes intent upon a fox-path, a mere shadow-track such as
+four of their number had seen on that first memorable day in the woods,
+where only the lightly trampled weeds or an occasional depression in
+some little bush told their assistant scoutmaster, whom nothing escaped,
+that some airy-footed animal was in the habit of passing there from
+burrow to hunting-ground.
+
+The waiting was sometimes long and the enforced silence irksome to
+youthful scouts; there were times when it oppressed one or other of the
+boys like a steel cage against the bars of which his voice, like a
+rebellious bird, dashed itself in some irrepressible sound, a
+pinched-off cry or smothered whistle.
+
+But that always drew a backward hiss of "Mak' you s-silent! W'at for you
+spik lak dat?" from the advance scout, Toiney, or a clipped, sarcastic
+"_T'as pas besoin_ to shoutee--engh?"
+
+And the needless semi-shout was repressed next time by the reprimanded
+one, many a lesson in self-control being learned thereby.
+
+[Illustration: "MAK' YOU S-SILENT! W'AT FOR YOU SPIK LAK DAT?"]
+
+More than once patience was at last rewarded by a glimpse of the
+trotting traveler, the sly red fox, maker of that shadow-path: of its
+sandy coat, white throat, large black ears, and the bushy, reddish tail,
+with milk-white tip, the "flag" as woodsmen call it.
+
+Instinctively on such occasions Leon at first yearned for his gun, his
+old "fuzzee," with which he had worked havoc--often purposeless and
+excessive--among shore birds, and from which he had to part when he
+enlisted in the Boy Scouts of America, and adopted principles tending
+toward the conservation of all wild life rather than to destruction.
+
+Gradually, however, Starrie Chase, like his brother scouts, came under
+the glamour of this peaceful trailing. He began to discover a subtler
+excitement, more spicy fun--the spicier for Toiney's presence--in the
+brief contemplation of that dog-fox at home, trotting along, unmolested,
+to his hunting-ground, than in past fevered glimpses of him when all
+interest in his wiles and habits was merged into greed for his skin and
+tail.
+
+Many were the opportunities, too, for a glimpse at the white flag of the
+shy deer as it bounded off into some deeper woodland glade, and for
+being thrilled by the swift drumming of the partridge's wings when it
+rose from its dusting-place on the ground or on some old log whose
+brown, flaky wood could be reduced to powder; or from feasting on the
+brilliant and lowly partridge-berries which, nestling amid their
+evergreen leaves, challenged November's sereness.
+
+Each woodland hike brought its own revelation--its special
+discovery--insignificant, perhaps--but which thereafter stood out as a
+beauty spot upon the face of the day.
+
+The hikes were generally conducted after this manner: seven of the Owls
+with their tall scoutmaster would leave the town bright and early on a
+Saturday morning, a goodly spectacle in their khaki uniforms, and, staff
+in hand, take their way through the woods to the little farm-clearing
+where they were reinforced by the assistant scoutmaster in his rough
+garb--Toiney would not don the scout uniform--and by Harold, the still
+weak brother.
+
+Their coming was generally heralded by modified shouting. And the
+impulsive Toiney would suspend some farm task and stand erect with an
+explosive "_Houp-là!_" tickling his throat, to witness that most
+exhilarating of present-day sights, a party of boy scouts emerging from
+the woods into a clearing, with Mother Nature in the guise of the early
+sunshine rushing, open-armed, to meet them, as if welcoming her stray
+children back to her heart.
+
+Then Toiney, as forest guide, would assume the leadership of the party,
+and not only was his thorough acquaintance with "de bird en de littal
+wil' an-ni-mal" valuable; but his fund of knowledge about "heem beeg
+tree," and the uses to which the different kinds of wood could be put,
+seemed broad and unfailing, too.
+
+The most exciting discovery of that season to the boys was when he
+pointed out to them one day the small hole or den amid some rocky ledges
+near Big Swamp where the Mother Coon--as sometimes happens, though she
+generally prefers a hollow tree--had brought forth her intrepid
+offspring; both the one which had raided Toiney's hencoop, and Raccoon
+Junior who had come to a warlike issue with the crows.
+
+Toiney, as he explained, had investigated that deep hole amid the ledges
+when the woods were green with spring, and had discovered some wild
+animal which by its size and general outline he knew to be a coon,
+crouching at the inner end of it, with her young "littal as small cat."
+He had beaten a hasty retreat, not willing to provoke a possible attack
+from the mother rendered bold by maternity, or to disturb the infant
+family.
+
+He was radiant at finding the coon's rocky home again, though
+tenantless, now.
+
+"Ha! I'll know we fin' heem den"; he beamed upon his comrades with
+primitive conceit. "We arre de boy--engh? We arre de bes' scout ev'ry
+tam!"
+
+And that was the aim of each member of the Owl Patrol, with the
+exception, perhaps, of Harold, not indeed to be the "best scout," but to
+figure as the equal in scoutcraft of any lad of his age and a
+corresponding period of service, in the United States. To this end he
+drilled, explored and studied, somewhat to the mystification of boys who
+still held aloof from the scout movement!
+
+"Where are ye off to, Starrie?" inquired Godey Peck, a youth of this
+type, one fair November afternoon, intercepting Leon about an hour after
+school had closed. "Don't you want to come along with me? I'm going down
+to Stanway's shipyard to have a look at the new vessel that they're
+going to launch at daybreak to-morrow. She's all wedged up on the ways,
+ready to go. Say!" Godey edged slyly nearer to Leon, "us boys--Choc
+Latour, Benjie Lane an' me--have hit on a plan for being launched in
+her. You know they won't allow boys to be aboard, if they know it, when
+she shoots off the launching ways. But those ship carpenters'll have to
+rise bright and early if they want to get ahead of us! See?"
+
+Godey laid a forefinger against the left side of his nose, to emphasize
+a high opinion of his own subtlety.
+
+"How are you going to work it?" Leon asked briefly.
+
+"Why! there's a vessel 'most built on the stocks right 'longside the
+finished hull. Us boys are going to wake very early, trot down to the
+shipyard before any of the workmen are around; then we'll shin up the
+staging an' over the half-built vessel right onto the white deck o' the
+new one that's waiting to be launched. 'Twill be easy to drop below into
+the cabin an' hide under the bunks until the time comes for launching
+her. When we hear 'em knocking out the last block from under her
+keel--when she's just beginning to crawl--then we'll pop up an' be on
+deck when she's launched; see?"
+
+"Ho! So you're going to do the stowaway act, eh?" Starrie Chase, with
+that characteristic snap of his brown eyes, seemed to be taking a mental
+photograph of the plan.
+
+"Only for an hour or two. You want to be in this too; don't you,
+Starrie?"
+
+Leon was silent, considering. The underhand scheme ran counter to the
+aboveboard principles of the scout law which he had sworn to obey; of
+that he felt sure. "On my honor I will do my best ... to keep myself
+morally straight!" Voluntarily and enthusiastically he had taken the
+chivalrous oath, and he was "too much of a fellow" to go back on it
+deliberately.
+
+"No! I don't want to play stowaway," he answered after a minute. "It's a
+crazy plan anyhow! Give it up, Gode! Likely enough you'll scratch up the
+paint of the new cabin with your boots, skulking there all three of
+you--then there'll be a big row; and 'twould seem a pity, too, after all
+the months it has taken to build an' paint that dandy new hull."
+
+Such a view would scarcely have presented itself to Leon two months ago;
+he certainly was "deepening the water" in which he floated.
+
+"Well, let's pop down to the shipyard anyhow, an' see her!" urged Godey,
+hoping that a contemplation of the new vessel, airily wedged high on the
+launching ways, with her bridal deck white as a hound's tooth, would
+weaken the other's resolution.
+
+"No, I'll be down there to-morrow morning, on the river-slip, to see her
+go. But I want to do something else this afternoon. I'm going home to
+study."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Flag-signaling in the Boy Scout Handbook. I can send a message by
+semaphore now, twenty letters per minute; I must get it down to sixteen
+before I can pass the examination for first-class scout!" Starrie threw
+this out impetuously, his face glowing. "We're going to have an outdoor
+test in some other things this evening--if I pass it I'll be a
+second-class scout. I don't want to be a tenderfoot for ever! Say! but
+the signaling gets me; it's so interesting: I'm beginning to study the
+Morse code now."
+
+"Pshaw! You boy scouts jus' make me tired." Godey leaned against the
+parapet of the broad bridge above the tidal river whereon the boys
+stood, as if the contemplation of so much energy ambitiously directed
+was too much for him. "Here comes another of your kind now!"
+
+He pointed to Colin Estey who came swinging along out of the distance,
+his quick springy step and upright carriage doing credit to the scouts'
+drill.
+
+Colin halted ere crossing the bridge to hail a street-car for an old
+gentleman who was making futile attempts to stop it, and then
+courteously helped him to the platform.
+
+Godey shook his head over the action. "Cock-a-doodle-doo!" he crowed
+scornfully. "Ain't we acting hifalutin?"
+
+Yet there was nothing at all bombastic about the simple good turn or in
+Colin's bright face as he joined the other scout upon the bridge and
+marched off homeward with him, their rhythmic step and erect carriage
+attracting the attention of more than one adult pedestrian.
+
+Godey lolled on the parapet, looking after them, racking his brain for
+some derisive epithet to hurl at their backs; he longed to shout,
+"Sissies!" and "Spongecakes!" But such belittling terms clearly didn't
+apply.
+
+The only mocking shaft in his quiver that would come anywhere near
+hitting the mark of those well-drilled backs--straight as a rod--was one
+which even he felt to be feeble:--
+
+"Oh! you Tin Scouts," he shouted maliciously. "Tin Soldiers! _Tin
+Scouts!_" sustaining the cry until the two figures disappeared from view
+in the direction of the Chase homestead.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE BALDFACED HOUSE
+
+
+But Leon did not study signaling and the Morse alphabet that afternoon.
+He was presently dispatched by his father, who owned a pleasant home on
+the outskirts of the town, on an errand to a farm some two miles distant
+on the uplands that skirted the woods.
+
+The afternoon had all the spicy beauty of early November, with a slight
+frost in the air. The fresh breeze laughed like a tomboy as it romped
+over the salt-marshes. Each eddying dimple in the tidal river shone like
+a star sapphire, while the broad, brackish channel wound in and out
+between the marshes with as many wriggles as a lively trout.
+
+"Those little creeks look like runaways," thought Leon as he paused upon
+the uplands and beamed down upon the wide panorama of golden marsh-land
+and winding water. "They're for all the world like schoolboys that have
+cut school, giggling an' running to hide!" His eye dreamily followed the
+course of many a truant creek that half-turned its head, looking under
+the tickling sunbeams as if it were glancing back over its shoulder,
+while it burrowed into the marshes vainly trying to hide where the
+relentless schoolmaster, called, for want of a better name, Solar
+Attraction, might not find it and compel its return to the ocean.
+
+"And the Sugarloaf Sand-Dunes; don't they look fine?" reflected the boy
+scout further, his eye traveling off downstream to where the curving
+tidal channel broadened into pearly plains of water, bounded at one
+distant point, near the juncture of river and sea, by a dazzlingly white
+beach.
+
+There the fine colorless sand, which when viewed closely had very much
+the hue of skim milk, the white being shot with a faint gray-blue tinge,
+had been piled by the winds of ages into tall sand-hills, into pyramids
+and columns: one dazzling pillar, in especial, being named the Sugarloaf
+from its crystalline whiteness, had given its name to the whole expanse
+of dune and beach.
+
+The tall Sugarloaf gleamed in the distance now like a snowy lighthouse
+whose lamps are sleeping, presiding over the mouth of the tidal river;
+its brother sand-hills capped by vegetation might have been the pure
+bright cliffs of some fairy shore.
+
+The boy scout stood for many minutes upon the uplands, gazing afar, his
+mouth open as if he were physically drinking in that distant beauty.
+
+"Gee whiz! this is gr-reat; isn't it, Blinkie?" he murmured to the
+squatting dog by his side. "I never before saw that old Sugarloaf look
+as it does to-day; did you, Mr. Dog?"
+
+It had appeared just as radiantly beautiful, off and on, during all the
+seasons of Leon's life. But his powers of observation had not been
+trained as was the case of late. In the years prior to his becoming a
+scout, when his inseparable companion on uplands and marsh had been a
+shotgun--from the time he was permitted free use of one--and the
+all-absorbing idea in his mind how to contrive a successful shot at
+shore bird or animal, he had gone about "lak wit' eye shut," so far as
+many things just now beginning to fill him with a wonderful, speechless
+gladness were concerned.
+
+"Well, we're not heading for that farmhouse, are we, pup?" he said at
+length, turning from the contemplation of runaway creeks and radiant
+dunes to the completion of his father's errand.
+
+But the sunlit beauty at which he had been gazing coursed through his
+every vein, finding vent in a curly, ecstatic whistle that ascended in
+spirals until it touched the high keynote of exultation and there hung
+suspended; while the rest of the trip to that upland farmhouse was
+accomplished in a series of broad jumps, the terrier being as wild with
+delight as his master.
+
+The errand performed and the boy scout having put in half an hour
+condescendingly amusing the farmer's two small children, while Blink
+exchanged compliments with his kind, master and dog started upon the
+return walk.
+
+"Oh! it's early yet; don't you want to come a little way into the woods,
+doggie?" said Leon, doubling backward after they had taken a few steps.
+"We haven't had many runs together lately. Your nose has been out of
+joint; poor pup!" stooping to caress the terrier. "Toiney says we can't
+take you on our scout hikes, because you'd scare every 'littal wil'
+an-ni-mal' within a mile. You would, too; wouldn't you? But there's an
+outdoor scout meeting to-night to be held over in Sparrow Hollow, each
+fellow lighting his own camp-fire--using not more than two matches--and
+cooking his own supper. And you may come. Yes, I said you might come!"
+as the dog, gyrating like a feather, seized his coat-sleeve between
+strong white teeth in his eagerness not to be excluded from any more fun
+that might be afoot.
+
+They were soon on the sere skirts of the woodland, prancing through
+leafy drifts.
+
+"We can't go far," said Leon. "We must get back to the town and buy our
+half-pound of beefsteak that we're to cook without the use of any
+ordinary cooking-utensil, and so pass one of the tests for becoming a
+second-class scout. I'll divvy up with you, pup! But whew! isn't this
+just fine?... The woods in November can put it all over the September
+woods to my mind."
+
+He added the last words to himself. There was something about the rugged
+strength of the stripped trees, with the stealing blue haze of evening
+softening their bareness, about the evergreen grandeur of pine and
+hemlock lording it over their robbed brethren, about the drab,
+parchment-like leaves clinging with eerie murmur to the oak-tree, and
+the ruddy twigs of bare berry-bushes, that appealed to the element of
+rugged daring in the boy himself.
+
+He could not so soon break away from the woods as he had intended,
+though he only explored their outskirts.
+
+Dusk was already falling when he found himself on the open uplands
+again, bound back toward the distant town.
+
+"The scouts are to start for Sparrow Hollow at six o'clock: we must
+hustle, if we want to start with them," he said to the dog. "The only
+way we can make it is by taking a short cut across the marshes and
+wading through the river; that would be a quick way of reaching the town
+and the butcher's shop, to buy our beefsteak," muttering rapidly, partly
+to himself, partly to his impatient companion. "The tide is full out
+now, the water will be shallow; I can take off my shoes and stockings
+and carry you, pup. Who cares if it's cold?"
+
+The boy scout, with an anticipatory glow all over him, felt impervious
+to any extreme of temperature as he bounded down the uplands, with the
+breeze--the freshening, freakish breeze--driving across the salt-marshes
+directly in his face, racing through every vein in him, stirring up a
+whirligig within, presently bringing waste things to the top even as it
+stirred up dust and refuse in the roadway.
+
+"Hullo! there's the old _baldfaced house_," he cried suddenly to the
+dog. "Here we are on our old stamping-ground, Blink! Wonder if 'Mom
+Baldwin' is doing her witch stunts still? We haven't said 'Howdy!' to
+her for a long time; have we, pup?"
+
+Slackening pace, for that fickle breeze was blowing away many things
+that he ought to have remembered, among them the lateness of the hour,
+he turned aside a few steps to where a lonely old house stood at the
+foot of the slope as the uplands melted into the salt-marshes.
+
+It was a shallow shell of a dwelling--all face and no rear
+apparently--and that face was bald, almost stripped of paint by the
+elements. Just as storm-stripped was the heart of the one old woman who
+lived in it, and whom Leon had been wont to call a "solitary crank!"
+
+To the neighborhood generally she was known as Ma'am Baldwin, mother of
+the young scape-grace, Dave Baldwin, who had so troubled the peaceful
+town by his pranks that he had finally been shut up in a reformatory,
+and who was now, a year after his release, a useless vagrant, spending,
+according to report, most of his time loafing between the white
+sand-dunes on one side of the river and the woods on the
+other--incidentally breaking his mother's heart at the same time.
+
+She had lived here in the old baldfaced house, with him, her youngest
+boy, the child of her middle age, until his wild doings brought the
+law's hand upon him. After his imprisonment shame prevented her leaving
+the isolated dwelling and going to live with her married daughter near
+the town, though that daughter's one child, her little grandson Jack,
+possessed all the love-spots still green in her withered heart.
+
+In her humiliation and loneliness "Mom Baldwin," as the boys called her,
+had become rather eccentric.
+
+She had more than once been seen by those town boys--Leon and his
+gang--stationed behind the smeared glass of her paintless window, doing
+strange signaling "stunts" with a lighted lantern, whose pale rays
+described a circle, dipped and then shot up as, held aloft in her bony
+old hand, it sent an amber gleam over the salt-marshes.
+
+"She's a witch--a witch like Dark Tammy, who lived on the edge of the
+woods over a hundred years ago and who washed her clothes at the Witch
+Rock," whispered Starrie Chase and his companions one to another as they
+lay low among the rank grass of the dark marshes, spying upon her.
+"She's a witch, working spells with that lantern!"
+
+Older people surmised that she was signaling to her vagabond son, who
+might be haunting the distant marshes, trying to lure him home; shame
+and grief on his account had half-unbalanced her, they said.
+
+But the boys pretended to stick to their own superstitious belief,
+because, to them, it offered some shabby excuse for tormenting her.
+
+Leon Chase in particular made her rank little garden his nightly
+stamping-ground, and was the most ingenious in his persecuting
+attentions.
+
+He it was who devised the plan of anchoring a shingle or other light
+piece of wood by a short string to the longest branch of the apple-tree
+that grew near her door.
+
+When the wind blew directly across the marshes, as it did this evening,
+and drove against that paintless door, it operated the impromptu
+knocker; the wooden shingle would keep up an intermittent tapping,
+playing ticktack upon the painted panels all night.
+
+Sometimes Ma'am Baldwin had come to the door a dozen times and peered
+forth over the dark salt-marshes, believing that it was her vagrant son
+who demanded entrance, while the perpetrators of the trick, Leon Chase,
+Godey Peck and others of their gang--tickled in the meanest part of them
+by the fact that they "kept her guessing"--hid among the marsh-grass
+and watched.
+
+Hardly any prank could have been more senseless, childish, and
+unfeeling. Yet Starrie Chase had actually believed that he got some sham
+excitement out of it.
+
+And to-night as his feet pressed his old stamping-ground beneath that
+apple-tree beside the house, while the wind raked the marshes and
+whipped his thoughts into dusty confusion, the old waste impulses which
+prompted the trick were mysteriously whirled uppermost again.
+
+The mischievous tide rip boiled in him once more.
+
+Just as he became conscious of its yeasty bubbling, his foot touched
+something on the ground--a hard winter apple. He picked it up and threw
+it against the house, imposing silence on his dog by dictatorial gesture
+and word.
+
+There was a stir within the paintless dwelling. Through the blurred
+window-panes he caught sight of a shrunken form moving.
+
+"Ha! there's the old 'witch' herself. She looks like a withered
+corn-stalk with all those odds and ends of shawls dangling about her.
+Ssh-ssh! Blinkie. Down, doggie! _Quiet, sir!_"
+
+Leon's fingers groped upon the ground, where twilight shadows were
+merging into darkness, for another apple. Since he enlisted as a boy
+scout mischief had been sentenced and shut up in a dark little cell
+inside him. But Malign Habit, though a captive, dies hard.
+
+Those seeking fingers touched something else, a worm-eaten shingle blown
+from the old roof. He picked it up and considered it in the darkness,
+while his left hand felt in his pocket for some twine.
+
+"Gee! it would be a great night for that trick to work," he muttered
+with a low chuckle that had less depth to it than a parrot's. "The wind
+is just in the right direction--driving straight through the house. Eh,
+Blink! Shall we 'get her on a string' again?"
+
+The dog whined softly with impatience. Of late, in his short excursions
+with his master, he had not been used to such stealthy doings. With the
+exception of the trailing expeditions through the woods from which
+canines were debarred, movements had been open, manly, and aboveboard
+since the master became a boy scout.
+
+But Leon had forgotten that he was a scout, had momentarily forgotten
+even the outdoor test in Sparrow Hollow, and the necessary preparations
+therefor.
+
+His fingers trifled with the shingle and string. His brain going ahead
+of those fingers was already attaching the one to the other when--the
+paintless door opened and Ma'am Baldwin stepped out.
+
+She did look like a wind-torn corn-stalk, short and withered, with the
+breeze catching at the many-colored strips of shawls that hung around
+her, uniting to protect her somewhat against that marsh-wind driving
+straight from the river through her home.
+
+From her left hand drooped a pale lantern, the one with which boyish
+imagination had accused her of working spells.
+
+It made an island of yellow light about her as she stepped slowly forth
+into the dusk. And Leon saw her raise her right arm to her breast with
+that timid, pathetic movement characteristic of old people--especially
+of those whom life has treated harshly--as if she was afraid of what
+might spring upon her out of the gusty darkness.
+
+Not for nothing had Starrie Chase been for two months a boy scout! Prior
+to those eight weeks of training that feebly defensive arm would have
+meant naught to him; hardly would he have noticed it. But just as his
+eyes had been opened to consider at length, with a dazzled thrill, that
+distant Sugarloaf Sand-Pillar and other of Nature's beauties as he had
+seldom or never contemplated them before; so those scout's eyes were
+being trained to remark each significant gesture of another person and
+to read its meaning.
+
+Somehow, that right arm laid across an old woman's breast told a tale of
+loneliness and lack of defenders which made the boy wince. The distance
+widened between his two hands holding respectively the shingle and
+string.
+
+There was a wood-pile within a few yards of him. Ma'am Baldwin stepped
+toward it, breathing heavily and ejaculating: "My sen-ses! How it do
+blow!" While Leon restrained the terrier with a "_Quiet_, Blink! Don't
+go for her!"
+
+Ma'am Baldwin, intent on holding fast to her shawls and procuring some
+chunks from the wood-pile--nearsighted as she was, to boot--did not
+notice the boy and dog standing in the blackness beneath the bare
+apple-tree.
+
+She set the lantern atop of the pile. As she bent forward, groping for a
+hatchet, its yellow rays kindled two other lanterns in her eyes by whose
+light the lurking boy gazed through into her heart and saw for a brief
+moment how tired, lonely, and baffled it was.
+
+At the glimpse he straightened up very stiffly. There was a gurgle in
+his throat, a stirring as of panic at the roots of his hair.
+
+But not scare produced the rigidity! It was caused by a sudden great
+throe within which scraped his throat and sent a dimness to his eyes.
+The captive, Malign Habit, imprisoned before, was dying now in the grasp
+of the Scout.
+
+To put it otherwise,--at sight of an old woman's arm pathetically
+shielding her breast, at a startled peep into her heart, the tight
+little bud of chivalry in Leon, watered of late by his scout training,
+fostered by the good turn to somebody every day, burst suddenly,
+impetuously into flower!
+
+With a low snarl at himself, he thrust the coil of string deep into his
+pocket, and flung the shingle as far as he could into the night.
+
+"Ughr-r-r! Guess I was meaner'n you'd be, Blink!" he muttered,
+swallowing the discovery that sometimes of yore, in his dealings with
+his own kind, he had been less of a gentleman than his dog.
+
+To which Blink, freed from restraint, returned a sharp, glad "Wouf!"
+that said: "I'm glad you've come to your senses, old man!"
+
+"Hullo! 'Mom Baldwin,'" Leon stepped forward as the bowed woman started
+at the monosyllabic bark, and peered fearfully into the darkness. "Don't
+you want me to split those chunks for you? You can't manage the
+hatchet."
+
+Ma'am Baldwin's experience had taught her to distrust boys--Leon
+especially! As her peering eyes recognized him, she backed away, raising
+her right arm to her breast again with that helpless gesture of defense.
+
+Starrie Chase blenched in turn. That pathetic old arm warding him off
+hurt him more at the core than a knockdown blow from a stronger limb.
+
+But remembering all at once that he was a scout, trained to prompt
+action, he picked up the hatchet where she had dropped it, and set to
+work vigorously, chopping wood.
+
+"Now! I'll carry these chunks into the house for you," he said
+presently. "Aw! let me. I'd just as soon do it!"
+
+Ma'am Baldwin had no alternative. Leon pushed the paintless door open
+and carried the wood inside, while she hobbled after him, well-nigh as
+much astonished as if Gabriel's trump had suddenly awoke the echoes of
+the gusty marshland.
+
+The scout went to and fro for another ten minutes, splitting more
+chunks, piling them ready to her hand within.
+
+Meanwhile his beneficiary, the old woman, seemed to have got a little
+light on the surprising situation. Grunting inarticulately, chewing her
+bewilderment between her teeth, she disappeared into a room off the
+kitchen and returned holding forth a ten-cent piece to her knight.
+
+"No, thanks! I'm a boy scout. We don't take money for doing a good
+turn." Leon shook his head. "Say! this old house is so draughty; you
+burn all the wood you want to-night; I'll run over to-morrow or next day
+an' split some more. Is there anything else I can do for you before I
+go? You've got enough water in from the well," he peered into the
+water-pail, which winked satisfactorily.
+
+Ma'am Baldwin had sunk upon a chair, alternately looking in perplexity
+at the energetic boy, and listening to the frisky gusts: "My sen-ses!
+Whatever's come over you, Leon?" she gasped; and then wailingly: "Deary
+me! if it should blow up a gale to-night, some things in this house'll
+ride out."
+
+"No, it isn't going to blow up a storm," Leon reassured her. "The wind's
+not really high, only it gets such a rake over the marshes. Here, I'll
+tie these old shutters together for you, the fastening is broken," and
+the coil of string was produced from his pocket for a new purpose. "But
+it must be _awful_ lonely for you, living here by yourself, Ma'am
+Baldwin. You'll be snowed in later on; we'll have to come and dig you
+out."
+
+Still chewing the cud of her bewilderment, she stared at him, mumbling,
+nodding, and stroking the gray hair from her forehead with nervous
+fingers. But there was a humid light in the old eyes that spilled over
+on the boy as he worked.
+
+"Why don't you go to live with your daughter an' your grandson in the
+town?" went on Leon as he tied together the last pair of flapping
+shutters. "And you're so fond of little Jack too; he's a nice kid!"
+
+"So he is!" nodded the grandmother; a change overspread her entire face
+now, she looked tender, grandmotherly, half-hopeful, as if for the
+moment trouble on behalf of her ne'er-do-well son was forgotten. "Well!
+perhaps I will move there before the winter sets in hard, Leon. I'm not
+so smart as I was. I'm sure I don't know how to thank you! Good-night!"
+
+"Good-night!" returned the scout. "You can untie those shutters easily
+enough in the morning."
+
+And he found himself outside again upon the dark marshland, with the
+obedient terrier who had trotted at his heels during the late
+proceedings, waltzing excitedly at his side.
+
+"Ah, la! la! as Toiney says, it's too late now, Blink, for us to put
+back to the town to buy our supper--half a pound of beefsteak and two
+potatoes, to be cooked over each one's special fire," muttered the boy,
+momentarily irresolute. "Well! we'll have to let the grub go, and race
+back across the uplands, over to the Hollow. Stir your trotters, Mr.
+Dog!"
+
+As the two regained the crest of the hilly uplands, Leon paused for
+breath. On his left hand stretched the dark, solemn woods, where the
+breeze hooted weirdly among leafless boughs. On his right, beyond upland
+and broad salt-marsh, wound the silver-spot river in whose now shallow
+ripples bathed a rising moon.
+
+Quarter of a mile ahead of him a rosy flush upon the cheek of darkness
+told that in the sheltered hollow, between a clump of pines that served
+as a windbreak and the woods, the Owls' camp-fires were already blazing.
+
+"Tooraloo! I feel as if I could start my fire to-night without using a
+match at all--just by snapping my fingers at it, or with a piece of damp
+bark and a snowball, as the woodsmen say," he confided half-audibly to
+the dog.
+
+Whence this feeling of prowess, of being a firebrand--a genial
+one--capable of kindling other and better lights in the world than a
+camp-fire?
+
+Starrie Chase did not analyze his sensations of magnificence, which
+bloomed from a discovery back there on the marshes of the secret which
+is at the root of the Boy Scout Movement, at the base of all Christian
+Chivalry, at the foundation of golden labor for mankind in every age:
+namely, that the excitement of helping people is vastly, vitally, and
+blissfully greater than the spurious excitement of hurting them!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+ESTU PRETA!
+
+
+"Hullo! here's Starrie. Well! it's about time you turned up. We waited
+quarter of an hour for you before leaving town.--Hey! Starrie, we've got
+our six cook-fires all going. I only used two matches in lighting mine;
+I've passed one half of to-night's test.--So've I! Whoopee! _I_ 'went
+the jolly test one better': I lit my fire with a single, solitary
+match."
+
+Starrie Chase, bounding down the grassy side of Sparrow Hollow, with
+these lusty cries of his brother Owls greeting him, stood for a moment
+in the brilliant glare of a belt of fires, as if dazed by the ruddy
+carnival, while his dog, making a wild circuit of the ring, bayed each
+bouquet of flames in turn.
+
+"Yaas; we'll get heem littal fire light lak' wink--sure! We ar-re de
+boy! We ar-re de scout, you'll bet!" supplemented the merry voice of
+Toiney, the assistant scoutmaster, who, with the tassel of his red cap
+bobbing, and the flame-light flickering on his blue homespun shirt, was
+on his knees before Harold's cook-fire, using his lungs as a pair of
+bellows.
+
+"Hurrah! I'm in this: I'll light my fire with one match, too. Kenjo Red
+shan't get ahead of me: no, sir!" Corporal Leon Chase was now working
+like lightning, piling dry leaves, pine splinters, dead twigs into a
+carefully arranged heap in a gap which had been left for him in the ring
+of half a dozen fires kindled by six tenderfoot scouts, ambitious of
+being admitted to a second-class degree.
+
+But he, the behind-time tenderfoot, was abruptly held up in his tardy
+labors by the voice of the tall scoutmaster, who with Scout Warren, the
+patrol leader of the Owls, was superintending the tests.
+
+"I want to speak to you for a minute, Leon," said Scoutmaster Estey,
+with a gravity that dropped like a weighty pebble into the midst of the
+fun.
+
+And Corporal Chase, otherwise Scout 2, of the Owls, obediently suspended
+fire-building, approached his superior officer and saluted.
+
+"I'd like to know where you have been for the last hour," began the
+scoutmaster with the dignity of a brigadier-general holding an
+investigation, while his keen eyes from under the drab broad-brimmed
+hat searched Leon's face in the sixfold firelight. "Jimmy Sweet,"
+nodding toward a squatting Owl, "said he caught a distant glimpse of you
+nearly an hour ago over on the edge of the salt-marshes near Ma'am
+Baldwin's old house. I hope you haven't been plaguing her again?"
+
+The voice of the superior officer was all ready to be stern, as if he
+had visions of a corporal being requested to hand over his scout-badge
+of chivalry until such time as he should prove himself worthy of wearing
+it.
+
+"Have you?"
+
+"No!" Leon cleared his throat hesitatingly. "No,"--he suddenly lifted
+steady eyes to the scoutmaster's face,--"I have been chopping wood and
+doing a few other little things for her; that made me late!"
+
+A moment's breathless silence enveloped the six cook-fires. The face of
+the scoutmaster himself was set in lines of amazement: genially it
+relaxed.
+
+"Good for you, Corporal!" He clapped the late-comer approvingly on the
+shoulder, and in his voice was a moved ring.
+
+For, as he scanned the boy's face in the sixfold glow, he read from it
+that, to-night, Leon had really become a scout: that, back there on the
+salt-marshes, the inner and chivalrous grace of knighthood, of which his
+oath was the outward and heralding sign, had been consciously born
+within him.
+
+The scoutmaster was feeling round in his broad approval for other words
+of commendation, when Toiney's sprightly tones broke the momentary
+tension.
+
+"Ha! dis poor ole oomans," he grunted, vivaciously pitying Ma'am
+Baldwin. "She's lif' all alone en she's burst she's heart for she haf
+such a _bad boy_, engh? She's boy, Dave, heem _canaille_,
+_vaurien_--w'at-you-call, good-for-nodings--engh?"
+
+"I'm afraid he is," agreed the scoutmaster regretfully. "Yet I pity Dave
+too. His elder brother went West when he was a little fellow; his
+father, who was a deep-sea fisherman, like Harold's father, was away
+nearly all the year round. Dave grew up without any strong man's hand
+over him; out of school-hours he had to work hard on a farm, and I
+suppose in his craving for fun of some kind he played all sorts of
+foolish pranks. After he left school and was old enough to know better,
+he kept them up--ran a locomotive out of the little railway station one
+night, came near killing a man and was sent to a reformatory!"
+
+"Bah! heem jus' vagabond--_errant_--how-you-say-eet--tramp-sonne-of-a-
+gun--_vaurien_, engh?" declared Toiney, gutturally contemptuous, while
+he poked Harold's fire with a dry stick.
+
+"Yes, he's a mere vagrant now, loafing about the Sugarloaf Sand-Dunes
+and the woods; and likely to get into trouble again through petty
+thefts, so people say. When he had served his sentence he seemed to
+think there wasn't much of a future before him, and didn't stick to the
+job he got. I pity his old mother! I think that every boy scout should
+make it a point to do a good turn for her when he can."
+
+"Ah! _oui_; shes break in pieces, engh?" murmured Toiney, the
+irrepressible, still punching up the fire, to prepare it for the cooking
+tests.
+
+Somehow, his eloquent sympathy sent a stab through Leon--whom everybody
+was at the moment regarding with admiration--for it brought a sharp
+recollection of an old woman backing away from him in fear, with her
+right arm laid across her breast in piteous self-defense.
+
+"Gee! I wish I could do something more for her than chopping
+wood--something that would make up for being mean to her," thought
+Corporal Chase, as he returned to his fire-building, arranging the fuel
+methodically so as to allow plenty of draught, and then triumphantly
+rivaling Kenjo's feat by lighting his cook-fire with one match.
+
+The tiny, snappy laughter of that matchhead, seeming to rejoice that
+another baby light was born into the world, as he drew it along a dry
+stick, restored his towering good spirits.
+
+"And now for the cooking test!" cried the scoutmaster. "Each scout to
+put his two potatoes to roast in the embers of his fire, and make a
+contrivance for broiling his beefsteak! And look out that you don't
+'cook the black ox,' boys, as Captain Andy would say!"
+
+"What do you mean by 'cooking the black ox'?" from two or three excited
+and perspiring scouts.
+
+"Why! that's what the sailors say when their beef is burnt to the color
+of a black-haired ox," laughed the superior officer. "Scout Chase,
+haven't you brought any beefsteak and potatoes?"
+
+"No, I meant to go back to the town for them an' meet you there. Blink
+an' I don't want any supper; we'll get it when we go home," returned
+Leon nonchalantly, swallowing his mortification at not being able to
+complete the outdoor test, this evening.
+
+"Oh! I'll share my rations with you, Starrie," volunteered Colin Estey.
+"I shan't 'cook the black ox': I'm too nifty a cook for that; trust me!"
+Colin was concocting a handsome gridiron of peeled twigs as he spoke.
+
+"Don't mind him, Starrie: I could cook better when I was born than Col
+can now! I'll divide my beefsteak and 'taters' with you," came from
+another primitive chef, the offer being repeated more or less alluringly
+by every boy scout.
+
+"Well! you're a generous-hearted bunch," put in Nixon, the patrol
+leader, from his over-seer's post. "But the scout-master and I have more
+than a pound of raw beefsteak here which we brought along for our
+supper. As I'm not in these tests" (Nixon was now a full-fledged
+first-class scout) "I'll cut off a piece for Leon so that he can cook it
+himself; I guess we can spare him a couple of potatoes too; then he can
+pass the test, with the others."
+
+During the supper which followed while each scout, sitting cross-legged
+by his own cook-fire, partook of the meal in primitive fashion and
+Toiney made coffee for the "crowd," more than one Owl shared in the
+opinion once enunciated by Leon that eating in the woods--or in a woodsy
+hollow such as sheltered them now from the breeze that drove keenly
+across the marshes--was the "best part of the business."
+
+They modified that opinion later when the seven small fires, which had
+sputtered merrily under the cooking, were reinforced by logs and
+branches, and stimulated into a belt of vivacious camp-fires, each
+rearing high its topknot of crested flame, and throwing wonderful
+reflections through the stony hollow.
+
+"I always wanted to be a savage. To-night, I feel nearer to it than ever
+before," said Colin, listening with an ecstatic shiver to the wind as it
+chanted among the pines that formed their windbreak, capered round the
+hollow, flinging them a gust or two that made the camp-fires roar with
+laughter, and then, as if unwilling to disturb such a jolly party,
+rushed wildly on to take it out of the trees in the woods. "And now for
+the powwow, Mr. Scoutmaster!" he suggested, looking across the ring of
+fires at his tall brother and superior officer.
+
+"Hark! that's an owl hooting somewhere," broke in Coombsie. "It's the
+Grand Duke, I think--the big old horned owl! One doesn't hear him often
+at this time of year. He wants to be present at the Owl Powwow."
+
+"Ah, la! la! I'll t'ink he soun' lak' hongree ole wolf, me," murmured
+Toiney dreamily.
+
+But the distant hoot, the deep "Whoo-hoo-hoodoo hoo," or
+"Whoo-hoo-whoo-whah-hoo!" as some of the boys interpreted it, from the
+far recesses of the woods, added a final touch of mystic wildness to the
+sevenfold radiance of the firelit scene which was reflected in the
+sevenfold rapture of boyish hearts.
+
+And now the heads of human Owls were bent nearer to the golden flames as
+notebooks were drawn out containing rough pencil jottings, and scouts
+compared their observations of man, beast, bird, fish, or inanimate
+object, encountered in the woods, on the uplands or marshes, or upon the
+river during the past few days!
+
+Kenjo Red offered the most important contribution.
+
+"I went to Ipswich yesterday to spend the day with my uncle," he began,
+as he lay, breast downward, gazing reflectively into his fire. "In the
+afternoon we walked over to the Sugarloaf Sand-Dunes and lounged about
+there on the white beach, watching the tide go out. We didn't see many
+birds, only a few herring gulls. But I'll tell you what we did see: two
+big harbor seals and a young one, lying out on a sand-spit which the
+tide had just left bare. They were sunning themselves an' having a dandy
+time! One was a monster, a male, or big old dog-seal, my uncle said; he
+must have been nearly six feet long, and weighed about half a ton."
+
+"More or less?" threw in the scoutmaster, laughing at Kenjo's jesting
+imagination. "Generally a big male weighs almost two hundred pounds,
+occasionally something over. Hereabouts, he is indifferently called the
+'dog-seal' or 'bull-seal,' according to the speaker's taste; his head is
+shaped rather like a setter dog's, with the ears laid flat back,--for
+the seal has no ears to speak of,--but the eyes are bovine," he
+explained to Nixon, who knew less about this sea mammal than did his
+brother scouts, and who had never seen him at close quarters.
+
+"Isn't it unusual to find seals high and dry at this time of year?"
+asked Coombsie. "In the spring and summer one sees plenty of them down
+near the mouth of the river, sprawling in the sun on a reef or sandbar.
+But in the late fall and winter they mostly stay in the water."
+
+"Not when the river is frozen over--or partially frozen," threw in
+Leon. "They love to take a ride on a drifting ice-cake, so Captain Andy
+says! Is there any bounty on their heads now, Mr. Scoutmaster?" he
+addressed the troop commander.
+
+"No, that has been removed. The marbled harbor seal, so called because
+of his spots, was being wiped out, as he was wiping out the fish many
+years ago, before the Government put a price on his head. Now that he is
+no longer severely persecuted the mottled dotard, as he is sometimes
+called,--I'm sure I don't know why, for I see no signs of senility about
+him,--is becoming tamer and more prevalent again. Still, he's wilder and
+shyer than he used to be."
+
+"Yes, there's an old fisherman's shack on one corner of the Sugarloaf
+Dunes, where a clam-digger keeps his pails and a boat," said Kenjo. "He
+let my uncle take the boat and we rowed across to the sand-spit. The
+seals let us come within thirty yards of them: then they stirred
+themselves lazily, with that funny wabble they have--just like a person
+whose hands are tied together, and his feet tied more tightly
+still--lifting the head and short fore-flippers first and swinging them
+to one side, then the back part of the body and long hind-flippers,
+giving them a swing to the other side. Say! but it was funny. So they
+flopped off into the water."
+
+"Goodness! I wish that I'd been with you, Kenjo," exclaimed Scout
+Warren. "I haven't seen a harbor seal yet, except just his head as he
+swam round in the water, when Captain Andy took me down the river in his
+power-boat, the Aviator. We rowed ashore in the Aviator's Pill,"
+laughingly, "in that funny little tub of a rowboat which dances
+attendance on the gasolene launch, but though we landed on the white
+sand-dunes and stayed round there for quite a while, not a seal did we
+see sprawling out on any reef."
+
+"I'll see heem _gros seal_ on reever," broke in Toiney gutturally. "I'll
+see heem six mont' past on reever _au printemps_--in spring--w'en, he go
+for kill todder gros seal; he'll hit heem en mak' heem go deaded--engh?"
+
+"Yes, the males have bad duels between themselves occasionally. But
+they're mild enough toward human beings. However, my father had a
+strange experience with them once," said the scoutmaster, pushing back
+his broad hat, so that the sevenfold glow from the fires danced upon his
+strong face. "He's told me about it ever since I was a little boy, and
+Colin too. When he was a very young man he rowed down to the mouth of
+the river one day with some sportsmen who went off to shoot ducks,
+leaving him to dig clams and get a clambake ready for them on the white
+dunes. Well, sir! left alone, he pulled off to the clam-flats, drew up
+his boat, stepped out, and the tide being at a low ebb, set to work to
+dig up the clams which were here and there thrusting their long necks up
+from the wet sand, to feed on the infusoria--their favorite feeding-time
+being when it is nearly, but not quite, low water.
+
+"The tide had receded altogether from the other side of the sand-flats,
+so that they joined the marshy mainland, and as my father landed he saw
+that there was a big herd of twenty or thirty seals lying out on those
+flats. It was before a bounty was set upon their heads, when they were
+very plentiful and tame. My father was not in the least afraid of them
+and was proceeding to dig his clams peacefully, when he suddenly saw
+that the whole herd was thrown into a wild panic by the discovery that
+_he_ was between them and the water. They broke into a floundering
+stampede and came straight for him--or rather for the water behind
+him--at a fast clip, half sliding, half throwing themselves along. A
+funny sight they must have been! Father says one big fellow came at him
+with his mouth wide open: the four sharp white teeth in front, two upper
+and two lower, shining. So Dad just turned tail and ran for the water as
+he had never run before; not waiting to jump into his boat, he plunged
+into the channel up to his waist!"
+
+"But the seals wouldn't have attacked him, would they?" incredulously
+from Nixon.
+
+"No; I think not. But he might not have been able to keep his feet. They
+would, perhaps, have struck him with their heavy bodies and knocked him
+down. And to feel a dozen or so of damp seals sliding over a fellow,
+their weights ranging anywhere from a hundred to two hundred and fifty
+pounds, wouldn't be a pleasant sensation, to say the least!"
+
+"I guess not!" chuckled the Owls.
+
+"I'd like to catch a creamy pup-seal--isn't that what you call the only
+child, the young one? 'Twould be fun to tame it," said Nixon. "Perhaps
+I'll get a chance to do so when we camp out on the Sugarloaf Dunes next
+summer. Aren't we going to have a camp there for two weeks during the
+end of August and beginning of September, Mr. Scoutmaster?"
+
+"I hope so, if I can get permission from the landlord who owns the
+dunes."
+
+"Maybe we'll run across Dave Baldwin too--the _vaurien_, as Toiney calls
+him--if he stays round there a part of the time?" This from Leon.
+
+"That wouldn't be a desirable encounter, I'm afraid. Now! has any scout
+a suggestion to make that would be useful in planning our work for this
+winter?" Scoutmaster Estey looked round at the ring of boyish faces,
+reflecting the sevenfold glow, at Harold, lying on his face and hands,
+blinking dreamily under Toiney's wing, while the firelight burnished the
+latter's swarthy features beneath the tasseled cap.
+
+"Mr. Scoutmaster!" Nixon Warren sprang to his feet impulsively, "Marcoo
+and I have a suggestion to offer,"--Nixon glanced at his cousin
+Coombsie,--"it hasn't any direct relation to our work, but we humbly
+submit it as an idea that might be useful, not only to our boy scout
+organization here, but to the movement everywhere all over the world."
+
+"Ho! Ho! What do you know about that? Out with it, Nix, if it's worth
+anything," came the dubious encouragement of his brother Owls.
+
+"I must tell a little yarn first. The day before yesterday Marcoo and I
+were in Boston. We lunched at a fine restaurant. At a table near us was
+a gentleman--he looked like a Mexican or Spaniard--who couldn't speak
+any English and addressed the waiter by signs. There was a boy with him,
+a classy-looking fellow of about fourteen, his son, I guess. 'I'll wager
+that boy is a scout!' I whispered to Marcoo. 'His eyes take in
+everything, without seeming to stare about him much--and see the way he
+carries himself--straight as a string!'"
+
+"So I suggested that we should try the scout salute on him as we passed
+out," struck in Marcoo. "We did! And fellows, he was on his feet like a
+flash, holding up his right hand, thumb resting on the little
+finger-nail, and the other three fingers upright, saluting back! We
+guessed then that he was a Mexican boy scout, traveling with his
+father."
+
+"He seemed jolly glad to see us," Nixon again took up the anecdote;
+"just beamed! But he didn't apparently understand a word of English
+except 'Good-day!' not even when we passed the scout motto to him as a
+watchword: 'Be Prepared!' We might all three have been mutes saluting
+each other.
+
+"We talked it over, coming home, Marcoo and I," went on the patrol
+leader. "And we arrived at the conclusion that it would be a great thing
+if our hearty motto, as Captain Andy calls it, could be taught to boy
+scouts all over the world, in some common form understood by all, as
+well as in their mother tongue. So that when scout meets scout of
+another country he could pass it on as a kind of bond and
+inspiration--together with the Scout Sign which is understood in almost
+every land to-day."
+
+"So we looked it up in Esperanto--the only attempt at a world-language
+of which we know, and in which my father is interested." Marcoo leaped
+to his feet, too, as he excitedly spoke. "And it sounded fine! Give it
+to them, Nix!"
+
+"_Estu preta!_"
+
+"Estu preta! Estu preta! BE PREPARED!" One and all these present-day
+scouts took it up, shouting it to the seven fires, and to the wind which
+caught it from their lips like a silver feather to bear it away beyond
+the hollow, as if it would girdle the world with that hearty motto, in
+some universal form, as Nixon had suggested.
+
+"Estu preta!" it was still on their tongues when, camp-fires
+extinguished, they marched home. They flung it at each other in joyous
+challenge as they said good-night.
+
+It entwined itself with the drowsy thoughts of the patrol leader from
+whom it emanated when he lay down to sleep, eclipsing his interest in
+the future summer camp, in marbled seals and cooing pup-seals--though
+such might not have been the case could he have foreseen how exciting
+would be his first glimpse of the "gros seal" at close quarters.
+
+It mingled with Leon's dreamy reminiscences too, as the first ripple of
+slumber, like the inflowing tide, invaded his consciousness.
+
+"Whew! this certainly has been a great day," he murmured, after
+repeating the Lord's Prayer with an elated fervor which he had never put
+into it before.
+
+Yet there was one smirch upon the day's golden face in the sudden memory
+of an old woman shrinking away from him with uplifted arm.
+
+"Gee! I wish I could do something for her beyond a few good turns." His
+drowsy tongue half-formed the words.
+
+And like a silver echo, stealing through his confused consciousness came
+the automatic answer: "_Estu preta!_ Live up to your able motto! Be
+Prepared!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE CHRISTMAS BRIGADE
+
+
+"Estu preta!" During the days that followed, while the fall season was
+merged in winter, the Owls who had passed their outdoor tests in Sparrow
+Hollow, six of whom were tenderfeet no longer, but second-class scouts,
+did try to live up to their hearty motto. And this not only in the
+development of their strong young bodies by exercise and drill, so that
+every expanding muscle was under control, not only in the training of
+their mental faculties toward keen observation and alert action, but
+also in the chivalrous practice of the little every-day kindness to man
+or beast--almost too trivial to be noticed, perhaps, yet preparing the
+heart for the rendering of a supreme good turn!
+
+Thus the Owl Patrol presently began to be recognized as a patriotic and
+progressive force. The Improvement Society of the little town sought its
+coöperation, and it soon became "lots more fun" to the boy scouts to
+lend a hand in making that too staid town a more beautiful and lively
+place to live in than to pile--as had often been the case
+formerly--destruction on its dullness.
+
+Under the direction of their energetic young scoutmaster they engaged in
+other crusades too, besides that against things ugly and retarding, in
+crusades for the rescue of many a needless and undue sufferer of the
+animal kingdom, their most noted enterprise along these lines being an
+attack upon the use of the steel trap among boys, especially those of
+the woodland farms, whereby many a little fur-bearing animal met its
+slow end in suffering unspeakable.
+
+The use of this steel-jawed atrocity was bad enough in the hands of the
+one or two adult professional trappers of the neighborhood who visited
+their traps regularly. (And it is to be hoped that the Boy Scouts of
+America, who champion the cause of their timid little brothers of the
+woods, will some day sweep this barbarous contrivance altogether from
+the earth!) But its use by irresponsible boys who set the traps in copse
+or thicket, and, in the multitudinous interests of boydom, frequently
+forgot all about them for days--leaving the little animal luckless
+enough to be caught to suffer indefinitely--is a cruelty too heinous to
+flourish upon the same free soil that yields such a fair growth of
+chivalry as that embodied in the Scouts of the U.S.A.
+
+One or two of the Owls, who shall remain incognito, had possessed such
+traps in the past: now, they took them out into a back yard, shattered
+them with a hammer, relegated the fragments to a refuse heap, and
+instituted a zealous crusade against the use of the steel trap by
+non-scouts of the neighboring farms, such as Godey Peck and his gang.
+
+There was a hand-to-hand skirmish over this matter before the Owl Patrol
+had its way; and the result thereof gave Godey cause for reflection.
+
+"It hasn't made 'softies' of 'em anyhow, this scout movement," he
+soliloquized. "They got the better _of us_. And they seem to have such
+ripping good times, hiking an' trailing! But--"
+
+The demurring "but" in this boy's mind sprang from the proviso that if
+he enlisted in the Boy Scouts of America, he would be obliged, like
+Leon, to part with his gun. Also, from a feeling that he would be
+debarred in future from the planning of such lawless escapades as
+playing stowaway aboard an unlaunched vessel; a scheme, it may be said,
+which was never carried through, being nipped in the bud by watchful
+shipwrights!
+
+Godey Peck was on the fence with regard to the new movement. And he did
+not yet know on which side he would drop down. Meanwhile from his
+wavering point of indecision, beset with discomfort, he soothed his
+feelings by renewed and vehement shouts of "Tin Scouts! Tin Soldiers!"
+whenever a khaki uniform and broad drab hat hove in view.
+
+He had ample opportunity to air his feeble-shafted malice during the
+week preceding Christmas, for scouts, in uniform and out of it, were
+constantly to be seen engaged in "hifalutin stunts," according to Godey,
+which meant that they had been organized into a brigade by the
+scoutmaster for the doing of sundry and many good turns befitting the
+season.
+
+It might be only the carrying of parcels, for a heavy-laden woman, who
+had visited a distant city on a shopping expedition, from the little
+railway station on the edge of the yellow wintry salt-marshes to her
+home! Or the bearing of gifts from a benevolent individual or society to
+some poor or solitary human brother or sister who otherwise might forget
+the meaning of Christmas.
+
+It was on behalf of one such person that Corporal Leon Chase--detailed
+for duty on this brigade--took counsel with his mother on the afternoon
+of Christmas Eve.
+
+"You don't suppose that _she'll_ stay alone in that old baldfaced house
+to-day and to-morrow, do you, mother?" he said, rather ambiguously. "The
+town authorities ought to forbid her living on there all by herself;
+she'll be snowed in pretty soon if this cold snap continues. Why! the
+river is all frozen over--ice fairly firm too. I'm going skating by an'
+by."
+
+"I'd wait until it is a little more solid, if I were you," returned the
+mother anxiously. "You know our brackish ice is apt to be treacherous;
+the salt in the water softens it, so your father says, renders it more
+porous and unsafe. I suppose you were speaking of old Ma'am Baldwin. I
+don't see what the authorities can do. They can't force her into an
+institution; she owns that old house. And I don't know that her
+daughter's husband--little Jack's father--wants her in his home. It's
+too bad that her son Dave should have turned out such a
+good-for-nothing! Trouble about him has aged her, I guess; she's not as
+old as she seems."
+
+Then Starrie Chase inveigled his dimpling mother into a pantry and,
+while she made passes at him with a rolling-pin, proceeded to whisper
+in her ear--with a measure of embarrassment, for he was not accustomed
+to himself in the rôle of alms-bearer. But in a shadowy corner within
+him, once tenanted by Malign Habit, there still lurked a vision which
+sprang out on him at times, of an old woman raising her feeble arm to
+ward him off: it caused him to grit his teeth and mutter: "I wish I
+could do something more than to chop her wood occasionally!" And vaguely
+the mental answer would come: "_Estu preta!_ At a time when you least
+expect it, you may find yourself up against the Big Minute!"
+
+And in the mean time Starrie cornered his mother in the pantry--floury
+shrine of Christmas culinary rites!--and presently listened,
+well-pleased, to her answer:--
+
+"Yes! I'm glad that you put it into my head, son. I'll pack some things
+into a basket for her, and you can take it across the marshes now. It
+must be bitterly lonely for her, poor old woman! And oh! Leon, as you'll
+be in that direction, could you go on into the woods and get me some red
+berries for Christmas decorations?"
+
+"Sure, mum!" And Leon stepped forth to speak to Colin Estey, who was
+awaiting him at the rear of the Chase homestead, exercising in a
+preliminary canter a new pedalomotor which Santa Claus, masquerading as
+the expressman, had dropped at his home a little too soon.
+
+"Take care you don't run into a tree, smash it up, and drive a splinter
+through your nose, as Marcoo did when he got his, last year!" admonished
+Starrie. "Say! Col, I can't go skating for a little while: I'm bound for
+the woods first to get some alder-berries for decorations. Want to
+come?"
+
+"Guess so!"
+
+"You can leave that 'pedalmobile' here. Wait a minute! Mother's just
+putting some Christmas 'grub,' mince-pies an' things, into a basket for
+old Ma'am Baldwin; we'll deposit it at her door as we go along!"
+
+"How'd it be to write on it, 'Merry Christmas from the Owls'?" suggested
+young Colin whimsically: "that would keep her guessing; she'd maybe
+think birds had come out o' the woods to feed her as they did Elijah or
+Elisha of old."
+
+So a card was tacked to the basket, on which was traced with a stub-end
+of colored chalk the outline of a perching owl, highly rufous as to
+plumage, with the proposed salutation beneath it.
+
+But the two Owls who placed the gift did not find the recipient at home.
+That baldfaced house beyond the frost-spiked marshes was empty, its
+paintless door, half screened by the icy boughs of the wind-beaten
+apple-tree, fast locked.
+
+"I guess she's gone over to the town to spend Christmas Eve with her
+daughter," suggested Colin. "She dotes on her gran'son, little Jack
+Barry; he's quite a boy for nine years old! What shall we do with the
+basket?"
+
+"Raise that kitchen window an' slip it inside--the fastening's broken!"
+
+"Say! but you're as barefaced as the house." Colin hugged himself with a
+sense of having got off a good joke as he watched Leon boldly raise the
+loose window and deposit the present within. "Let's put for the woods
+now!" he added, the deed accomplished.
+
+And the two scouts climbed the uplands toward those midwinter woods that
+crowned the heights in dismantled majesty.
+
+But they were not robbed of beauty, the December woods: the frosty
+sunshine knew that as it picked out the berry-laden black alders
+displaying their coral branches against the velvet background of a pine,
+and embraced the regiment of hemlock bushes, green dwarfs which,
+together with their full-sized brothers, held the fort for spring
+against all the hosts of winter.
+
+"Whee-ew! I think the woods are just dandy at this time o' year!" Leon
+led a whistling onslaught upon the vividly laden black alder bushes,
+while the white gusts of the boys' breath floated like incense through
+the coral and evergreen sanctuary of beauty, guarded by the silvery
+pillars of white birch-trees, where, in the bare forest, Nature had not
+left herself without a witness to joy and color.
+
+"These berries are as red as Varney's Paintpot," laughed Colin by and
+by, as the two scouts retraced their steps across the salt-marshes,
+crunching underfoot the frozen spikes of yellow marsh-grass. "Well, we
+had a great time on that day when we found the old Paintpot--though we
+succeeded in getting lost!"
+
+"We surely did! I wonder if the frost will hold, so that we'll have some
+good skating after Christmas? It's freezing now." Leon's gaze strayed
+ahead to the solid white surface of the tidal river, stained with amber
+by the setting sun.
+
+They were within a hundred yards of it by this time, and caught the
+shrill cries and yells of boyish laughter from youthful skaters who
+careered and pirouetted at a short, safe distance from the bank. But a
+clear view of what was going on was shut off from the two berry-laden
+scouts, crossing the saffron marshes at a leisurely pace, by some
+tumble-down sheds that intervened between them and the river.
+
+"Well, the kids seem to be having a good time on the ice anyhow--though
+I don't think it can be very firm yet. Whew! what's that?" exclaimed
+Colin suddenly, as a piercing cry came ringing from the river-bank
+whereon each blade of the coarse beach-grass glittered like a jeweled
+spike under the waning sunlight.
+
+"Oh! _somebody_ is blowing off the smoke of his troubles," laughed Leon
+unconcernedly.
+
+The afternoon was so sharply delectable, with the sky all pale gold in
+the west, flinging them a remote, lukewarm smile like a Christmas
+greeting from some half-reminiscent friend, the hearts of the two scouts
+reflecting the beauty of the Christmas woods were so elated that they
+could not all in a moment slide down from Mount Happiness into the
+valley where danger and pain become realities.
+
+But _now_ a volley of cries, frenzied and appealing, rang out over the
+salt-marshes. Mingling with them--outshrilling them--came a call which
+made each scout jump as if an arrow had struck him.
+
+It was the weird hoot of an owl uttered by a human throat, shrill with
+desperation, the signal call of the Owl Patrol--but with a violent note
+of distress in it such as to their ears had never sharpened it before.
+
+"_Gee whiz!_ Something's wrong--something's up! I'll wager 'twas Nix
+Warren who hooted that time!"
+
+Starrie Chase dropped his coral-laden branches upon the frozen ground.
+
+"The Owls to the rescue!" he cried, and dashed toward the frozen
+river-bank.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE BIG MINUTE
+
+
+When Scouts Chase and Estey reached that frosty bank a confused scene
+met their eyes.
+
+Before the tumble-down sheds some wildly terrified small boys were
+stumbling to and fro on the pale brink of the ice, floundering like
+river seals in their attempts to walk upon the skates which they were
+too distracted to remove, and shrieking at intervals:--
+
+"He's drown-dr-rowning! Oh! he's _drowning_. Jack Barry's drowning in
+the river!"
+
+"Who's drowning? What's the matter, Marcoo? Has anybody gone through the
+ice?" questioned Leon sharply of the one older boy upon the bank, who
+turned upon him over a heaving shoulder the pleasant, ruddy face,
+empurpled by shock, of Coombsie.
+
+"Yes, the ice gave way out there." Marcoo pointed to a wide hole thirty
+yards from the bank, where the dark, imprisoned water bubbled like a
+whirlpool. "Little Jack Barry has fallen through. Ice rotten there!
+Couldn't reach him without a rope! Nix gone for it!" Coombsie flung the
+words from him like broken twigs. "Here he comes now!"
+
+Bareheaded, breathless, the patrol leader of the Owls tore toward the
+bank, in his hand a coil of rope. Behind him ran two distracted women
+from a near-by house; the drowning boy's mother and his
+grandmother--whose one unshattered idol he was--old Ma'am Baldwin.
+
+She looked more like a ragged cornstalk than ever, that little old
+woman, thought Leon--in the way that trivial reflections have of being
+whirled to the surface upon the tempest of a moment like this--with all
+her odds and ends of shawls streaming on the icy breeze that skated
+mockingly to meet her. With her long wisps of gray hair outstreaming
+too!
+
+And as she came she raised her right arm to her breast with that
+pathetic gesture familiar to Starrie Chase, as though to shield her
+half-broken old heart from the last blow that Fate might deal to it: as
+if she would defend the image it held of the drowning child, and
+therewith little Jack himself, from the robber Death.
+
+Starrie's brown eyes took one rapid snapshot of the old woman in her
+quaking anguish, and his mind passed two resolutions: that the Big
+Minute had come: and that there wasn't water or ice enough in the tidal
+river to keep him from saving Ma'am Baldwin's grandson.
+
+"Tie this rope round me! _Quick!_ Bowline knot! I'll try an' crawl out
+to him!" Nixon was shrieking in his ear.
+
+"You can't alone! The ice is too rotten. You'd break through--and we
+mightn't be able to pull you out that way. Must make a chain! I'll go
+first. Crawl after me, Nix, and hang on tight to my feet!"
+
+Corporal Chase was already lying flat on his stomach, working himself
+out over the infirm ice where, here and there, within the white map of
+lines and circles traced by the skates of the small boys, were small
+holes through which the captive water heaved like Ma'am Baldwin's
+breast, under a thin, glassy fretwork.
+
+After him crawled Nixon, grasping his ankles in a strong grip. And,
+performing a like service for the patrol leader, came Coombsie, and
+after Coombsie Colin; the four forming a human chain, trusting their
+lives to the unstable, saline ice, and to the grip of each other.
+
+"Hold on tight, Nix! I see his head. We'll land him--yet!" Leon flung
+the last challenge between his set teeth at the white, porous ice and
+the little dark wells of bubbling water.
+
+Worming his body in and out between those fretting holes, he reached the
+glassy skirts of the larger fissure which imprisoned little Jack. There
+the nine-year-old victim's hands clutched frantically at the jagged
+edges of the encircling ice, while his screams for help grew weaker. To
+Jack himself they seemed not to rise above the cold, pale ring that
+hemmed him in.
+
+"_Hold--tight!_" The clenched word was passed along the chain as Leon at
+its head, hearing the tidal current beneath him sobbing, straining to be
+free, flung his hands out and grasped the victim's collar and shoulder,
+trying to lift him out of the hole.
+
+But with a groan the brittle ice surrounding it gave way: the foremost
+rescuer's body was plunged too into the freezing, brackish water.
+
+"We'll both go now--Jack an' I--unless Nix hangs on to me like a
+bulldog!" was the thought that stabbed him as an ice-spear while the
+dark tidal current, shot with glints of light like cruel eyes, engulfed
+his shoulders.
+
+But Nixon held on to his ankles, like grim death fighting grim Death
+himself. Not a link in that human chain parted, though the ice cracked
+ominously beneath it!
+
+And Leon, half submerged, battling for breath, clung steadfastly to
+Jack, as if indeed there was not water enough in the seven miles of
+tidal river to sunder them.
+
+Presently, while his comrades backed cautiously, dragging upon the lower
+part of his body, his head and arms reappeared, the latter clasping
+Ma'am Baldwin's grandson.
+
+A sob, half hysterical, burst from the gathering spectators on the bank.
+
+"If--if the Lord hadn't been with him, he couldn't have hung on to him
+that time!" muttered Captain Andy, the old life-saver, who had limped to
+the scene.
+
+And, indeed, it did seem as if the Lord was with Leon Chase and made his
+strength in this desperate minute--like that of one of the famous
+knights of the Round Table--as the strength of ten because his heart was
+pure!--Purified of all but the desire to help and save!
+
+"Starrie's got him! Starrie's holding on to him!" came in an exultant
+cry from a group of boys rigid upon the river-brink; in their midst
+gleamed the face, pale and fixed as the ice itself, of Godey Peck; and
+from Godey's eyes streamed the first ray of ardent hero-worship those
+rather dull eyes had ever known--leveled at the Tin Scouts.
+
+"Keep cool, boys! Take it easy an' you'll land him now!" shouted Captain
+Andy.
+
+Afraid, for their sakes, to burden farther the ice with his massive
+body, he, too, stretched himself, breast downward, on the more solid
+crust near the bank, and seizing Colin's ankles directly they came
+within reach added another link to that human chain by means of which
+Jack's half-conscious body was finally drawn ashore and placed in his
+mother's arms.
+
+"You saved him, Leon. I'll thank you as well--as well as I can--Leon!"
+quavered the grandmother's broken voice.
+
+"Aw! that's all right," came in an embarrassed shiver from between the
+chattering teeth of the foremost rescuer, from whom the water ran in
+rivulets that would freeze in another minute.
+
+"I'll forward the names of you four boys to National Headquarters, to
+receive the scout medal for life-saving!" proudly cried Scoutmaster
+Estey, who at this minute appeared upon the river-bank, while he plucked
+Jack's numbed body from his mother's shaking arms and set off at a run
+with it toward the nearest house.
+
+Leon was hustled in the same direction by an admiring crowd.
+
+But whence came that shrill challenge waking the echoes of the Christmas
+Eve? Did Godey's lips utter the cry: "What's the matter with the Boy
+Scouts? They're all right!"
+
+And a score of throats gave back the answer:--
+
+"Three cheers for the Boy Scouts of America! Three cheers--an' a
+tiger--for the Owl Patrol."
+
+"Say, Mister!" Half an hour later, as Scoutmaster Estey issued from the
+cottage where, with the help of Kenjo Red and another scout, he had been
+turning his first-aid knowledge to account in the resuscitation of
+little Jack, he heard himself thus addressed and felt a hand pluck at
+his sleeve. Looking down, in the twilight, he saw Godey Peck.
+
+"Say! it hasn't made 'softies' of 'em, this scout business," declared
+Godey oracularly. "I want to be a scout too. Us boys all want to come
+in!" He glanced behind him at his gang who had constituted him their
+spokesman.
+
+"Really? Do you _all_ want to enlist in the Boy Scouts of America?"
+
+"Sure! We want to come in now at the rate of sixty miles an hour, you
+bet!" Godey chuckled.
+
+"Oh! well, if you're in such a hurry as that, come round to my house
+to-night; we're going to have a Christmas celebration there." And the
+tall scoutmaster walked off, laughing.
+
+Thus on Christmas Eve did Godey drop off the fence on the side of the
+boy scouts, whose code of chivalry is only an elaboration of the first
+Christmas message: "Peace on earth, good will to men!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+A RIVER DUEL
+
+
+With the enlisting of Godey and his gang, who mainly represented
+whatever tendency there might be to youthful rowdyism in the demure
+little town, the whole vicinity of the tidal river was won over to the
+Boy Scout Movement.
+
+The new recruits, those who gave in their names on Christmas Eve as
+would-be scouts, together with one or two later additions, were formed
+into a second patrol, of which Godey became patrol leader, called the
+Foxes in honor of the commonest animal of moderate size to be found in
+their woods; the red fox being prevalent, too, among the white
+sand-hills, the Sugarloaf Dunes, that formed part of the wild coast near
+the mouth of the Exmouth River.
+
+Those milky dunes, formed of pale sand which was popularly supposed to
+have drifted down from New Hampshire to the sea and to have been swept
+in here by the winds and tides of ages, were a sort of El Dorado to the
+boys of the little town far up the tidal river.
+
+Pirates' treasure was confidently believed to be buried there; each lad
+who made the trip by steam launch, motor-boat, or plodding rowboat
+downstream for several miles to the dunes, was certain that if he could
+only hit upon the right sand-hill and dig deep enough, he would find its
+whiteness richly inlaid with gold.
+
+Other wild tales centred about the romantic dunes, of smugglers and
+their lawless doings in earlier and less law-enforcing times than the
+beginning of the twentieth century.
+
+It was even hinted that within recent years there had been unlawful
+importations at rare intervals of certain dutiable commodities, such as
+intoxicating liquors and cigars, by means of a rowboat that would lie up
+during the day in the sandy pocket of some little creek that intersected
+the marshes near the white dunes, stealing forth at night into the bay
+to meet a mysterious vessel.
+
+The latest report connected the name of Dave Baldwin, the _vaurien_, as
+Toiney contemptuously called him, with this species of petty smuggling.
+
+Wiseacres, such as Captain Andy and the doctor, were of opinion that no
+such lawless work could be carried on to-day under the Argus eyes of
+revenue officers. But it was known that Dave spent most of his vagrant
+days hanging round the milky dunes and their neighborhood, sleeping on
+winter nights in some empty camp or deserted summer cottage, and
+occasionally varying the pale monotony of the dunes by sojourning in the
+woods at the opposite side of the river.
+
+The possibility of running across him during a visit to the Sugarloaf
+Sand-Hills, or of seeing his "pocketed" boat reposing in some little
+creek where the mottled mother-seal secreted her solitary young one, had
+little interest for the boy scouts.
+
+Toiney's contempt for the skulking vagrant who had caused his mother's
+heart to "break in pieces," had communicated itself to them. They were
+much more interested in the prospect of pursuing acquaintance with the
+spotted harbor seal, once the floundering despot of the tidal river, now
+scarcer and more shy.
+
+As winter merged into spring a third patrol of boy scouts was formed,
+composed of boys from farms down the river, who had recourse to this
+harbor mammal for a name and called themselves the Seals.
+
+Thus when April swelled the buds upon the trees, and the salt-marshes
+were all feathery with new green, there were three patrols of boy
+scouts who met in the little town hall of Exmouth, forming a complete
+scout troop, to plan for hikes and summer camps; and to go on their
+cheery way out of meeting, ofttimes creating spring in the heart of
+winter by doing the regulation good turn for somebody.
+
+In especial, good turns toward the sorrow-bowed old woman, Ma'am
+Baldwin, were in vogue that season, because a first-rate recipe for
+sympathy is to perform a service for its object. The greater and more
+risky the service, the broader the stream of good will that flows from
+it!
+
+So it was with the four members of the Owl Patrol who had received the
+boy scout medal for life-saving--the silver cross suspended from a blue
+ribbon, awarded to the scout who saves life with considerable risk to
+himself--for their gallant work in rescuing the old woman's grandson
+from the frozen waters of the tidal river. Their own moved feelings at
+that the finest moment of their young lives were thereafter as a shining
+mantle veiling the peculiarities of her who, solitary and defenseless,
+had once been regarded as fair game for their most merciless teasing.
+
+She was not so solitary now. Much shaken by the accident to her
+grandchild, she was in no fit state to return to her baldfaced house on
+Christmas Eve or for many days after; so Public Opinion at length took
+the matter into its own hands and decreed that henceforth she must find
+a home with her daughter.
+
+There, in a little dwelling on the outskirts of the town, she often
+watched the khaki-clad scouts march by. Invariably they saluted her. And
+Jack, the rescued nine-year-old, would strut and stretch and stamp in a
+vain attempt to hasten the advent of his twelfth birthday when he might
+enlist as a tenderfoot.
+
+The Saturday spring hikes were varied by trips down the river when each
+patrol in turn was taken on an excursion in Captain Andy's motor-boat.
+It was on such an occasion that Nixon Warren, who had begun his scout
+service as a member of the Peewit Patrol of Philadelphia, obtained his
+coveted chance of seeing Spotty Seal at close quarters.
+
+"You stay round Exmouth during the spring an' summer, Nix, and I'll take
+you where you'll see a seal close enough for you to shake his flipper,"
+promised the sea-captain; and he kept his word, though the pledge was
+fulfilled after a fashion not in accordance with his intentions.
+
+It was a glorious day, when the power-boat Aviator, owned by Captain
+Andy, left the town wharf with six of the Owls aboard in charge of the
+assistant scoutmaster, Toiney Leduc, and with the absurd little rowboat
+that danced attendance upon the Aviator, and which was jocosely named
+the Pill, bobbing behind them on the tidal ripples at the end of a
+six-foot towrope.
+
+Spring was on the river to-day. Spring was in the clear call of the
+greater yellow-legs as it skimmed over the marshes, in the lightning
+dart of the kingfisher, in the wave of the tall black grass fringing
+each marshy bank, showered with diamonds by the advance and retreat of a
+very high tide tickled into laughter by the April breeze.
+
+And spring was in the scouts' hearts, focusing all Nature's joy-thrills,
+as they glided down the river.
+
+"_Houp-e-là!_ I'll t'ink heem prett' good day for go on reever, me,"
+announced Assistant Scoutmaster Toiney, his black eyes dancing.
+
+And he presently woke the echoes, while they wound in and out between
+the feathery marshes, with a gay "Tra-la!" or "Rond'! Rond'! Rond'!"
+that seemed the very voice of Spring herself bursting into song.
+
+"Goodness! I can hardly wait for the end of August when our scoutmaster
+will get his vacation and we're to camp out on the Sugarloaf Dunes,"
+said Leon Chase. "You can see the white dunes from here, Nix. It's a
+great old Sugarloaf, isn't it?" pointing across broad, pearly plains of
+water which at high tide spread out on either side of the central tidal
+channel, at the crystalline sand-pillar, guarding the mouth of the tidal
+river.
+
+"The other sand-hills look like a row of tall, snowy breakers at this
+distance. Whew! aren't they splendid--with that bright blue sky-line
+behind them? I expect we'll just have the 'time of our lives' when we
+camp out there!" came in blissful accents from the patrol leader.
+
+"Well! we're not going to land on the dunes to-day," said Captain Andy,
+who was standing up forward, steering the gasolene launch, his keen eyes
+scanning the plains of water from under his visored cap, in search of
+Spotty Seal's sleek dog-like head cleaving the ripples as he swam, with
+his strong hind-flippers propelling him along.
+
+"Whoo'! Whoo'! she threw the water a bit that time; didn't she, lads?"
+alluding to his motor-boat, as the April breeze plucked a crisp sheet of
+spray from the breast of the high tide, like a white leaf from a book,
+and laughingly threw it at the occupants of the launch. "But that's
+nothing!" went on the old skipper. "Bless ye, boys, I've been down this
+river in a rowboat when the seas would come tumbling in on me from the
+bay, each looking big as a house as it shoved its white comb along!
+'Twould rear itself like a glassy roof over the boat and I'd think it
+meant 'day, day!' to me, but I'd crawl out somehow. An' I've lived to
+tell the tale.
+
+"But I'm gettin' too old for such scrapes now," went on the old
+sea-fighter. "I'm going to turn 'Hayseed!' You mayn't believe it, but I
+am!" glowering at the laughing, incredulous scouts. "I'm about buying a
+piece o' land that's only half cleared o' timber yet, up Exmouth way;
+going to start a farm. But, great sailor! how'll I ever get along with a
+cow. That's what stumps me."
+
+"We'll come out an' milk her for you, Captain Andy," volunteered with
+one breath the boy scouts, their merry voices ringing out over the
+mother-of-pearl plains of water, bounded on one side by the headlands of
+a bold shore, on the other by green peninsulas of salt-marsh, insulated
+at high water by the winding creeks that burrowed among them, and
+farther on by the radiant dunes.
+
+"I'll t'ink he no lak' for be tie to cow, me!" Toiney nodded
+mischievously at the sea-captain. Then, all of a sudden, his voice
+exploded gutturally like a bomb: "_Gard' donc! Gard' donc_, de gros
+seal! _Sapré tonnere!_ _deux_ gros seal. Two beeg seal! _V'là V'là!_
+shes jomp right out o' reever--engh!"
+
+The excited Canadian's gesticulating hands drew every eye in the
+direction he indicated, which was a little to the left of the central
+tidal channel, between them and the straying creeks.
+
+And the scouts' excitement fairly fizzed like a burning fuse as, mingled
+with Toiney's cry, sounded a hoarse bark, wafted across the plains of
+water, the harsh "Beow!" or "Weow!" according as the semi-distant ear
+might translate it, of an angry bull-seal.
+
+Each boy's heart leaped into his distended throat at the sound, but not
+so high as leaped the bull-seal, to whom the other term significant of
+his male gender--that of dog-seal--hardly applied, for he outweighed
+half a dozen good-sized dogs.
+
+Breathlessly gazing, the scouts saw him jump clear out of the water not
+quarter of a mile from them, his sleek, dark bulk sheathed in crystal
+armor, wrought of brine and sunbeams--his flippers dripping rainbows!
+Down he came again with a wrathful splash that sent the foam flying, and
+struck his companion, an apparently smaller animal whose head alone was
+visible, a furious blow on that sleek head with one of his clawed
+flippers.
+
+"_Gard' donc!_ _Gard' donc_, les gros seal _qui se battent_! De beeg
+seal dat fights--dat strike heem oder, engh?" exploded Toiney again.
+
+"So they are--fighting! Goodness! that big fellow is pitching into the
+one in the water. Going for him like fury, for some reason!" broke from
+the excited boys, as they stared, open-mouthed, while this belligerent
+performance was repeated, accompanied once or twice by the grunting bark
+of the larger seal.
+
+"Great guns! he's a snorter, isn't he? You could hear that battle-cry of
+his nearly a mile off, at night, when the weather is decently calm as
+to-day," came from Captain Andy while he slowed down the panting
+motor-boat in order that the scouts might have a good view of the angry
+sea-calf--another name for the harbor seal--which Nixon yearned to see,
+and which was so absorbed in wreaking vengeance on a flippered rival
+that it paid no attention at all to the approaching launch.
+
+"Gee whiz! isn't he a monster?"--"Must be five or six feet
+long!"--"Can't he make the foam fly, though?"--"You'd think he owned the
+river!" came at intervals from the gasping spectators.
+
+"_Nom-de-tonnerre!_ she's _gros_ seal: shes mak de watere go lak'
+scramble de egg--engh?" gurgled Toiney, mixing up his pronouns in
+guttural excitement over this river duel, such as he had witnessed once
+before, when two male seals contested for the favor of some marbled
+sweetheart.
+
+In this case the duelists were evidently unevenly matched, for presently
+a wild cry came from Scout Nixon:--
+
+"See! See! he has him by the throat now. That big fellow has his fangs
+in the other seal's throat! Must have! For he's dragging him along to
+that little creek! He's going to kill him."
+
+"_Mille tonnerres!_ I'll t'ink shes go for choke heem, me: dat's de tam
+he'll go deaded sure--engh?" Thus Toiney came gutturally in on the
+excited duet, as seven strained faces peered over the motor-boat's side
+at the one-sided battle.
+
+"_Mille tonnerres_"--"a thousand thunders"--were being launched,
+indeed, upon the spotted head of the weaker animal, half stunned by the
+furious blows rained on him by the clawed hind-flippers of his
+adversary, and now finding himself dragged, willy-nilly, through the
+water into the secluded creek, like a prisoner to the block.
+
+He tried diving, to loosen those cruel fangs, but was mercilessly forced
+to the surface again by his big rival.
+
+"Well! I think this fight has gone on long enough; I'm going to separate
+them," cried Captain Andy. "I guess the tide is high enough for us to
+overhaul them in that little creek, without danger of being pocketed, or
+hung up aground, there!"
+
+And with a warning _chug! chug!_ the power-boat Aviator made straight
+for the bubbling mouth of the creek, across the foamy wake left by the
+fighting seals, and dashed in after them.
+
+Not until it was almost upon them did the triumphant male tear his four
+fangs from his rival's throat. Then, startled at last, he swam off a few
+strokes in a wild flurry, and dove, while Captain Andy drove his
+throbbing boat in between the combatants.
+
+For a thrilling minute the scouts found themselves at the centre of a
+grand old mix-up that churned the waters of the creek; the weaker seal,
+now half dead, was right beneath the boat. Presently his head appeared
+upon the surface a few yards ahead of it. Swimming feebly a short
+distance, he crawled out of the water a little higher up the creek and
+lay upon the marshy bank entirely played out.
+
+His merciless rival reappeared too, to the rear of the boat, strong as
+ever, swimming rapidly for the creek's mouth and the open water beyond
+it.
+
+"That seal is 'all in';" Nixon pointed to the victim. "If we could go on
+to the head of the creek, we might step out on the bank and have a good
+look at him."
+
+"I can't land you from the power-boat, but you can get into the little
+Pill if you like, an' row up 'longside him." Captain Andy pointed to the
+tubby rowboat bobbing astern. "No! only three of you may go, more might
+capsize her; she ain't much of a boat, though she's a slick bit o' wood
+for her size! Easy there now! Steady!"
+
+The sturdy Pill was drawn alongside. Scouts Warren and Chase, with one
+brother Owl, stepped into her, and rowed to the head of the creek,
+whence they had a near view of the half-throttled creature as he lay,
+mouth open, stretched out upon the marshy bank, his strong hind-flippers
+extended behind him, their brown claws glistening with brine.
+
+"Whew! he's spotted like a sandpiper's egg," said Nixon, looking at the
+head and back of the marbled seal. "Seems to me he's of a lighter color
+than the big fellow who nearly did for him; _he_ looked almost black out
+of water--but then he was all wet. And what a funny little tail this one
+has, not bigger than a pair of spectacles!"
+
+"See his black nose an' short fore-flippers!" whispered Leon. "Don't his
+eyes stick out? They're a kind o' blue-black an' glazy. There! he's
+noticing us now. He's trying to flounder off--with that funny, teetering
+kind o' wabble they have! Say! hadn't we better row back to Captain
+Andy, and leave him to recover? He's all used up; that big one gave him
+an awful licking."
+
+And this merciful consideration from Starrie Chase, who, prior to his
+scout days, would have had no thought save how to finish the cruel work
+of the big bully and put an end to the beaten rival!
+
+"Well! you did see a harbor seal, Nix, 'most near enough to shake his
+flipper, eh?" challenged Captain Andy as the three scrambled back aboard
+the motor-boat, and made the little Pill fast astern by its short
+towrope, while the Aviator bore out of the blue creek, to head upstream
+toward the town again.
+
+"Yes! I'd have tried to do it too, if he hadn't been so completely 'all
+in,'" laughed the scout. "I suppose we'll have plenty of opportunities
+to see seals and listen to their barking when we camp out on the white
+dunes during the last days of August and the beginning of September.
+They say the young ones make a kind of cooing noise, much like a
+turtle-dove, only stronger; I'm bent on capturing a pup-seal, to tame
+him!"
+
+"Oh! you'd have no trouble about the taming, only you couldn't feed him!
+But you'll see seals a-plenty an' hear 'em, too, next summer. They just
+love to lie out on a reef o' rocks in the sun, when the tide's low,
+especially if the wind's a little from the no'thwest," said the
+ex-skipper. "A lonely reef, a warm sun, and light no'thwesterly breeze
+make up the harbor-seal's heaven, I guess!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE CAMP ON THE DUNES
+
+
+And when those fervently anticipated last days of August did in due time
+dawn, they brought with them many opportunities to Nixon and his brother
+scouts of watching Spotty Seal and his kindred in the enjoyment of their
+mundane paradise, whose pavement of gold was a wave-washed reef and its
+harpings the mild bluster of a northwesterly breeze.
+
+During the final week of August and the first of September their
+scoutmaster, a rising young naval architect, had a respite from
+designing wooden vessels, from considering how he could best combine
+speed and seaworthiness in an up-to-date model; and he arranged to
+devote the whole of that holiday to camping out with his boy scout troop
+upon the milky Sugarloaf Dunes.
+
+A more ideal camping-ground could scarcely have been found than among
+the white sand-hills, capped with plumy vegetation which formed the
+background for an equally dazzling line of beach, where the
+gray-and-white gulls strutted in feathered rendezvous, and were hardly
+to be scared away by the landing in their midst of the first patrol of
+scouts, put ashore from Captain Andy's motor-boat in a light skiff, a
+more capacious rowboat than the Pill.
+
+But they had brought the tubby Pill down the river too, in tow of the
+launch; and Captain Andy, who was partial to scouts, had arranged to
+leave that rotund little rowboat with them, so that, two or three at a
+time, they might explore the tidal river with the creeks that
+intersected the marshes in the neighborhood of the white dunes.
+
+"Just look at that gray gull, will you?" laughed Patrol Leader Nixon, as
+he landed from the skiff. "He's made up his mind that we Owls have no
+rights here: that this white beach is his stamping-ground, and he won't
+be frightened away!"
+
+Other gulls had reluctantly taken wing and wheeled off during the
+prolonged process of landing the eight members of the Owl Patrol, with
+their scoutmasters and camp outfit, in various detachments from the
+launch, which was too large to run right in to the beach.
+
+But this one youthful sea-gull, a mere boy in plumage gray, held his
+ground, parading the lonely beach with head turning alertly from side
+to side, as if he were admonishing his wheeling brothers with: "These
+are boy scouts! Look at me: I tell you, you have nothing to fear!"
+
+So bold was his mien, so peaceful the attitude of the human invaders,
+that presently the regiment of sea-gulls fluttered back to a point of
+rendezvous only a little removed from their former one.
+
+"We won't have much company beyond ourselves and the birds, I guess!"
+remarked Nixon presently. "There are no houses in sight except those
+three fine bungalows about quarter of a mile off on the edge of the
+dunes. And the fisherman's shack on the beach below them!"
+
+"Yes, that belongs to an old clam-digger," said Kenjo Red. "He keeps his
+pails there. Don't you remember my telling you about his letting us--my
+uncle an' me--have his boat one day last November, so's we could row
+over to the sand-spit opposite, and take a look at some seals that were
+sunning themselves there?"
+
+"Oh! yes, _we_ remember, Kenjo; you've told about that at half a dozen
+camp-fire powwows, at least." Starrie Chase plucked off Kenjo's cap and
+combed his ruddy locks with a teasing forefinger. "They say Dave
+Baldwin, the _vaurien_," with guttural mimicry of Toiney's accents,
+"hangs out among the dunes here, when he isn't loafing in the woods up
+the river," added Corporal Chase, peering off among the white
+sand-hills, capped with biscuit-colored plumes of dry beach-grass, and
+the more verdant beach-pea, as if he expected to see young Baldwin's
+head pop up among them.
+
+"I wonder if we'll run across him?" said Nixon. "He can't 'make camp'
+among the dunes. Nobody is allowed to camp out here, without special
+permission. Boy scouts are privileged persons; they know we won't set
+fire to the brush."
+
+"Oh! when he needs a fire--when he knocks a woodchuck on the head and
+wants to cook it--I suppose he rows over to one of those little islands
+there; they say he has an old rowboat here." Leon pointed to two small
+islets rising from the plains of water a little higher up the river.
+
+"Well, I don't envy him!" Marcoo shrugged his shoulders. "He must have a
+bitter time of it in winter, when the river is frozen over down to the
+bay, an' you don't hear a sound here beyond the occasional pop of a
+sportsman's gun, or the barking of the seals--and even they're pretty
+quiet in midwinter. Hey! Look at that spotted sandpiper. 'Teeter-tail'
+we call him: see his tail bob up and down!" exclaimed Coombsie, who was
+an enthusiast about birds.
+
+In watching the sandpiper rise from the white beach and dart across the
+water, in listening to his sweet, whistling "peet-weet!" note,
+speculations about the habits of the _vaurien_, the good-for-nothing
+young vagrant, were forgotten.
+
+He, Dave Baldwin, faded completely from the campers' thoughts as the
+narrow skiff grounded its sharp nose for the fourth time on the beach,
+landing the remainder of their camp dunnage and commissariat; and the
+work began of selecting a site for the camp amid the milky sand-hills,
+interspersed with a few trees, slender and short of stature.
+
+Those gray birches and ash-trees formed pleasant spots of shade amid the
+dazzling whiteness of the dunes. But there was other and more unique
+vegetable growth to be considered.
+
+"Say! but will you just look at the cranberry patch, growing out of the
+white beach?" shrieked young Colin after an ecstatic interval,
+addressing no one scout in particular.
+
+"Cranberries there near the tide!"--"Growing out of the
+sand!"--"Tooraloo!"--"Nonsense!" came from his brother Owls who were
+already getting busy, erecting tents.
+
+But cranberries there were, in ripening beauty--as the workers presently
+saw for themselves--cranberries whose roots underran the dazzling beach,
+whose crimson creepers trailed delicately over its whiteness, whose
+berries nestled their rosy cheeks daintily, each upon its snowy pillow.
+
+"_Gee!_" The one united ejaculation--the little nondescript, uncouth
+monosyllable which expresses so many emotions of the boyish heart, from
+panic to panegyric--was all that the scouts could find voice for in
+presence of this red-and-white loveliness secreted by Nature upon a
+lonely shore.
+
+"Hey! fellows, Captain Andy is going," the voice of the busy scoutmaster
+broke in upon their bliss. "He's to bring the Foxes down to-morrow in
+his motor-boat," alluding to the Fox Patrol, of which Godey was leader.
+"The Seals will row over, to-morrow forenoon, from the other side of the
+river; so our scout troop will be complete. We owe a lot to Captain
+Andy. Don't you want to show him that you can make a noise: don't you
+want to give your yell, with his name at the end? Now, all in line, and
+together!"
+
+And each scout with his arm around a comrade upon either side--Leon's
+clasping the back of Harold Greer who, a year ago, had cowered at sight
+of him--all in a welded line, swaying together where the ripples broke
+upon the milky beach, they proved their prowess as chief noise-makers
+and made the welkin ring with:--
+
+        AMERICA
+      Boy Scouts! Boy Scouts!
+        Rah! Rah! Rah!
+    Exmouth! Exmouth! Exmouth!
+  Captain Andy! Captain Andy! _Cap-tain An-dy!_
+
+The weatherbeaten ex-skipper, standing "up for'ard" in his launch, which
+was just beginning its panting trip up the river, waved his hand in
+acknowledgment, while the Aviator's whistle returned a triple salute to
+that linked line upon the water's edge.
+
+"They're fine lads!" A little moisture gathered in the captain's
+narrowed blue eye as he gazed back at the beach--moisture which did not
+come in over the Aviator's rail. "Some one has spoken of this Boy Scout
+Movement as the 'Salvation of England'--as I've heard! So here's to it
+again as the Future of America!" And he sounded three more whistles--and
+yet another three--giving the scouts three times three, until it seemed
+as if his power-boat would burst its steel throat.
+
+Then comparative silence reigned again upon the sands and certain
+startled birds resumed their feeding avocations, notably that
+white-breasted busybody, the sanderling or surf-snipe, called by
+river-men the "whitey."
+
+"See! the 'whitey' doesn't believe that 'two is company, three none':
+they're chasing after their dinner in triplets! They run out into the
+ripples and back again, pecking in the sand, so quickly that the larger
+waves can't catch them: don't they, Greerie?" said Leon Chase, pointing
+them out to Harold in the overflowing brotherliness established by that
+yell.
+
+Harold was no longer the "Hare." That nickname had been forbidden by the
+patrol leader of the Owls under pain of dire penalties. The "poltron,"
+or coward, as Toiney had once in pity called him, was "Greerie" now; and
+was gradually learning what mere bugaboos were the fears which had
+separated him from his kind and from boyhood's activities--something
+which might never have come home to him thoroughly, save in the
+stimulating society of other boys who aimed earnestly at helping him.
+
+"We're going to have a splendid time here for the next two weeks,
+Greerie, camping among the dunes," Leon assured him. "To-morrow Nix an'
+you and I will go out in the little rowboat, the Pill, and hunt up a
+creamy pup-seal and bring him back to camp for a pet. Now! you must come
+and do your share of the work--help to set up the other tents among the
+sand-hills."
+
+One was already erected, a large canvas shelter, to contain four boys,
+another went up like unto it for the other four members of the patrol,
+then a smaller tent for the scoutmaster, and the cook-tent which
+sheltered the "commissariat," stocked with cans of preserved meats,
+vegetables, and all that went to make up the scouts' daily rations.
+
+"Where are _you_ going to sleep, Toiney?" asked Patrol Leader Nixon.
+
+"Me--I'll lak' for sleep out in de air, me--wit' de littal star on top
+o' me!" Toiney shrugged his shoulders complacently at the summer sky,
+now taking on the hues of evening, as if the firmament were a blanket
+woven for his comfort.
+
+"Oh! I'll sleep out with you.--And I!--Me, too!" Each and every member
+of the patrol, from the leader downward, longed to feel the white sand
+beneath him as a mattress, to have the stars for canopy, to hear the
+night-tide as it broke upon the near-by beach crooning his lullaby.
+
+[Illustration: IN CAMP]
+
+"You may take it in turns, fellows--each sleep out with him one night,
+when the weather is fine," decided the scoutmaster. "Now! I'm going to
+appoint Scouts Warren and Chase cooks for to-night."
+
+A first-rate supper did those cooks turn out, of flapjacks and scrambled
+eggs, the latter stirred with a peeled stick, while the great
+coffee-pot, brooding upon its rosy nest of birch-logs, grinned
+facetiously when a stray flame wreathed its spout, then broke into
+bubbling laughter.
+
+Night fell upon the pale dunes that turned to silver monuments under the
+smile of a moon in its third quarter. A gentle, lowing sound came to the
+scouts' ears from the tide at far ebb upon the silvery beach, as, the
+cook-fire abandoned, they gathered round a blazing camp-fire that cast
+weird reflections upon the surrounding white hillocks.
+
+The holding of a calm powwow on this first night in camp, when each
+heart was thrilling tumultuously to the novelty of the surroundings, was
+impossible. Toiney sang wild fragments of songs that found a suitable
+accompaniment in the distant, hoarse barking of the harbor seal, and in
+the plaintive "Oo-oo-ooo!"--the dove-like call of the creamy pup-seal to
+its marbled mother in some lonely tidal creek.
+
+Once and again from the shore side of the scouts' camp-fire, from among
+the shimmering sand-hills, came the weaker, more snappy bark of the
+little dog-fox, as he prowled the dunes.
+
+The dazzling Sugarloaf Pillar near the mouth of the river was wrapped in
+night's mantle. But lights flickered out in two of the handsome summer
+bungalows which the boys had noticed, standing at some distance from
+their camping-ground, looming high above the beach, erected upon
+stilt-like props driven into the sandy soil.
+
+"Those houses were only built last spring; they're occupied for the
+first time this summer," said Kenjo Red, who was more familiar with this
+region than the others. "Say! let's chant our African war-song, fellows.
+This is just the night for it." And the barbaric chant rang weirdly
+among the sand-hills, the leader shouting the first line, his companions
+answering with the other three, to the accompaniment of the flames'
+crackle and the night calls of bird and beast:--
+
+  "Een gonyâma--gonyâma.
+  Invoboo!
+  Yah bô! Yah bô
+  Invoboo!"
+
+Presently the bark of the dog-fox was heard farther off. _He_ knew, the
+stealthy slyboots, that he was not the only lone prowler among the pale
+dunes that night who listened intently to the boisterous revelry round
+the scouts' camp-fire.
+
+His keen sense of smell informed him that behind one plumed sand-hill,
+between his own trotting form and the noisy company in the firelight,
+there lurked a solitary man-figure.
+
+But he, the sandy-coated little trotter from burrow to burrow, could
+neither hear nor interpret the sound, half groan, half oath, savagely
+envious, that escaped from the other night-prowler's lips as he listened
+to the boys' voices.
+
+Silence, broken only by ringing snatches of laughter, reigned
+temporarily over the dunes. Then once again it blossomed into song:--
+
+  "Hurrah for the brave, hurrah for the good,
+    Hurrah for the pure in heart!
+  At duty's call, with a smile for all,
+    The Scout will do his part!"
+
+And the soft purr of the low tide, with the breeze skipping among pallid
+dunes that looked like capped haystacks in the darkness, flung back the
+cheer for the "Scouts of the U.S.A."
+
+"_Aghrr-r!_" snarled the testy dog-fox, his distant petulant growl much
+resembling that of Leon's terrier, who, unfortunately, was not present
+upon the dunes to-night. Blink had already added the word "Scout" to
+his limited human vocabulary, but the wild fox had no such linguistic
+powers. The foreign music upon the lonely dunes was irritating, alarming
+to him.
+
+It seemed to have something of the same effect upon his brother-prowler,
+upon the man who skulked among the sand-hills within hearing of the
+song: at any rate, the semi-articulate sound which from time to time he
+uttered, deepened into an unmixed groan that escaped from his lips again
+later when the clear notes of a bugle rang over the Sugarloaf Dunes,
+warning the scouts by the "first call" that fun was at an end for
+to-night, and sleep would be next upon the programme.
+
+Then when lights were out, came the sweet sound of "Taps," the wind-up
+of the first day in camp, the expert bugler being Corporal Chase.
+
+For the Exmouth doctor had kept his word: Leon had been given the
+"bugle" literally and figuratively since he enlisted as a scout, symbol
+of the challenge to all the energy in him to advance along new lines,
+instead of the "foghorn" reproofs and warnings that had been showered on
+him prior to his scouting days.
+
+Then, at last, stillness reigned, indeed, upon the moonlit dunes.
+
+The bark of the dog-fox melted into distance, becoming indistinguishable
+from the voice of the returning tide.
+
+The man-prowler among the sand-hills slipped away to some lair as lonely
+as the fox's.
+
+And Toiney, with Scout Nixon Warren wrapped in his camper's blanket
+beside him, slept out upon the white sands "wit' de littal star on top
+o' them!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE PUP-SEAL'S CREEK
+
+
+The music of "Taps" was eclipsed by the blither music of "Reveille," the
+morning blast blown by Leon standing in front of the white tents, the
+sands beneath his feet jeweled by the early sunshine, the blue ribbon
+attached to his bugle flirting with the breeze that capered among the
+plumy hillocks.
+
+The tide which had ebbed and flowed again since midnight--when the last
+excited scout had fallen asleep lulled by its full purr--broke high upon
+the beach, where the white sands gleamed through its translucent flood
+like milk in a crystal vase.
+
+Far away in dim distance, higher up the tidal river upon its other side,
+beyond the plains of water, the woods which enclosed Varney's Paintpot
+and the cave called the Bear's Den smiled remotely through a pearly veil
+of haze.
+
+And all the waking glee of tide, dunes, and woods was personified in the
+boy bugler's face.
+
+The sight of him as he stood there, face to the tents where his comrades
+scrambled up from cot or ground, his brown eyes snapping and flashing
+under the scout's broad hat, with the delight of having found an
+absorbing interest which stimulated and turned to good account every
+budding activity within him--that sight would have made the veriest old
+Seek-sorrow among men take heart and feel that a new era of chivalry was
+in flower among the Scouts of the U.S.A.
+
+And the old religious reverence, that fortifying kernel of knighthood,
+was not neglected by this boy scout patrol.
+
+Bareheaded, and in line with their scoutmasters presently, while their
+eyes gazed off over the sparkling dunes and crystal tide-stretches, they
+repeated in unison the Lord's Prayer, offering morning homage to the
+Power, dimly discerned, of whom and through whom and to whom are all
+things. Of his, the Father's, presence chamber, gladness and beauty
+stand at the threshold!
+
+"_Now_, for our early swim! The tide's just right. Come along, Harold;
+I'm going to give _you_ your first swimming-lesson; and I expect you'll
+be a star pupil!" cried Nixon, the patrol leader, when the brief
+adoration was over. "What! you don't want to learn to swim? Nonsense!
+You _are_ going into that dandy water. Oh! that's not a scout's mouth,
+Harold."
+
+And the corners of Harold's mouth, which had drooped with fear of this
+new experience, curled up in a yielding grin.
+
+Once he was in the invigorating salt water, feeling the boisterous tidal
+ripples, fresh and not too cold, rise about his body, the timid lad
+underwent another lightning change, just as at the moment of his tying
+the bowline knot, the spirit of his fisherman father became uppermost in
+him, and he learned to swim almost as easily and naturally as a
+pup-seal.
+
+The improvement in his condition was such that his brother Owls had won
+his promise to enter school when it should reopen after this jolly
+camping period was over. "And if any boy picks on you or teases you,
+Harold, mind you're to let us know at once, because we're your brother
+scouts--and he won't try it a second time!" So they admonished him.
+
+Thus Harold, under the Owls' sheltering wing, was gradually losing his
+inherited and imbibed dread of a crowd, of any gathering of his own
+kind.
+
+Although this bugbear fear returned upon him a little when, later on
+that morning, the Fox Patrol, with Godey Peck as its leader, was landed
+upon the Sugarloaf Dunes from Captain Andy's motor-launch, and still
+later in the day the Seals rowed across in two large rowboats from
+certain farms or fishermen's houses upon the opposite side of the river,
+to join the other two patrols. So that the boy scout troop was complete,
+and Harold found himself one of twenty-four boisterous, though
+good-natured, boys upon this strange white beach.
+
+A little homesickness beset him for the farm-clearing in the woods and
+his grandfather's staid presence, to cure which Scouts Warren and Chase
+took him off with them in the little rowboat, the Pill, lent by Captain
+Andy, to explore the tidal river and the little truant creeks that
+escaped from it to burrow among the salt-marshes.
+
+"We're going to try and hunt up a creamy pup-seal, Harold, and bring it
+back to camp," said Nixon; and in the excitement of this quest the still
+shy boy forgot his nervous qualms.
+
+Fortune favored the expedition. It was now between one and two o'clock
+in the afternoon. The tide, which had been high at six in the morning
+and again at twelve, was once more on the ebb, as the two elder scouts
+rowing in leisurely fashion, turned the Pill's snub nose into a pearly
+creek whose shallow water was clear and pellucid, over its sandy bed.
+
+Hardly half a dozen strokes had they taken between bold marshy banks
+when, from some half-submerged rocks near the head of the creek, they
+heard a prolonged and dulcet "Oo-oo-oo-ooo" that might have been the
+call of a dove, save that it was louder.
+
+"_Hear him?_" cried Leon, shipping his oar in blinking excitement.
+"That's our pup-seal, Nix! We've got him cornered in this little creek;
+if he dives, the water is so shallow that we can pick him up from the
+bottom; and he can't swim fast enough to get away from us--though as
+likely as not he won't want to!"
+
+The last conjecture proved true. The young seal, little more than two
+months old, which lay sprawled out, a creamy splotch, upon the low reef
+which the tide was forsaking, with his baby flippers clinging to the wet
+rock and his little eyes staring unwinkingly into the sunlight, had not
+the least objection to human company. He welcomed it.
+
+When the scouts rowed up alongside the ledge he suffered Nixon to lift
+his moist fat body into the boat, where he stretched himself upon the
+bottom planks in perfect contentment, and took all the caresses which
+the three boys lavished upon him like any other lazy puppy.
+
+"Isn't he 'cunning', though?" gasped Harold, trying to lift the youthful
+mammal into his arms, an attempt which failed because he, the weak one
+of the Owls, was not strong enough to do so without capsizing the
+Pill--not because the pup-seal objected. "I thought he'd be a kind of
+whitish color, eh?" appealing diffidently to Leon.
+
+"So he was, when born; his hair is turning darker now, to a dull yellow;
+by and by it will be a brownish drab. See, Greerie! his spots are
+beginning to appear!" Leon ran his finger down the seal's dog-like head
+and back, already faintly dotted with those round markings which gain
+for his family the name of the "marbled seal."
+
+"Isn't he a 'sprawly' pup, and so friendly? The other scouts will be
+'tickled to death' with him--" Nixon was beginning, when a shadow
+suddenly fell across the boat and its three occupants, whose attention
+was entirely upon the young seal.
+
+"Hi, there! You'll get pocketed in this little creek, you fellows--hung
+up aground here--if you don't look out! Can't you see that the water is
+leaving you?" cried a harsh voice from the bold marsh-bank which
+overhung the creek to the right of them, so suddenly that the three
+jumped.
+
+Looking up, they saw the unkempt figure of a young man, short of stature
+and showing a hungry leanness about the neck and face. This sudden
+apparition which had approached noiselessly over the soft marshes, was
+plainly outlined against the surrounding wildness of salt-marsh and
+tideway.
+
+Had the little dog-fox which prowled among the moonlit dunes been near,
+he might have recognized in the shabby figure his brother-prowler of the
+night before.
+
+Recognition was springing from another source. Starrie Chase caught his
+breath with such a wild gasp that he rocked the Pill as if a gust had
+struck it. Something about that stocky figure and in the expression of
+the face, half wistful, half savage, reminded him overwhelmingly of an
+old woman whom he had seen issuing, lantern in hand, from her paintless
+home, and who had raised her trembling arm to her breast at sight of
+him, Leon.
+
+"Forevermore! it's _Dave Baldwin_," he ejaculated in a whisper audible
+only to Nixon. "That's who it is--Nix!"
+
+"Don't you see that the tide is leaving you?" snapped the stranger
+again. "There won't be a teaspoonful of water in this creek presently."
+
+He was looking down at the Pill and its occupants, with a gleam in his
+eyes fugitive and phosphorescent as a marsh-light, which revealed a new
+expression upon his mud-smeared face, one of passionate envy--envy of
+the boy scouts healthily rejoicing over their captive pup-seal.
+
+"Tide leaving us! S-so it is!" Nixon seized an oar as if awakening from
+a dream. "Thank you for warning us! We don't want to be hung up in the
+pocket of this little creek--until it rises again!"
+
+"Then pull for all you're worth! Your boat--she's a funny one," broke
+off the stranger with the ghost of a boyish twinkle in his eye; "she
+looks as if she was made from a flat-bottomed dory that had been cut in
+two!"
+
+"So she was, I guess!" Leon too found his voice suddenly.
+
+"Well! luckily for you, she doesn't draw much water; you may scrape by
+an' get out into the open channel while there's tide enough left to
+float her!" And with an inarticulate grunt that might have been
+construed into some sort of farewell, the stranger disappeared over the
+marshes abruptly as he had come.
+
+Their own plight now engrossed the boys. It was clear that if they did
+not want to be pocketed in this out-of-the-way creek with their
+amphibious prize, grounded in the sand for the next five or six hours,
+without a hope of getting back to their camp on the dunes until the tide
+should rise again, they certainly must row for all they were worth!
+
+Even as it was, the two older scouts, divesting themselves of shoes and
+stockings, rolling up their khaki trousers, had to "get out and shove"
+ere they could propel the flat-bottomed Pill through the mouth of the
+creek.
+
+"If that fellow hadn't warned us just in time, we'd have been in a bad
+scrape," said Scout Chase. "We're not out of the misery yet, Nix! See
+the old mud-shadow poking its nose up on either side of the main
+channel!"
+
+"Yes, the water on those shallows looks like the inside of an
+oyster-shell,--thick and iridescent. 'Shove' is the word again,
+Starrie!" returned his toiling companion, arduously putting that
+watchword in practice, pushing the little boat containing Harold and the
+pup-seal (the latter being the only member of the party placidly
+unmoved by the situation) through the iridescent opaqueness of the
+ebbing ripples that now barely covered vast silvery stretches of tidal
+mud.
+
+[Illustration: "CAN'T YOU SEE THE TIDE IS LEAVING YOU?"]
+
+"Look at that old clam-digger, who has his shack on the white beach,
+about quarter of a mile from our camp! He's left his boat behind and is
+wading out to the clam-flats." Nixon paused, with his breast to the
+boat's stern, in the act of propelling it. "Goody! I'd like to stop and
+dig clams with him. But we'd never get back to camp! What ho! she sticks
+again. There! that brings her."
+
+By dint of alternately propelling and rowing the three scouts, with
+their prize, finally reached the white beach of the dunes before the
+tide completely deserted them. They brought a full cargo of excitement
+into camp in their tale of the stranger who had warned them; who, with
+worthless vagrancy stamped all over him, they felt must be the
+_vaurien_, Dave Baldwin; and in their engaging prize, the flippered
+pup-seal.
+
+The latter quite eclipsed the interest felt in the former. Never was
+there a more docile, fatter, or more amiable puppy. He enjoyed being
+fondled in a scout's arms, under difficulties, as, for a pup, he was
+quite a heavy-weight and slippery too, on account of the amount of
+blubber secreted under his creamy skin. His oily brown eyes were softly
+trustful.
+
+But the tug-of-war came with feeding-time. Vainly did the boy scouts
+offer him of their best, vainly did Marcoo and Colin tramp a mile over
+the dunes to bring back a quart of new milk for him from the nearest
+farm, and try to pour it gently down his infant throat!
+
+He set up a dove-like moaning that was plainly a call for his mother as
+he lay sprawled out on the white sands. And, at nightfall, by order of
+the scoutmaster, Scouts Warren and Chase rowed out into the channel and
+returned him to the water in which he was quite at home.
+
+But he was possessed of a contradictory spirit, for he swam after the
+Pill, crying to be taken aboard again. They could hear his dulcet
+"Oo-oo-ooo!" as they gathered round their camp-fire in the white hollow
+among the sand-hills.
+
+At the powwow to-night the encounter with Dave Baldwin, if the vagrant
+of the marshes was really he, came in for its share of discussion.
+Guesses were rife as to the probability of the scouts running across him
+again, and as to how he might occupy his time in the lazy vagabond life
+which he was leading.
+
+It was here that Harold broke through the semi-shy reserve which still
+encrusted him and contributed a remark, the first as a result of his
+observations, to the powwow.
+
+"Well! he had an _awful_ sorry face on him," he said impulsively,
+alluding to the vagrant. "It just made me feel badly for a while!"
+
+"You're right, Greerie, he had!" corroborated Leon. "Whatever he's
+doing, it isn't agreeing with him. We'll probably come on him again some
+time on the marshes or among the dunes."
+
+But eleven days went by, eleven full days for the scout campers, golden
+with congenial activity, wherein each hour brought its own interesting
+"stunt," as they called it; and they saw no more of the _vaurien_, the
+worthless one, who had caused his mother's heart to "break in pieces."
+
+And they gave little thought to him. For those breezy days, the last of
+August and the first of September, were spent in observation tours over
+marsh and dune or on the heaving river, in playing their exciting scout
+games among the sandhills, in clam-bakes, in practising signaling with
+the little red-and-white flags according to the semaphore or wig-wag
+code--one scout transmitting a message to another posted on a distant
+hill--and in the various duties assigned to them in pairs, of cooking,
+and keeping the camp generally in order.
+
+The more fully one lives, the more joyously one adventures, the more
+quickly flutters the present into the past, like a sunny landscape
+flitting by a train! It had come to be the last night but one in camp.
+Within another two days the Sugarloaf Dunes would be deserted so far as
+campers were concerned.
+
+School would presently reopen. And at the end of the month the Owls
+would lose their brother and patrol leader: during the first days of
+October Scout Nixon Warren's parents were expected home from Europe, and
+he would rejoin his former troop in Philadelphia.
+
+To-night, every one was bent upon making the end of the camping trip a
+season of befitting jollity. They sang their scout songs as they
+gathered round the camp-fire. They retailed the last good joke from
+their magazine. They challenged the darkness with their hearty
+motto,--both in the strong sweet mother tongue wherein it had been given
+to the world, and in the pretty _Estu preta!_ form, which two of their
+number thought might serve as a universal link.
+
+But the night refused to rejoice with them. It was chilly, colder than
+on the same date one year ago when four lost boys camped out in the
+Bear's Den. The inflowing tide broke on the beach with sobbing clamor.
+There was no moon, few stars. The white sand-hills were wild-looking
+sable mounds waving blood-red plumes of beach-grass or beach-pea
+wherever the light of camp-fire or camp-lantern struck them.
+
+The clusters of gray birches and ash-trees scattered here and there
+among the dunes cowered like ebony shadows fearful of the rising wind.
+
+"Bah! De night she's as black as one black crow," declared Toiney with a
+shrug as he threw another birch log on the camp-fire and set one of the
+two bright oil-lanterns on a sand-hill where it spied upon the gusty,
+secretive darkness like a watchful eye.
+
+With the exception of a few small carbide lamps attached to tent-posts,
+those lanterns were the only luminaries in camp.
+
+"An' de win' she commence for mak' noise lak' mad cat! Saint Ba'tiste!
+I'll t'ink dis iss night for de come-backs--me." And Toiney glanced
+half-fearfully behind him at the sable mounds so milky in daylight.
+
+"He means it's a night for spooks--ghosts! He doesn't believe much in
+'come-backs,' though: look at his face!" Leon pointed at the assistant
+scoutmaster's black eyes dancing in the firelight, at the tassel of his
+red cap capering in the breeze. "By the way, Nix and I saw one
+'come-back,' about an hour ago--a human one!" went on Corporal Chase
+suddenly, after a minute's pause: "that rough customer, Dave Baldwin, as
+we suppose him to be, turned up again this evening near the summer
+bungalows away over on the beach. He was acting rather queerly, too!"
+
+"He certainly was!" chimed in Nixon, looking thoughtfully at a little
+topknot of flame that sprouted upon the blazing log nearest to him as he
+lay, with his brother Owls, prone upon his face and hands, gazing into
+the fire.
+
+"What was he doing?" asked Jesse Taber, a member of the Seal Patrol.
+
+"Why, he was up on the high piazza of the largest bungalow--that house
+built just on the edge of the dunes which looks as if it was standing on
+stilts, and getting ready to walk off! He seemed to be trying one of the
+windows when we came along as if attempting to get in."
+
+"The summer people who own that house left there this morning; we saw
+them going," broke in Godey Peck of the Fox Patrol. "I guess all the
+three houses are empty now; those dandified 'summer birds' don't like
+staying round here when the wind 'makes noise like mad cat'!" Godey
+hugged himself and beamed over the wild noises of the night, and at the
+voice of the tidal river calling lustily.
+
+"Well! did he get into the house?" asked Jemmie Ahern of the Seals.
+
+"No, as we came along over the dunes he saw us and scooted off!" Thus
+Corporal Leon Chase again took up the thread of the story. "But Nix an'
+I looked back as we walked along the beach; it was getting dusk then,
+but we made out his figure disappearing into a large shed belonging to
+that bungalow."
+
+"I hope he wasn't up to any mischief," said the scoutmaster gravely.
+"Now! let's forget about him. Haven't any of you other scouts some
+contribution to make to to-night's powwow about things you've observed
+during the day?"
+
+"Mr. Scoutmaster, I have!" Marcoo lifted his head upon the opposite side
+of the camp-fire where he lay, breast downward, on the sand. "Colin and
+I and two members of the Seal Patrol, Howsie and Jemmie Ahern, saw an
+_awfully_ big heap of clam-shells between two sand-hills on the
+shore-edge of the beach. They were partly covered with sand; but we dug
+them out; and--somehow--they looked as if they had been there for
+ages."
+
+"Likely enough, they had! The Indians used to hold clam-bakes here." The
+firelight danced upon the scoutmaster's white teeth; he greatly enjoyed
+the camp-fire powwow. "You see, fellows, this fine, white sand is
+something like snow--but snow which doesn't harden--the wind blows it
+into a drift; then, perhaps, another big gale comes along, picks up the
+drift and deposits it somewhere else. That's what uncovered your
+clam-shells."
+
+"Then how is it these white dunes aren't traveling round the country?"
+Colin waved his arm toward the neighboring sand-hills with a laugh.
+
+"Because they are held in place by the vegetation that quickly sprang up
+on and between them. That beach-grass has very coarse strong roots which
+interlace under the surface. Now! let's listen to Toiney singing; we
+must be merry, seeing it's our second last night in camp." Scoutmaster
+Estey waved his hand toward his assistant in the blue shirt and tasseled
+cap.
+
+Toiney, tiring of the conversation which it was an effort for him to
+follow, was crooning softly an old French ditty wherewith he had been
+sung to sleep by his grandfather when he was a black-eyed babe in a
+saffron-hued night-cap and gown:--
+
+  "À la clair-e fontain-e
+  M'en allant promener,
+  J'ai trouvé l'eau si belle,
+  Que je m'y suis baigné!"
+
+"Oh! you took a walk near the fountain and found the water so fine that
+you went in bathing!" cried one and another of the scouts who were in
+their first year in high school. "Must have been a pretty big fountain!
+Go ahead: what did you do next, Toiney?"
+
+But the singer had suddenly sprung to his feet and stood, an alert,
+tense figure, in the flickering twilight.
+
+"_Gard' donc!_" he cried gutturally, while the cat-like breeze capered
+round him, flicking his short red tassel, catching at his legs in their
+queer high boots. "_Gard' donc!_ de littal light in de sky--engh? _Sapré
+tonnerre!_ I'll t'ink shee's fire, me. No camp-fire, _non_! Beeg
+fire--engh? _V'là! V'là!_"
+
+He glanced round sharply at his scout comrades, and pointed, with
+excited gesticulations, across the sable dunes in the direction of those
+recently erected summer residences.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE SIGNALMAN
+
+
+"Patrol leaders and corporals, muster your men!" The voice of the young
+scoutmaster rang sharply out upon the night.
+
+The three boy patrols, Owls, Seals, and Foxes, who fell quickly into
+line at his order, were no longer surrounding their camp-fire amid the
+dusky sand-hills. That had been deserted even while Toiney was speaking,
+while he was pointing out the claims of a larger fire on their
+attention.
+
+From the glare in the sky this was evidently a threatening blaze; its
+fierce reflection overhung like an intangible flaming sword the trio of
+recently erected summer residences about quarter of a mile from the
+scouts' camp--those handsome bungalows from which the summer birds had
+flown.
+
+"That's no brush fire," Scoutmaster Estey had exclaimed directly he
+sighted the glare. "It's a building of some kind. Come on, fellows;
+there's work for us here!" And snatching one of the two camp-lanterns
+from its sandy pedestal he led the way across the dark wilderness of the
+dunes.
+
+Nixon caught up the second luminary and followed his chief. In their
+wake raced the three patrols, down in a sandy hollow one moment,
+climbing wildly the next, tearing their way through the plumed tangle of
+beach-grass and other vegetation that capped each pale mound now swathed
+in blackness, Toiney keeping Harold by his side.
+
+"It isn't one of the houses, thank goodness! Only a big shed!" cried the
+scoutmaster as they neared the scene of the fire, where golden flames
+tore in two the darkness that cowered on either side of them, having
+gained complete mastery of an outbuilding which had been used as a
+modest garage during the summer.
+
+"_Whee-ew!_ Gracious!" Nixon vented a prolonged whistle of
+consternation. "Why! 'twas into that very shed that we saw Dave
+Baldwin--or the man whom we took for him--disappear a couple of hours
+ago."
+
+But the demands of the moment were such, if the three houses were to be
+saved, that the remark, tossed at random into the darkness, was lost
+there amid the reign of fiery motes and rampant sparks that strove to
+carry the destruction farther.
+
+"Luckily, the wind isn't setting toward the house--it's mostly in
+another direction!" The scoutmaster by a breathless wave of his blinking
+lantern indicated the largest of the three bungalows to which the
+blazing outbuilding belonged. "No hope of saving that shed! But if the
+little wood-shed near-by catches, the house will go too. We may head the
+fire off!"
+
+It was then that he issued the ringing order to patrol leaders and those
+second in command to muster their men.
+
+And as the boy scouts fell into line, while Toiney was muttering,
+aghast: "Ah, _quel gros feu_! She's beeg fire! How we put shes
+out--engh?" the alert brain of the American scoutmaster had outlined his
+plan of campaign; and the air cracked with his orders:--
+
+"Toiney, take the Owls and break into that clam-digger's shack on the
+beach: get his pails! Foxes and Seals form a line to the beach; fill the
+pails as you get them an' pass 'em along to me! Tide's high; you need
+only wade in a little way! Hey! Leon,"--to Corporal Chase, who was
+obeying the first order with the rest of his patrol,--"you're good at
+signaling: take these lanterns, get up on the tallest sand-hill an'
+signal Annisquam Lighthouse; tell them to get help! Men there can
+probably read semaphore!"
+
+"_We_ may not be able to prevent the fire's spreading. And if it attacks
+that bungalow, the others will go too--the whole colony! Lighthouse men
+may take the glare in the sky to mean only a brush-fire," added the
+scoutmaster, _sotto voce_, as he stationed himself upon the crest of the
+sandy slope that led from the burning shed to the dim lapping water.
+
+That doomed shed was now blazing like a mammoth bonfire. The flames
+flung their gleeful arms out, seizing a solemn gray birch-tree for a
+partner in their wild dance, scattering their rosy fire-petals broadcast
+until they lodged in the roof of the wood-shed adjacent to the house,
+and upon the piazza of the bungalow itself.
+
+But they had a trained force to reckon with in the boy scouts. In the
+clam-digger's shack were found more than a dozen pails which their owner
+had cleaned and set in order before he went home that evening. And among
+the excited raiders who seized upon them with wild eagerness was Harold
+Greer--Harold who a year ago was called "poltron" and "scaree" even by
+the friend who protected him--Harold, with the last wisp of bugbear
+fear that trammeled him burned off by the contagious excitement of the
+moment--acquitting himself sturdily as a Scout of the U.S.A!
+
+Under his patrol leader's direction he took his place in the chain of
+boys that formed from the conflagration to the wave-edge of the beach,
+where half a dozen of his comrades rushed bare-legged into the howling
+tide, filled the pails and passed them along, up the line, to their
+scoutmaster on the hill.
+
+And he held to his place and to his duty stanchly, did the one-time
+"poltron," even when Toiney, his mainstay, was summoned to the hill-top,
+to aid the commander-in-chief in his direct onslaughts upon the fire.
+Seeing which, Scout Warren touched his shoulder once proudly, in
+passing, and said in a voice huskily triumphant: "Well done, Harold! I
+always knew you were a boy!"
+
+The dragon which had held sway upon that woodland clearing was slain at
+last, and the scars which he had left upon his victim were being
+cauterized by the fire.
+
+"Go to it, boys! Good work! That's fine!" rang out the commanding shout
+of the scoutmaster above the sullen roar of semi-defeated flames and the
+hiss of contending elements.
+
+"_Houp-là!_ _Ça c'est bien!_ Dat's ver' good!" screamed Toiney airily
+from his perch atop of a ladder which he had found in the wood-shed.
+
+From this vantage-point he was deluging with salt water the roof of the
+smaller shed and also the walls of the bungalow wherever a fire-seed
+lodged, ready to take root. Like a huge monkey he looked, swarming up
+there, with the flame-light dancing deliriously upon his dingy red cap!
+But his voice would put merriment into any exigency.
+
+"_Houp-e-là!_ We arre de boy! We arre de bes' scout ev'ry tam'!" he
+carolled gayly, as he launched his hissing pailfuls at each threatened
+spot. "_Continue cette affaire d'eau_--go on wit' dis watere bizness. We
+done good work--engh?"
+
+So they were, doing very good work! But the issue was still exceedingly
+doubtful as to whether, without any proper fire-fighting apparatus, they
+could hold the flames in check, restricting their destruction to the
+large shed whose roof toppled in with a resounding crash, and a
+volcano-like eruption of sparks.
+
+And what of Leon? What of Corporal Chase, alone upon the tallest
+sand-hill he could pick out, a solitary scout figure remote from his
+comrades with the dune breeze shrieking round him?
+
+What were his feelings as he shook his two bright signaling lanterns
+aloft at arm's length, to attract the attention of the men who kept the
+distant lighthouse beyond the dunes at the mouth of another tidal river,
+and then spelled out his message with those flashing luminaries, instead
+of the ordinary signal-flags: "Fire! Get help! House afire! Get help!"
+calling assistance out of the black night?
+
+Well! Starrie Chase was conscious of a monster thrill shooting through
+him to his feet which firmly pressed the sandy soil: breaking up into a
+hundred little thrills, it made most of the sensations which he had
+misnamed excitement a year ago seem tame, thin, and unboyish.
+
+He stood there, an isolated, sixteen-year-old boy. But he knew himself a
+trained force stronger than the "mad-cat" wind that clawed at him, than
+the tide which moaned behind him, even than the fire he combated;
+stronger always in the long run than these, for he was growing into a
+man who could get the better of them ninety-nine times out of a hundred.
+
+He was a scout, in line with the world's progress, allied with rescue,
+not ruin, with healing, not harm, with a chivalry that crowned all.
+
+"Fire! Get help!" Thus he kept on signaling at intervals, his left arm
+extending one flashing lantern at arm's length, while the companion
+light was lowered to his knees for the formation of the first letter of
+the message. And so on, the twin lights held at various angles
+illumining the youthful signalman until he stood out like a black statue
+on a pedestal among the lonely dunes.
+
+To Starrie Chase that sand-peak pedestal seemed to grow into a mountain
+and his uniformed figure to tower with it--become colossal--in the
+excitement of the moment!
+
+While, not twenty yards distant, behind a smaller sand-hillock, crouched
+another figure whose half-liberated groan the wind caught and tossed
+away like a feather as he gazed between clumps of beach-grass at the
+gesturing form of the scout.
+
+It was the same figure which had haunted the dunes, listening to the
+camp-fire revelry upon the boy scouts' first night in camp, the same
+which had so suddenly appeared upon the marshes near the pup-seal's
+creek.
+
+But distress seemed now to lie heavier upon that vagrant figure,
+instead of diminishing. For, as he still studied the light-girdled form
+of the signalman, Dave Baldwin vented a groan full and unmistakable, and
+blew upon a pair of burned hands.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+THE LOG SHANTY AGAIN
+
+
+"This fire has been the work of some incendiary--that's what I think!"
+was the opinion delivered later that night by the captain of the nearest
+fire-brigade, who, with his company, had been summoned by Leon's
+signaled message, passed on via telephone wires by the lighthouse men.
+
+"Of course, it may have been a case of accident or spontaneous
+combustion, but the former seems out of the question, seeing that the
+houses were empty, and the latter not probable," went on the grizzled
+chief. "Anyhow, I congratulate you on your boys, Mr. Scoutmaster! Under
+your leadership they certainly did good work in saving this whole summer
+colony."
+
+"So they did; I'm proud of them!" returned the scoutmaster impulsively,
+which made the three patrol leaders within hearing, Scout Warren of the
+Owls, Godey Peck of the Foxes, and Jesse Taber of the Seals, straighten
+their tired bodies, feeling repaid.
+
+"Well! I expect you'll see one or two officers landing upon these
+Sugarloaf Dunes to-morrow, to try and get at the cause of the fire,"
+said the chief again. "It started in that shed where, so far as we know,
+there was nothing inflammable."
+
+"I ought to tell you," Scoutmaster Estey looked very grave, "that two of
+my scouts saw a man entering the shed," pointing to what was now a mere
+smouldering heap of ashes, "just about an hour, or a little over, before
+the fire broke out. When they first caught sight of him he was on the
+piazza of the bungalow itself, and seemed trying to get into the house."
+
+"Ho! Ho! I thought so. This is a case for the district police, I guess!"
+muttered the grizzled fire-chief.
+
+That was the opinion also of the police representatives who landed upon
+the white dunes from a motor-boat early the next morning. And when the
+sharp questioning of one of the officers brought out the fact that the
+individual who had lurked about the scene of the fire was believed to be
+a youthful ne'er-do-weel, Dave Baldwin, with a prison record behind him,
+whose name was known to the two policemen, though his person was not,
+suspicion fastened upon that vagrant as possibly the malicious author
+of the fire.
+
+"That fellow first got into trouble through a morbid craving for
+excitement," said one of the officers. "The same craving _may_ have led
+him on from one thing to another until he hasn't stopped at
+arson--especially if he had a spiteful motive for it, which is likely
+with a tramp. That may have been his purpose in trying to enter the
+house."
+
+"I can scarcely imagine Dave's having become such an utter degenerate,"
+answered the scoutmaster sadly. "I went to school with him long ago. And
+Captain Andy Davis knew his father well; they were shipmates on more
+than one trawling trip to the Grand Banks. Captain Andy speaks of the
+elder David Baldwin as a brave man and a big fisherman. Even if the son
+did start this fire, it may have been accidental in some way."
+
+"Well! we must get our hands on him, anyhow," decided the officer. "I
+wonder if he's skulking round among the dunes still; that's not
+probable? I'd like to know whether any one of these observant boy scouts
+of yours saw a boat leave this shore since daybreak?"
+
+It transpired that Coombsie had: after a night of unprecedented
+excitement--like his tossing brother scouts who sought the shelter of
+their tents about one o'clock in the morning--he had been unable to
+sleep, had crept out of his tent at daybreak and climbed a white
+sand-hill, to watch the sun rise over the river.
+
+"I saw a rowboat shoot out of a little creek farther up the river, I
+should say about half a mile from the dunes," said Marcoo. "There was
+only one person in it; seemed to me he was acting rather queerly; he'd
+row for a while, then stand up in the stern and scull a bit, then row
+again."
+
+"Could you see for what point he was heading?"
+
+"For the salt-marshes high up on the other side of the river, I guess! I
+think he landed there."
+
+"Then, he's probably hiding in the woods beyond the marshes. We must
+search them. That French-Canadian, Toiney Leduc, who's camping with you,
+has worked as a lumberman in those woods; he knows them well, and is a
+good trailer. I'd like to have him for a guide this morning." Here the
+officer turned to the scoutmaster. "And if you have no objection I think
+it would be well that those two boys should come with us," he nodded
+toward Scouts Warren and Chase. "They can identify the man whom they saw
+trying to enter that bungalow last night."
+
+There is nothing at all inspiriting about a man-hunt; so Nixon and Leon
+decided when, within an hour, they landed from the police boat on the
+familiar salt-marshes high up the river, and silently took their way
+across them, in company with Toiney and the policemen, over the uplands
+into the woods.
+
+They had come upon the fugitive's boat, hidden among a clump of bushes
+near the river. Using that as a starting-point, Toiney followed Dave
+Baldwin's trail into the maze of woodland; though how he did so was to
+the boy scouts a problem, for to them it seemed blind work.
+
+But the guide in the tasseled cap, blue shirt, and heelless high boots,
+would stop now and again at a soft spot on the marshes or uplands, or
+when they came to a swampy patch in the woods; at such times he would
+generally drop on all fours with a muttered: "Ha! _V'là ses pis!_" in
+his queer patois. "Dere's heem step!" And anon: "Dere me fin his feets
+again!"
+
+When there was no footprint to guide him Toiney would stoop down and
+read the story of the dry pine-needles, just faintly disturbed by the
+toe of a rough boot which had kicked them aside a little in passing.
+
+Or he would carefully examine a broken twig, the wood of which, being
+whitish and not discolored, showed that it had been recently snapped by
+a tread heavier than that of a fox; and again they would hear him mutter
+in his quaint dialect: "_Tiens! le tzit ramille cassé_: de littal stick
+broke! I'll t'ink hees step jus' here--engh?"
+
+It was a lesson in trailing which the two boy scouts never forgot as
+they took their way through the thick woods, fairly well known to them
+now, past Varney's Paintpot, Rattlesnake Brook, and other points of
+interest.
+
+Ere they reached the Bear's Den, however, the trail which Toiney had
+been following seemed to turn off at an angle and then double backward
+through the woods, in an opposite direction to that in which they had
+been pursuing it.
+
+"Mebbe she's no' de same trail?" pondered the guide aloud. "Mebbe dere's
+oder man's feets, engh?"
+
+It was now that a sudden idea, a swift memory, struck Scout Warren.
+
+"Say! Starrie," he exclaimed in a low tone to his brother scout. "Do you
+remember our looking all over that loggers' camp last year, the shanty
+back there in the woods, with the rusty grindstone trough and mountain
+of sawdust beside it? We found some fresh tobacco ash on the table and
+in one of the bunks which showed that, though the shanty was deserted in
+summer, somebody was using it for a shelter at night. That somebody may
+have been Dave Baldwin."
+
+"Yes, they say he has spent his time--or most of it--loafing among the
+dunes or in the woods," returned Leon, well recalling the incident and
+how, too, he had scoffed at the boy scout for taking the trouble to read
+the sign story told by every article in and about the rough shanty,
+including the overturned trough.
+
+"Eh! what's that, boys?" asked one of the two policemen, catching part
+of the conversation.
+
+As in duty bound they told him; and the search party turned in the
+direction of the log shanty.
+
+As they surmised it was not empty. On the discolored mattress in the
+lower bunk left there by the lumbermen who once occupied it, was
+stretched the figure of a man, fast asleep. One foot emerging from a
+charred, torn trouser-leg which looked as if it had come into contact
+with fire, hung over the edge of the deal crib.
+
+When the party filed into the shanty the sleeper started up and rubbed
+his eyes. At sight of the two policemen his smudged face took on a
+pinched pallor.
+
+"I didn't do it on purpose!" he cried in the bewilderment of this sudden
+awakening, without time to collect his senses. "So help me! I never
+meant to set that shed on fire!"
+
+"You were seen hanging round there an hour before the blaze broke out,
+and trying to get into the house too," challenged the elder of the
+policemen.
+
+Dave Baldwin slipped from the bunk to the ground; he saw that his best
+course lay in making a clean breast of last night's proceedings.
+
+"So I was!" he said. "And these two fellows," he pointed to the boy
+scouts, "saw me up on the piazza of the house, trying a window. I was
+hungry; I'd had nothing to eat all day but the last leg of a woodchuck
+that I knocked on the head day before yesterday. I thought the summer
+people who had just gone away might have left some canned stuff or
+remnants o' food behind 'em. I didn't want to steal anything else, or to
+do mischief!" he went on with that same passionate frankness of a man
+abruptly startled out of sleep, while the policemen listened patiently.
+"I didn't, I tell ye! I'd been hangin' round those Sugarloaf Dunes for
+nigh on two weeks, watching the boys who were camping there, having a
+ripping good time--doing a lot o' stunts that I knew nothing
+about--wishing I'd had the chanst they have now!"
+
+"How came you to go into the shed that was burned down?" asked one of
+the officers.
+
+"I was hungry, as I tell you, an' I couldn't get into the house, so I
+thought I'd lie down under the nearest cover, that shed, go to sleep an'
+forget it. I guess I knocked the ashes out o' my pipe an' dozed. Smoke
+an' the smell o' wood burning woke me. I found one side o' the shed was
+on fire. Maybe, some one had left an oily rag, or one with turpentine on
+it, around, and the spark from my pipe caught it. I don't know! I tried
+to stamp out the fire--to beat it out with my hands!" He extended
+blistered palms and knuckles. "I've made a mess o' my life I know! But I
+ain't a crazy fire-bug!"
+
+"Why didn't you try and get help to fight it?"
+
+"I was too scared. I thought, likely as not, nobody would believe me,
+seeing I had a 'reformatory record,'" the youthful vagrant's face
+twitched. "I was afraid o' being 'sent up' again, so I hid among the
+dunes and crossed to the woods this morning."
+
+"Well, you can tell all that to the judge; you must come with me now,"
+said the older policeman inflexibly, not unkindly; he knew that men when
+suddenly aroused from sleep usually speak the truth; he was impressed by
+the argument of those blistered palms; on the other hand, the youthful
+vagrant's past record was very much against him.
+
+But those charred palms were evidence enough for Toiney; though they
+might leave the officers of the law unconvinced.
+
+"Ha! _courage_, Dave," he cried, feeling an emotion of pity mingle with
+the contempt which he, honest Antoine, had felt for the _vaurien_ who
+had caused his old mother's heart to burst. "_Bon courage_, Dave! I'll
+no t'ink you do dat, for sure, me. Mebbe littal fire fly f'om you' pipe.
+I'll no t'ink you do dat for de fun!"
+
+"We don't think you did it on purpose, Dave," struck in the two boy
+scouts, seconding their guide.
+
+Nevertheless, Dave Baldwin passed that night in a prison cell and
+appeared before the judge next morning with the certainty confronting
+him that he would be remanded to appear before the higher court on the
+grave charge of being an incendiary.
+
+And it seemed improbable that bail would be offered for the prisoner, so
+that he would be allowed out of jail in the mean time.
+
+Yet bail was forthcoming. A massive, weatherbeaten figure, well known in
+this part of Essex County, stood up in court declaring that he was ready
+and willing to sign the prisoner's bail bonds. It was Captain Andy
+Davis.
+
+And when all formalities had been gone through, when the prisoner was
+liberated until such time as his case should come up for trial, Captain
+Andy took him in tow.
+
+"You come along home with me, Dave!" he commanded. "I'm going to put it
+up to you straight whether you want to live a man's life, or not."
+
+And so he did that evening.
+
+"I've been wanting to get hold of you for some time, Dave Baldwin," said
+the sea-captain. "Your father an' I were shipmates together on more'n
+one trip. He was a white man, brave an' hard-working; it's hard for me
+to believe that there isn't some o' the same stuff in his son."
+
+The youthful ne'er-do-weel was silent. Captain Andy slowly went on:--
+
+"As for the matter of this fire, I don't believe you started it on
+purpose. I doubt if the policemen who arrested you do! It's your past
+record that's against you. Now! if I see the district attorney, Dave
+Baldwin," Captain Andy's eyes narrowed meditatively under the heavy
+lids, "and succeed in getting this case against you _nol prossed_--I
+guess that's the term the lawyer used--it means squashed, anyhow, do you
+want to start over again an' head for some port worth while?"
+
+"Nobody would give me the chance," muttered the younger man huskily.
+
+"I will. I've bought a piece of land over there on the edge of the
+woods, lad; it ain't more'n half cleared yet. I'm intending to start a
+farm. But I don't know much about farming; that's the truth!" The grand
+old Viking looked almost pathetically helpless. "But you've worked on a
+farm, Dave, when you were a boy and since: if you want to take hold an'
+help me--if you want to stick to work an' make good--this is your
+chance!"
+
+An inarticulate sound from the _vaurien_; it sounded like a sob bitten
+in two by clenched teeth!
+
+"The two boys who were with the officers who arrested you told me that
+you declared you'd been hangin' round the Sugarloaf Dunes lately,
+watching those scouts at their signaling stunts an' the like, an'
+wishing that you'd had the chance they have now, when you were a boy.
+Well! _theirs_ is a splendid chance--better than boys ever had before,
+it seems to me--of joining the learning o' useful things with fun."
+Captain Andy planted an elbow emphatically upon a little table near him.
+"Now! Dave, you don't want to let those boy scouts be the ones to do the
+good turns for your old mother that you should do? If you ain't set on
+breaking her heart altogether--if you want to be a decent citizen of the
+country that raises boys like these scouts--if you want to see your own
+sons scouts some day--well, give us your fin, lad!"
+
+The captain's voice dropped upon the last words, the semi-comical
+wind-up of a peroration broken and blustering in its earnestness.
+
+There was a repetition of the hysterical sound in Dave Baldwin's throat
+which failed to pass his gritting teeth. He did not extend his hand at
+Captain Andy's invitation. But his shoulders heaved as he turned his
+head away; and the would-be benefactor was satisfied.
+
+"And so Captain Andy is going to stand back of Dave Baldwin and give him
+another chance to make good in life!" said the Exmouth doctor, member of
+the Local Council of Boy Scouts, when he heard what had come of the
+vagrant's arrest. "That's like Andy! And I don't think he'll have much
+difficulty with the district attorney; nobody really believes that
+Baldwin started that fire maliciously, and the district attorney will be
+very ready to listen to anything Captain Andy has to say!"
+
+Here the doctor's eye watered. He was recalling an incident which had
+occurred some years before at sea, when the son of that district
+attorney, who did not then occupy his present distinguished position,
+and the doctor's own son, with one or two other young men of Dave
+Baldwin's age, had been wrecked while yachting upon certain ragged rocks
+of Newfoundland, owing to their foolhardiness in putting to sea when a
+storm was brewing.
+
+At daybreak upon an October morning their buffeted figures were sighted,
+clinging to the rocks, by the lookout on the able fishing vessel,
+Constellation, of which Captain Andrew Davis was then in command.
+
+The furious gale had subsided. But as Captain Andy knew, the greatest
+danger to his own vessel lay in the sullen and terrible swell of the
+"old sea" which it had stirred up.
+
+Nevertheless, the Constellation bore down upon the shipwrecked men,
+getting as near to them as possible, without being swept on to the rocks
+herself.
+
+Then Captain Andy gave the order to put over a dory, stepped into it,
+and called for a volunteer. Twice, to and fro through the towering swell
+of the old sea, went that gallant little dory. She was smashed to
+kindling wood on her second trip, but not before the men in her could be
+hauled aboard the Constellation with ropes--not before every member of
+the yachting party was saved!
+
+"And I guess if Captain Andy wants a chance to haul Dave Baldwin off the
+rocks where the old sea stirred up by the gusts of his own waywardness
+and wrongdoing have stranded him, the district attorney won't stand in
+the way!" said the doctor to himself.
+
+His surmise proved correct.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was just one month after the fire upon the dunes that the three
+patrols of boy scouts, Owls, Foxes, and Seals, assembled at a point of
+rendezvous upon the outskirts of the town, bound off upon a long
+Saturday hike through the October woods.
+
+But some hearts in the troop were at bottom heavy to-day, though on the
+surface they rose above the feeling.
+
+For it was the last woodland hike, for the present, that Scout Warren of
+the Owls would take with his patrol. The return of his parents from
+Europe was expected during the coming week; and he--now with two white
+stripes upon his arm, signifying his two years of service in the Boy
+Scouts of America, wearing also the patrol leader's bars and first-class
+scout badge--would rejoin his Peewit Patrol in Philadelphia.
+
+However, his comrades' regrets were softened by Nixon's promise that he
+would frequently visit the Massachusetts troop with which he had spent
+an exciting year, and which, unintentionally, he had been instrumental
+in forming.
+
+And on this brilliant October Saturday Assistant Scoutmaster Toiney
+Leduc, perceiving that the coming parting was casting a faint shadow
+before, exerted himself to banish that cloudlet as the troop started on
+its hike.
+
+"_Houp-e-là!_ We arre de boy! We arre de stuff! We arre de bes' scout
+ev'ry tam'!" he shouted with an _esprit de corps_ which found its echo
+in one breast at least--that of the terrier, Blink, who to-day capered
+with the troop as its mascot. "We arre de bes' scout; _n'est-ce pas_,
+mo' smarty?" And Toiney embraced Harold, marching at his side--Harold,
+whose lips turned up to-day and every day now in the scout's smile, for
+since the night of the dune fire had not each of his comrades and the
+scoutmasters too, kept impressing on him that he had "behaved like a
+little man and a good scout" at duty's call!
+
+There were individuals among the onlookers, too, watching the three
+patrols march out of the town that morning, who shared Toiney's
+primitive conceit that they were the "best scouts"; or at least fairly
+on the way to being a model troop.
+
+Little Jack Baldwin, gazing at his rescuers, Scouts Warren and Chase,
+Marcoo and Colin Estey, marching two and two at the head of the leading
+patrol, clapped his hands and almost burst his heart in wishing that he
+could be twelve years old to-morrow so that he might enlist as a
+tenderfoot scout.
+
+Whereupon his old grandmother smilingly bade him "take patience," for
+the two years which now separated him from his heart's desire would not
+be long in passing.
+
+And the boy scouts, as they raised their broad-brimmed hats to old Ma'am
+Baldwin, saw a happier look upon her face than it had ever worn before,
+to their knowledge.
+
+Farther on they came upon the explanation of this! They were taking a
+different route to-day from that which they usually followed in entering
+the woods. About a mile from the town they struck a partial clearing,
+where the land, not yet entirely relieved of timber, was evidently being
+gradually converted into a farm.
+
+As the scouts approached they heard the ringing strokes of a woodsman's
+axe, and presently came upon a perspiring young man, putting all his
+strength into felling a stubborn oak-tree.
+
+"Hullo, Dave; how goes it?" cried the scoutmaster, halting with his
+troop.
+
+"Fine!" came back the panting answer from the individual engaged in this
+scouting or pioneering work, who was the former _vaurien_, Dave Baldwin.
+
+"Find this better than loafing about the dunes, eh?"
+
+"Well! I should say so," came the answer with an honest smile.
+
+But the boy scouts were hardly noticing Dave Baldwin: Owls, Foxes, and
+Seals, they were gazing in transfixed amusement at their hero-in-chief,
+Captain Andy, owner of this half-cleared land.
+
+He, who in his seagoing days had been known by such flattering titles as
+the Grand Bank Horse, the Ocean Patrol, and the like, was seated in the
+midst of a half-acre of pasture land, holding on like grim death to one
+end of a twenty-foot rope coiled round his hand, the hemp's other
+extremity being hitched to the leg of a very lively red cow which
+presently dragged him the entire length of the pasture and then across
+and across it, in obedience to her feminine whims.
+
+"She'll be the death o' me, boys!" he shouted comically to the convulsed
+scouts. "Great Neptune! I'd rather take a vessel through the breakers on
+Sable Island Bar than to be tied to her heels for one day."
+
+"For pity's sake! Hold on to her, Cap!" Dave Baldwin paused in his
+energetic tree-felling. "Yesterday, she got into that little plowed
+field that I'd just seeded down with winter rye, and thrashed about
+there!"
+
+"Ha! I'll t'ink you go for be good _habitant_--farmer--Dave," broke in
+Toiney suddenly and genially. "I'll t'ink you get dere after de w'ile,
+engh?"
+
+It was plain to each member of the troop that so far as Dave himself was
+concerned he was already "getting there,"--reaching the goal of an
+honest, industrious manhood.
+
+The triple responsibility of starting a farm, directing the energies of
+his benefactor, and combating the cow, was rapidly making a man of him.
+
+They heard the virile blows of his axe against the tree-trunk as they
+marched on their woodland way. And their song floated back to him:--
+
+  "At duty's call, with a smile for all,
+    The Scout will do his part!"
+
+Dave Baldwin paused for a minute to listen; then, as he swung his axe in
+a tremendous, final blow against the tottering oak, he too broke
+triumphantly into the refrain:--
+
+  "And we'll shout, shout, shout,
+  For the Scout, Scout, Scout,
+    For the Scouts of the U.S.A!"
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Scout of To-day, by Isabel Hornibrook
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A SCOUT OF TO-DAY ***
+
+***** This file should be named 38540-8.txt or 38540-8.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/3/8/5/4/38540/
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Paul Fernandez and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.