“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 somebodydoesoccupy 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 woodentrough 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’sDen, 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 stayhereforever.” 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, inconsistentlyfinding 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 spreadingnut-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! wemustget 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 fromthe 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—rearedon 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 thatdandy 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 thecoats 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 arelivespots 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.
“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 wayI’llland 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 onterra 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 thehero 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, knottedround 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 mightallhave stuck high and dry, in theriver 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 thedoor, 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 couldsteer 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 oppositionmovement. 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 hungrybefore 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 ofnotching 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-oneyears 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 yougo 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 Ihaven’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.”
“Blamedrubbish!” Starrie Chase snorted. “As if sucking a stone like a baby would do you any good!”
“Everything is ‘rubbish,’ except what you know yourself; andthat’snext 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 goesAt 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 tallstately 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 asquirrel 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 determinedthat 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 wasnow 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, asat 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 purplefidelity 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 alongwhich 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, andhisface 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 badresults 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’vegotto 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’sa 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 chunkof 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 thetinder; 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 bentbow 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 rockbehind 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 whichfilled 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 narratordwelt 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!”