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.
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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 brightWe 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 twowords 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 whichhad 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 touchthem, 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 shadowhe 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 menof 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—oneof 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 rearedfor 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!Lethim 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 aboutthe 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 makesthatso 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! itdoeslook tome—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 thebugle: give it to him literally and figuratively: you’ll need a bugler inyour 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, andMark 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 therebywaking 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 didheget 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 QueroBank, 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 theremightbehope 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, andthe 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 whichearlier 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 areyou?” 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 seehim.” 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 apoltron, 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’sgo 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,”—hisshrugging shoulders pumped up a huge sigh as he turned toward Harold,—”mis-éri-corde!he’llno marche aséclaireur—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 wordéclaireur, 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 anéclaireurin 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 trueéclaireur: 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 tomefor 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 patrolleader 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—mightbe 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 moreefficient 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 saidup, 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 abona-fidelesson, 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 punkywood, 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, thepoltronaddressed, in a nervous squawk, not the absorbed scouts, but Toiney, his friend and protector.
“I can t-tie it better ’nhedoes! 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 beathimevery 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 breezeskipped 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, theéclaireurs, 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 atenderfoot,” 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, hewould 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:—