“On my honor I will do my best, to do my dutyto God and my country, and to obey the scout law:To help other people at all times, to keep myself physicallystrong, mentally awake and morally straight.”
Captain Andy cleared his throat as he listened, and the doctor wiped his glasses.
Then, as corporal or second in command of the new patrol, Leon stood holding aloft the brand-new flag of that patrol—a great, horned hoot-owl, the Grand Duke of the neighboring woods, embroidered on a blue ground by Colin’s mother—while his brother recruits, having each passed the tenderfoot test, took the oath and were enrolled as duly fledged Owls.
Harold, the timid fledgling, came last. Supported on either side by his sponsors, Nixon and Coombsie, he distinguished himself by tying the four knots which formed part of the test with swiftness and skill, and by “muddling” throughthe rest of the examination, consent having been obtained from headquarters that some leniency in the matter of answers might be shown to this handicapped boy who had never been to school and for whom—as for Leon—the Boy Scout Movement might prove The Thing.
Captain Andy declared it to be “The Thing” when later that night he was called upon for a speech.
“Boys!” he said, heaving his massive figure erect, the sky-blue rift of his eye twinkling under the cloudy lid. “Boys! it’s an able craft, this new movement, if you’ll only buckle to an’ work it well. And it’s a hearty motto you have:Be Prepared. Prepared to help yourselves, so that you can stand by to help others! Lads,”—the voice of the old sea-fighter boomed blustrously,—”there comes a time to ’most every one who isn’t a poor-hearted lubber, when he wants to help somebody else more than he ever wanted to help himself; and if he hasn’t made the most o’ what powers he has, why! when that Big Minute comes he won’t be ‘in it.’ Belay that! Make it fast here!” tapping his forehead. “Live up to your able motto an’ pretty soon you’ll find yourselves going ahead under all the sail you can carry; an’ you won’t be trying to get a corneron the breeze either, or to blanket any other fellow’s sails! Rather, you’ll show him the road an’ give him a tow when he needs it. God bless you! So long!”
And when the wisdom of the grand old sea-scout had been cheered to the echo, the eight members of the new patrol, rallying round their Owl flag, broke into the first verse of their song, a part of which Nixon had sung to them by the camp-fire in the woods:—
“No loyal Scout gives place to doubt,But action quick he shows!Like a knight of old he is brave and bold,And chivalry he knows.Then hurrah for the brave, hurrah for the good!Hurrah for the pure in heart!At duty’s call, with a smile for all,The Scout will do his part!”
“Sing! Harold. Do your part, and sing!” urged Nixon, the patrol leader. “Oh, go on: that isn’t a scout’s mouth, Harold!” looking at the weak brother’s fear-tightened lips. “A scout’s mouth turns up at the corners. Smile, Harold! Smile and sing.”
A minute later Scout Warren’s own features were wreathed by a smile, humorous, moved, glad—more glad than any which had illumined his face hitherto—for by his side the boy whohad once feared the stars as they stole out above the clearing, was singing after him:—
“Hurrah for the sun, hurrah for the storm!Hurrah for the stars above!”
“He’s going to make a good scout, some time; don’t you think so, Cap?” Nixon, glancing down at the timid “poltron,” nudged Captain Andy’s arm.
“Aye, aye! lad, I guess he will, when you’ve put some more backbone into him,” came the optimistic answer.
But Captain Andy’s gaze did not linger on Harold. The keen search-light of his glance was trained upon Leon—upon Corporal Chase, who, judging by the new and lively purpose in his face, had to-night, indeed, through the channel of his scout oath, “deepened the water in which he floated,” as he stood holding high the royal-blue banner of the Owl Patrol.
CHAPTER IX
GODEY PECK
That stirring initiation meeting was the forerunner of others thereafter held weekly in the small town hall, when the members of the new patrol had their bodies developed, stiffened into manly erectness by a good drill and various rousing indoor games, while their minds were expanded by the practice of various new and exciting “stunts” as Leon called them.
To Starrie Chase the most interesting of these in which he soon became surprisingly proficient was the flag-signaling, transmitting or receiving a message to or from a brother scout stationed at the other end of the long hall. Spelling out such a message swiftly, letter by letter, with the two little red and white flags, according to either the semaphore or American Morse code, had a splendid fascination for him.
More exciting still was it when on some dark fall evening, at the end of the Saturday afternoon hike, he gathered with his brother scouts around a blazing camp-fire on the uplands, withthe pale gray ribbon of the tidal river dimly unrolling itself beyond the low-lying marshes, and the scoutmaster would suggest that he should try some outdoor signaling to another scout stationed on a distant hillock, using torches, two red brands from the fire, one in each hand, instead of the regulation flags.
“Oh! but this is in-ter-est-ing; makes a fellow feel as if he were ‘going some’!” Starrie would declare to himself in an ecstatic drawl, as, first his right arm, then his left, manipulated the rosy firebrands, while his keen eyes could barely discern the black silhouette of his brother Owl’s figure on its distant mound, as he spelled out a brief message.
It certainly was “going.” There was progress here: exciting progress. Growth which made the excitement squeezed out of his former pranks seem tame and childish!
And more than one resident of the neighborhood—including Dave Baldwin’s old mother, who lived alone in her shallow, baldfaced house, almost denuded of paint by the elements, at a bleak point where upland and salt-marsh met—drew a free breath and thanked God for a respite.
In addition to the indoor signaling there weretalks on first-aid to the injured by the busy doctor and on seamanship by Captain Andy whose big voice had a storm-burr clinging to it in which, at exciting moments, an intent ear could almost catch the echo of the gale’s roar, of raging seas, shrieking rigging and slatting sails—all the wild orchestra of the storm-king.
Then there were the Saturday hikes, and once in a while the week-end camping-out in the woods from Friday evening to Saturday night, whenever Scoutmaster Estey, Colin’s much-admired brother, could obtain a forenoon holiday, in addition to the customary Saturday afternoon, from the office where he worked as naval architect, or expert designer of fishing-vessels, in connection with a shipbuilding yard on the river.
A notable figure in relation to the scouts’ outdoor life was Toiney Leduc, the French-Canadian farmhand. As time progressed he became an inseparable part of it.
For Harold, the abnormally timid boy, for whom it was hoped that the new movement would do much, was inseparable from him: Harold would not come to scout meeting or march on hike without Toiney, although with his brother Owls and their scoutmaster he was alreadybeginning to emerge from his shadowy fears like a beetle from the grub.
In time he would no doubt fully realize what impotent bugaboos were his vague terrors, and would be reconciled to the world at large through the medium of the Owl Patrol.
Already there was such an improvement in his health and spirits that his grandfather raised Toiney’s wages on condition that he would consent to work all the year round on the little farm-clearing, and no longer spend his winters at some loggers’ camp, tree-felling, in the woods.
Moreover Old Man Greer, to whom the abnormal condition of his only grandson had been a sore trial, was willing and glad to spare Toiney’s services as woodland guide to the boy scouts, including Harold, whenever they were required for a week-end excursion.
And so much did those eight scouts learn from this primitive woodsman, who could not command enough English to say “Boo!” straight, according to Leon, but who understood the language and track-prints of bird and animal as if they the shy ones had taught him, that by general petition of all members of the new patrol, Toiney was elected assistant scoutmaster, and dulyreceived his emblazoned certificate from headquarters.
His presence and songs lent a primitive charm to many a camp-fire gathering; no normal boy could feel temporarily dull in his company, for Toiney, besides being an expert in woodlore and a good trailer, was essentially abon enfant, or jolly child, at heart, meeting every experience with the blithe faith that, somehow—somewhere—he would come out on top.
In the woods his songs were generally inaudible, locked up in his heart or throat, though occasionally they escaped to his lips which would move silently in a preliminary canter, then part to emit a gay bar or two, a joyous “Tra la la ... la!” or:—
“Rond’, Rond’, Rond’, peti’ pie pon’ ton’!”
But on these occasions the strain rarely soared above a whisper and was promptly suspended lest it should startle any wild thing within hearing, while he led his boy scouts through the denser woods with the skill and stealth of the Indian whose wary blood mingled very slightly with the current in his veins.
Those were mighty moments for the young scoutmaster and members of the Owl Patrolwhen they “lay low,” crouching breathlessly in some thicket, with Toiney, prostrate on his face and hands, a little in advance of them, his black eyes intent upon a fox-path, a mere shadow-track such as four of their number had seen on that first memorable day in the woods, where only the lightly trampled weeds or an occasional depression in some little bush told their assistant scoutmaster, whom nothing escaped, that some airy-footed animal was in the habit of passing there from burrow to hunting-ground.
The waiting was sometimes long and the enforced silence irksome to youthful scouts; there were times when it oppressed one or other of the boys like a steel cage against the bars of which his voice, like a rebellious bird, dashed itself in some irrepressible sound, a pinched-off cry or smothered whistle.
But that always drew a backward hiss of “Mak’ you s-silent! W’at for you spik lak dat?” from the advance scout, Toiney, or a clipped, sarcastic “T’as pas besointo shoutee—engh?”
And the needless semi-shout was repressed next time by the reprimanded one, many a lesson in self-control being learned thereby.
More than once patience was at last rewarded by a glimpse of the trotting traveler, the sly red fox, maker of that shadow-path: of its sandy coat, white throat, large black ears, and the bushy, reddish tail, with milk-white tip, the “flag” as woodsmen call it.
Instinctively on such occasions Leon at first yearned for his gun, his old “fuzzee,” with which he had worked havoc—often purposeless and excessive—among shore birds, and from which he had to part when he enlisted in the Boy Scouts of America, and adopted principles tending toward the conservation of all wild life rather than to destruction.
Gradually, however, Starrie Chase, like his brother scouts, came under the glamour of this peaceful trailing. He began to discover a subtler excitement, more spicy fun—the spicier for Toiney’s presence—in the brief contemplation of that dog-fox at home, trotting along, unmolested, to his hunting-ground, than in past fevered glimpses of him when all interest in his wiles and habits was merged into greed for his skin and tail.
Many were the opportunities, too, for a glimpse at the white flag of the shy deer as it bounded off into some deeper woodland glade, and for being thrilled by the swift drumming of thepartridge’s wings when it rose from its dusting-place on the ground or on some old log whose brown, flaky wood could be reduced to powder; or from feasting on the brilliant and lowly partridge-berries which, nestling amid their evergreen leaves, challenged November’s sereness.
Each woodland hike brought its own revelation—its special discovery—insignificant, perhaps—but which thereafter stood out as a beauty spot upon the face of the day.
The hikes were generally conducted after this manner: seven of the Owls with their tall scoutmaster would leave the town bright and early on a Saturday morning, a goodly spectacle in their khaki uniforms, and, staff in hand, take their way through the woods to the little farm-clearing where they were reinforced by the assistant scoutmaster in his rough garb—Toiney would not don the scout uniform—and by Harold, the still weak brother.
Their coming was generally heralded by modified shouting. And the impulsive Toiney would suspend some farm task and stand erect with an explosive “Houp-là!” tickling his throat, to witness that most exhilarating of present-day sights, a party of boy scouts emerging from the woods into a clearing, with Mother Nature in the guiseof the early sunshine rushing, open-armed, to meet them, as if welcoming her stray children back to her heart.
Then Toiney, as forest guide, would assume the leadership of the party, and not only was his thorough acquaintance with “de bird en de littal wil’ an-ni-mal” valuable; but his fund of knowledge about “heem beeg tree,” and the uses to which the different kinds of wood could be put, seemed broad and unfailing, too.
The most exciting discovery of that season to the boys was when he pointed out to them one day the small hole or den amid some rocky ledges near Big Swamp where the Mother Coon—as sometimes happens, though she generally prefers a hollow tree—had brought forth her intrepid offspring; both the one which had raided Toiney’s hencoop, and Raccoon Junior who had come to a warlike issue with the crows.
Toiney, as he explained, had investigated that deep hole amid the ledges when the woods were green with spring, and had discovered some wild animal which by its size and general outline he knew to be a coon, crouching at the inner end of it, with her young “littal as small cat.” He had beaten a hasty retreat, not willing to provoke a possible attack from the motherrendered bold by maternity, or to disturb the infant family.
He was radiant at finding the coon’s rocky home again, though tenantless, now.
“Ha! I’ll know we fin’ heem den”; he beamed upon his comrades with primitive conceit. “We arre de boy—engh? We arre de bes’ scout ev’ry tam!”
And that was the aim of each member of the Owl Patrol, with the exception, perhaps, of Harold, not indeed to be the “best scout,” but to figure as the equal in scoutcraft of any lad of his age and a corresponding period of service, in the United States. To this end he drilled, explored and studied, somewhat to the mystification of boys who still held aloof from the scout movement!
“Where are ye off to, Starrie?” inquired Godey Peck, a youth of this type, one fair November afternoon, intercepting Leon about an hour after school had closed. “Don’t you want to come along with me? I’m going down to Stanway’s shipyard to have a look at the new vessel that they’re going to launch at daybreak to-morrow. She’s all wedged up on the ways, ready to go. Say!” Godey edged slyly nearer to Leon, “us boys—Choc Latour, Benjie Lane an’ me—have hit on a plan for being launchedin her. You know they won’t allow boys to be aboard, if they know it, when she shoots off the launching ways. But those ship carpenters’ll have to rise bright and early if they want to get ahead of us! See?”
Godey laid a forefinger against the left side of his nose, to emphasize a high opinion of his own subtlety.
“How are you going to work it?” Leon asked briefly.
“Why! there’s a vessel ’most built on the stocks right ’longside the finished hull. Us boys are going to wake very early, trot down to the shipyard before any of the workmen are around; then we’ll shin up the staging an’ over the half-built vessel right onto the white deck o’ the new one that’s waiting to be launched. ’Twill be easy to drop below into the cabin an’ hide under the bunks until the time comes for launching her. When we hear ’em knocking out the last block from under her keel—when she’s just beginning to crawl—then we’ll pop up an’ be on deck when she’s launched; see?”
“Ho! So you’re going to do the stowaway act, eh?” Starrie Chase, with that characteristic snap of his brown eyes, seemed to be taking a mental photograph of the plan.
“Only for an hour or two. You want to be in this too; don’t you, Starrie?”
Leon was silent, considering. The underhand scheme ran counter to the aboveboard principles of the scout law which he had sworn to obey; of that he felt sure. “On my honor I will do my best ... to keep myself morally straight!” Voluntarily and enthusiastically he had taken the chivalrous oath, and he was “too much of a fellow” to go back on it deliberately.
“No! I don’t want to play stowaway,” he answered after a minute. “It’s a crazy plan anyhow! Give it up, Gode! Likely enough you’ll scratch up the paint of the new cabin with your boots, skulking there all three of you—then there’ll be a big row; and ’twould seem a pity, too, after all the months it has taken to build an’ paint that dandy new hull.”
Such a view would scarcely have presented itself to Leon two months ago; he certainly was “deepening the water” in which he floated.
“Well, let’s pop down to the shipyard anyhow, an’ see her!” urged Godey, hoping that a contemplation of the new vessel, airily wedged high on the launching ways, with her bridal deck white as a hound’s tooth, would weaken the other’s resolution.
“No, I’ll be down there to-morrow morning, on the river-slip, to see her go. But I want to do something else this afternoon. I’m going home to study.”
“What?”
“Flag-signaling in the Boy Scout Handbook. I can send a message by semaphore now, twenty letters per minute; I must get it down to sixteen before I can pass the examination for first-class scout!” Starrie threw this out impetuously, his face glowing. “We’re going to have an outdoor test in some other things this evening—if I pass it I’ll be a second-class scout. I don’t want to be a tenderfoot for ever! Say! but the signaling gets me; it’s so interesting: I’m beginning to study the Morse code now.”
“Pshaw! You boy scouts jus’ make me tired.” Godey leaned against the parapet of the broad bridge above the tidal river whereon the boys stood, as if the contemplation of so much energy ambitiously directed was too much for him. “Here comes another of your kind now!”
He pointed to Colin Estey who came swinging along out of the distance, his quick springy step and upright carriage doing credit to the scouts’ drill.
Colin halted ere crossing the bridge to hail astreet-car for an old gentleman who was making futile attempts to stop it, and then courteously helped him to the platform.
Godey shook his head over the action. “Cock-a-doodle-doo!” he crowed scornfully. “Ain’t we acting hifalutin?”
Yet there was nothing at all bombastic about the simple good turn or in Colin’s bright face as he joined the other scout upon the bridge and marched off homeward with him, their rhythmic step and erect carriage attracting the attention of more than one adult pedestrian.
Godey lolled on the parapet, looking after them, racking his brain for some derisive epithet to hurl at their backs; he longed to shout, “Sissies!” and “Spongecakes!” But such belittling terms clearly didn’t apply.
The only mocking shaft in his quiver that would come anywhere near hitting the mark of those well-drilled backs—straight as a rod—was one which even he felt to be feeble:—
“Oh! you Tin Scouts,” he shouted maliciously. “Tin Soldiers!Tin Scouts!” sustaining the cry until the two figures disappeared from view in the direction of the Chase homestead.
CHAPTER X
THE BALDFACED HOUSE
But Leon did not study signaling and the Morse alphabet that afternoon. He was presently dispatched by his father, who owned a pleasant home on the outskirts of the town, on an errand to a farm some two miles distant on the uplands that skirted the woods.
The afternoon had all the spicy beauty of early November, with a slight frost in the air. The fresh breeze laughed like a tomboy as it romped over the salt-marshes. Each eddying dimple in the tidal river shone like a star sapphire, while the broad, brackish channel wound in and out between the marshes with as many wriggles as a lively trout.
“Those little creeks look like runaways,” thought Leon as he paused upon the uplands and beamed down upon the wide panorama of golden marsh-land and winding water. “They’re for all the world like schoolboys that have cut school, giggling an’ running to hide!” His eye dreamily followed the course of many a truantcreek that half-turned its head, looking under the tickling sunbeams as if it were glancing back over its shoulder, while it burrowed into the marshes vainly trying to hide where the relentless schoolmaster, called, for want of a better name, Solar Attraction, might not find it and compel its return to the ocean.
“And the Sugarloaf Sand-Dunes; don’t they look fine?” reflected the boy scout further, his eye traveling off downstream to where the curving tidal channel broadened into pearly plains of water, bounded at one distant point, near the juncture of river and sea, by a dazzlingly white beach.
There the fine colorless sand, which when viewed closely had very much the hue of skim milk, the white being shot with a faint gray-blue tinge, had been piled by the winds of ages into tall sand-hills, into pyramids and columns: one dazzling pillar, in especial, being named the Sugarloaf from its crystalline whiteness, had given its name to the whole expanse of dune and beach.
The tall Sugarloaf gleamed in the distance now like a snowy lighthouse whose lamps are sleeping, presiding over the mouth of the tidal river; its brother sand-hills capped by vegetationmight have been the pure bright cliffs of some fairy shore.
The boy scout stood for many minutes upon the uplands, gazing afar, his mouth open as if he were physically drinking in that distant beauty.
“Gee whiz! this is gr-reat; isn’t it, Blinkie?” he murmured to the squatting dog by his side. “I never before saw that old Sugarloaf look as it does to-day; did you, Mr. Dog?”
It had appeared just as radiantly beautiful, off and on, during all the seasons of Leon’s life. But his powers of observation had not been trained as was the case of late. In the years prior to his becoming a scout, when his inseparable companion on uplands and marsh had been a shotgun—from the time he was permitted free use of one—and the all-absorbing idea in his mind how to contrive a successful shot at shore bird or animal, he had gone about “lak wit’ eye shut,” so far as many things just now beginning to fill him with a wonderful, speechless gladness were concerned.
“Well, we’re not heading for that farmhouse, are we, pup?” he said at length, turning from the contemplation of runaway creeks and radiant dunes to the completion of his father’s errand.
But the sunlit beauty at which he had beengazing coursed through his every vein, finding vent in a curly, ecstatic whistle that ascended in spirals until it touched the high keynote of exultation and there hung suspended; while the rest of the trip to that upland farmhouse was accomplished in a series of broad jumps, the terrier being as wild with delight as his master.
The errand performed and the boy scout having put in half an hour condescendingly amusing the farmer’s two small children, while Blink exchanged compliments with his kind, master and dog started upon the return walk.
“Oh! it’s early yet; don’t you want to come a little way into the woods, doggie?” said Leon, doubling backward after they had taken a few steps. “We haven’t had many runs together lately. Your nose has been out of joint; poor pup!” stooping to caress the terrier. “Toiney says we can’t take you on our scout hikes, because you’d scare every ‘littal wil’ an-ni-mal’ within a mile. You would, too; wouldn’t you? But there’s an outdoor scout meeting to-night to be held over in Sparrow Hollow, each fellow lighting his own camp-fire—using not more than two matches—and cooking his own supper. And you may come. Yes, I said you might come!” as the dog, gyrating like a feather,seized his coat-sleeve between strong white teeth in his eagerness not to be excluded from any more fun that might be afoot.
They were soon on the sere skirts of the woodland, prancing through leafy drifts.
“We can’t go far,” said Leon. “We must get back to the town and buy our half-pound of beefsteak that we’re to cook without the use of any ordinary cooking-utensil, and so pass one of the tests for becoming a second-class scout. I’ll divvy up with you, pup! But whew! isn’t this just fine?... The woods in November can put it all over the September woods to my mind.”
He added the last words to himself. There was something about the rugged strength of the stripped trees, with the stealing blue haze of evening softening their bareness, about the evergreen grandeur of pine and hemlock lording it over their robbed brethren, about the drab, parchment-like leaves clinging with eerie murmur to the oak-tree, and the ruddy twigs of bare berry-bushes, that appealed to the element of rugged daring in the boy himself.
He could not so soon break away from the woods as he had intended, though he only explored their outskirts.
Dusk was already falling when he found himselfon the open uplands again, bound back toward the distant town.
“The scouts are to start for Sparrow Hollow at six o’clock: we must hustle, if we want to start with them,” he said to the dog. “The only way we can make it is by taking a short cut across the marshes and wading through the river; that would be a quick way of reaching the town and the butcher’s shop, to buy our beefsteak,” muttering rapidly, partly to himself, partly to his impatient companion. “The tide is full out now, the water will be shallow; I can take off my shoes and stockings and carry you, pup. Who cares if it’s cold?”
The boy scout, with an anticipatory glow all over him, felt impervious to any extreme of temperature as he bounded down the uplands, with the breeze—the freshening, freakish breeze—driving across the salt-marshes directly in his face, racing through every vein in him, stirring up a whirligig within, presently bringing waste things to the top even as it stirred up dust and refuse in the roadway.
“Hullo! there’s the oldbaldfaced house,” he cried suddenly to the dog. “Here we are on our old stamping-ground, Blink! Wonder if ‘Mom Baldwin’ is doing her witch stunts still?We haven’t said ‘Howdy!’ to her for a long time; have we, pup?”
Slackening pace, for that fickle breeze was blowing away many things that he ought to have remembered, among them the lateness of the hour, he turned aside a few steps to where a lonely old house stood at the foot of the slope as the uplands melted into the salt-marshes.
It was a shallow shell of a dwelling—all face and no rear apparently—and that face was bald, almost stripped of paint by the elements. Just as storm-stripped was the heart of the one old woman who lived in it, and whom Leon had been wont to call a “solitary crank!”
To the neighborhood generally she was known as Ma’am Baldwin, mother of the young scape-grace, Dave Baldwin, who had so troubled the peaceful town by his pranks that he had finally been shut up in a reformatory, and who was now, a year after his release, a useless vagrant, spending, according to report, most of his time loafing between the white sand-dunes on one side of the river and the woods on the other—incidentally breaking his mother’s heart at the same time.
She had lived here in the old baldfaced house, with him, her youngest boy, the child of her middleage, until his wild doings brought the law’s hand upon him. After his imprisonment shame prevented her leaving the isolated dwelling and going to live with her married daughter near the town, though that daughter’s one child, her little grandson Jack, possessed all the love-spots still green in her withered heart.
In her humiliation and loneliness “Mom Baldwin,” as the boys called her, had become rather eccentric.
She had more than once been seen by those town boys—Leon and his gang—stationed behind the smeared glass of her paintless window, doing strange signaling “stunts” with a lighted lantern, whose pale rays described a circle, dipped and then shot up as, held aloft in her bony old hand, it sent an amber gleam over the salt-marshes.
“She’s a witch—a witch like Dark Tammy, who lived on the edge of the woods over a hundred years ago and who washed her clothes at the Witch Rock,” whispered Starrie Chase and his companions one to another as they lay low among the rank grass of the dark marshes, spying upon her. “She’s a witch, working spells with that lantern!”
Older people surmised that she was signalingto her vagabond son, who might be haunting the distant marshes, trying to lure him home; shame and grief on his account had half-unbalanced her, they said.
But the boys pretended to stick to their own superstitious belief, because, to them, it offered some shabby excuse for tormenting her.
Leon Chase in particular made her rank little garden his nightly stamping-ground, and was the most ingenious in his persecuting attentions.
He it was who devised the plan of anchoring a shingle or other light piece of wood by a short string to the longest branch of the apple-tree that grew near her door.
When the wind blew directly across the marshes, as it did this evening, and drove against that paintless door, it operated the impromptu knocker; the wooden shingle would keep up an intermittent tapping, playing ticktack upon the painted panels all night.
Sometimes Ma’am Baldwin had come to the door a dozen times and peered forth over the dark salt-marshes, believing that it was her vagrant son who demanded entrance, while the perpetrators of the trick, Leon Chase, Godey Peck and others of their gang—tickled in the meanest part of them by the fact that they “kepther guessing”—hid among the marsh-grass and watched.
Hardly any prank could have been more senseless, childish, and unfeeling. Yet Starrie Chase had actually believed that he got some sham excitement out of it.
And to-night as his feet pressed his old stamping-ground beneath that apple-tree beside the house, while the wind raked the marshes and whipped his thoughts into dusty confusion, the old waste impulses which prompted the trick were mysteriously whirled uppermost again.
The mischievous tide rip boiled in him once more.
Just as he became conscious of its yeasty bubbling, his foot touched something on the ground—a hard winter apple. He picked it up and threw it against the house, imposing silence on his dog by dictatorial gesture and word.
There was a stir within the paintless dwelling. Through the blurred window-panes he caught sight of a shrunken form moving.
“Ha! there’s the old ‘witch’ herself. She looks like a withered corn-stalk with all those odds and ends of shawls dangling about her. Ssh-ssh! Blinkie. Down, doggie!Quiet, sir!”
Leon’s fingers groped upon the ground, wheretwilight shadows were merging into darkness, for another apple. Since he enlisted as a boy scout mischief had been sentenced and shut up in a dark little cell inside him. But Malign Habit, though a captive, dies hard.
Those seeking fingers touched something else, a worm-eaten shingle blown from the old roof. He picked it up and considered it in the darkness, while his left hand felt in his pocket for some twine.
“Gee! it would be a great night for that trick to work,” he muttered with a low chuckle that had less depth to it than a parrot’s. “The wind is just in the right direction—driving straight through the house. Eh, Blink! Shall we ‘get her on a string’ again?”
The dog whined softly with impatience. Of late, in his short excursions with his master, he had not been used to such stealthy doings. With the exception of the trailing expeditions through the woods from which canines were debarred, movements had been open, manly, and aboveboard since the master became a boy scout.
But Leon had forgotten that he was a scout, had momentarily forgotten even the outdoor test in Sparrow Hollow, and the necessary preparations therefor.
His fingers trifled with the shingle and string. His brain going ahead of those fingers was already attaching the one to the other when—the paintless door opened and Ma’am Baldwin stepped out.
She did look like a wind-torn corn-stalk, short and withered, with the breeze catching at the many-colored strips of shawls that hung around her, uniting to protect her somewhat against that marsh-wind driving straight from the river through her home.
From her left hand drooped a pale lantern, the one with which boyish imagination had accused her of working spells.
It made an island of yellow light about her as she stepped slowly forth into the dusk. And Leon saw her raise her right arm to her breast with that timid, pathetic movement characteristic of old people—especially of those whom life has treated harshly—as if she was afraid of what might spring upon her out of the gusty darkness.
Not for nothing had Starrie Chase been for two months a boy scout! Prior to those eight weeks of training that feebly defensive arm would have meant naught to him; hardly would he have noticed it. But just as his eyes had been openedto consider at length, with a dazzled thrill, that distant Sugarloaf Sand-Pillar and other of Nature’s beauties as he had seldom or never contemplated them before; so those scout’s eyes were being trained to remark each significant gesture of another person and to read its meaning.
Somehow, that right arm laid across an old woman’s breast told a tale of loneliness and lack of defenders which made the boy wince. The distance widened between his two hands holding respectively the shingle and string.
There was a wood-pile within a few yards of him. Ma’am Baldwin stepped toward it, breathing heavily and ejaculating: “My sen-ses! How it do blow!” While Leon restrained the terrier with a “Quiet, Blink! Don’t go for her!”
Ma’am Baldwin, intent on holding fast to her shawls and procuring some chunks from the wood-pile—nearsighted as she was, to boot—did not notice the boy and dog standing in the blackness beneath the bare apple-tree.
She set the lantern atop of the pile. As she bent forward, groping for a hatchet, its yellow rays kindled two other lanterns in her eyes by whose light the lurking boy gazed through into her heart and saw for a brief moment how tired, lonely, and baffled it was.
At the glimpse he straightened up very stiffly. There was a gurgle in his throat, a stirring as of panic at the roots of his hair.
But not scare produced the rigidity! It was caused by a sudden great throe within which scraped his throat and sent a dimness to his eyes. The captive, Malign Habit, imprisoned before, was dying now in the grasp of the Scout.
To put it otherwise,—at sight of an old woman’s arm pathetically shielding her breast, at a startled peep into her heart, the tight little bud of chivalry in Leon, watered of late by his scout training, fostered by the good turn to somebody every day, burst suddenly, impetuously into flower!
With a low snarl at himself, he thrust the coil of string deep into his pocket, and flung the shingle as far as he could into the night.
“Ughr-r-r! Guess I was meaner’n you’d be, Blink!” he muttered, swallowing the discovery that sometimes of yore, in his dealings with his own kind, he had been less of a gentleman than his dog.
To which Blink, freed from restraint, returned a sharp, glad “Wouf!” that said: “I’m glad you’ve come to your senses, old man!”
“Hullo! ‘Mom Baldwin,’” Leon stepped forwardas the bowed woman started at the monosyllabic bark, and peered fearfully into the darkness. “Don’t you want me to split those chunks for you? You can’t manage the hatchet.”
Ma’am Baldwin’s experience had taught her to distrust boys—Leon especially! As her peering eyes recognized him, she backed away, raising her right arm to her breast again with that helpless gesture of defense.
Starrie Chase blenched in turn. That pathetic old arm warding him off hurt him more at the core than a knockdown blow from a stronger limb.
But remembering all at once that he was a scout, trained to prompt action, he picked up the hatchet where she had dropped it, and set to work vigorously, chopping wood.
“Now! I’ll carry these chunks into the house for you,” he said presently. “Aw! let me. I’d just as soon do it!”
Ma’am Baldwin had no alternative. Leon pushed the paintless door open and carried the wood inside, while she hobbled after him, well-nigh as much astonished as if Gabriel’s trump had suddenly awoke the echoes of the gusty marshland.
The scout went to and fro for another tenminutes, splitting more chunks, piling them ready to her hand within.
Meanwhile his beneficiary, the old woman, seemed to have got a little light on the surprising situation. Grunting inarticulately, chewing her bewilderment between her teeth, she disappeared into a room off the kitchen and returned holding forth a ten-cent piece to her knight.
“No, thanks! I’m a boy scout. We don’t take money for doing a good turn.” Leon shook his head. “Say! this old house is so draughty; you burn all the wood you want to-night; I’ll run over to-morrow or next day an’ split some more. Is there anything else I can do for you before I go? You’ve got enough water in from the well,” he peered into the water-pail, which winked satisfactorily.
Ma’am Baldwin had sunk upon a chair, alternately looking in perplexity at the energetic boy, and listening to the frisky gusts: “My sen-ses! Whatever’s come over you, Leon?” she gasped; and then wailingly: “Deary me! if it should blow up a gale to-night, some things in this house’ll ride out.”
“No, it isn’t going to blow up a storm,” Leon reassured her. “The wind’s not really high, only it gets such a rake over the marshes.Here, I’ll tie these old shutters together for you, the fastening is broken,” and the coil of string was produced from his pocket for a new purpose. “But it must beawfullonely for you, living here by yourself, Ma’am Baldwin. You’ll be snowed in later on; we’ll have to come and dig you out.”
Still chewing the cud of her bewilderment, she stared at him, mumbling, nodding, and stroking the gray hair from her forehead with nervous fingers. But there was a humid light in the old eyes that spilled over on the boy as he worked.
“Why don’t you go to live with your daughter an’ your grandson in the town?” went on Leon as he tied together the last pair of flapping shutters. “And you’re so fond of little Jack too; he’s a nice kid!”
“So he is!” nodded the grandmother; a change overspread her entire face now, she looked tender, grandmotherly, half-hopeful, as if for the moment trouble on behalf of her ne’er-do-well son was forgotten. “Well! perhaps I will move there before the winter sets in hard, Leon. I’m not so smart as I was. I’m sure I don’t know how to thank you! Good-night!”
“Good-night!” returned the scout. “Youcan untie those shutters easily enough in the morning.”
And he found himself outside again upon the dark marshland, with the obedient terrier who had trotted at his heels during the late proceedings, waltzing excitedly at his side.
“Ah, la! la! as Toiney says, it’s too late now, Blink, for us to put back to the town to buy our supper—half a pound of beefsteak and two potatoes, to be cooked over each one’s special fire,” muttered the boy, momentarily irresolute. “Well! we’ll have to let the grub go, and race back across the uplands, over to the Hollow. Stir your trotters, Mr. Dog!”
As the two regained the crest of the hilly uplands, Leon paused for breath. On his left hand stretched the dark, solemn woods, where the breeze hooted weirdly among leafless boughs. On his right, beyond upland and broad salt-marsh, wound the silver-spot river in whose now shallow ripples bathed a rising moon.
Quarter of a mile ahead of him a rosy flush upon the cheek of darkness told that in the sheltered hollow, between a clump of pines that served as a windbreak and the woods, the Owls’ camp-fires were already blazing.
“Tooraloo! I feel as if I could start my fireto-night without using a match at all—just by snapping my fingers at it, or with a piece of damp bark and a snowball, as the woodsmen say,” he confided half-audibly to the dog.
Whence this feeling of prowess, of being a firebrand—a genial one—capable of kindling other and better lights in the world than a camp-fire?
Starrie Chase did not analyze his sensations of magnificence, which bloomed from a discovery back there on the marshes of the secret which is at the root of the Boy Scout Movement, at the base of all Christian Chivalry, at the foundation of golden labor for mankind in every age: namely, that the excitement of helping people is vastly, vitally, and blissfully greater than the spurious excitement of hurting them!
CHAPTER XI
ESTU PRETA!
“Hullo! here’s Starrie. Well! it’s about time you turned up. We waited quarter of an hour for you before leaving town.—Hey! Starrie, we’ve got our six cook-fires all going. I only used two matches in lighting mine; I’ve passed one half of to-night’s test.—So’ve I! Whoopee!I‘went the jolly test one better’: I lit my fire with a single, solitary match.”
Starrie Chase, bounding down the grassy side of Sparrow Hollow, with these lusty cries of his brother Owls greeting him, stood for a moment in the brilliant glare of a belt of fires, as if dazed by the ruddy carnival, while his dog, making a wild circuit of the ring, bayed each bouquet of flames in turn.
“Yaas; we’ll get heem littal fire light lak’ wink—sure! We ar-re de boy! We ar-re de scout, you’ll bet!” supplemented the merry voice of Toiney, the assistant scoutmaster, who, with the tassel of his red cap bobbing, and the flame-light flickering on his blue homespun shirt, wason his knees before Harold’s cook-fire, using his lungs as a pair of bellows.
“Hurrah! I’m in this: I’ll light my fire with one match, too. Kenjo Red shan’t get ahead of me: no, sir!” Corporal Leon Chase was now working like lightning, piling dry leaves, pine splinters, dead twigs into a carefully arranged heap in a gap which had been left for him in the ring of half a dozen fires kindled by six tenderfoot scouts, ambitious of being admitted to a second-class degree.
But he, the behind-time tenderfoot, was abruptly held up in his tardy labors by the voice of the tall scoutmaster, who with Scout Warren, the patrol leader of the Owls, was superintending the tests.
“I want to speak to you for a minute, Leon,” said Scoutmaster Estey, with a gravity that dropped like a weighty pebble into the midst of the fun.
And Corporal Chase, otherwise Scout 2, of the Owls, obediently suspended fire-building, approached his superior officer and saluted.
“I’d like to know where you have been for the last hour,” began the scoutmaster with the dignity of a brigadier-general holding an investigation, while his keen eyes from under the drabbroad-brimmed hat searched Leon’s face in the sixfold firelight. “Jimmy Sweet,” nodding toward a squatting Owl, “said he caught a distant glimpse of you nearly an hour ago over on the edge of the salt-marshes near Ma’am Baldwin’s old house. I hope you haven’t been plaguing her again?”
The voice of the superior officer was all ready to be stern, as if he had visions of a corporal being requested to hand over his scout-badge of chivalry until such time as he should prove himself worthy of wearing it.
“Have you?”
“No!” Leon cleared his throat hesitatingly. “No,”—he suddenly lifted steady eyes to the scoutmaster’s face,—”I have been chopping wood and doing a few other little things for her; that made me late!”
A moment’s breathless silence enveloped the six cook-fires. The face of the scoutmaster himself was set in lines of amazement: genially it relaxed.
“Good for you, Corporal!” He clapped the late-comer approvingly on the shoulder, and in his voice was a moved ring.
For, as he scanned the boy’s face in the sixfold glow, he read from it that, to-night, Leon hadreally become a scout: that, back there on the salt-marshes, the inner and chivalrous grace of knighthood, of which his oath was the outward and heralding sign, had been consciously born within him.
The scoutmaster was feeling round in his broad approval for other words of commendation, when Toiney’s sprightly tones broke the momentary tension.
“Ha! dis poor ole oomans,” he grunted, vivaciously pitying Ma’am Baldwin. “She’s lif’ all alone en she’s burst she’s heart for she haf such abad boy, engh? She’s boy, Dave, heemcanaille,vaurien—w’at-you-call, good-for-nodings—engh?”
“I’m afraid he is,” agreed the scoutmaster regretfully. “Yet I pity Dave too. His elder brother went West when he was a little fellow; his father, who was a deep-sea fisherman, like Harold’s father, was away nearly all the year round. Dave grew up without any strong man’s hand over him; out of school-hours he had to work hard on a farm, and I suppose in his craving for fun of some kind he played all sorts of foolish pranks. After he left school and was old enough to know better, he kept them up—ran a locomotive out of the little railway station one night,came near killing a man and was sent to a reformatory!”
“Bah! heem jus’ vagabond—errant—how-you-say-eet—tramp-sonne-of-a-gun—vaurien, engh?” declared Toiney, gutturally contemptuous, while he poked Harold’s fire with a dry stick.
“Yes, he’s a mere vagrant now, loafing about the Sugarloaf Sand-Dunes and the woods; and likely to get into trouble again through petty thefts, so people say. When he had served his sentence he seemed to think there wasn’t much of a future before him, and didn’t stick to the job he got. I pity his old mother! I think that every boy scout should make it a point to do a good turn for her when he can.”
“Ah!oui; shes break in pieces, engh?” murmured Toiney, the irrepressible, still punching up the fire, to prepare it for the cooking tests.
Somehow, his eloquent sympathy sent a stab through Leon—whom everybody was at the moment regarding with admiration—for it brought a sharp recollection of an old woman backing away from him in fear, with her right arm laid across her breast in piteous self-defense.
“Gee! I wish I could do something more forher than chopping wood—something that would make up for being mean to her,” thought Corporal Chase, as he returned to his fire-building, arranging the fuel methodically so as to allow plenty of draught, and then triumphantly rivaling Kenjo’s feat by lighting his cook-fire with one match.
The tiny, snappy laughter of that matchhead, seeming to rejoice that another baby light was born into the world, as he drew it along a dry stick, restored his towering good spirits.
“And now for the cooking test!” cried the scoutmaster. “Each scout to put his two potatoes to roast in the embers of his fire, and make a contrivance for broiling his beefsteak! And look out that you don’t ‘cook the black ox,’ boys, as Captain Andy would say!”
“What do you mean by ‘cooking the black ox’?” from two or three excited and perspiring scouts.
“Why! that’s what the sailors say when their beef is burnt to the color of a black-haired ox,” laughed the superior officer. “Scout Chase, haven’t you brought any beefsteak and potatoes?”
“No, I meant to go back to the town for them an’ meet you there. Blink an’ I don’t want anysupper; we’ll get it when we go home,” returned Leon nonchalantly, swallowing his mortification at not being able to complete the outdoor test, this evening.
“Oh! I’ll share my rations with you, Starrie,” volunteered Colin Estey. “I shan’t ‘cook the black ox’: I’m too nifty a cook for that; trust me!” Colin was concocting a handsome gridiron of peeled twigs as he spoke.
“Don’t mind him, Starrie: I could cook better when I was born than Col can now! I’ll divide my beefsteak and ‘taters’ with you,” came from another primitive chef, the offer being repeated more or less alluringly by every boy scout.
“Well! you’re a generous-hearted bunch,” put in Nixon, the patrol leader, from his over-seer’s post. “But the scout-master and I have more than a pound of raw beefsteak here which we brought along for our supper. As I’m not in these tests” (Nixon was now a full-fledged first-class scout) “I’ll cut off a piece for Leon so that he can cook it himself; I guess we can spare him a couple of potatoes too; then he can pass the test, with the others.”
During the supper which followed while each scout, sitting cross-legged by his own cook-fire, partook of the meal in primitive fashion andToiney made coffee for the “crowd,” more than one Owl shared in the opinion once enunciated by Leon that eating in the woods—or in a woodsy hollow such as sheltered them now from the breeze that drove keenly across the marshes—was the “best part of the business.”
They modified that opinion later when the seven small fires, which had sputtered merrily under the cooking, were reinforced by logs and branches, and stimulated into a belt of vivacious camp-fires, each rearing high its topknot of crested flame, and throwing wonderful reflections through the stony hollow.
“I always wanted to be a savage. To-night, I feel nearer to it than ever before,” said Colin, listening with an ecstatic shiver to the wind as it chanted among the pines that formed their windbreak, capered round the hollow, flinging them a gust or two that made the camp-fires roar with laughter, and then, as if unwilling to disturb such a jolly party, rushed wildly on to take it out of the trees in the woods. “And now for the powwow, Mr. Scoutmaster!” he suggested, looking across the ring of fires at his tall brother and superior officer.
“Hark! that’s an owl hooting somewhere,” broke in Coombsie. “It’s the Grand Duke, Ithink—the big old horned owl! One doesn’t hear him often at this time of year. He wants to be present at the Owl Powwow.”
“Ah, la! la! I’ll t’ink he soun’ lak’ hongree ole wolf, me,” murmured Toiney dreamily.
But the distant hoot, the deep “Whoo-hoo-hoodoo hoo,” or “Whoo-hoo-whoo-whah-hoo!” as some of the boys interpreted it, from the far recesses of the woods, added a final touch of mystic wildness to the sevenfold radiance of the firelit scene which was reflected in the sevenfold rapture of boyish hearts.
And now the heads of human Owls were bent nearer to the golden flames as notebooks were drawn out containing rough pencil jottings, and scouts compared their observations of man, beast, bird, fish, or inanimate object, encountered in the woods, on the uplands or marshes, or upon the river during the past few days!
Kenjo Red offered the most important contribution.
“I went to Ipswich yesterday to spend the day with my uncle,” he began, as he lay, breast downward, gazing reflectively into his fire. “In the afternoon we walked over to the Sugarloaf Sand-Dunes and lounged about there on the white beach, watching the tide go out. We didn’tsee many birds, only a few herring gulls. But I’ll tell you what we did see: two big harbor seals and a young one, lying out on a sand-spit which the tide had just left bare. They were sunning themselves an’ having a dandy time! One was a monster, a male, or big old dog-seal, my uncle said; he must have been nearly six feet long, and weighed about half a ton.”
“More or less?” threw in the scoutmaster, laughing at Kenjo’s jesting imagination. “Generally a big male weighs almost two hundred pounds, occasionally something over. Hereabouts, he is indifferently called the ‘dog-seal’ or ‘bull-seal,’ according to the speaker’s taste; his head is shaped rather like a setter dog’s, with the ears laid flat back,—for the seal has no ears to speak of,—but the eyes are bovine,” he explained to Nixon, who knew less about this sea mammal than did his brother scouts, and who had never seen him at close quarters.
“Isn’t it unusual to find seals high and dry at this time of year?” asked Coombsie. “In the spring and summer one sees plenty of them down near the mouth of the river, sprawling in the sun on a reef or sandbar. But in the late fall and winter they mostly stay in the water.”
“Not when the river is frozen over—orpartially frozen,” threw in Leon. “They love to take a ride on a drifting ice-cake, so Captain Andy says! Is there any bounty on their heads now, Mr. Scoutmaster?” he addressed the troop commander.
“No, that has been removed. The marbled harbor seal, so called because of his spots, was being wiped out, as he was wiping out the fish many years ago, before the Government put a price on his head. Now that he is no longer severely persecuted the mottled dotard, as he is sometimes called,—I’m sure I don’t know why, for I see no signs of senility about him,—is becoming tamer and more prevalent again. Still, he’s wilder and shyer than he used to be.”
“Yes, there’s an old fisherman’s shack on one corner of the Sugarloaf Dunes, where a clam-digger keeps his pails and a boat,” said Kenjo. “He let my uncle take the boat and we rowed across to the sand-spit. The seals let us come within thirty yards of them: then they stirred themselves lazily, with that funny wabble they have—just like a person whose hands are tied together, and his feet tied more tightly still—lifting the head and short fore-flippers first and swinging them to one side, then the back part of the body and long hind-flippers, giving thema swing to the other side. Say! but it was funny. So they flopped off into the water.”
“Goodness! I wish that I’d been with you, Kenjo,” exclaimed Scout Warren. “I haven’t seen a harbor seal yet, except just his head as he swam round in the water, when Captain Andy took me down the river in his power-boat, the Aviator. We rowed ashore in the Aviator’s Pill,” laughingly, “in that funny little tub of a rowboat which dances attendance on the gasolene launch, but though we landed on the white sand-dunes and stayed round there for quite a while, not a seal did we see sprawling out on any reef.”
“I’ll see heemgros sealon reever,” broke in Toiney gutturally. “I’ll see heem six mont’ past on reeverau printemps—in spring—w’en, he go for kill todder gros seal; he’ll hit heem en mak’ heem go deaded—engh?”
“Yes, the males have bad duels between themselves occasionally. But they’re mild enough toward human beings. However, my father had a strange experience with them once,” said the scoutmaster, pushing back his broad hat, so that the sevenfold glow from the fires danced upon his strong face. “He’s told me about it ever since I was a little boy, and Colin too. Whenhe was a very young man he rowed down to the mouth of the river one day with some sportsmen who went off to shoot ducks, leaving him to dig clams and get a clambake ready for them on the white dunes. Well, sir! left alone, he pulled off to the clam-flats, drew up his boat, stepped out, and the tide being at a low ebb, set to work to dig up the clams which were here and there thrusting their long necks up from the wet sand, to feed on the infusoria—their favorite feeding-time being when it is nearly, but not quite, low water.
“The tide had receded altogether from the other side of the sand-flats, so that they joined the marshy mainland, and as my father landed he saw that there was a big herd of twenty or thirty seals lying out on those flats. It was before a bounty was set upon their heads, when they were very plentiful and tame. My father was not in the least afraid of them and was proceeding to dig his clams peacefully, when he suddenly saw that the whole herd was thrown into a wild panic by the discovery thathewas between them and the water. They broke into a floundering stampede and came straight for him—or rather for the water behind him—at a fast clip, half sliding, half throwing themselvesalong. A funny sight they must have been! Father says one big fellow came at him with his mouth wide open: the four sharp white teeth in front, two upper and two lower, shining. So Dad just turned tail and ran for the water as he had never run before; not waiting to jump into his boat, he plunged into the channel up to his waist!”
“But the seals wouldn’t have attacked him, would they?” incredulously from Nixon.
“No; I think not. But he might not have been able to keep his feet. They would, perhaps, have struck him with their heavy bodies and knocked him down. And to feel a dozen or so of damp seals sliding over a fellow, their weights ranging anywhere from a hundred to two hundred and fifty pounds, wouldn’t be a pleasant sensation, to say the least!”
“I guess not!” chuckled the Owls.
“I’d like to catch a creamy pup-seal—isn’t that what you call the only child, the young one? ’Twould be fun to tame it,” said Nixon. “Perhaps I’ll get a chance to do so when we camp out on the Sugarloaf Dunes next summer. Aren’t we going to have a camp there for two weeks during the end of August and beginning of September, Mr. Scoutmaster?”
“I hope so, if I can get permission from the landlord who owns the dunes.”
“Maybe we’ll run across Dave Baldwin too—thevaurien, as Toiney calls him—if he stays round there a part of the time?” This from Leon.
“That wouldn’t be a desirable encounter, I’m afraid. Now! has any scout a suggestion to make that would be useful in planning our work for this winter?” Scoutmaster Estey looked round at the ring of boyish faces, reflecting the sevenfold glow, at Harold, lying on his face and hands, blinking dreamily under Toiney’s wing, while the firelight burnished the latter’s swarthy features beneath the tasseled cap.
“Mr. Scoutmaster!” Nixon Warren sprang to his feet impulsively, “Marcoo and I have a suggestion to offer,”—Nixon glanced at his cousin Coombsie,—”it hasn’t any direct relation to our work, but we humbly submit it as an idea that might be useful, not only to our boy scout organization here, but to the movement everywhere all over the world.”
“Ho! Ho! What do you know about that? Out with it, Nix, if it’s worth anything,” came the dubious encouragement of his brother Owls.
“I must tell a little yarn first. The day before yesterday Marcoo and I were in Boston. We lunched at a fine restaurant. At a table near us was a gentleman—he looked like a Mexican or Spaniard—who couldn’t speak any English and addressed the waiter by signs. There was a boy with him, a classy-looking fellow of about fourteen, his son, I guess. ‘I’ll wager that boy is a scout!’ I whispered to Marcoo. ‘His eyes take in everything, without seeming to stare about him much—and see the way he carries himself—straight as a string!’”
“So I suggested that we should try the scout salute on him as we passed out,” struck in Marcoo. “We did! And fellows, he was on his feet like a flash, holding up his right hand, thumb resting on the little finger-nail, and the other three fingers upright, saluting back! We guessed then that he was a Mexican boy scout, traveling with his father.”
“He seemed jolly glad to see us,” Nixon again took up the anecdote; “just beamed! But he didn’t apparently understand a word of English except ‘Good-day!’ not even when we passed the scout motto to him as a watchword: ‘Be Prepared!’ We might all three have been mutes saluting each other.
“We talked it over, coming home, Marcoo and I,” went on the patrol leader. “And we arrived at the conclusion that it would be a great thing if our hearty motto, as Captain Andy calls it, could be taught to boy scouts all over the world, in some common form understood by all, as well as in their mother tongue. So that when scout meets scout of another country he could pass it on as a kind of bond and inspiration—together with the Scout Sign which is understood in almost every land to-day.”
“So we looked it up in Esperanto—the only attempt at a world-language of which we know, and in which my father is interested.” Marcoo leaped to his feet, too, as he excitedly spoke. “And it sounded fine! Give it to them, Nix!”
“Estu preta!”
“Estu preta! Estu preta!Be Prepared!” One and all these present-day scouts took it up, shouting it to the seven fires, and to the wind which caught it from their lips like a silver feather to bear it away beyond the hollow, as if it would girdle the world with that hearty motto, in some universal form, as Nixon had suggested.
“Estu preta!” it was still on their tongues when, camp-fires extinguished, they marchedhome. They flung it at each other in joyous challenge as they said good-night.
It entwined itself with the drowsy thoughts of the patrol leader from whom it emanated when he lay down to sleep, eclipsing his interest in the future summer camp, in marbled seals and cooing pup-seals—though such might not have been the case could he have foreseen how exciting would be his first glimpse of the “gros seal” at close quarters.
It mingled with Leon’s dreamy reminiscences too, as the first ripple of slumber, like the inflowing tide, invaded his consciousness.
“Whew! this certainly has been a great day,” he murmured, after repeating the Lord’s Prayer with an elated fervor which he had never put into it before.
Yet there was one smirch upon the day’s golden face in the sudden memory of an old woman shrinking away from him with uplifted arm.
“Gee! I wish I could do something for her beyond a few good turns.” His drowsy tongue half-formed the words.
And like a silver echo, stealing through his confused consciousness came the automatic answer: “Estu preta!Live up to your able motto! Be Prepared!”
CHAPTER XII
THE CHRISTMAS BRIGADE