“Estu preta!” During the days that followed, while the fall season was merged in winter, the Owls who had passed their outdoor tests in Sparrow Hollow, six of whom were tenderfeet no longer, but second-class scouts, did try to live up to their hearty motto. And this not only in the development of their strong young bodies by exercise and drill, so that every expanding muscle was under control, not only in the training of their mental faculties toward keen observation and alert action, but also in the chivalrous practice of the little every-day kindness to man or beast—almost too trivial to be noticed, perhaps, yet preparing the heart for the rendering of a supreme good turn!
Thus the Owl Patrol presently began to be recognized as a patriotic and progressive force. The Improvement Society of the little town sought its coöperation, and it soon became “lots more fun” to the boy scouts to lend a hand in making that too staid town a more beautifuland lively place to live in than to pile—as had often been the case formerly—destruction on its dullness.
Under the direction of their energetic young scoutmaster they engaged in other crusades too, besides that against things ugly and retarding, in crusades for the rescue of many a needless and undue sufferer of the animal kingdom, their most noted enterprise along these lines being an attack upon the use of the steel trap among boys, especially those of the woodland farms, whereby many a little fur-bearing animal met its slow end in suffering unspeakable.
The use of this steel-jawed atrocity was bad enough in the hands of the one or two adult professional trappers of the neighborhood who visited their traps regularly. (And it is to be hoped that the Boy Scouts of America, who champion the cause of their timid little brothers of the woods, will some day sweep this barbarous contrivance altogether from the earth!) But its use by irresponsible boys who set the traps in copse or thicket, and, in the multitudinous interests of boydom, frequently forgot all about them for days—leaving the little animal luckless enough to be caught to suffer indefinitely—is a cruelty too heinous to flourish upon thesame free soil that yields such a fair growth of chivalry as that embodied in the Scouts of the U.S.A.
One or two of the Owls, who shall remain incognito, had possessed such traps in the past: now, they took them out into a back yard, shattered them with a hammer, relegated the fragments to a refuse heap, and instituted a zealous crusade against the use of the steel trap by non-scouts of the neighboring farms, such as Godey Peck and his gang.
There was a hand-to-hand skirmish over this matter before the Owl Patrol had its way; and the result thereof gave Godey cause for reflection.
“It hasn’t made ‘softies’ of ’em anyhow, this scout movement,” he soliloquized. “They got the betterof us. And they seem to have such ripping good times, hiking an’ trailing! But—”
The demurring “but” in this boy’s mind sprang from the proviso that if he enlisted in the Boy Scouts of America, he would be obliged, like Leon, to part with his gun. Also, from a feeling that he would be debarred in future from the planning of such lawless escapades as playing stowaway aboard an unlaunched vessel; a scheme, it may be said, which was never carried through, being nipped in the bud by watchful shipwrights!
Godey Peck was on the fence with regard to the new movement. And he did not yet know on which side he would drop down. Meanwhile from his wavering point of indecision, beset with discomfort, he soothed his feelings by renewed and vehement shouts of “Tin Scouts! Tin Soldiers!” whenever a khaki uniform and broad drab hat hove in view.
He had ample opportunity to air his feeble-shafted malice during the week preceding Christmas, for scouts, in uniform and out of it, were constantly to be seen engaged in “hifalutin stunts,” according to Godey, which meant that they had been organized into a brigade by the scoutmaster for the doing of sundry and many good turns befitting the season.
It might be only the carrying of parcels, for a heavy-laden woman, who had visited a distant city on a shopping expedition, from the little railway station on the edge of the yellow wintry salt-marshes to her home! Or the bearing of gifts from a benevolent individual or society to some poor or solitary human brother or sister who otherwise might forget the meaning of Christmas.
It was on behalf of one such person that Corporal Leon Chase—detailed for duty on thisbrigade—took counsel with his mother on the afternoon of Christmas Eve.
“You don’t suppose thatshe’llstay alone in that old baldfaced house to-day and to-morrow, do you, mother?” he said, rather ambiguously. “The town authorities ought to forbid her living on there all by herself; she’ll be snowed in pretty soon if this cold snap continues. Why! the river is all frozen over—ice fairly firm too. I’m going skating by an’ by.”
“I’d wait until it is a little more solid, if I were you,” returned the mother anxiously. “You know our brackish ice is apt to be treacherous; the salt in the water softens it, so your father says, renders it more porous and unsafe. I suppose you were speaking of old Ma’am Baldwin. I don’t see what the authorities can do. They can’t force her into an institution; she owns that old house. And I don’t know that her daughter’s husband—little Jack’s father—wants her in his home. It’s too bad that her son Dave should have turned out such a good-for-nothing! Trouble about him has aged her, I guess; she’s not as old as she seems.”
Then Starrie Chase inveigled his dimpling mother into a pantry and, while she made passes at him with a rolling-pin, proceeded to whisperin her ear—with a measure of embarrassment, for he was not accustomed to himself in the rôle of alms-bearer. But in a shadowy corner within him, once tenanted by Malign Habit, there still lurked a vision which sprang out on him at times, of an old woman raising her feeble arm to ward him off: it caused him to grit his teeth and mutter: “I wish I could do something more than to chop her wood occasionally!” And vaguely the mental answer would come: “Estu preta!At a time when you least expect it, you may find yourself up against the Big Minute!”
And in the mean time Starrie cornered his mother in the pantry—floury shrine of Christmas culinary rites!—and presently listened, well-pleased, to her answer:—
“Yes! I’m glad that you put it into my head, son. I’ll pack some things into a basket for her, and you can take it across the marshes now. It must be bitterly lonely for her, poor old woman! And oh! Leon, as you’ll be in that direction, could you go on into the woods and get me some red berries for Christmas decorations?”
“Sure, mum!” And Leon stepped forth to speak to Colin Estey, who was awaiting him at the rear of the Chase homestead, exercising in a preliminary canter a new pedalomotor which SantaClaus, masquerading as the expressman, had dropped at his home a little too soon.
“Take care you don’t run into a tree, smash it up, and drive a splinter through your nose, as Marcoo did when he got his, last year!” admonished Starrie. “Say! Col, I can’t go skating for a little while: I’m bound for the woods first to get some alder-berries for decorations. Want to come?”
“Guess so!”
“You can leave that ‘pedalmobile’ here. Wait a minute! Mother’s just putting some Christmas ‘grub,’ mince-pies an’ things, into a basket for old Ma’am Baldwin; we’ll deposit it at her door as we go along!”
“How’d it be to write on it, ‘Merry Christmas from the Owls’?” suggested young Colin whimsically: “that would keep her guessing; she’d maybe think birds had come out o’ the woods to feed her as they did Elijah or Elisha of old.”
So a card was tacked to the basket, on which was traced with a stub-end of colored chalk the outline of a perching owl, highly rufous as to plumage, with the proposed salutation beneath it.
But the two Owls who placed the gift did not find the recipient at home. That baldfaced housebeyond the frost-spiked marshes was empty, its paintless door, half screened by the icy boughs of the wind-beaten apple-tree, fast locked.
“I guess she’s gone over to the town to spend Christmas Eve with her daughter,” suggested Colin. “She dotes on her gran’son, little Jack Barry; he’s quite a boy for nine years old! What shall we do with the basket?”
“Raise that kitchen window an’ slip it inside—the fastening’s broken!”
“Say! but you’re as barefaced as the house.” Colin hugged himself with a sense of having got off a good joke as he watched Leon boldly raise the loose window and deposit the present within. “Let’s put for the woods now!” he added, the deed accomplished.
And the two scouts climbed the uplands toward those midwinter woods that crowned the heights in dismantled majesty.
But they were not robbed of beauty, the December woods: the frosty sunshine knew that as it picked out the berry-laden black alders displaying their coral branches against the velvet background of a pine, and embraced the regiment of hemlock bushes, green dwarfs which, together with their full-sized brothers, held the fort for spring against all the hosts of winter.
“Whee-ew! I think the woods are just dandy at this time o’ year!” Leon led a whistling onslaught upon the vividly laden black alder bushes, while the white gusts of the boys’ breath floated like incense through the coral and evergreen sanctuary of beauty, guarded by the silvery pillars of white birch-trees, where, in the bare forest, Nature had not left herself without a witness to joy and color.
“These berries are as red as Varney’s Paintpot,” laughed Colin by and by, as the two scouts retraced their steps across the salt-marshes, crunching underfoot the frozen spikes of yellow marsh-grass. “Well, we had a great time on that day when we found the old Paintpot—though we succeeded in getting lost!”
“We surely did! I wonder if the frost will hold, so that we’ll have some good skating after Christmas? It’s freezing now.” Leon’s gaze strayed ahead to the solid white surface of the tidal river, stained with amber by the setting sun.
They were within a hundred yards of it by this time, and caught the shrill cries and yells of boyish laughter from youthful skaters who careered and pirouetted at a short, safe distance from the bank. But a clear view of what wasgoing on was shut off from the two berry-laden scouts, crossing the saffron marshes at a leisurely pace, by some tumble-down sheds that intervened between them and the river.
“Well, the kids seem to be having a good time on the ice anyhow—though I don’t think it can be very firm yet. Whew! what’s that?” exclaimed Colin suddenly, as a piercing cry came ringing from the river-bank whereon each blade of the coarse beach-grass glittered like a jeweled spike under the waning sunlight.
“Oh!somebodyis blowing off the smoke of his troubles,” laughed Leon unconcernedly.
The afternoon was so sharply delectable, with the sky all pale gold in the west, flinging them a remote, lukewarm smile like a Christmas greeting from some half-reminiscent friend, the hearts of the two scouts reflecting the beauty of the Christmas woods were so elated that they could not all in a moment slide down from Mount Happiness into the valley where danger and pain become realities.
Butnowa volley of cries, frenzied and appealing, rang out over the salt-marshes. Mingling with them—outshrilling them—came a call which made each scout jump as if an arrow had struck him.
It was the weird hoot of an owl uttered by a human throat, shrill with desperation, the signal call of the Owl Patrol—but with a violent note of distress in it such as to their ears had never sharpened it before.
“Gee whiz!Something’s wrong—something’s up! I’ll wager ’twas Nix Warren who hooted that time!”
Starrie Chase dropped his coral-laden branches upon the frozen ground.
“The Owls to the rescue!” he cried, and dashed toward the frozen river-bank.
CHAPTER XIII
THE BIG MINUTE
When Scouts Chase and Estey reached that frosty bank a confused scene met their eyes.
Before the tumble-down sheds some wildly terrified small boys were stumbling to and fro on the pale brink of the ice, floundering like river seals in their attempts to walk upon the skates which they were too distracted to remove, and shrieking at intervals:—
“He’s drown-dr-rowning! Oh! he’sdrowning. Jack Barry’s drowning in the river!”
“Who’s drowning? What’s the matter, Marcoo? Has anybody gone through the ice?” questioned Leon sharply of the one older boy upon the bank, who turned upon him over a heaving shoulder the pleasant, ruddy face, empurpled by shock, of Coombsie.
“Yes, the ice gave way out there.” Marcoo pointed to a wide hole thirty yards from the bank, where the dark, imprisoned water bubbled like a whirlpool. “Little Jack Barry has fallen through. Ice rotten there! Couldn’t reach him without a rope! Nix gone for it!” Coombsieflung the words from him like broken twigs. “Here he comes now!”
Bareheaded, breathless, the patrol leader of the Owls tore toward the bank, in his hand a coil of rope. Behind him ran two distracted women from a near-by house; the drowning boy’s mother and his grandmother—whose one unshattered idol he was—old Ma’am Baldwin.
She looked more like a ragged cornstalk than ever, that little old woman, thought Leon—in the way that trivial reflections have of being whirled to the surface upon the tempest of a moment like this—with all her odds and ends of shawls streaming on the icy breeze that skated mockingly to meet her. With her long wisps of gray hair outstreaming too!
And as she came she raised her right arm to her breast with that pathetic gesture familiar to Starrie Chase, as though to shield her half-broken old heart from the last blow that Fate might deal to it: as if she would defend the image it held of the drowning child, and therewith little Jack himself, from the robber Death.
Starrie’s brown eyes took one rapid snapshot of the old woman in her quaking anguish, and his mind passed two resolutions: that the Big Minute had come: and that there wasn’t wateror ice enough in the tidal river to keep him from saving Ma’am Baldwin’s grandson.
“Tie this rope round me!Quick!Bowline knot! I’ll try an’ crawl out to him!” Nixon was shrieking in his ear.
“You can’t alone! The ice is too rotten. You’d break through—and we mightn’t be able to pull you out that way. Must make a chain! I’ll go first. Crawl after me, Nix, and hang on tight to my feet!”
Corporal Chase was already lying flat on his stomach, working himself out over the infirm ice where, here and there, within the white map of lines and circles traced by the skates of the small boys, were small holes through which the captive water heaved like Ma’am Baldwin’s breast, under a thin, glassy fretwork.
After him crawled Nixon, grasping his ankles in a strong grip. And, performing a like service for the patrol leader, came Coombsie, and after Coombsie Colin; the four forming a human chain, trusting their lives to the unstable, saline ice, and to the grip of each other.
“Hold on tight, Nix! I see his head. We’ll land him—yet!” Leon flung the last challenge between his set teeth at the white, porous ice and the little dark wells of bubbling water.
Worming his body in and out between those fretting holes, he reached the glassy skirts of the larger fissure which imprisoned little Jack. There the nine-year-old victim’s hands clutched frantically at the jagged edges of the encircling ice, while his screams for help grew weaker. To Jack himself they seemed not to rise above the cold, pale ring that hemmed him in.
“Hold—tight!” The clenched word was passed along the chain as Leon at its head, hearing the tidal current beneath him sobbing, straining to be free, flung his hands out and grasped the victim’s collar and shoulder, trying to lift him out of the hole.
But with a groan the brittle ice surrounding it gave way: the foremost rescuer’s body was plunged too into the freezing, brackish water.
“We’ll both go now—Jack an’ I—unless Nix hangs on to me like a bulldog!” was the thought that stabbed him as an ice-spear while the dark tidal current, shot with glints of light like cruel eyes, engulfed his shoulders.
But Nixon held on to his ankles, like grim death fighting grim Death himself. Not a link in that human chain parted, though the ice cracked ominously beneath it!
And Leon, half submerged, battling for breath,clung steadfastly to Jack, as if indeed there was not water enough in the seven miles of tidal river to sunder them.
Presently, while his comrades backed cautiously, dragging upon the lower part of his body, his head and arms reappeared, the latter clasping Ma’am Baldwin’s grandson.
A sob, half hysterical, burst from the gathering spectators on the bank.
“If—if the Lord hadn’t been with him, he couldn’t have hung on to him that time!” muttered Captain Andy, the old life-saver, who had limped to the scene.
And, indeed, it did seem as if the Lord was with Leon Chase and made his strength in this desperate minute—like that of one of the famous knights of the Round Table—as the strength of ten because his heart was pure!—Purified of all but the desire to help and save!
“Starrie’s got him! Starrie’s holding on to him!” came in an exultant cry from a group of boys rigid upon the river-brink; in their midst gleamed the face, pale and fixed as the ice itself, of Godey Peck; and from Godey’s eyes streamed the first ray of ardent hero-worship those rather dull eyes had ever known—leveled at the Tin Scouts.
“Keep cool, boys! Take it easy an’ you’ll land him now!” shouted Captain Andy.
Afraid, for their sakes, to burden farther the ice with his massive body, he, too, stretched himself, breast downward, on the more solid crust near the bank, and seizing Colin’s ankles directly they came within reach added another link to that human chain by means of which Jack’s half-conscious body was finally drawn ashore and placed in his mother’s arms.
“You saved him, Leon. I’ll thank you as well—as well as I can—Leon!” quavered the grandmother’s broken voice.
“Aw! that’s all right,” came in an embarrassed shiver from between the chattering teeth of the foremost rescuer, from whom the water ran in rivulets that would freeze in another minute.
“I’ll forward the names of you four boys to National Headquarters, to receive the scout medal for life-saving!” proudly cried Scoutmaster Estey, who at this minute appeared upon the river-bank, while he plucked Jack’s numbed body from his mother’s shaking arms and set off at a run with it toward the nearest house.
Leon was hustled in the same direction by an admiring crowd.
But whence came that shrill challenge waking the echoes of the Christmas Eve? Did Godey’s lips utter the cry: “What’s the matter with the Boy Scouts? They’re all right!”
And a score of throats gave back the answer:—
“Three cheers for the Boy Scouts of America! Three cheers—an’ a tiger—for the Owl Patrol.”
“Say, Mister!” Half an hour later, as Scoutmaster Estey issued from the cottage where, with the help of Kenjo Red and another scout, he had been turning his first-aid knowledge to account in the resuscitation of little Jack, he heard himself thus addressed and felt a hand pluck at his sleeve. Looking down, in the twilight, he saw Godey Peck.
“Say! it hasn’t made ‘softies’ of ’em, this scout business,” declared Godey oracularly. “I want to be a scout too. Us boys all want to come in!” He glanced behind him at his gang who had constituted him their spokesman.
“Really? Do youallwant to enlist in the Boy Scouts of America?”
“Sure! We want to come in now at the rate of sixty miles an hour, you bet!” Godey chuckled.
“Oh! well, if you’re in such a hurry as that, come round to my house to-night; we’re going to have a Christmas celebration there.” And the tall scoutmaster walked off, laughing.
Thus on Christmas Eve did Godey drop off the fence on the side of the boy scouts, whose code of chivalry is only an elaboration of the first Christmas message: “Peace on earth, good will to men!”
CHAPTER XIV
A RIVER DUEL
With the enlisting of Godey and his gang, who mainly represented whatever tendency there might be to youthful rowdyism in the demure little town, the whole vicinity of the tidal river was won over to the Boy Scout Movement.
The new recruits, those who gave in their names on Christmas Eve as would-be scouts, together with one or two later additions, were formed into a second patrol, of which Godey became patrol leader, called the Foxes in honor of the commonest animal of moderate size to be found in their woods; the red fox being prevalent, too, among the white sand-hills, the Sugarloaf Dunes, that formed part of the wild coast near the mouth of the Exmouth River.
Those milky dunes, formed of pale sand which was popularly supposed to have drifted down from New Hampshire to the sea and to have been swept in here by the winds and tides of ages, were a sort of El Dorado to the boys of the little town far up the tidal river.
Pirates’ treasure was confidently believed to be buried there; each lad who made the trip by steam launch, motor-boat, or plodding rowboat downstream for several miles to the dunes, was certain that if he could only hit upon the right sand-hill and dig deep enough, he would find its whiteness richly inlaid with gold.
Other wild tales centred about the romantic dunes, of smugglers and their lawless doings in earlier and less law-enforcing times than the beginning of the twentieth century.
It was even hinted that within recent years there had been unlawful importations at rare intervals of certain dutiable commodities, such as intoxicating liquors and cigars, by means of a rowboat that would lie up during the day in the sandy pocket of some little creek that intersected the marshes near the white dunes, stealing forth at night into the bay to meet a mysterious vessel.
The latest report connected the name of Dave Baldwin, thevaurien, as Toiney contemptuously called him, with this species of petty smuggling.
Wiseacres, such as Captain Andy and the doctor, were of opinion that no such lawless work could be carried on to-day under the Argus eyes of revenue officers. But it was known that Davespent most of his vagrant days hanging round the milky dunes and their neighborhood, sleeping on winter nights in some empty camp or deserted summer cottage, and occasionally varying the pale monotony of the dunes by sojourning in the woods at the opposite side of the river.
The possibility of running across him during a visit to the Sugarloaf Sand-Hills, or of seeing his “pocketed” boat reposing in some little creek where the mottled mother-seal secreted her solitary young one, had little interest for the boy scouts.
Toiney’s contempt for the skulking vagrant who had caused his mother’s heart to “break in pieces,” had communicated itself to them. They were much more interested in the prospect of pursuing acquaintance with the spotted harbor seal, once the floundering despot of the tidal river, now scarcer and more shy.
As winter merged into spring a third patrol of boy scouts was formed, composed of boys from farms down the river, who had recourse to this harbor mammal for a name and called themselves the Seals.
Thus when April swelled the buds upon the trees, and the salt-marshes were all feathery with new green, there were three patrols of boy scoutswho met in the little town hall of Exmouth, forming a complete scout troop, to plan for hikes and summer camps; and to go on their cheery way out of meeting, ofttimes creating spring in the heart of winter by doing the regulation good turn for somebody.
In especial, good turns toward the sorrow-bowed old woman, Ma’am Baldwin, were in vogue that season, because a first-rate recipe for sympathy is to perform a service for its object. The greater and more risky the service, the broader the stream of good will that flows from it!
So it was with the four members of the Owl Patrol who had received the boy scout medal for life-saving—the silver cross suspended from a blue ribbon, awarded to the scout who saves life with considerable risk to himself—for their gallant work in rescuing the old woman’s grandson from the frozen waters of the tidal river. Their own moved feelings at that the finest moment of their young lives were thereafter as a shining mantle veiling the peculiarities of her who, solitary and defenseless, had once been regarded as fair game for their most merciless teasing.
She was not so solitary now. Much shaken by the accident to her grandchild, she was in no fitstate to return to her baldfaced house on Christmas Eve or for many days after; so Public Opinion at length took the matter into its own hands and decreed that henceforth she must find a home with her daughter.
There, in a little dwelling on the outskirts of the town, she often watched the khaki-clad scouts march by. Invariably they saluted her. And Jack, the rescued nine-year-old, would strut and stretch and stamp in a vain attempt to hasten the advent of his twelfth birthday when he might enlist as a tenderfoot.
The Saturday spring hikes were varied by trips down the river when each patrol in turn was taken on an excursion in Captain Andy’s motor-boat. It was on such an occasion that Nixon Warren, who had begun his scout service as a member of the Peewit Patrol of Philadelphia, obtained his coveted chance of seeing Spotty Seal at close quarters.
“You stay round Exmouth during the spring an’ summer, Nix, and I’ll take you where you’ll see a seal close enough for you to shake his flipper,” promised the sea-captain; and he kept his word, though the pledge was fulfilled after a fashion not in accordance with his intentions.
It was a glorious day, when the power-boatAviator, owned by Captain Andy, left the town wharf with six of the Owls aboard in charge of the assistant scoutmaster, Toiney Leduc, and with the absurd little rowboat that danced attendance upon the Aviator, and which was jocosely named the Pill, bobbing behind them on the tidal ripples at the end of a six-foot towrope.
Spring was on the river to-day. Spring was in the clear call of the greater yellow-legs as it skimmed over the marshes, in the lightning dart of the kingfisher, in the wave of the tall black grass fringing each marshy bank, showered with diamonds by the advance and retreat of a very high tide tickled into laughter by the April breeze.
And spring was in the scouts’ hearts, focusing all Nature’s joy-thrills, as they glided down the river.
“Houp-e-là!I’ll t’ink heem prett’ good day for go on reever, me,” announced Assistant Scoutmaster Toiney, his black eyes dancing.
And he presently woke the echoes, while they wound in and out between the feathery marshes, with a gay “Tra-la!” or “Rond’! Rond’! Rond’!” that seemed the very voice of Spring herself bursting into song.
“Goodness! I can hardly wait for the end ofAugust when our scoutmaster will get his vacation and we’re to camp out on the Sugarloaf Dunes,” said Leon Chase. “You can see the white dunes from here, Nix. It’s a great old Sugarloaf, isn’t it?” pointing across broad, pearly plains of water which at high tide spread out on either side of the central tidal channel, at the crystalline sand-pillar, guarding the mouth of the tidal river.
“The other sand-hills look like a row of tall, snowy breakers at this distance. Whew! aren’t they splendid—with that bright blue sky-line behind them? I expect we’ll just have the ‘time of our lives’ when we camp out there!” came in blissful accents from the patrol leader.
“Well! we’re not going to land on the dunes to-day,” said Captain Andy, who was standing up forward, steering the gasolene launch, his keen eyes scanning the plains of water from under his visored cap, in search of Spotty Seal’s sleek dog-like head cleaving the ripples as he swam, with his strong hind-flippers propelling him along.
“Whoo’! Whoo’! she threw the water a bit that time; didn’t she, lads?” alluding to his motor-boat, as the April breeze plucked a crisp sheet of spray from the breast of the high tide,like a white leaf from a book, and laughingly threw it at the occupants of the launch. “But that’s nothing!” went on the old skipper. “Bless ye, boys, I’ve been down this river in a rowboat when the seas would come tumbling in on me from the bay, each looking big as a house as it shoved its white comb along! ’Twould rear itself like a glassy roof over the boat and I’d think it meant ‘day, day!’ to me, but I’d crawl out somehow. An’ I’ve lived to tell the tale.
“But I’m gettin’ too old for such scrapes now,” went on the old sea-fighter. “I’m going to turn ‘Hayseed!’ You mayn’t believe it, but I am!” glowering at the laughing, incredulous scouts. “I’m about buying a piece o’ land that’s only half cleared o’ timber yet, up Exmouth way; going to start a farm. But, great sailor! how’ll I ever get along with a cow. That’s what stumps me.”
“We’ll come out an’ milk her for you, Captain Andy,” volunteered with one breath the boy scouts, their merry voices ringing out over the mother-of-pearl plains of water, bounded on one side by the headlands of a bold shore, on the other by green peninsulas of salt-marsh, insulated at high water by the winding creeks that burrowedamong them, and farther on by the radiant dunes.
“I’ll t’ink he no lak’ for be tie to cow, me!” Toiney nodded mischievously at the sea-captain. Then, all of a sudden, his voice exploded gutturally like a bomb: “Gard’ donc!Gard’ donc, de gros seal!Sapré tonnere!deuxgros seal. Two beeg seal!V’là V’là!shes jomp right out o’ reever—engh!”
The excited Canadian’s gesticulating hands drew every eye in the direction he indicated, which was a little to the left of the central tidal channel, between them and the straying creeks.
And the scouts’ excitement fairly fizzed like a burning fuse as, mingled with Toiney’s cry, sounded a hoarse bark, wafted across the plains of water, the harsh “Beow!” or “Weow!” according as the semi-distant ear might translate it, of an angry bull-seal.
Each boy’s heart leaped into his distended throat at the sound, but not so high as leaped the bull-seal, to whom the other term significant of his male gender—that of dog-seal—hardly applied, for he outweighed half a dozen good-sized dogs.
Breathlessly gazing, the scouts saw him jump clear out of the water not quarter of a mile fromthem, his sleek, dark bulk sheathed in crystal armor, wrought of brine and sunbeams—his flippers dripping rainbows! Down he came again with a wrathful splash that sent the foam flying, and struck his companion, an apparently smaller animal whose head alone was visible, a furious blow on that sleek head with one of his clawed flippers.
“Gard’ donc!Gard’ donc, les gros sealqui se battent! De beeg seal dat fights—dat strike heem oder, engh?” exploded Toiney again.
“So they are—fighting! Goodness! that big fellow is pitching into the one in the water. Going for him like fury, for some reason!” broke from the excited boys, as they stared, open-mouthed, while this belligerent performance was repeated, accompanied once or twice by the grunting bark of the larger seal.
“Great guns! he’s a snorter, isn’t he? You could hear that battle-cry of his nearly a mile off, at night, when the weather is decently calm as to-day,” came from Captain Andy while he slowed down the panting motor-boat in order that the scouts might have a good view of the angry sea-calf—another name for the harbor seal—which Nixon yearned to see, and which was so absorbed in wreaking vengeance on aflippered rival that it paid no attention at all to the approaching launch.
“Gee whiz! isn’t he a monster?”—”Must be five or six feet long!”—”Can’t he make the foam fly, though?”—”You’d think he owned the river!” came at intervals from the gasping spectators.
“Nom-de-tonnerre!she’sgrosseal: shes mak de watere go lak’ scramble de egg—engh?” gurgled Toiney, mixing up his pronouns in guttural excitement over this river duel, such as he had witnessed once before, when two male seals contested for the favor of some marbled sweetheart.
In this case the duelists were evidently unevenly matched, for presently a wild cry came from Scout Nixon:—
“See! See! he has him by the throat now. That big fellow has his fangs in the other seal’s throat! Must have! For he’s dragging him along to that little creek! He’s going to kill him.”
“Mille tonnerres!I’ll t’ink shes go for choke heem, me: dat’s de tam he’ll go deaded sure—engh?” Thus Toiney came gutturally in on the excited duet, as seven strained faces peered over the motor-boat’s side at the one-sided battle.
“Mille tonnerres”—”a thousand thunders”—werebeing launched, indeed, upon the spotted head of the weaker animal, half stunned by the furious blows rained on him by the clawed hind-flippers of his adversary, and now finding himself dragged, willy-nilly, through the water into the secluded creek, like a prisoner to the block.
He tried diving, to loosen those cruel fangs, but was mercilessly forced to the surface again by his big rival.
“Well! I think this fight has gone on long enough; I’m going to separate them,” cried Captain Andy. “I guess the tide is high enough for us to overhaul them in that little creek, without danger of being pocketed, or hung up aground, there!”
And with a warningchug! chug!the power-boat Aviator made straight for the bubbling mouth of the creek, across the foamy wake left by the fighting seals, and dashed in after them.
Not until it was almost upon them did the triumphant male tear his four fangs from his rival’s throat. Then, startled at last, he swam off a few strokes in a wild flurry, and dove, while Captain Andy drove his throbbing boat in between the combatants.
For a thrilling minute the scouts found themselves at the centre of a grand old mix-up thatchurned the waters of the creek; the weaker seal, now half dead, was right beneath the boat. Presently his head appeared upon the surface a few yards ahead of it. Swimming feebly a short distance, he crawled out of the water a little higher up the creek and lay upon the marshy bank entirely played out.
His merciless rival reappeared too, to the rear of the boat, strong as ever, swimming rapidly for the creek’s mouth and the open water beyond it.
“That seal is ‘all in’;” Nixon pointed to the victim. “If we could go on to the head of the creek, we might step out on the bank and have a good look at him.”
“I can’t land you from the power-boat, but you can get into the little Pill if you like, an’ row up ’longside him.” Captain Andy pointed to the tubby rowboat bobbing astern. “No! only three of you may go, more might capsize her; she ain’t much of a boat, though she’s a slick bit o’ wood for her size! Easy there now! Steady!”
The sturdy Pill was drawn alongside. Scouts Warren and Chase, with one brother Owl, stepped into her, and rowed to the head of the creek, whence they had a near view of the half-throttledcreature as he lay, mouth open, stretched out upon the marshy bank, his strong hind-flippers extended behind him, their brown claws glistening with brine.
“Whew! he’s spotted like a sandpiper’s egg,” said Nixon, looking at the head and back of the marbled seal. “Seems to me he’s of a lighter color than the big fellow who nearly did for him;helooked almost black out of water—but then he was all wet. And what a funny little tail this one has, not bigger than a pair of spectacles!”
“See his black nose an’ short fore-flippers!” whispered Leon. “Don’t his eyes stick out? They’re a kind o’ blue-black an’ glazy. There! he’s noticing us now. He’s trying to flounder off—with that funny, teetering kind o’ wabble they have! Say! hadn’t we better row back to Captain Andy, and leave him to recover? He’s all used up; that big one gave him an awful licking.”
And this merciful consideration from Starrie Chase, who, prior to his scout days, would have had no thought save how to finish the cruel work of the big bully and put an end to the beaten rival!
“Well! you did see a harbor seal, Nix, ’mostnear enough to shake his flipper, eh?” challenged Captain Andy as the three scrambled back aboard the motor-boat, and made the little Pill fast astern by its short towrope, while the Aviator bore out of the blue creek, to head upstream toward the town again.
“Yes! I’d have tried to do it too, if he hadn’t been so completely ‘all in,’” laughed the scout. “I suppose we’ll have plenty of opportunities to see seals and listen to their barking when we camp out on the white dunes during the last days of August and the beginning of September. They say the young ones make a kind of cooing noise, much like a turtle-dove, only stronger; I’m bent on capturing a pup-seal, to tame him!”
“Oh! you’d have no trouble about the taming, only you couldn’t feed him! But you’ll see seals a-plenty an’ hear ’em, too, next summer. They just love to lie out on a reef o’ rocks in the sun, when the tide’s low, especially if the wind’s a little from the no’thwest,” said the ex-skipper. “A lonely reef, a warm sun, and light no’thwesterly breeze make up the harbor-seal’s heaven, I guess!”
CHAPTER XV
THE CAMP ON THE DUNES
And when those fervently anticipated last days of August did in due time dawn, they brought with them many opportunities to Nixon and his brother scouts of watching Spotty Seal and his kindred in the enjoyment of their mundane paradise, whose pavement of gold was a wave-washed reef and its harpings the mild bluster of a northwesterly breeze.
During the final week of August and the first of September their scoutmaster, a rising young naval architect, had a respite from designing wooden vessels, from considering how he could best combine speed and seaworthiness in an up-to-date model; and he arranged to devote the whole of that holiday to camping out with his boy scout troop upon the milky Sugarloaf Dunes.
A more ideal camping-ground could scarcely have been found than among the white sand-hills, capped with plumy vegetation which formed the background for an equally dazzling line of beach, where the gray-and-white gulls strutted in feathered rendezvous, and were hardly to be scaredaway by the landing in their midst of the first patrol of scouts, put ashore from Captain Andy’s motor-boat in a light skiff, a more capacious rowboat than the Pill.
But they had brought the tubby Pill down the river too, in tow of the launch; and Captain Andy, who was partial to scouts, had arranged to leave that rotund little rowboat with them, so that, two or three at a time, they might explore the tidal river with the creeks that intersected the marshes in the neighborhood of the white dunes.
“Just look at that gray gull, will you?” laughed Patrol Leader Nixon, as he landed from the skiff. “He’s made up his mind that we Owls have no rights here: that this white beach is his stamping-ground, and he won’t be frightened away!”
Other gulls had reluctantly taken wing and wheeled off during the prolonged process of landing the eight members of the Owl Patrol, with their scoutmasters and camp outfit, in various detachments from the launch, which was too large to run right in to the beach.
But this one youthful sea-gull, a mere boy in plumage gray, held his ground, parading the lonely beach with head turning alertly from sideto side, as if he were admonishing his wheeling brothers with: “These are boy scouts! Look at me: I tell you, you have nothing to fear!”
So bold was his mien, so peaceful the attitude of the human invaders, that presently the regiment of sea-gulls fluttered back to a point of rendezvous only a little removed from their former one.
“We won’t have much company beyond ourselves and the birds, I guess!” remarked Nixon presently. “There are no houses in sight except those three fine bungalows about quarter of a mile off on the edge of the dunes. And the fisherman’s shack on the beach below them!”
“Yes, that belongs to an old clam-digger,” said Kenjo Red. “He keeps his pails there. Don’t you remember my telling you about his letting us—my uncle an’ me—have his boat one day last November, so’s we could row over to the sand-spit opposite, and take a look at some seals that were sunning themselves there?”
“Oh! yes,weremember, Kenjo; you’ve told about that at half a dozen camp-fire powwows, at least.” Starrie Chase plucked off Kenjo’s cap and combed his ruddy locks with a teasing forefinger. “They say Dave Baldwin, thevaurien,” with guttural mimicry of Toiney’s accents,“hangs out among the dunes here, when he isn’t loafing in the woods up the river,” added Corporal Chase, peering off among the white sand-hills, capped with biscuit-colored plumes of dry beach-grass, and the more verdant beach-pea, as if he expected to see young Baldwin’s head pop up among them.
“I wonder if we’ll run across him?” said Nixon. “He can’t ‘make camp’ among the dunes. Nobody is allowed to camp out here, without special permission. Boy scouts are privileged persons; they know we won’t set fire to the brush.”
“Oh! when he needs a fire—when he knocks a woodchuck on the head and wants to cook it—I suppose he rows over to one of those little islands there; they say he has an old rowboat here.” Leon pointed to two small islets rising from the plains of water a little higher up the river.
“Well, I don’t envy him!” Marcoo shrugged his shoulders. “He must have a bitter time of it in winter, when the river is frozen over down to the bay, an’ you don’t hear a sound here beyond the occasional pop of a sportsman’s gun, or the barking of the seals—and even they’re pretty quiet in midwinter. Hey! Look at that spotted sandpiper. ‘Teeter-tail’ we call him: see his tailbob up and down!” exclaimed Coombsie, who was an enthusiast about birds.
In watching the sandpiper rise from the white beach and dart across the water, in listening to his sweet, whistling “peet-weet!” note, speculations about the habits of thevaurien, the good-for-nothing young vagrant, were forgotten.
He, Dave Baldwin, faded completely from the campers’ thoughts as the narrow skiff grounded its sharp nose for the fourth time on the beach, landing the remainder of their camp dunnage and commissariat; and the work began of selecting a site for the camp amid the milky sand-hills, interspersed with a few trees, slender and short of stature.
Those gray birches and ash-trees formed pleasant spots of shade amid the dazzling whiteness of the dunes. But there was other and more unique vegetable growth to be considered.
“Say! but will you just look at the cranberry patch, growing out of the white beach?” shrieked young Colin after an ecstatic interval, addressing no one scout in particular.
“Cranberries there near the tide!”—”Growing out of the sand!”—”Tooraloo!”—”Nonsense!” came from his brother Owls who were already getting busy, erecting tents.
But cranberries there were, in ripening beauty—as the workers presently saw for themselves—cranberries whose roots underran the dazzling beach, whose crimson creepers trailed delicately over its whiteness, whose berries nestled their rosy cheeks daintily, each upon its snowy pillow.
“Gee!” The one united ejaculation—the little nondescript, uncouth monosyllable which expresses so many emotions of the boyish heart, from panic to panegyric—was all that the scouts could find voice for in presence of this red-and-white loveliness secreted by Nature upon a lonely shore.
“Hey! fellows, Captain Andy is going,” the voice of the busy scoutmaster broke in upon their bliss. “He’s to bring the Foxes down to-morrow in his motor-boat,” alluding to the Fox Patrol, of which Godey was leader. “The Seals will row over, to-morrow forenoon, from the other side of the river; so our scout troop will be complete. We owe a lot to Captain Andy. Don’t you want to show him that you can make a noise: don’t you want to give your yell, with his name at the end? Now, all in line, and together!”
And each scout with his arm around a comrade upon either side—Leon’s clasping the back of Harold Greer who, a year ago, had coweredat sight of him—all in a welded line, swaying together where the ripples broke upon the milky beach, they proved their prowess as chief noise-makers and made the welkin ring with:—