"Pshaw! You boy scouts jus' make me tired." G.o.dey leaned against the parapet of the broad bridge above the tidal river whereon the boys stood, as if the contemplation of so much energy ambitiously directed was too much for him. "Here comes another of your kind now!"

He pointed to Colin Estey who came swinging along out of the distance, his quick springy step and upright carriage doing credit to the scouts'

drill.

Colin halted ere crossing the bridge to hail a street-car for an old gentleman who was making futile attempts to stop it, and then courteously helped him to the platform.

G.o.dey shook his head over the action. "c.o.c.k-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.

G.o.dey lolled on the parapet, looking after them, racking his brain for some derisive epithet to hurl at their backs; he longed to shout, "Sissies!" and "Spongecakes!" But such belittling terms clearly didn't apply.

The only mocking shaft in his quiver that would come anywhere near hitting the mark of those well-drilled backs--straight as a rod--was one which even he felt to be feeble:--

"Oh! you Tin Scouts," he shouted maliciously. "Tin Soldiers! _Tin Scouts!_" sustaining the cry until the two figures disappeared from view in the direction of the Chase homestead.

CHAPTER X

THE BALDFACED HOUSE

But Leon did not study signaling and the Morse alphabet that afternoon.

He was presently dispatched by his father, who owned a pleasant home on the outskirts of the town, on an errand to a farm some two miles distant on the uplands that skirted the woods.

The afternoon had all the spicy beauty of early November, with a slight frost in the air. The fresh breeze laughed like a tomboy as it romped over the salt-marshes. Each eddying dimple in the tidal river shone like a star sapphire, while the broad, brackish channel wound in and out between the marshes with as many wriggles as a lively trout.

"Those little creeks look like runaways," thought Leon as he paused upon the uplands and beamed down upon the wide panorama of golden marsh-land and winding water. "They're for all the world like schoolboys that have cut school, giggling an' running to hide!" His eye dreamily followed the course of many a truant creek that half-turned its head, looking under the tickling sunbeams as if it were glancing back over its shoulder, while it burrowed into the marshes vainly trying to hide where the relentless schoolmaster, called, for want of a better name, Solar Attraction, might not find it and compel its return to the ocean.

"And the Sugarloaf Sand-Dunes; don't they look fine?" reflected the boy scout further, his eye traveling off downstream to where the curving tidal channel broadened into pearly plains of water, bounded at one distant point, near the juncture of river and sea, by a dazzlingly white beach.

There the fine colorless sand, which when viewed closely had very much the hue of skim milk, the white being shot with a faint gray-blue tinge, had been piled by the winds of ages into tall sand-hills, into pyramids and columns: one dazzling pillar, in especial, being named the Sugarloaf from its crystalline whiteness, had given its name to the whole expanse of dune and beach.

The tall Sugarloaf gleamed in the distance now like a snowy lighthouse whose lamps are sleeping, presiding over the mouth of the tidal river; its brother sand-hills capped by vegetation might have been the pure bright cliffs of some fairy sh.o.r.e.

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 sh.o.r.e bird or animal, he had gone about "lak wit' eye shut," so far as many things just now beginning to fill him with a wonderful, speechless gladness were concerned.

"Well, we're not heading for that farmhouse, are we, pup?" he said at length, turning from the contemplation of runaway creeks and radiant dunes to the completion of his father's errand.

But the sunlit beauty at which he had been gazing coursed through his every vein, finding vent in a curly, ecstatic whistle that ascended in spirals until it touched the high keynote of exultation and there hung suspended; while the rest of the trip to that upland farmhouse was accomplished in a series of broad jumps, the terrier being as wild with delight as his master.

The errand performed and the boy scout having put in half an hour condescendingly amusing the farmer's two small children, while Blink exchanged compliments with his kind, master and dog started upon the return walk.

"Oh! it's early yet; don't you want to come a little way into the woods, doggie?" said Leon, doubling backward after they had taken a few steps.

"We haven't had many runs together lately. Your nose has been out of joint; poor pup!" stooping to caress the terrier. "Toiney says we can't take you on our scout hikes, because you'd scare every 'littal wil'

an-ni-mal' within a mile. You would, too; wouldn't you? But there's an outdoor scout meeting to-night to be held over in Sparrow Hollow, each fellow lighting his own camp-fire--using not more than two matches--and cooking his own supper. And you may come. Yes, I said you might come!"

as the dog, gyrating like a feather, seized his coat-sleeve between strong white teeth in his eagerness not to be excluded from any more fun that might be afoot.

They were soon on the sere skirts of the woodland, prancing through leafy drifts.

"We can't go far," said Leon. "We must get back to the town and buy our half-pound of beefsteak that we're to cook without the use of any ordinary cooking-utensil, and so pa.s.s one of the tests for becoming a second-cla.s.s scout. I'll divvy up with you, pup! But whew! isn't this just fine?... The woods in November can put it all over the September woods to my mind."

He added the last words to himself. There was something about the rugged strength of the stripped trees, with the stealing blue haze of evening softening their bareness, about the evergreen grandeur of pine and hemlock lording it over their robbed brethren, about the drab, parchment-like leaves clinging with eerie murmur to the oak-tree, and the ruddy twigs of bare berry-bushes, that appealed to the element of rugged daring in the boy himself.

He could not so soon break away from the woods as he had intended, though he only explored their outskirts.

Dusk was already falling when he found himself on the open uplands again, bound back toward the distant town.

"The scouts are to start for Sparrow Hollow at six o'clock: we must hustle, if we want to start with them," he said to the dog. "The only way we can make it is by taking a short cut across the marshes and wading through the river; that would be a quick way of reaching the town and the butcher's shop, to buy our beefsteak," muttering rapidly, partly to himself, partly to his impatient companion. "The tide is full out now, the water will be shallow; I can take off my shoes and stockings and carry you, pup. Who cares if it's cold?"

The boy scout, with an antic.i.p.atory glow all over him, felt impervious to any extreme of temperature as he bounded down the uplands, with the breeze--the freshening, freakish breeze--driving across the salt-marshes directly in his face, racing through every vein in him, stirring up a whirligig within, presently bringing waste things to the top even as it stirred up dust and refuse in the roadway.

"Hullo! there's the old _baldfaced house_," he cried suddenly to the dog. "Here we are on our old stamping-ground, Blink! Wonder if 'Mom Baldwin' is doing her witch stunts still? We haven't said 'Howdy!' to her for a long time; have we, pup?"

Slackening pace, for that fickle breeze was blowing away many things that he ought to have remembered, among them the lateness of the hour, he turned aside a few steps to where a lonely old house stood at the foot of the slope as the uplands melted into the salt-marshes.

It was a shallow sh.e.l.l of a dwelling--all face and no rear apparently--and that face was bald, almost stripped of paint by the elements. Just as storm-stripped was the heart of the one old woman who lived in it, and whom Leon had been wont to call a "solitary crank!"

To the neighborhood generally she was known as Ma'am Baldwin, mother of the young scape-grace, Dave Baldwin, who had so troubled the peaceful town by his pranks that he had finally been shut up in a reformatory, and who was now, a year after his release, a useless vagrant, spending, according to report, most of his time loafing between the white sand-dunes on one side of the river and the woods on the other--incidentally breaking his mother's heart at the same time.

She had lived here in the old baldfaced house, with him, her youngest boy, the child of her middle age, until his wild doings brought the law's hand upon him. After his imprisonment shame prevented her leaving the isolated dwelling and going to live with her married daughter near the town, though that daughter's one child, her little grandson Jack, possessed all the love-spots still green in her withered heart.

In her humiliation and loneliness "Mom Baldwin," as the boys called her, had become rather eccentric.

She had more than once been seen by those town boys--Leon and his gang--stationed behind the smeared gla.s.s 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 gra.s.s of the dark marshes, spying upon her.

"She's a witch, working spells with that lantern!"

Older people surmised that she was signaling to her vagabond son, who might be haunting the distant marshes, trying to lure him home; shame and grief on his account had half-unbalanced her, they said.

But the boys pretended to stick to their own superst.i.tious 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, G.o.dey Peck and others of their gang--tickled in the meanest part of them by the fact that they "kept her guessing"--hid among the marsh-gra.s.s 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.