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 pa.s.sed 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 gra.s.sy side of Sparrow Hollow, with these l.u.s.ty 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 a.s.sistant scoutmaster, who, with the ta.s.sel of his red cap bobbing, and the flame-light flickering on his blue homespun shirt, was on 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-cla.s.s 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 drab broad-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 had really 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 a _bad boy_, engh? She's boy, Dave, heem _canaille_, _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 for her 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 any supper; 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-cla.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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 and Toiney 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, I think--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't see 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--or partially 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 them a swing to the other side. Say! but it was funny. So they flopped off into the water."