"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 ash.o.r.e 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 heem _gros seal_ on reever," broke in Toiney gutturally. "I'll see heem six mont' past on reever _au 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. When he 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 that _he_ was 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 themselves along. 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--the _vaurien_, 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 ta.s.seled 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 cla.s.sy-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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.s 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 marched home. 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

"Estu preta!" During the days that followed, while the fall season was merged in winter, the Owls who had pa.s.sed their outdoor tests in Sparrow Hollow, six of whom were tenderfeet no longer, but second-cla.s.s 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 cooperation, and it soon became "lots more fun" to the boy scouts to lend a hand in making that too staid town a more beautiful and 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 r.e.t.a.r.ding, 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 mult.i.tudinous 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 the same 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 inst.i.tuted a zealous crusade against the use of the steel trap by non-scouts of the neighboring farms, such as G.o.dey 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 G.o.dey cause for reflection.

"It hasn't made 'softies' of 'em anyhow, this scout movement," he soliloquized. "They got the better _of 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!

G.o.dey 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 G.o.dey, 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 this brigade--took counsel with his mother on the afternoon of Christmas Eve.

"You don't suppose that _she'll_ stay 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 inst.i.tution; 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 pa.s.ses at him with a rolling-pin, proceeded to whisper in her ear--with a measure of embarra.s.sment, for he was not accustomed to himself in the role 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?"