"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 Santa Claus, 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 house beyond 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-gra.s.s. "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 was going 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 coa.r.s.e beach-gra.s.s glittered like a jeweled spike under the waning sunlight.

"Oh! _somebody_ is 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.

But _now_ a 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's _drowning_. 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!" Coombsie flung 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 pa.s.sed two resolutions: that the Big Minute had come: and that there wasn't water or 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, gla.s.sy 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 gla.s.sy 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 pa.s.sed 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.