"Chuck me your handkerchiefs!" said the crutch-maker to the other two uninjured boys. "We'll pad the top of it, so that it won't dig into his armpit. Now then, Leon! get this under your right arm and put your left one round my neck--that will fix you up to hobble a short distance."

A half-reluctant grin, distorted by agony, convulsed Leon's face as, leaning hard upon the white-birch prop, he arose and limped a few steps; he recollected how at odd moments in the woods--whenever there wasn't too much doing--he had believed that he held a grudge against the scout for making him yield one sharply contested point and that about such an infinitesimal thing in his eyes as the brief life of a chipmunk.

"Oh! I guess I can limp along with the crutch," he said, smearing the dew of pain over his bedaubed face, now ghastly under the paint.

"Go on; you're only wasting time!" Nixon drew the other's left arm with its moist cold hand around his neck--all the heat in Leon's body had gone to swell the thunderstorm in his ankle.

And thus plowing, stumbling through the undergrowth, the scout's right hand keeping the impudent twigs from poking his companion's eyes out, they reached the narrow clearing along which the ambient light of a September sunset flowed like a golden river.

No coveted log shanty, where at least they could encamp for the night, decorated it.

But on its opposite side there loomed before the boys' eyes as they issued from the woods a great, lichen-covered rock, over twenty feet high, with a deep cavernous opening that yawned like a sleepy mouth at sunset as it swallowed the rays streaming into it.

"Glory halleluiah! it's the Bear's Den--at last," e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Leon, pain momentarily eclipsed. "Thanks, Nix: you're a horse!" as he withdrew his arm from his comrade's shoulders. "But that cave is about five miles from anywhere--from any opening in the woods! What on earth are we going to do now?"

"Why! light a fire the first thing, I guess," returned the boy scout practically.

CHAPTER VI

THE FRICTION FIRE

"We haven't got any matches to start a fire with!" Coombsie sat down in a pool of gold with the well-nigh empty basket beside him, and turned baffled eyes upon the others.

"I have a few in a safety box in my pocket. Thank goodness! I didn't go back on our scout motto: 'Be Prepared!' so far as matches are concerned, anyway." Nixon felt in each pocket of his Norfolk jacket with a face that lengthened dismally under the smears of Varney's Paintpot.

"_Gone!_" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed despairingly. "I must have lost the box!"

"It probably dropped out of your pocket into the gra.s.s when I tied our coats round the chest-nut-tree, to prevent that young c.o.o.n from 'lighting down,'" suggested Leon, and _his_ face grew pinched; it was not a refreshing memory that conjured up a picture of Racc.o.o.n Junior limping back to the hole among the ledges near Big Swamp, with a leg broken by his stone, at the moment when a fellow had a whole thunderstorm in his ankle.

"Well! we're up against it now," gasped the scout. "We can't get out of the woods to-night; that's sure! We could sleep in the cave and be jolly comfortable too"--he stooped down and examined its wide interior--"if we only had a fire. But, without a camp-fire or a single blanket, we'll be uncomfortable enough when it comes on dark; these September nights are chilly."

He threw his hat on the ground, drew his coat-sleeve across his ruddy forehead, rendering his bedaubed countenance slightly more grotesque than before. He had forgotten that it was smeared, forgotten paint and frolic. An old look descended upon his face.

He was desperately tired. Every muscle of his body ached. His head was confused too from long wandering among the trees; his thoughts seemed to skip back into the woods away from him; he felt himself stalking them as Blink would stalk a rabbit. But there was one thing more alive in him at that moment than ever before, a sense of protective responsibility.

With Leon disabled and the two younger boys completely worn out, it rested with him alone to turn a night in the Bear's Den into a mere "corking" adventure, or to let it drag by as a dark age of discomfort with certainly bad results for two of the party. Nixon had felt Leon's hand as it slipped from his neck at the edge of the clearing, it was clammy as ice; his first-aid training as a scout told him that the injured lad would feel the cold bitterly during the night.

Starrie Chase would probably "stick it out without squealing," as in such circ.u.mstances he would try to do himself. But it would be a hard experience. And young Colin's clothing was still sodden from his partial immersion in Big Swamp. It was one of those moments for the Scout of the U.S.A. when the potential father in the boy is awake.

"I've _got_ to fix things up for the night, somehow," he wearily told himself aloud. "I wonder--I wonder if I could manage to start a fire without matches--with 'rubbing-sticks'? I did it once when we were camping out with our scoutmaster. But he helped me. If I could only get the fire, now, 'twould be a--great--stunt!"

"'Start a fire without matches!' You're crazy!" Colin and Coombsie looked sideways at him; they had heard of people being "turned round" in their heads by much woodland wandering.

"Shut up, you two!" commanded Leon, suddenly imperious. "He knows what he's about. He did a good stunt in helping me along here."

"If I could only find the right kinds of wood to start a friction fire--balsam fir for the fireboard and drill, and a little chunk of cedarwood to be shredded into tinder!" The boy scout was eagerly scanning the trees on either side of the gra.s.s-grown logging-road, trees which at this moment seemed to have their roots in the forest soil and their heads in Heaven's own glory.

"_There's_ a fir-tree! Among those pines--a little way along the road!"

Leon spoke in that slow, stiff voice, sprained by pain. "Perhaps I can help you--Nix?"

"No, you lie still, but chuck me your knife, it's stronger than mine! I ought to have two tools for preparing the 'rubbing-sticks,' so the Chief Scout tells us in our book, but I'll have to get along somehow with our pocketknives."

Nix Warren was off up the road as he spoke; hope, responsibility, and ambition toward the performance of a "great stunt," forming a fighting trio to get the better of weariness.

The glory was waning from the tree-tops when he returned, bearing with him one sizeable chunk of balsamic fir-wood and a long stick from the same tree.

"Any sort of stick will do for the bent bow which is attached to the drill and works it; that's what our book says," he murmured, as if conning over a lesson. "Who's got a leather shoe-lace? You have--cowhide laces--in those high boots of yours, Colin! Mind letting me have one?"

The speaker was excitedly setting to work, now, fashioning the flat fireboard from the chunk of fir-wood, carving a deep notch in its side, and scooping out a shallow hole at the inner end of the notch into which the point of the upright drill would fit.

In feeling, he was the primitive man again, this modern boy scout: he was that grand old savage ancestor of prehistoric times into whose ear G.o.d whispered the secret, unknown to beast or bird, of creating light and warmth for himself and those dependent on him, when the sun forsook them.

"Say! can't you fellows get busy and collect some materials for a fire, dry chips and pine-splinters--fat pine-splinters--and dead branches?

There's plenty of good fuel around! You wood-finders'll have a cinch!"

It certainly was a signal act of faith in Colin and Coombsie when they bestirred their weary limbs to obey this command from the wizard who was to try and evoke the mysterious fire-element latent in the combustible wood he handled, but hard to get at without the aids which civilization places at man's disposal.

They each kept a corner of their inquisitive eyes upon him while they collected the fuel, watching the shaping of the notched fireboard, of the upright pointed drill, over a dozen inches in length, and the construction of a rude bow out of a supple stick found on the clearing, with Colin's cowhide shoe-lace made fast to each end as the cord or strap that bent the bow.

This cord was twisted once round the upper part of the drill whose lower point fitted into the shallow hole in the fireboard.

"Whew! I must find a piece of pine-wood with a knot in it and scoop that knot out, so that it will form a disc for the top of the drill in which it will turn easily," said the perspiring scout. "Oh, sugarloons! I've forgotten all about the _tinder_; we may have to trot a long way into the woods to find a cedar-tree."

"I'll go with you, Nix," proffered Marcoo, while Leon, lying on the ground near the cave, with his dog pressing close to him, undertook the task of scooping that soft knot out of the pine-disk.

"All right; bring along the tin mug out of your basket; perhaps we may find water!"

And they did! Oh, blessed find! Wearily they trudged back about sixty yards into the woods, in an opposite direction from that in which they had traveled before--Nixon taking the precaution of breaking off a twig from every second or third tree so as to mark the trail--before they lit on a grove of young cedars through which ran a sound, now a purling sob, now a tinkling laugh; softer, more angel-like, than the wind's mirth!

"_Water!_ A spring! Oh--tooraloo!" And they drank their fill, bringing back, along with the cedar-wood for tinder--water, as much as their tin vessel would hold, for the two boys and dog keeping watch over the fire-sticks on the old bear's camping-ground.

The soft cedar was shredded into tinder between two stones. The drill was set up with its lower point resting in the notched hole of the fire-board, its upper point fitting into the pine-disk which Nixon steadied with his hand.

Then the boy scout began to work the bent bow which pa.s.sed through a hole in the upper part of the drill, steadily to and fro, slowly turning that drill, grinding its lower point into the punky wood of the fireboard.

In the eye of each of the four boys the coveted spark already glowed, drilled by excitement out of the dead wood of his fatigue.

Even the dog, his jaws gaping, his tongue lolling out, lay stretched at attention, his gaze intent upon the central figure of the boy scout working the strapped bow backward and forward, turning the pointed drill that bored into the fireboard.

Ground-up wood began to fall through the notch in the fireboard adjacent to the hole upon another slab of wood which Nixon had placed as a tray beneath it.

This powdered wood was brown. Slowly it turned black. Was that smoke?

It was a strange tableau, the four disheveled boys with their red-smeared faces, the painted clown's dog, all holding their breath intent upon the primitive miracle of the fire-birth.

Smoke it was! _Increasing smoke!_ And in its tiny cloud suddenly appeared the miracle--a dull red spark at the heart of the black wood dust.