"That was before you could walk," Pee-wee reminded him.

"The last home I was in was in New York," Blythe said. "It wasn't mine."

"I guess you're like we are," Westy said, noticing perhaps a little embarra.s.sment in their friend's manner, "our home is outdoors."

"And believe me, the sky has all the tin roofs I ever saw beaten twenty ways," observed Warde Hollister. That was pretty good for a new scout.

"Roofs are all right to slide down," Pee-wee observed. "They're all right as long as you're not under them."

"Believe me, we wouldn't have the sky over us if we didn't have to,"

said Roy. "It's a blamed nuisance when it rains. The trouble with the solar system is there are too many stars and planets and things in it.

You can't get out into the open."

"What are you talking about?" Pee-wee retorted contemptuously.

"I'd get rid of all the stars, stationary stars, movie stars and all,"

Roy said.

"Scouts are supposed to like the stars," Pee-wee informed Blythe.

"Sure, if he had his own way he'd eat hunter's stew out of the Big Dipper," said Roy. "A lot he knows about the stars; he doesn't even know that Mercury is named after a thermometer."

"This bunch is crazy," Pee-wee informed Blythe.

"That's because we sleep under crazy quilts," Roy said.

Blythe just sat there laughing, the silent, diffident pleasure in his countenance shown by the crackling, cheery blaze.

"What would you do if you didn't have the North Star, I'd like to know?"

Pee-wee demanded. "We'd be all roaming around lost in the woods, dead maybe."

"I should worry about roaming around dead," said Roy. "Do you think I've got the North Star?"

With a look of pitying contempt, Pee-wee turned from Roy to the more congenial bowl, now sizzling and bubbling on the fire. "It's ready," he said.

"Be prepared," said Roy; "each one arm himself with a tin plate and after that every scout for himself. This is called a hunter's stew because you have to hunt for the meat in it, but it's got plenty of e-pluribus unions in it. The potatoes and dumplings go to the patrol leaders, carrots to first and second hand scouts; tenderfeet get nothing because the stew isn't tender enough...."

It was pleasant sitting there in the bright area surrounded by darkness, chatting and planning the work for the morrow, and eating hunter's stew, scout style, patent applied for. And notwithstanding the slurs which Roy had cast at the sky it was pleasant to see that vast bespangled blackness over head. In the solemn night the neighboring shacks were divested of their tawdry cheapness, the loose and flapping strips of tar-paper and the broken windows were not visible, and the buildings seemed clothed in a kind of sombre dignity--silent memorials of the boys who had made those old boards and rafters ring with their shouts and laughter. Not a sound was there now from all those barnlike remains of a life that was gone. Only the noise of the saw and the hammer would resound where once the stirring revelry echoed.

"You hear some funny sounds here at night, when the wind blows," Blythe remarked.

"Shh, listen; I hear something now," one of the scouts said.

"I heard that last night," said Blythe uneasily; "or else I dreamed it."

Westy, who had been poking up the fire, paused, his stick poised, listening. "It's over there," he said, pointing to the tall dark outline of the windmill.

"There isn't breeze enough to turn the fan," Doc Carson said.

"It sounds like someone groaning," said another.

From the neighborhood of that old tower, though perhaps farther off, they could not tell, came a sound almost human, a kind of moaning intermingled with a plaintive wail, pitched in a higher key.

"Spooky," Westy said.

"This is the kind of a place I like," said Connie.

"Only it's nice to have somebody here," Blythe admitted.

"That's all right, _we're_ here," Pee-wee said.

They did not hear the sound again. If one were superst.i.tious he might have conjured that sound into a crying of the ghost of some dead soldier haunting the old forsaken camp. But these scouts did not believe in ghosts.

They did, however, believe in hunter's stew and they forgot all else as they sat around their camp-fire in the quiet darkness, telling yarns, and amusing their new friend by jollying....

CHAPTER X

THE FALL OF SCOUT HARRIS

As a camping place, perhaps the old reservation would not have proved a spot to the heart of the woods lover, but it was sequestered and had about it that romance which attaches to deserted habitations that are not tainted by the sordid environments of city life. The old buildings had never been beautiful and it was only the atmosphere of a place deserted which gave them a sort of romantic character.

But Nature had not been forced to evacuate the camp area; trees and tiny patches of woodland had remained, and the things which scouts love and seek had rea.s.serted their supremacy there after the last of the soldiers, and later the army of clerical workers, had gone away.

The result was a kind of jumble of man's hurried handiwork and Nature's persistence, and the place, for a while, was a novel, nay even a delightful, spot in which to camp.

In conference with Blythe, who seemed cheerfully agreeable to any plan, the troop decided that each patrol should have the task of demolishing a building, and should work under the supervision of its leader, with Blythe as a sort of general overseer.

The whole troop, however, bunked in a small fourth building because this would not be in process of razing. From the appearance of this little building it had been a sort of club or meeting place. The window gla.s.s was quite gone, as indeed was all the window gla.s.s in the camp. Near by was a good place for their camp and cook fire. The little shack had shelves on which the scouts kept their stores. They made beds of balsam, scout fashion, and slept both in and out-of-doors, as the weather dictated.

Roy was cook, as he always was on their troop enterprises. In his forages against the stronghold of Chocolate Drop, the professional cook at Temple Camp, he had learned much of the beloved art in which that grinning negro excelled. The unruly flipflop tossed in air, fluttered down into his greasy pan like a tamed bird. In Pee-wee's experiments it had a perverse habit of alighting on his head.

Roy's spirit, indeed, seemed to pa.s.s into his cookery and give it a flavor all its own. His bacon sizzled with joy. His coffee bubbled over with mirth. His turnovers wore a scout smile. His baked potatoes had his own twinkle in their eyes. His dumplings were indented with merry dimples like those in his own cheeks.

The morning after their arrival they set to work in real earnest. They had not a complete equipment of axes and saws, excepting their belt-axes, but as much of the work consisted of gathering and piling the lumber, and removing nails from it, there were implements enough for all. Some of the scouts worked above, loosening the boards from the roofs, while others on the ground pulled the tar-paper and nails from these and made an orderly pile of them.

Such was the nature of their work during the first two or three days and they found it strenuous but neither too difficult nor heavy. And work was relieved somewhat by the comedy element furnished by Pee-wee who rolled off a roof on one occasion while eating a sandwich.

"Take the nails out of him, pull the sandwich out of his hands, and pile him up with the boards," Roy called from a neighboring roof. "He's docked thirty cents for the time lost in rolling down."

"He ought to have an emergency brake," Westy suggested, as the young Raven clambered up to his place again, sandwich and all, and proceeded working with the sandwich in one hand and a hammer in the other.

"Didn't you say that's all roofs are good for?" Pee-wee vociferously demanded. "To roll off of?"

"To roll _down_, I said," Roy answered from his own perch among the beams of the next shack.