A Scout of To-day Part 24

For the Exmouth doctor had kept his word: Leon had been given the "bugle" literally and figuratively since he enlisted as a scout, symbol of the challenge to all the energy in him to advance along new lines, instead of the "foghorn" reproofs and warnings that had been showered on him prior to his scouting days.

Then, at last, stillness reigned, indeed, upon the moonlit dunes.

The bark of the dog-fox melted into distance, becoming indistinguishable from the voice of the returning tide.

The man-prowler among the sand-hills slipped away to some lair as lonely as the fox's.

And Toiney, with Scout Nixon Warren wrapped in his camper's blanket beside him, slept out upon the white sands "wit' de littal star on top o' them!"

CHAPTER XVI

THE PUP-SEAL'S CREEK

The music of "Taps" was eclipsed by the blither music of "Reveille," the morning blast blown by Leon standing in front of the white tents, the sands beneath his feet jeweled by the early suns.h.i.+ne, the blue ribbon attached to his bugle flirting with the breeze that capered among the plumy hillocks.

The tide which had ebbed and flowed again since midnight--when the last excited scout had fallen asleep lulled by its full purr--broke high upon the beach, where the white sands gleamed through its translucent flood like milk in a crystal vase.

Far away in dim distance, higher up the tidal river upon its other side, beyond the plains of water, the woods which enclosed Varney's Paintpot and the cave called the Bear's Den smiled remotely through a pearly veil of haze.

And all the waking glee of tide, dunes, and woods was personified in the boy bugler's face.

The sight of him as he stood there, face to the tents where his comrades scrambled up from cot or ground, his brown eyes snapping and flas.h.i.+ng under the scout's broad hat, with the delight of having found an absorbing interest which stimulated and turned to good account every budding activity within him--that sight would have made the veriest old Seek-sorrow among men take heart and feel that a new era of chivalry was in flower among the Scouts of the U.S.A.

And the old religious reverence, that fortifying kernel of knighthood, was not neglected by this boy scout patrol.

Bareheaded, and in line with their scoutmasters presently, while their eyes gazed off over the sparkling dunes and crystal tide-stretches, they repeated in unison the Lord's Prayer, offering morning homage to the Power, dimly discerned, of whom and through whom and to whom are all things. Of his, the Father's, presence chamber, gladness and beauty stand at the threshold!

"_Now_, for our early swim! The tide's just right. Come along, Harold; I'm going to give _you_ your first swimming-lesson; and I expect you'll be a star pupil!" cried Nixon, the patrol leader, when the brief adoration was over. "What! you don't want to learn to swim? Nonsense!

You _are_ going into that dandy water. Oh! that's not a scout's mouth, Harold."

And the corners of Harold's mouth, which had drooped with fear of this new experience, curled up in a yielding grin.

Once he was in the invigorating salt water, feeling the boisterous tidal ripples, fresh and not too cold, rise about his body, the timid lad underwent another lightning change, just as at the moment of his tying the bowline knot, the spirit of his fisherman father became uppermost in him, and he learned to swim almost as easily and naturally as a pup-seal.

The improvement in his condition was such that his brother Owls had won his promise to enter school when it should reopen after this jolly camping period was over. "And if any boy picks on you or teases you, Harold, mind you're to let us know at once, because we're your brother scouts--and he won't try it a second time!" So they admonished him.

Thus Harold, under the Owls' sheltering wing, was gradually losing his inherited and imbibed dread of a crowd, of any gathering of his own kind.

Although this bugbear fear returned upon him a little when, later on that morning, the Fox Patrol, with G.o.dey Peck as its leader, was landed upon the Sugarloaf Dunes from Captain Andy's motor-launch, and still later in the day the Seals rowed across in two large rowboats from certain farms or fishermen's houses upon the opposite side of the river, to join the other two patrols. So that the boy scout troop was complete, and Harold found himself one of twenty-four boisterous, though good-natured, boys upon this strange white beach.

A little homesickness beset him for the farm-clearing in the woods and his grandfather's staid presence, to cure which Scouts Warren and Chase took him off with them in the little rowboat, the Pill, lent by Captain Andy, to explore the tidal river and the little truant creeks that escaped from it to burrow among the salt-marshes.

"We're going to try and hunt up a creamy pup-seal, Harold, and bring it back to camp," said Nixon; and in the excitement of this quest the still shy boy forgot his nervous qualms.

Fortune favored the expedition. It was now between one and two o'clock in the afternoon. The tide, which had been high at six in the morning and again at twelve, was once more on the ebb, as the two elder scouts rowing in leisurely fas.h.i.+on, turned the Pill's snub nose into a pearly creek whose shallow water was clear and pellucid, over its sandy bed.

Hardly half a dozen strokes had they taken between bold marshy banks when, from some half-submerged rocks near the head of the creek, they heard a prolonged and dulcet "Oo-oo-oo-ooo" that might have been the call of a dove, save that it was louder.

"_Hear him?_" cried Leon, s.h.i.+pping his oar in blinking excitement.

"That's our pup-seal, Nix! We've got him cornered in this little creek; if he dives, the water is so shallow that we can pick him up from the bottom; and he can't swim fast enough to get away from us--though as likely as not he won't want to!"

The last conjecture proved true. The young seal, little more than two months old, which lay sprawled out, a creamy splotch, upon the low reef which the tide was forsaking, with his baby flippers clinging to the wet rock and his little eyes staring unwinkingly into the sunlight, had not the least objection to human company. He welcomed it.

When the scouts rowed up alongside the ledge he suffered Nixon to lift his moist fat body into the boat, where he stretched himself upon the bottom planks in perfect contentment, and took all the caresses which the three boys lavished upon him like any other lazy puppy.

"Isn't he 'cunning', though?" gasped Harold, trying to lift the youthful mammal into his arms, an attempt which failed because he, the weak one of the Owls, was not strong enough to do so without capsizing the Pill--not because the pup-seal objected. "I thought he'd be a kind of whitish color, eh?" appealing diffidently to Leon.

"So he was, when born; his hair is turning darker now, to a dull yellow; by and by it will be a brownish drab. See, Greerie! his spots are beginning to appear!" Leon ran his finger down the seal's dog-like head and back, already faintly dotted with those round markings which gain for his family the name of the "marbled seal."

"Isn't he a 'sprawly' pup, and so friendly? The other scouts will be 'tickled to death' with him--" Nixon was beginning, when a shadow suddenly fell across the boat and its three occupants, whose attention was entirely upon the young seal.

"Hi, there! You'll get pocketed in this little creek, you fellows--hung up aground here--if you don't look out! Can't you see that the water is leaving you?" cried a harsh voice from the bold marsh-bank which overhung the creek to the right of them, so suddenly that the three jumped.

Looking up, they saw the unkempt figure of a young man, short of stature and showing a hungry leanness about the neck and face. This sudden apparition which had approached noiselessly over the soft marshes, was plainly outlined against the surrounding wildness of salt-marsh and tideway.

Had the little dog-fox which prowled among the moonlit dunes been near, he might have recognized in the shabby figure his brother-prowler of the night before.

Recognition was springing from another source. Starrie Chase caught his breath with such a wild gasp that he rocked the Pill as if a gust had struck it. Something about that stocky figure and in the expression of the face, half wistful, half savage, reminded him overwhelmingly of an old woman whom he had seen issuing, lantern in hand, from her paintless home, and who had raised her trembling arm to her breast at sight of him, Leon.

"Forevermore! it's _Dave Baldwin_," he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed in a whisper audible only to Nixon. "That's who it is--Nix!"

"Don't you see that the tide is leaving you?" snapped the stranger again. "There won't be a teaspoonful of water in this creek presently."

He was looking down at the Pill and its occupants, with a gleam in his eyes fugitive and phosph.o.r.escent as a marsh-light, which revealed a new expression upon his mud-smeared face, one of pa.s.sionate envy--envy of the boy scouts healthily rejoicing over their captive pup-seal.

"Tide leaving us! S-so it is!" Nixon seized an oar as if awakening from a dream. "Thank you for warning us! We don't want to be hung up in the pocket of this little creek--until it rises again!"

"Then pull for all you're worth! Your boat--she's a funny one," broke off the stranger with the ghost of a boyish twinkle in his eye; "she looks as if she was made from a flat-bottomed dory that had been cut in two!"

"So she was, I guess!" Leon too found his voice suddenly.

"Well! luckily for you, she doesn't draw much water; you may sc.r.a.pe by an' get out into the open channel while there's tide enough left to float her!" And with an inarticulate grunt that might have been construed into some sort of farewell, the stranger disappeared over the marshes abruptly as he had come.

Their own plight now engrossed the boys. It was clear that if they did not want to be pocketed in this out-of-the-way creek with their amphibious prize, grounded in the sand for the next five or six hours, without a hope of getting back to their camp on the dunes until the tide should rise again, they certainly must row for all they were worth!

Even as it was, the two older scouts, divesting themselves of shoes and stockings, rolling up their khaki trousers, had to "get out and shove"

ere they could propel the flat-bottomed Pill through the mouth of the creek.

"If that fellow hadn't warned us just in time, we'd have been in a bad sc.r.a.pe," said Scout Chase. "We're not out of the misery yet, Nix! See the old mud-shadow poking its nose up on either side of the main channel!"

"Yes, the water on those shallows looks like the inside of an oyster-sh.e.l.l,--thick and iridescent. 'Shove' is the word again, Starrie!" returned his toiling companion, arduously putting that watchword in practice, pus.h.i.+ng the little boat containing Harold and the pup-seal (the latter being the only member of the party placidly unmoved by the situation) through the iridescent opaqueness of the ebbing ripples that now barely covered vast silvery stretches of tidal mud.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "CAN'T YOU SEE THE TIDE IS LEAVING YOU?"]

"Look at that old clam-digger, who has his shack on the white beach, about quarter of a mile from our camp! He's left his boat behind and is wading out to the clam-flats." Nixon paused, with his breast to the boat's stern, in the act of propelling it. "Goody! I'd like to stop and dig clams with him. But we'd never get back to camp! What ho! she sticks again. There! that brings her."