A Scout of To-day Part 7

Colin lay out in the sun, being rolled over at intervals by the scout, to dislodge the caking mud from his clothes, and to knead up his "soggy"

spirits.

"Well! if we had carried out our first intention this morning, Nix, if we had gone down the river to the Sugarloaf Sand-Dunes near its mouth, we might _all_ have stuck high and dry, in the river mud, if the tide forsook us," said Coombsie by and by, as he dispensed a limited amount of cold coffee from a pint bottle. "That's a pleasure in store, whenever we can get Captain Andy to take us in his motor-boat. Say! he's great; he was skipper of a Gloucester fis.h.i.+ng schooner until a year ago, when he lost his vessel in a fog; the main-boom fell on him and broke his leg; he's lame still. He stays in Exmouth with his daughter most o' the time now. He was one o' the Gloucester crackerjacks: he saved so many lives at sea that he used to be called the Ocean Patrol!"

"Why, he must be a regular sea-scout," Nixon's eye watered; he had the b.u.mp of hero-wors.h.i.+p strongly developed.

"Captain Andy's laying for you, Leon," remarked Coombsie, pa.s.sing round some jelly-roll.

"Oh, I guess I know why!" came the nonchalant answer. "It's for tying a wooden s.h.i.+ngle to a long branch of the apple-tree near old Ma'am Baldwin's house, so that it would keep tapping on her door through the night. If the wind is in the right direction it works finely--keeps her guessing all the time! I've lain low among the marsh-gra.s.s and seen her come to the door, in the dark, a dozen times, gruntin' like a grizzly!

I hate solitary cranks!"

"Captain Andy says that she was never peculiar as she is now, until her youngest son ran wild and was sent to a reformatory," suggested Marcoo gravely.

"I'd cut out that trick, if I were you!" growled the scout.

"Oh! I don't know; there are times when a fellow must paint the town red--or something--or 'he'd bust'! That reminds me, we were going to daub ourselves with red from Varney's Paintpot. If we're to find it to-day, we'd better be moving on pretty soon. It must be after two o'clock now."

"I haven't got my watch on, but it's quite that, or later," the scout glanced upward at the brilliant afternoon sun.

"Hadn't we better give up all idea of visiting the Paintpot or the Bear's Den," Marcoo suggested rather nervously, "and begin tramping homeward--if we can discover in which direction home lies? I think we ought to try and find some outlet from the woods."

"So do I. Col will have a peck of swamp mud to carry round with him. His clothes are heavy and damp. If I only had my compa.s.s we could steer a fairly straight course, for these woods lie to the southeast of the town; don't they? Anybody got a watch on? I left mine at home." Nixon looked eagerly at his companions.

"Our boy-scout handbook tells us how to use the watch as a compa.s.s by pointing the hour-hand to the sun and reckoning back halfway to noon, at which point the south would be."

"My 'timer' is out of commission," regretted Marcoo.

Neither of the other two boys possessed a watch.

"In that case we might trust to the dog to lead us out of the woods.

We'd better just tell Blink to go home, and follow him; he'll find his way out some time; won't you, pup?" Nix stooped to fondle the tan ears of the terrier which had taken to him from the first, having never harbored the ghost of a suspicion of his being a "flowerpot fellow."

The little dog stretched his jaws in a tired yawn. The pink pads of his paws were sore from much running, following up rabbit trails, and the rest. But the purple lights in his faithful brown eyes said plainly: "Leave it to me, fellows! Instinct can put it all over reason, just now!"

But Blink's master started an opposition movement. He had been invited to guide the expedition; he was averse to resigning such leaders.h.i.+p to his terrier; in that case his supposed knowledge of the woods, of which he had boasted aforetime to the Exmouth boys, would henceforth be regarded as a "windy joke."

"Follow Blink!" Thus he flouted the idea. "If we do, we won't get out of these woods before midnight! He'll dodge round after every live thing he sees, from a weasel to a gra.s.shopper--like a regular will-o'-the-wisp.

The sensible thing to do is to search for a logging-road--we're sure to come to one in time--and follow that on. Or a stream--a stream would lead out on to the salt-marshes, to join the river."

"There don't appear to be any streams in these woods; they seem as dry as an attic!" Nixon, the scout, knew that the proposal now adopted by the majority was all wrong, contrary to the advice derived through his book from the great Chief Scout, Grand Master of Woodlore, but he hated to raise another fuss or make a split in the camp.

So the quartette of boys filed slowly up the slope and back into the woods, Coombsie carrying the almost empty basket, containing spa.r.s.e remnants of the feast: "We may be hungry before we arrive home!" he remarked, with involuntary foreboding in his tone.

That foreboding increased as they pressed on. Each one now became depressingly sure that he was wandering in the woods "lak wit' eye shut"; without any knowledge of his bearings, or of how to retrace his steps to the log shanty flanked by the mountain of sawdust, whence he might be able to find his way back to the farm-clearing where he had encountered the musical woodchopper, frightened boy and dead racc.o.o.n.

The boy scout was silently reproaching himself for having fallen short of the prudent standard inculcated by his scout training. Carried away by the novelty of these strange woods and his equally strange companions, he had lowered the foresail of prudence--just tramped along blindly with the others--taking no note of landmarks, nor leaving any trace behind him that would serve to guide him back along the course by which he had come.

But, then, he had trusted to Leon's leaders.h.i.+p; and the latter's boasted knowledge of the woods proved, as Coombsie had suspected, to consist of bluff as a chief ingredient!

"I wish I had kept my eyes open and noticed things as I came along, or that I had thought of notching the trees at intervals with my penknife--blazing a trail--which we could have followed back," lamented the scout. "I guess we're only wandering round in a circle now; we're not hitting a logging-road or trail of any kind. Tck! puppie,"--emitting an inarticulate summons between his tongue and palate,--"let's see what's the matter with those forepaws of yours! Blood, is it? Have you scratched them?"

He stooped to examine Blink's slim white forelegs.

"_Gee whiz!_ it isn't blood--it's clay--red clay: we must be on the trail of Varney's Paintpot, fellows!"

So they were! They presently found it, that red-ochre bed, lying in obscurity among the bushes, scrub oak, dwarf pine and cedar, together with tall ferns, that stood guard over it jealously, in a particularly dense portion of the woods.

Once the clay had been vivid and valuable, with wonderful painting properties. Many an Indian had stained his arrow blood-red with it. Many a white man, an early settler, had painted the rude furniture of his home from that forest paintpot--then a moist tank of Nature's pigment.

Later on it had been used too, as civilization progressed, and was claimed by the man whose name it bore.

Now, it was for the most part caked and dried up, its coloring power weakened; yet there were still moist and vivid spots such as that in which Blink, with the dog's unerring instinct for scenting out the unusual, had smeared himself.

And those spots the boys promptly turned into a rouge-pot. They painted their own faces and each other's, until more savage-looking red men these woods had never seen.

They forbore from delaying to smear their bodies, as Nixon had suggested, for one word was now booming in each tired brain like a foghorn through a mist: "Lost! Lost! _Lost!_" And they could not quite escape from it in this new diversion.

Still they tried to dye hope a fresh rose-color at this forest paintpot too: to silence with whooping yells and fantastic capers, and in flitting war-dances in and out among the trees, the grim raving of that word in their ears.

They painted Blink likewise in zebra-like stripes across his back, whereupon he promptly rolled on the ground, blurring his markings, until he was a mottled and grotesque red-and-white object.

"He looks like a clown's dog," said Coombsie. "If any one should meet us in the woods, they'd think we were a troop of painted guys escaped from a circus! We'll create a sensation in the town when we get home--if we ever do?" _sotto voce_. "Hadn't we better stop 'training on' now, and try to get somewhere?"

So, controlling the training-on, capering savage now rampant in each one corresponding to his painted face, they toiled on again, while the afternoon shadows lengthened in the woods--until they stood transfixed, their war-whoops silenced, before another surprise of the woods on which they had tumbled, unprepared.

It was a lengthy gray cairn of stones with a rude wooden marker at the top bearing the date 1790, and at the foot a modern granite slab inscribed with the words: "Bishop's Grave," and the date of the stone's erection.

"_Bishop's Grave!_" Coombsie e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, while the empty basket drooped heavily from his hand as if "the gra.s.shopper had suddenly become a burden." "I've heard of the grave, but I've never seen it before. Bishop was lost in these woods about a hundred and twenty-one years ago; he couldn't find his way out and wandered round till he died. His body was discovered months afterwards and they buried it here."

Awe fell upon the four boys. Their faces were drawn under the smearing of paint. Their eyes gleamed strangely, like sunken islands, from out their ruddy setting. The mottled terrier, with that sympathetic perception which dogs have of their masters' moods, pointed one ear sharply and drooped the other, like a flag at half-mast, while he stared at the rude cairn.

The scout impulsively lifted his broad-brimmed hat as he was in the habit of doing if, when marching with his troop, he encountered a funeral.

In the mind of each lad tolled like a slow bell the menacing echo of Toiney's words: "You walkee--walkee--en you haf so tire' en so lonesam you _go deaded_!"

CHAPTER V

"YOU MUST LOOK OUT!"

The four boys did not linger long before that lonely grave; the fears it evoked were too unpleasant. They pushed on again through the woods, each one clearing his throat of a husky tickling that was third cousin to a weary sob.

The scout was inwardly combating the depressing memory of Toiney Leduc's warning with the advice of the Chief Scout that if he should ever find himself lost in the woods, Fear, not hunger or cold, would prove his worst enemy.

"I mustn't lose my grip! I must keep my head--not be fogged by fear! I'm a boy scout of America," he reminded himself.