A Scout of To-day Part 8

Still the shadow of that gray cairn stalked him as well as the others.

Even Leon was subdued by it. His manner had lost the last trace of its shallow c.o.c.ksureness. The mantle of bluff had melted from him, leaving him a distracted, temper-tried boy like his three companions.

"I know that the cave called the Bear's Den is not quite a mile from Bishop's grave, but I haven't the least idea of how to go about reaching it," he admitted. "A logging-road pa.s.ses the cave; that might lead us somewhere. I wish we could strike a stream."

"So do I! My mouth is dry as dust; I'm parched with thirst." Nixon, as he spoke, stooped, picked up a round pebble, inserted it between his dry palate and tongue and began sucking on it, as on a gum-drop.

"What on earth are you doing that for?" questioned Leon sharply; the nerves in his tired body were now jangling like an instrument out of tune; together with his three companions he was cross as a thorn--ready to quarrel with his own shadow.

"'What am I doing it for?' Why! to start the saliva," quavered the scout, sucking hard; "to prevent me from feeling the thirst so much."

"_Blamed_ rubbis.h.!.+" Starrie Chase snorted. "As if sucking a stone like a baby would do you any good!"

"Everything is 'rubbish,' except what you know yourself; and _that's_ next to nothing!" Nixon was now equally cross. "You don't know half as much about the woods as your dog does. If it hadn't been for you, we'd have been out of this place long ago!"

"Oh! you think you're It, because you're a boy scout, but I think the opposite!"

"Shut up! Don't give me any of your 'jaw'!"

But there was a sudden, queer contortion of the scout's face on the last word.

Abruptly he stalked on, humming to himself--a curious-looking being, with his painted face and dazed eyes under the broad-brimmed hat.

"What's that you're singing, Nix?" Coombsie was catching at a straw to divert thought from Bishop's grave.

"Oh! go on, let's hear it. Sounds lively!" urged Leon, whose temper had sunk beneath the realization of their plight, a quenched flash.

The scout sidetracked his pebble between right cheek and gums and began to sing with what cheerfulness he could muster, as much for his own encouragement as that of his companions, a patrol song, the gift of a poet to the boy scouts of the world:--

"Look out when your temper goes At the end of a losing game; And your boots are too tight for your toes, And you answer and argue and blame!

It's the hardest part of the law, But it's got to be learned by the scout, For whining and s.h.i.+rking and 'jaw,'

All patrols look out!

These are our regulations, There's just one law for the scout, And the first and the last, and the present and the past, And the future and the perfect is look out!"

Before Nixon had finished the chorus his three companions were shouting it with him as a spur to their jaded spirits.

"Ours is a losing game in earnest--all because we didn't look out and take proper precautions so that we might have some chance of returning by the way that we came," remarked the soloist with a grim laugh. "Now, we 'jolly well must look out!' as the song says. I'm going to climb the next tree that's good an' tall, and see whether I can discover any faraway smoke that would show us where a house might be,--or a gap in the woods,--or anything."

"Good idea! I'll climb too," seconded Leon. "You choose one tree; I'll take another, and see what we can make out!"

But they were toiling through a comparatively insignificant part of the fine woods now, where the foamy undergrowth billowed about their ears.

Here the birch-trees, hickories, and maples, with an occasional pine and hemlock, only averaged from thirty-five to forty feet in stature. Not for another half-mile or so did Nixon sight a tall stately trunk towering above its forest brethren, its many-pointed leaves proclaiming it to be a fine red oak.

"Whoo'! Whoo'! It's me for that oak-tree!" he cried. "I'll s.h.i.+n up that, right to the top and scour the horizon. 'Twill be easily climbed too!"

"See that freak pine with the divided trunk a little farther on? I'm going to climb that," announced Leon Chase. "It's a fine tree, if it is a freak--like the Siamese Twins."

In another minute with the agility of a cat he had climbed to the crotch of the freak tree where its twin trunks divided.

"Look out! those lower branches are brown an' rotten, Starrie. I wouldn't trust to them if I were you!" shouted Colin, indicating the drooping pine-boughs about ten feet from the ground; he kicked a similar large drab branch, as he spoke, which had fallen and lay decaying at the foot of the freak tree.

"Right you are! I won't." Leon was a wonderful climber; twining his arms and legs round one olive-green trunk of the divided pine he managed to reach the firm boughs above through whose needles the late afternoon breeze crooned a sonorous warning.

The scout, meanwhile, had clambered like a squirrel nearly to the top of the splendid oak-tree. Presently the two boys upon the ground heard a shrill "Tewitt! Tewitt!" the signal-whistle of his peewit patrol, fully sixty feet above their heads, followed by Nixon's voice shouting: "Can't see smoke anywhere, fellows--or any sign of a real break in the woods.

But there seems to be some sort of little clearing about two hundred yards from here, I should say!" He was carefully scanning the s.p.a.ce over intervening tree-tops with his eye, knowing that if he could judge this distance in the woods with approximate accuracy it would count as a point in his favor toward realizing the height of his ambition and graduating into a first-cla.s.s scout.

Leon, a moment later, was singing out blithely from the pine-tree's top: "I see that gap between the trees too, just a little way farther on. I guess it's a logging-road at last--probably a shanty as well--the road will lead somewhere anyhow. Hurrah! We'll be out o' the misery in time.

Race you down, Nix?" he challenged exuberantly at the top of his voice.

Then began a swift, racing descent, marked on Leon's part by the touch of recklessness that often characterized his movements; he was determined that though the boy scout might excel him in certain points of knowledge, he should not outdo him in athletic activity.

"There! I knew I could 'trim' you anywhere--in a tree or on the ground,"

he cried all in one gasping breath as--caution to the winds--he stepped on one of the lower dead boughs which he had avoided going up.

It snapped under his hundred and twenty-five pounds of st.u.r.dy weight, like a breaking twig. He crashed to the ground, alighting in a huddle upon the decayed branch, the crumbling wind-fall, at the foot of the tree.

"Gracious! are you hurt, Starrie?" Coombsie and Colin rushed to him.

"I--think--not! I guess I'm all here." Leon made a desperate attempt to rise, and instantly sank back, clutching at the gra.s.s around him with such a sound as n.o.body had ever heard before from the lips of Leon Starr Chase--the moan of a maimed creature.

"My ankle! My right ankle!" he groaned. "I twisted it, coming down on that rotten branch. It feels as if every tree in the woods had fallen on it together! Ouch! I--can't--stand." Drops of agony stole out upon his forehead.

"You've sprained it, I guess!" Nixon was now bending over the victim.

"Here, let me take your shoe off, before the foot swells! Perhaps, with Col and me helping you, you can limp along to that clearing?"

Leon made another attempt, with the leather pressure removed, but sank down again and began to relieve himself of his stocking too, in order to examine the injury.

"Ou-ouch!" he groaned savagely. "My ankle is as black as a thundercloud already. It feels just like a thunderstorm, too--all heavy throbs an'

lightning shoots of pain!"

The trail of those fiery darts could be traced in the livid blue and yellow streaks that were turning the rapidly swelling ankle, in which the ligaments were badly torn, to as many hues as Joseph's coat, against a background of sullen black.

"Well! this is the--limit!" Coombsie dropped the lunch-basket, to which he had clung faithfully, into a nest of underbrush: with a probable logging-road within reach that might serve as a clue to lead them somewhere, here was one of their number with a thunderstorm in his ankle!

And then the hero that dwelt in the shadow of the savage in that contradictory breast of Leon Chase flashed awake again in a moment, as at Big Swamp; the real plucky boyhood in him shone out like a star!

"'Twill be dark--in the woods--before very long," he said, his voice sprained too by pain, while his clammy face, still coated with the red-ochre pigment of Varney's Paintpot, smeared by the drops of agony and his coat-sleeve, was a lurid sight. "You fellows will have to hustle if you want to reach that road--if it is a logging-road--and get out of the woods before night! I can hardly--hobble. I'd better stay here: Blink will stay with me; won't you, pup? When you boys get home--let my father know--he and Jim will come out an' find me; they know every inch of the woods."

"And leave you alone in the woods for hours? Not I, for one!" The scout's answer was decisive, so were the loyal protests of the other two lads.

Blink, with a shrewd comprehension that something was wrong with his master, had been alternately licking Leon's ear and the inflamed pads of his own paws. At the mention of his name he pressed so close to the victim's side, sitting bolt upright on his haunches, that their two bodies might have been joined at one point like the trunks of the freak tree. And the purple fidelity lights in his brown eyes said plainly that not hunger, thirst, or lonely death itself, could separate him from the being who was a greater fellow in his eyes than any scout of the U.S.A.

The other three boys were at that stage of fatigue and discomfiture when the well of emotion is easily pumped; their eyes grew moist at the dog's steadfast look.

But the scout shook himself brusquely as if trying to awake something within.

"We ought to be able to fix you up so that you can get along to that little clearing, anyhow!" he said, his mind busy with the sixth point of the scout law and how under these circ.u.mstances he could best live up to it and help an injured comrade. "We might form a chair-carry, Col and I, but the undergrowth ahead is too thick; we couldn't wrestle through--three abreast. Ha! we'd better make a crutch for you; that's the idea! There's a birch sapling, neat an' handy, as an Irishman would say!"

And the ubiquitous white birch, the wood-man's friend, came into play again. Its slim trunk, being wrenched from the ground, roots and all, and trimmed off with Nixon's knife, formed a fair prop.