The Boy Scouts of Bob's Hill Part 2

It was awful to hear, and the girls didn't wait for another, or even for the sob part. At the first moan they started to their feet, looking around with scared faces, and when the menagerie turned loose away they went on a run.

"Charge, my braves!" cried Skinny, as soon as he could stop laughing long enough to speak. "Let's surround 'em."

With a yell, we charged across the top of the hill, down the slope beyond and into a field which rose gently up to Plunkett's woods.

Just before the girls reached the woods one of them looked back, saw us, and told the others. I thought they would run harder than ever when they saw us coming, but it was just as Hank said about not knowing what they would do. They turned and stood there, the whole twelve of them, looking so mad that we stopped running and waited to see what would happen.

"We know who you are, Skinny Miller," said the one who had seen us first, "and you ought to be ashamed of yourself. We'll fix you for this."

She said something to the others, which we couldn't hear, and pointed toward us. Then they stooped and each one grabbed a stick from the edge of the woods.

"Great snakes!" said Bill. "I wish I hadn't come."

"Fellers," said Skinny, looking at his watch. "It's 'most four o'clock.

We'll have to run like sixty if we get to the cave in time for the meetin'."

There are a lot of boys who never saw a mountain, and the Band, even, never saw the Rockies and big mountains like those. But Greylock is big enough for us. On a summer day, with fleecy clouds chasing over his head like great, white b.u.t.terflies; suns.h.i.+ne resting on the pine trees, and the mountain smiling down on us with arms outstretched, as if he would gather in all of Ma.s.sachusetts and a part of Vermont, and the cawing of crows in the Bellows Pipe, and no school to call us back--say, that's living; that is!

Soon we came to the woods and followed along a path until we could hear the rus.h.i.+ng and roaring of Peck's Falls in front of us, sounding as if old Greylock himself was talking.

We stopped at Pulpit Rock a minute to see the falls and the foaming pool below; then followed Skinny down the side of the steep ravine to our cave at the edge of the stream.

"The meetin' will come to order," said Skinny, after we had crawled in and were sitting on the floor. "Are we all here?"

"I am," said Benny, "and I," "and I," "and I," said the others, faster than I could count them.

"All the fellers that want to go to Mr. Norton's," said Skinny, as soon as he had found that everybody was there, "to see about this Scout business--and eat ice cream," he added, looking at Bill when he said it, "mark a cross on the floor of the cave with your knives."

Everybody marked except Bill. He didn't have his knife with him.

"It's all right," said he. "I'll go, anyhow, knife or no knife. I'd rather be an Injun than a Scout any day in the week, but there ain't any use letting that ice cream go to waste."

"'Tis well," said Skinny. "We have spoken."

CHAPTER II

RAVEN PATROL HITS THE TRAIL

WHEN Monday night came, the Band met at Skinny's and went from there to Mr. Norton's. He seemed glad to see us and started in for a good time without saying a word about the Scout business. I was just going to ask him about it when Mrs. Norton brought in the ice cream. After that we were too busy to ask anything.

When at last we had eaten all that we wanted and Bill had put away three dishes, Mr. Norton gathered us around him and said that he would tell us a story, if we wished to hear it.

We told him to go ahead, and, after thinking a moment, he began.

"You boys probably do not remember the Boer war in Africa. You were too young at the time. During that war the Boers surrounded a town called Mafeking. All the able-bodied men were needed for fighting in order to defend the city and could not be spared for the work of carrying despatches and things like that.

"They had some lively lads in that town. As soon as the boys found out the situation they made up their minds that they could do that kind of work just as well as the men could. They did, too. Back and forth they hurried on bicycles, through a rain of bullets, from fort to fort, carrying messages and scouting. I tell you, those English boys were heroes. I don't see how they escaped being killed. They must have dodged the bullets."

When Skinny heard Mr. Norton speak of their being English boys he looked troubled, because Skinny thinks a lot of the United States of America.

"Is this an English story, Mr. Norton?" he asked. "Because if it is I don't know about it. How about George Was.h.i.+ngton, Bunker Hill, seeing the whites of the enemy's eyes, and all those things? We named our boat out on Fox River in Illinois, the 'Paul Revere.'"

"Guess what!" put in Benny, laughing at something he was thinking.

"Skinny couldn't dodge any bullets? 'Cause why? He's too fat. They couldn't miss him."

"Aw, what's the matter with you?" said Skinny. "I could dodge as many as you could, I guess. If a bullet hit you there wouldn't be anything left of you; that's what. Why, I----"

"A hero is a hero," said Mr. Norton, before Skinny had time to finish, "and a boy is a boy, I guess, no matter in what country he happens to live. I have heard all about the Band, and I know that if you had been in Mafeking that time you would have been among the first to volunteer for scout service, bullets or no bullets, and Was.h.i.+ngton or no Was.h.i.+ngton."

"Hurrah!" yelled Bill, forgetting where he was. "That's the stuff. Injun or no Injun, too. I knew an English boy once, and he was all right. Say, you ought to have seen him in a sc.r.a.p."

Mr. Norton laughed and went on with his story.

"A few years later Gen. Robert Baden-Powell, who had been colonel in command of the English forces at Mafeking, got to thinking about those boys in South Africa and how manly it made them to help in the scouting.

He liked boys and he made up his mind that if scouting had been good for those boys it would be good for any boys. Not the fighting part, I mean, but the outdoor life, learning to take care of themselves in the wilderness, make camps, build fires, find their way through the forest, follow a trail, and such things. So he called a meeting of a lot of boys and talked to them and showed them how to do it. They played at being Indians mostly."

"They don't have Injuns in England," said Bill, shaking his head, "unless it's in a Wild West show, and that doesn't count."

"You are stopping the story, Bill," Skinny told him. "What's the difference?"

"Well, they don't," grumbled Bill.

"Anyhow," Mr. Norton went on, "the boys enjoyed the play, and the idea spread like wildfire, until now there are Boy Scouts all over the world.

In America here Ernest Thompson Seton had much the same idea. He was teaching the boys woodcraft, camp life, and such things by organizing the Seton Indians that you may have heard about. Then he went to England, where he and General Baden-Powell put their heads together and worked out the Boy Scout idea. In this country the boys are known as 'the Boy Scouts of America,' but nearly every civilized nation has its Boy Scouts under some name or other, and the movement is very popular among the boys.

"I invited you up here to-night to get acquainted with the Band. Skinny, I mean Gabriel, tells me that you are all live wires. I want to know if you will join the Scouts. You can have a patrol of your own, select your own patrol leader and your own patrol animal."

"What's a patrol animal?" we asked.

"Patrol animal? Why, each patrol is named after some animal, and the Scouts all have to be able to imitate its call, so that they can let each other know where they are hiding."

When Mr. Norton told us that you hardly could have heard yourself think for a minute. Mrs. Norton didn't know what had broken loose and came running in from the next room. Skinny was hissing like a snake; Bill croaked like a frog; Benny cawed like a crow; Hank barked like a dog, and the other boys did something else, and n.o.body could tell what they were doing.

"You seem to have the right idea," smiled Mr. Norton.

There was a lot more to it, uniforms and rules and signs and all that sort of thing, but that doesn't belong in this history. It didn't take us long to decide that we would go in. Bill Wilson was the craziest one in the bunch.

Mr. Norton thought that we ought to decide on a patrol leader before we went home. We told him that there was nothing to decide.

"Skinny is captain, all right," said Benny, "and the Band is the Band, I guess, whether we are Scouts or Injuns."

"Yes, I'm captain of the Band," Skinny told him, when Mr. Norton waited to see what he had to say about it, "but I don't know about this patrol business. It wouldn't do to vote on it here, anyway. The cave is where we meet. We ought to vote in the cave, seeing it is summer time. If it was winter we could meet in Pedro's barn."

We left it that way and were so busy during the closing days of school that we didn't have time to think much more about it until Friday. When we came in from afternoon recess, there was the Sign, as big as life, drawn with chalk on the blackboard.