A Scout of To-day Part 13

"Houp-e-la!" he explained in bantering astonishment as he surveyed the two scouts in the uniform which was strange to him. "_Houp-e-la!_ We arre de boy! We arre de stuff, I guess, engh?" He pointed an earthy forefinger at the figures in khaki, his black eyes sparkling with whimsical flattery. "But, _comment_, you'll no come for go in gran'

foret agen, dat's de tam' you'll get los' agen--hein?"

"No, we're not going any farther into the woods to-day. We came to see _him_." Nixon nodded in the direction of Harold skulking timidly behind the berry bushes. "We want to speak to him about something."

"Ah--misericorde--he'll no speak on you; he's a _poltron_, a scaree: some tam' I'll be so shame for heem I'll feel lak' cry!" returned Toiney, moved to voluble frankness, his eye glistening like a moist bead, now, with mortified pity. "Son gran'pere--hees gran'fader--he's go on town dis day: he's try ver' hard for get heem to go also--for to see! Mais, _non_! He's too scaree!" And the speaker, glancing toward the screen of bushes, shrugged his shoulders despairingly, as if asking what could possibly be done for such a craven.

Scout Nixon was not baffled. Persistent by nature, he had worked well into the fibre of his being the tenth point of the scout law: that defeat, or the semblance thereof, must not down the true scout.

"Then I'll talk to you first, Toiney," he said, "and tell you about something that we think might help him."

And in the simplest English that he could choose, eked out at intervals with freshman French, he made clear to Toiney's quick understanding the aim and methods of the Boy Scout Movement.

The Canadian, a born son of the woods, was quick to grasp and commend the return to Nature.

"_ca c'est b'en!_" he murmured with an approving nod. "I'll t'ink dat iss good for boy to go in gran' foret--w'en he know how fin' de way--for see heem beeg tree en de littal wil' an-ni-mal, engh? Mais, miseri-corde,"--his shrugging shoulders pumped up a huge sigh as he turned toward Harold,--"mis-eri-corde! _he'll_ no marche as _eclaireur_--w'at-you-call-eet--scoutee--hein? He'll no go on meetin' or on school, engh?"

And Toiney set to work cutting down cornstalks again as if the subject were unhappily disposed of.

Such was not the case, however. At one word which he, the blue-s.h.i.+rted woodsman, had used in his harangue, Nixon started, and a strange look shot across his face. He knew enough of French to translate literally that word _eclaireur_, the French military term for scout. He knew that it meant figuratively a light-spreader: one who marches ahead of his comrades to enlighten the others.

Could any term be more applicable to the peace scout of to-day who is striving to bring in an advanced era of progress and good will?

Somehow, it stimulated in Scout Warren the desire to be an _eclaireur_ in earnest to the darkened boy overshadowed by his bugbear fears, now skulking behind the berry-bushes.

"I guess it's no use our trying to get hold of him," Coombsie was saying meanwhile in his cousin's ear. "See that old dame over there, Nix?" he pointed to a portly, elderly woman with an immense straw hat tied down, sunbonnet fas.h.i.+on, over her head. "Well! she took care of Harold's mother before she died; now she keeps house for his grandfather, and she, that old woman, told my mother that up to the time Harold was seven years old he would often run and hide his head in her lap of an evening as it was coming on dark. And when she asked what frightened him he said that he was 'afraid of the stars'! Just fancy! Afraid of the stars as they came out above the clearing here!"

"Gee whiz! What do you know about that?" exclaimed Nixon with a rueful whistle: that dark hobgoblin, Fear, was more absurdly entrenched than he had thought possible.

Yet Harold's seemed more than ever a case in which the scout who could once break down the wall of shyness round him might prove a true _eclaireur_: so he advanced upon the timid boy and addressed him with a honeyed mildness which made Coombsie chuckle and gasp, "Oh, sugar!"

under his breath; though Marcoo set himself to second his patrol leader's efforts to the best of his ability.

Together they sought to decoy Harold into a conversation, asking him questions about his life, whether he ever went into the woods with Toiney or played solitary games on the clearing. They intimated that they knew he was "quite a boy" if he'd only make friends with them and not be so stand-offish; and they tried to inveigle him into a simple game of tag or hide-and-seek among the bushes as a prelude to some more exciting sport such as duck-on-a-rock or prisoner's base.

But the hapless "_poltron_" only answered them in jerky monosyllables, cowering against the bushes, and finally slunk back to the side of the blue-s.h.i.+rted farmhand with whom he had become familiar--whose merry songs could charm away the dark spirit of fear--and there remained, hovering under Toiney's wing.

"I knew that it would be hard to get round him," said Marcoo thoughtfully. "Until now all the boys whom he has met have picked on an'

teased him. Suppose you turn your attention to _me_ for a while, Nix!

Suppose you were to make a bluff of teaching me some of the things that a fellow must learn before he can enlist as a tenderfoot scout! Perhaps, then, he'd begin to listen an' take notice. I've got a toy flag in my pocket; let's start off with that!"

"Good idea! You do use your head for something more than a hat-rack, Marcoo!" The patrol leader relapsed with a relieved sigh into his natural manner. "I brought an end of rope with me; I thought we might have got along to teaching him how to tie one or other of the four knots which form part of the tenderfoot test. You take charge of the rope-end.

And don't lose it if you want to live!"

He pa.s.sed the little brown coil to his cousin and receiving in return the miniature Stars and Stripes, went through a formal flag-raising ceremony there on the sunny clearing. Tying the toy flag-staff to the top of his tall scout's staff, he planted the latter in some soft earth; then both scouts stood at attention and saluted Old Glory, after which they pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed it at marching pace, each time removing their broad-brimmed hats with much respect and an eye on Harold to see if he was taking notice.

Subsequently the patrol leader stationed himself by the impromptu flagstaff, and delivered a simple lecture to Coombsie upon the history and composition of the National Flag; a knowledge of which, together with the proper forms of respect due to that starry banner, would enter into his examination for tenderfoot scout.

Both were hoping that some crumbs of information--some ray of patriotic enthusiasm--might be absorbed by Harold, the boy who had never been to school, and who had scantily profited by some elementary and intermittent lessons in reading and writing from his grandfather. His brown eyes, shy as any rodent's, watched this parade curiously. But though Toiney tried to encourage him by precept and gesticulation to follow the boy scouts' example and salute the Flag, plucking off his own ta.s.seled cap and going through a dumb pantomime of respect to it, the "scaree" could not be moved from his shuffling stolidity.

The starry flaglet waving from the scout's planted staff, might have been a gorgeous, drifting leaf from the surrounding woods for all the attention he paid to it!

"Say! but it's hard to land him, isn't it?" Nixon suspended the parade with a sigh almost of despair. "Well, here goes, for one more attempt to get him interested! Chuck me that rope-end, Marcoo! I'll show you how to tie a bowline knot; perhaps, as his father was a sailor--a deep-sea fisherman--knot-tying may be more in his line than flag-raising."

The next minute Coombsie's fingers were fumbling with the rope rather blunderingly, for Marcoo was by nature a bookworm and more efficient along lines of abstract study than at anything requiring manual skill.

"Pa.s.s the end up through the bight," directed Scout Warren when the bight or loop had been formed upon the standing part of the rope. "I said _up_, not down, jacka.s.s! Now, pa.s.s it round the 'standing part'; don't you know what that means? Why! the long end of the rope on which you're working. Oh! you're a dear donkey," nodding with good-humored scorn.

Now both the donkey recruit and the instructing scout had become for the moment genuinely absorbed in the intricacies of that bowline knot, and forgot that this was not intended as a _bona-fide_ lesson, but as mere "show off" to awaken the interest of a third person.

Their tail-end glances were no longer directed furtively at Harold to see whether or not he was beginning to "take notice."

So they missed the first quiver of a peculiar change in him; they did not see that his sagging chin was suddenly reared a little as if by the application of an invisible bearing-rein.

They missed the twitching face-muscles, the slowly dilating eye, the breath beginning to come in quick puffs through his spreading nostrils, like the smoke issuing from the punky wood, heralding the advent of the ruddy spark, when in the woods they started a fire with rubbing-sticks.

And just as suddenly and mysteriously as that triumphant spark appeared--evolved by Nixon's fire-drill, from the dormant possibilities in the dull wood--did the first glitter of fascinated light appear and grow in the eye of Harold Greer, the prisoner of Fear, disparagingly nicknamed the "Hare"!

"I--I can do that! I c-can do it--b-better than he can!" Stuttering and trembling in a strange paroxysm of eagerness, the _poltron_ addressed, in a nervous squawk, not the absorbed scouts, but Toiney, his friend and protector.

"I can t-tie it better'n _he_ does! I know--I know I can!" The shrill boyish voice which seemed suddenly to dominate every other sound on the clearing was hoa.r.s.e with derision as the abnormally shy and timid boy pointed a trembling finger at Marcoo still, like a "dear donkey,"

blundering with the rope-end.

Had the gray rabbit, which suddenly at that moment whisked out of the woods and across a distant corner, opened its mouth and addressed them, the surprise to the two scouts could scarcely have been greater.

"Oh! _you can_, can you?" said Nixon thickly. "Let's see you try!" He placed the rope-end in Harold's hand, which received it with a fondling touch.

"Here you make a small loop on this part of the rope, leaving a good long end," he began coolly, while his heart bounded, for the spark in the furtive eye of the twelve-year-old "scaree" was rapidly becoming a scintillation: the scouts had struck fire from him at last.

A triumph beside which the signal achievement of their friction fire in the woods paled!

The intangible dragon which held their brother boy a captive on this lonely clearing, not permitting him to mingle freely with his fellows for study or play, was weakening before them.

"That's right, Harold! Go ahead: now pa.s.s the end up through the loop!

Bravo, you're the boy! Now, around the standing part--the rope itself--and down again! Good: you have it. You can beat _him_ every time at tying a knot: he's just a blockhead, isn't he?"

And Scout Warren pointed with much show of scorn at Marcoo, the normal recruit, who looked on delightedly. Never before did boy rejoice so unselfishly over being beaten at a test as Coombsie then! For right here on the little farm-clearing a strange thing had happened.

In the gloom of every beclouded mind there is one c.h.i.n.k by which light, more or less, may enter; and a skillful teacher can work an improvement by enlarging that c.h.i.n.k.

Harold's brain was not darkened in the sense of being defective. And the gray tent of fear in which he dwelt had its c.h.i.n.k too; the scouts had found it in the frayed rope-end and knot.

For while the timid boy watched Coombsie's bungling fingers, that drab knot, upon which they blundered, suddenly beckoned to him like a star.

And, all in a moment, it was no longer his fear-stricken mother who lived in him, but his daring fisherman-father whose h.o.r.n.y fingers could tie every sailor's knot that was ever heard of, and who had used that bowline noose in many an emergency at sea to save a s.h.i.+p-wrecked fellow-creature.

The bowline was the means of saving the fisherman's son now from mental s.h.i.+pwreck, or something nearly as bad. Harold's eager thoughts became entangled in it, while his fingers worked under Nixon's directions; he forgot, for once, to be afraid.

Presently the noose was complete, and Nixon was showing him how to tighten it by pulling on the standing part of the rope.

This achieved, the timid human "Hare" raised his brown eyes from the rope in his hand and looked from one to another of his three companions as in a dream, a bright one.