A SCOUT OF TO-DAY

BY

ISABEL HORNIBROOK

Author of “Camp and Trail,” “Lost in Maine Woods,” “Captain Curly’s Boy,” etc., etc.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press Cambridge 1913

COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY ISABEL HORNIBROOK

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published June 1913

AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED TO

“NED”

The Author expresses her indebtedness to Edmund Richard Cummins for the song, “The Scouts of the U.S.A.”

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

From drawings by J. Reading

[Pg 1]

A SCOUT OF TO-DAY

CHAPTER I

THE GREAT WOODS

“Well! this would be the very day for a long tramp up into the woods. Tooraloo! I feel just in the humor for that.”

Colin Estey stretched his well-developed fourteen-year-old body among the tall feathery grasses of the broad salt-marsh whereon he lay, kicking his heels in the September sunshine, and gazed longingly off toward the grand expanse of New England woodland that bordered the marshes and, rising into tree-clad hills, stretched away much farther than the eye could reach in apparently illimitable majesty.

Those woods were the most imposing and mysterious feature in Colin’s world. They bounded it in a way. Beyond a certain shallow point in them lay the Unknown, the Woodland Wonder, whereof he had heard much, but which he had never explored for himself. And this reminded him unpleasantly that he was barely fourteen, [Pg 2] in stature measuring five feet three and three eighths, facts which never obtruded themselves baldly upon his memory when he romped about the salt-marshes, or rowed a boat—or if no boat was forthcoming, paddled a washtub—on the broad tidal river that wound in and out between the marshes.

Yet though the unprobed mystery of the dense woods vexed him with the feeling of being immature and young—woodland distances look vaster at fourteen than at eighteen—it fascinated him, too, more than did any riddle of the salt-marshes or lunar enigma of the ebb and flow of tide in the silvery, brackish river formed by an arm of sea that coursed inland for many a mile to meet a freshwater stream near the town where Colin was born.

Any daring boy above the age of ten could learn pretty nearly all there was to know about that tidal river: of the mammal and fish wherewith it teemed, from the great harbor seal, once the despot of the river, to the tiny brit that frolicked in the eddies; and about the graceful bird-life that soared above its brackish current.

He could bathe, shrieking with excitement, as wild from delight as any young water-bird, in the foam of the rocky bar where fresh stream and [Pg 3] salt stream met with a great crowing of waters and laughter of spray.

He could imitate the triple whistle, the shrill “Wheu! Wheu! Wheu!” of the greater yellow-legs so cleverly as to beguile that noisy bird, which is said to warn every other feathered thing within hearing, into forgetting its panic and alighting near him.

He could give the drawn-out, plaintive “Ter-lee-ee!” call of the black-breasted plover, and find the crude nest of the spotted sandpiper nestling beneath a tall clump of candle-grass.

All these secrets and many more were within easy reach and could be studied in his unwritten Nature Primer whose pages were traced in the flight of each bird and the spawn of every fish.

But the Heart of the Woods was a closed book to most fourteen-year-old boys born and brought up in the little tidal town of Exmouth.

Colin had often longed to turn the pages of that book—to penetrate farther into the woods than he had dared to do yet. This longing was fanned by the tales of men who had hunted, trapped or felled trees in them, who could spell out each syllable of the woodlore to be studied in their golden twilight; and who, as they roved and read, could put a finger on many a colored [Pg 4] illustration of Nature’s methods set against a green background of branches or fluttering underbrush, like the flitting foliage of moving pictures.

To-day the wood-longing possessed Colin so strongly that it actually stung him all over, from his neck to his drumming, purposeless heels.

He glanced up into the brilliant September sky arching the salt-marshes, questioning it as to what might be going on in the woods at this moment under its imperial canopy.

And the blue eye of the sky winked back at him, hinting that it knew of forest secrets to be discovered to-day—of fascinating woodland creatures to be seen for a moment at their whisking gambols.

The sunlight’s energy raced through him. The briny ozone of the salt-marshes was a tickling feather in his nostrils, teasing him with a desire to find an outlet for that energy in some new and unprecedented form of activity.

He sprang to his feet, spurning the plumy grass.

“Gee whiz! I’m not going to lie here any longer, smelling marsh-hay,” he cried half articulately, his eye taking in the figures of two hay-makers who were mowing the tall marsh-grass [Pg 5] and letting it lie in fragrant swathes to dry into the salt hay that forms such juicy fodder for cattle. “It’s me for the woods to-day! I want to go farther into those old woods than I’ve ever gone before—far enough to find Varney’s Paintpot and the Bear’s Den—and the coon’s hole that Toiney Leduc saw among the alders an’ ledges near Big Swamp!”

He halted on the first footstep, whistling blithely to a gray-winged yellow-legs that skimmed above his head. The curly, boyish whistle, ascending in spirals, carried the musical challenge aloft: “I’m glad I’m alive and athirst for adventure; aren’t you?”

To which the bird’s noisy three-syllabled cry responded like three cheers!

“It’s me for the woods to-day!” Colin set off at an easy lope across the marshes. “I’m going to look up Coombsie and Starrie Chase—and Kenjo Red! Us boys won’t have much more time for fun before school reopens!” grammar capsizing in the sudden, boisterous eddy within him.

That eddy of excitement carried him like a feather up an earthy embankment that ascended from the low-lying marshes, over a fence, and out onto the drab highroad which a little farther [Pg 6] on blossomed out into houses on either side and became the quiet main street of Exmouth.

Colin turned his face westward toward the home of “Coombsie,” otherwise Mark Coombs—also shortened into “Marcoo” by nickname-loving boydom.

He had not gone far when his loping speed slackened abruptly to a contemplative trot. The trot sobered down to a crestfallen walk. The walk dwindled into a halt right in the middle of the sunny road.

“Tooraloo! here comes Coombsie now,” he ejaculated behind his twitching lips. “And some one with him! Oh, I forgot all about that!” Dismay stole over his face at the thought. “Of course it’s the strange boy, Marcoo’s cousin, who came from Philadelphia yesterday and is going to stay here for ever so long—six months or so—while his parents travel in Europe. This spoils our fun. Probably he won’t want to start off on a long hike through the woods,” rigidly scanning the approaching stranger as a stiffened terrier might size up a dog of a different breed. “His folks are rich, so Marcoo said; I suppose he’s been brought up in a city flowerpot—and isn’t much of a fellow anyhow!” with a disgruntled grin.

[Pg 7]

But as the oncoming pair drew within twenty yards of the youthful critic the latter’s tense face-muscles relaxed. Reassurance crept into his expression.

“Gee! he looks all right, this city boy. He’s not dolled-up much anyway! And he doesn’t look ‘Willified’ either!” was Colin’s complacent comment.

No, the stranger’s dress was certainly not patterned after the fashion of the boy-doll which Colin Estey had seen simpering in store-windows. He wore a khaki shirt stained with service, rough tweed knickerbockers and a soft broad-brimmed hat. He carried his coat; the ends of his blue necktie dangled outside his shirt, one was looped up into a careless knot. His gray eye was rather more than usually alert and bright, his general appearance certainly not suggestive of a flowerpot plant; his step, quick and springy, embodied the saline breeze that skipped over the salt-marshes.

So much Colin took in before criticism was blown out of his mind by a shout from Coombsie.

“Hullo! Col,” exclaimed Marcoo. “Say, this is fine! We were just starting off to hunt you up—Nix and I! This is my cousin, Nixon Warren, who popped up here from Philadelphia [Pg 8] late last night. Nix, this is my chum, Colin Estey!”

The two boys acknowledged the introduction with gruff shyness.

“Nixon and I settled on going down the river to-day in Captain Andy’s power-boat, and Mother put us up a corking good luncheon,” Marcoo significantly swung a basket pendant from his right hand. “But we’ve just been talking to Captain Andy,” glancing backward over his shoulder at the receding figure of an elderly man who limped as he walked, “and he says he can’t take us to-day. He won’t even loan us the Pill.” Coombsie gesticulated with the basket toward the broad tidal river gleaming in the sunshine, on which rode a trim gasolene launch with a little rowboat, so tubby that it was almost round and aptly named the Pill, lying as tender beside it.

“Pshaw! the Pill isn’t much of a boat. One might as well put to sea in a shoebox!” Colin chuckled.

“I know! Well, we can’t go on the river anyhow, so we’ve determined to take the basket along and spend the whole day in the woods. Nix is—”

“Great O!” whooped Colin, breaking in. [Pg 9] “That’s what I’ve been planning on doing too. I want to go far into the woods to-day,”—his hands doubled and opened excitedly, as if grasping at something hitherto out of reach,—”farther than I’ve ever been before,—far enough to see Varney’s Paintpot and the old Bear’s Den—and some of the other wonders that the men tell about!”

“But there aren’t any bears in these Massachusetts woods now?” It was the strange boy, Nixon Warren, who eagerly spoke.

“Not that we know of!” Coombsie answered. “If one should stray over the border from New Hampshire he manages to lie low. Apparently there’s nothing bigger than a deer traveling in our woods to-day—together with foxes in plenty and an occasional coon. The last bear seen in this region, Nix, had his den in the cave of a great rock in the thickest part o’ the woods. He was such an everlasting nuisance, killing calves and lambs, that a hunter tracked him into the cave and killed him with his knife. Ever since it has been called the Bear’s Den. I’ve never seen it; nor you, Col!”

“No, but Starrie Chase has! I was going to hunt him up too, and Kenjo Red: they’re a team if you want to go into the woods; they [Pg 10] know more about them than any other boy in Exmouth.”

“Kenjo has gone to Salem to-day. And Leon Chase?” Coombsie’s expression was doubtful. “I guess Leon makes a bluff of knowing the woods better than he does. He’ll scare everything away with his dog and shotgun. Captain Andy is hunting for him now,” with another backward glance to where the massive figure of the old sea-captain was melting from view. “He’s threatening to shake Starrie until his heels change places with his head for fixing the Doctor’s doorbell last night, wedging a pin into it so that it kept on ringing until the electricity gave out—and for teasing old Ma’am Baldwin again.”

“’Mom Baldwin,’ who lives in that old baldfaced house ’way over on the salt-marshes!” Colin hooted. “Pshaw! she ought to wash her clothes at the Witch Rock, where Dark Tammy was made to wash hers, over a hundred years ago. I guess Leon knows the way to Varney’s Paintpot anyhow,” he advanced clinchingly.

“What sort of queer Paintpot is that?” Nixon Warren spoke; his stranger’s part in the conversation was limited to putting excited questions.

“It’s a red-ochre swamp—a bed of moist red [Pg 11] clay—that’s hidden somewhere in the woods,” Colin explained. “The Indians used it for making paint. So did the farmers, hereabouts, until a few years ago. I believe it’s mostly dried up now.”

“Whoopee! if we could only find it, we might paint ourselves to our waists, make believe we were Indians and go yelling through the woods!” Nixon’s eye sparkled like sun-touched granite, and Colin parted with the last lingering suspicion of his being a flowerpot fellow.

This suggestion settled it. Starrie Chase, otherwise Leon, might let his boyish energy leak off as waste steam in planting another thorn in the side of the hard-worked doctor who bore the burdens of half the community, and in persecuting lonely old women, but—he was supposed to know the way to Varney’s Paintpot!

And the three started along the road to find him.

The quest did not lead them far. Rounding a bend in the highroad, they came abruptly upon Leon Starr Chase, familiarly called Starrie, almost a fifteen-year-old boy, of Nixon’s age.

He was leaning against a low fence above the marshes, holding a dead bird high above the head of a very lively fox-terrier whose tan ears [Pg 12] gesticulated like tiny signal flags as he jumped into the air to capture it, with a short one-syllabled bark.

“Ha! you can’t catch it, Blink—and you shan’t have it till you do,” teased his master, lowering its limp yellow legs a little.

The dog’s nose touched them. The next instant he had the bird in his mouth.

With equal swiftness he dropped it on the sidewalk, growling and gagging at the warm feathers which almost choked him. “Ugh-r-r!” He spurned it with his black nose along the ground, the tiny yellow claws raking up minute spirals of dust.

“There! I knew you wouldn’t eat it,” remarked his master indifferently. “You’re a spoiled pup!” Simultaneously Leon caught sight of the three boys making toward him and burst into a complacent shout of recognition.

“Hullo, Colin! Hullo, Coombsie!” he cried. “See what I’ve got! Six yellow-legs! I fired into a flock; the first I’ve seen this year. They were going from me and I dropped half a dozen of them together, with this old ‘fuzzee’!” He touched an ancient shotgun propped beside him. “I’ve shot quite a number one at a time this week. [Pg 13]”

His left hand went out to a huddle of still quivering feathers on top of the fence in which five pairs of yellow spindle-legs were tangled like slim twigs.

Colin, as was expected of him, burst into an exclamation of wonder at this destructive skill. Coombsie’s admiration was more forced.

Blink, the terrier, scornfully rolled over the feathered thing in the dust. He snapped angrily at the stranger, Nixon Warren, who tried to pick it up and examine it.

“That bird won’t be fit to eat now, after the dog has played with it,” suggested the latter, addressing Leon without the benefit of an introduction.

“I don’t care. Probably I’ll give the whole bunch of yellow-legs away, anyhow—Mother doesn’t like their sedgy flavor. She’d rather I’d let the birds alone, I guess!”

“Why do you shoot so many if you don’t want them?”

“Oh! partly for the sport and partly because these ‘Greater Yellow-legs’ are such telltales that they warn every duck and other bird within hearing by their noisy whistle.”

Impulsively Nixon put out a finger and touched one slim leg with its limp claw that protruded [Pg 14] from the fence. At the same moment he glanced upward.

Over the boys’ heads, having just risen from the feathery marshes, skimmed a feathered telltale, live counterpart of the one he touched, its legs golden spindles in the sunshine, its shrill joy-whistle: “Wheu! Wheu! Whe-eu!” proclaiming the thanksgiving which had rioted through Colin’s mind on the fragrant salt-marshes: “Glad I’m alive! Glad I’m alive! Glad—I’m alive!”

A smothered exclamation broke from Coombsie as he followed the finger and the flight.

Leon snatched up the gun.

“One can’t have too much of a good thing: I guess I could drop that ‘telltale,’ too!”

But Marcoo’s hand fastened upon his arm with an impulsive cry.

“Eh! What’s the matter with you—Flutter-budget?” Lowering the pointed shotgun, Leon whisked round; his restless brown eyes had a lightning trick of shutting and opening, as if he were taking a photograph of the person addressed, which was in general highly disconcerting to the boy who differed from him. “No need to make a fuss! I wouldn’t let her off here, anyhow,” he added, fondling the gun. “Father [Pg 15] would be fined if I should fire a shot on the highroad.”

“We’re starting off on a hike—for a long tramp into the woods, Leon,” began Coombsie hurriedly, anxious to create a diversion. “We want you to come with us, as leader; Colin says that you know the way to Varney’s Paintpot!”

The other’s expression changed like a rocket: Starrie Chase enjoyed leading other boys, even more than he reveled in “popping yellow-legs”—for the former Nature had intended him.

“All right!” he responded with swift eagerness. “Just, you fellows, keep an eye on my gun while I run home with the birds; I’ll be back in a minute!”

“Oh! you’re not going to take your gun into the woods?”

“Sure—I am! I might get a chance at a fox!”

“Won’t it be an awful nuisance carrying it all the way through the thick undergrowth—we want to go as far into the woods as the Bear’s Den?” suggested Marcoo tactfully.

“Well, perhaps it would. I’ll just scoot home then, and be back in no time!”

He snatched the dead birds from the fence, raced away and reappeared in three minutes, with the terrier barking at his heels.

[Pg 16]

“I’m going to let Blink come anyhow; he’ll have a great time chasing things—eh, Blinkie?” Leon made a hurdle of his outstretched arm for the scampering dog to jump over it.

And the terrier replied in a volley of excited barks, saying in doggy talk: “Fellows! if there’s fun ahead, I’m in with you. The woods are a grand old playground!”

He led the way, and the four boys followed, jostling each other merrily, rubbing their high spirits together and bringing sparks from the contact—bound for that mysterious forest Paintpot.

But the stranger, Nixon Warren, could not forbear throwing one backward glance from under his wide-brimmed hat at the poor dog-scorned yellow-legs, its joy-whistle silenced, stiffening in the dust.

[Pg 17]

CHAPTER II

ONLY A CHIP’

“Oh! I wish I had worn my tramping togs,” exclaimed Nixon Warren as the four boys, after covering an easy mile along the highroad and over the uplands that lay between marsh and woodland, plunged, whooping, in amid the forest shadows roofed by the meeting branches of pines, hemlocks, oaks, and birches, with here and there a maple already turning ruddy, that formed the outposts of the dense woods.

A dwarf counterpart of the same trees laced with vines and prickly brambles made an undergrowth so thick that they parted with shreds of their clothing as they went threshing through it, in a fascinating gold-misted twilight, through which the slender sunbeams flashed like fairy knitting-needles weaving a scarf of light and shade around each tall trunk.

“Why! you’re better ‘togged’ for the woods than the rest of us are,” answered Leon Starr Chase, looking askance at the new boy. “That’s a dandy hat; must shade your eyes a whole lot [Pg 18] when you’re tramping on open ground! I guess ours don’t need any shading!”

A wandering sunbeam kindled a brassy spark in Leon’s brown eye which looked as if it could face anything unabashed. In his mind lurked the same suspicion that had hovered over Colin’s at first sight of Nixon, that this newcomer from a distant city might be somewhat of a flowerpot fellow, delicately reared and coddled, not a hardy plant that could revel and rough it in the wilderness atmosphere of the thick woods.