A Scout of To-day Part 17

And to-night as his feet pressed his old stamping-ground beneath that apple-tree beside the house, while the wind raked the marshes and whipped his thoughts into dusty confusion, the old waste impulses which prompted the trick were mysteriously whirled uppermost again.

The mischievous tide rip boiled in him once more.

Just as he became conscious of its yeasty bubbling, his foot touched something on the ground--a hard winter apple. He picked it up and threw it against the house, imposing silence on his dog by dictatorial gesture and word.

There was a stir within the paintless dwelling. Through the blurred window-panes he caught sight of a shrunken form moving.

"Ha! there's the old 'witch' herself. She looks like a withered corn-stalk with all those odds and ends of shawls dangling about her.

Ssh-ssh! Blinkie. Down, doggie! _Quiet, sir!_"

Leon's fingers groped upon the ground, where twilight shadows were merging into darkness, for another apple. Since he enlisted as a boy scout mischief had been sentenced and shut up in a dark little cell inside him. But Malign Habit, though a captive, dies hard.

Those seeking fingers touched something else, a worm-eaten shingle blown from the old roof. He picked it up and considered it in the darkness, while his left hand felt in his pocket for some twine.

"Gee! it would be a great night for that trick to work," he muttered with a low chuckle that had less depth to it than a parrot's. "The wind is just in the right direction--driving straight through the house. Eh, Blink! Shall we 'get her on a string' again?"

The dog whined softly with impatience. Of late, in his short excursions with his master, he had not been used to such stealthy doings. With the exception of the trailing expeditions through the woods from which canines were debarred, movements had been open, manly, and aboveboard since the master became a boy scout.

But Leon had forgotten that he was a scout, had momentarily forgotten even the outdoor test in Sparrow Hollow, and the necessary preparations therefor.

His fingers trifled with the shingle and string. His brain going ahead of those fingers was already attaching the one to the other when--the paintless door opened and Ma'am Baldwin stepped out.

She did look like a wind-torn corn-stalk, short and withered, with the breeze catching at the many-colored strips of shawls that hung around her, uniting to protect her somewhat against that marsh-wind driving straight from the river through her home.

From her left hand drooped a pale lantern, the one with which boyish imagination had accused her of working spells.

It made an island of yellow light about her as she stepped slowly forth into the dusk. And Leon saw her raise her right arm to her breast with that timid, pathetic movement characteristic of old people--especially of those whom life has treated harshly--as if she was afraid of what might spring upon her out of the gusty darkness.

Not for nothing had Starrie Chase been for two months a boy scout! Prior to those eight weeks of training that feebly defensive arm would have meant naught to him; hardly would he have noticed it. But just as his eyes had been opened to consider at length, with a dazzled thrill, that distant Sugarloaf Sand-Pillar and other of Nature's beauties as he had seldom or never contemplated them before; so those scout's eyes were being trained to remark each significant gesture of another person and to read its meaning.

Somehow, that right arm laid across an old woman's breast told a tale of loneliness and lack of defenders which made the boy wince. The distance widened between his two hands holding respectively the shingle and string.

There was a wood-pile within a few yards of him. Ma'am Baldwin stepped toward it, breathing heavily and ejaculating: "My sen-ses! How it do blow!" While Leon restrained the terrier with a "_Quiet_, Blink! Don't go for her!"

Ma'am Baldwin, intent on holding fast to her shawls and procuring some chunks from the wood-pile--nearsighted as she was, to boot--did not notice the boy and dog standing in the blackness beneath the bare apple-tree.

She set the lantern atop of the pile. As she bent forward, groping for a hatchet, its yellow rays kindled two other lanterns in her eyes by whose light the lurking boy gazed through into her heart and saw for a brief moment how tired, lonely, and baffled it was.

At the glimpse he straightened up very stiffly. There was a gurgle in his throat, a stirring as of panic at the roots of his hair.

But not scare produced the rigidity! It was caused by a sudden great throe within which sc.r.a.ped his throat and sent a dimness to his eyes.

The captive, Malign Habit, imprisoned before, was dying now in the grasp of the Scout.

To put it otherwise,--at sight of an old woman's arm pathetically shielding her breast, at a startled peep into her heart, the tight little bud of chivalry in Leon, watered of late by his scout training, fostered by the good turn to somebody every day, burst suddenly, impetuously into flower!

With a low snarl at himself, he thrust the coil of string deep into his pocket, and flung the shingle as far as he could into the night.

"Ughr-r-r! Guess I was meaner'n you'd be, Blink!" he muttered, swallowing the discovery that sometimes of yore, in his dealings with his own kind, he had been less of a gentleman than his dog.

To which Blink, freed from restraint, returned a sharp, glad "Wouf!"

that said: "I'm glad you've come to your senses, old man!"

"Hullo! 'Mom Baldwin,'" Leon stepped forward as the bowed woman started at the monosyllabic bark, and peered fearfully into the darkness. "Don't you want me to split those chunks for you? You can't manage the hatchet."

Ma'am Baldwin's experience had taught her to distrust boys--Leon especially! As her peering eyes recognized him, she backed away, raising her right arm to her breast again with that helpless gesture of defense.

Starrie Chase blenched in turn. That pathetic old arm warding him off hurt him more at the core than a knockdown blow from a stronger limb.

But remembering all at once that he was a scout, trained to prompt action, he picked up the hatchet where she had dropped it, and set to work vigorously, chopping wood.

"Now! I'll carry these chunks into the house for you," he said presently. "Aw! let me. I'd just as soon do it!"

Ma'am Baldwin had no alternative. Leon pushed the paintless door open and carried the wood inside, while she hobbled after him, well-nigh as much astonished as if Gabriel's trump had suddenly awoke the echoes of the gusty marshland.

The scout went to and fro for another ten minutes, splitting more chunks, piling them ready to her hand within.

Meanwhile his beneficiary, the old woman, seemed to have got a little light on the surprising situation. Grunting inarticulately, chewing her bewilderment between her teeth, she disappeared into a room off the kitchen and returned holding forth a ten-cent piece to her knight.

"No, thanks! I'm a boy scout. We don't take money for doing a good turn." Leon shook his head. "Say! this old house is so draughty; you burn all the wood you want to-night; I'll run over to-morrow or next day an' split some more. Is there anything else I can do for you before I go? You've got enough water in from the well," he peered into the water-pail, which winked satisfactorily.

Ma'am Baldwin had sunk upon a chair, alternately looking in perplexity at the energetic boy, and listening to the frisky gusts: "My sen-ses!

Whatever's come over you, Leon?" she gasped; and then wailingly: "Deary me! if it should blow up a gale to-night, some things in this house'll ride out."

"No, it isn't going to blow up a storm," Leon rea.s.sured her. "The wind's not really high, only it gets such a rake over the marshes. Here, I'll tie these old shutters together for you, the fastening is broken," and the coil of string was produced from his pocket for a new purpose. "But it must be _awful_ lonely for you, living here by yourself, Ma'am Baldwin. You'll be snowed in later on; we'll have to come and dig you out."

Still chewing the cud of her bewilderment, she stared at him, mumbling, nodding, and stroking the gray hair from her forehead with nervous fingers. But there was a humid light in the old eyes that spilled over on the boy as he worked.

"Why don't you go to live with your daughter an' your grandson in the town?" went on Leon as he tied together the last pair of flapping shutters. "And you're so fond of little Jack too; he's a nice kid!"

"So he is!" nodded the grandmother; a change overspread her entire face now, she looked tender, grandmotherly, half-hopeful, as if for the moment trouble on behalf of her ne'er-do-well son was forgotten. "Well!

perhaps I will move there before the winter sets in hard, Leon. I'm not so smart as I was. I'm sure I don't know how to thank you! Good-night!"

"Good-night!" returned the scout. "You can untie those shutters easily enough in the morning."

And he found himself outside again upon the dark marshland, with the obedient terrier who had trotted at his heels during the late proceedings, waltzing excitedly at his side.

"Ah, la! la! as Toiney says, it's too late now, Blink, for us to put back to the town to buy our supper--half a pound of beefsteak and two potatoes, to be cooked over each one's special fire," muttered the boy, momentarily irresolute. "Well! we'll have to let the grub go, and race back across the uplands, over to the Hollow. Stir your trotters, Mr.

Dog!"

As the two regained the crest of the hilly uplands, Leon paused for breath. On his left hand stretched the dark, solemn woods, where the breeze hooted weirdly among leafless boughs. On his right, beyond upland and broad salt-marsh, wound the silver-spot river in whose now shallow ripples bathed a rising moon.

Quarter of a mile ahead of him a rosy flush upon the cheek of darkness told that in the sheltered hollow, between a clump of pines that served as a windbreak and the woods, the Owls' camp-fires were already blazing.

"Tooraloo! I feel as if I could start my fire to-night without using a match at all--just by snapping my fingers at it, or with a piece of damp bark and a s...o...b..ll, as the woodsmen say," he confided half-audibly to the dog.

Whence this feeling of prowess, of being a firebrand--a genial one--capable of kindling other and better lights in the world than a camp-fire?

Starrie Chase did not a.n.a.lyze his sensations of magnificence, which bloomed from a discovery back there on the marshes of the secret which is at the root of the Boy Scout Movement, at the base of all Christian Chivalry, at the foundation of golden labor for mankind in every age: namely, that the excitement of helping people is vastly, vitally, and blissfully greater than the spurious excitement of hurting them!