CHAPTER XVI
THE PUP-SEAL'S CREEK
The music of "Taps" was eclipsed by the blither music of "Reveille," themorning blast blown by Leon standing in front of the white tents, thesands beneath his feet jeweled by the early sunshine, the blue ribbonattached to his bugle flirting with the breeze that capered among theplumy hillocks.
The tide which had ebbed and flowed again since midnight--when the lastexcited scout had fallen asleep lulled by its full purr--broke high uponthe beach, where the white sands gleamed through its translucent floodlike milk in a crystal vase.
Far away in dim distance, higher up the tidal river upon its other side,beyond the plains of water, the woods which enclosed Varney's Paintpotand the cave called the Bear's Den smiled remotely through a pearly veilof haze.
And all the waking glee of tide, dunes, and woods was personified in theboy bugler's face.
The sight of him as he stood there, face to the tents where his comradesscrambled up from cot or ground, his brown eyes snapping and flashingunder the scout's broad hat, with the delight of having found anabsorbing interest which stimulated and turned to good account everybudding activity within him--that sight would have made the veriest oldSeek-sorrow among men take heart and feel that a new era of chivalry wasin flower among the Scouts of the U.S.A.
And the old religious reverence, that fortifying kernel of knighthood,was not neglected by this boy scout patrol.
Bareheaded, and in line with their scoutmasters presently, while theireyes gazed off over the sparkling dunes and crystal tide-stretches, theyrepeated in unison the Lord's Prayer, offering morning homage to thePower, dimly discerned, of whom and through whom and to whom are allthings. Of his, the Father's, presence chamber, gladness and beautystand at the threshold!
"_Now_, for our early swim! The tide's just right. Come along, Harold;I'm going to give _you_ your first swimming-lesson; and I expect you'llbe a star pupil!" cried Nixon, the patrol leader, when the briefadoration was over. "What! you don't want to learn to swim? Nonsense!You _are_ going into that dandy water. Oh! that's not a scout's mouth,Harold."
And the corners of Harold's mouth, which had drooped with fear of thisnew experience, curled up in a yielding grin.
Once he was in the invigorating salt water, feeling the boisterous tidalripples, fresh and not too cold, rise about his body, the timid ladunderwent another lightning change, just as at the moment of his tyingthe bowline knot, the spirit of his fisherman father became uppermost inhim, and he learned to swim almost as easily and naturally as apup-seal.
The improvement in his condition was such that his brother Owls had wonhis promise to enter school when it should reopen after this jollycamping period was over. "And if any boy picks on you or teases you,Harold, mind you're to let us know at once, because we're your brotherscouts--and he won't try it a second time!" So they admonished him.
Thus Harold, under the Owls' sheltering wing, was gradually losing hisinherited and imbibed dread of a crowd, of any gathering of his ownkind.
Although this bugbear fear returned upon him a little when, later onthat morning, the Fox Patrol, with Godey Peck as its leader, was landedupon the Sugarloaf Dunes from Captain Andy's motor-launch, and stilllater in the day the Seals rowed across in two large rowboats fromcertain farms or fishermen's houses upon the opposite side of the river,to join the other two patrols. So that the boy scout troop was complete,and Harold found himself one of twenty-four boisterous, thoughgood-natured, boys upon this strange white beach.
A little homesickness beset him for the farm-clearing in the woods andhis grandfather's staid presence, to cure which Scouts Warren and Chasetook him off with them in the little rowboat, the Pill, lent by CaptainAndy, to explore the tidal river and the little truant creeks thatescaped from it to burrow among the salt-marshes.
"We're going to try and hunt up a creamy pup-seal, Harold, and bring itback to camp," said Nixon; and in the excitement of this quest the stillshy boy forgot his nervous qualms.
Fortune favored the expedition. It was now between one and two o'clockin the afternoon. The tide, which had been high at six in the morningand again at twelve, was once more on the ebb, as the two elder scoutsrowing in leisurely fashion, turned the Pill's snub nose into a pearlycreek whose shallow water was clear and pellucid, over its sandy bed.
Hardly half a dozen strokes had they taken between bold marshy bankswhen, from some half-submerged rocks near the head of the creek, theyheard a prolonged and dulcet "Oo-oo-oo-ooo" that might have been thecall of a dove, save that it was louder.
"_Hear him?_" cried Leon, shipping his oar in blinking excitement."That's our pup-seal, Nix! We've got him cornered in this little creek;if he dives, the water is so shallow that we can pick him up from thebottom; and he can't swim fast enough to get away from us--though aslikely as not he won't want to!"
The last conjecture proved true. The young seal, little more than twomonths old, which lay sprawled out, a creamy splotch, upon the low reefwhich the tide was forsaking, with his baby flippers clinging to the wetrock and his little eyes staring unwinkingly into the sunlight, had notthe least objection to human company. He welcomed it.
When the scouts rowed up alongside the ledge he suffered Nixon to lifthis moist fat body into the boat, where he stretched himself upon thebottom planks in perfect contentment, and took all the caresses whichthe three boys lavished upon him like any other lazy puppy.
"Isn't he 'cunning', though?" gasped Harold, trying to lift the youthfulmammal into his arms, an attempt which failed because he, the weak oneof the Owls, was not strong enough to do so without capsizing thePill--not because the pup-seal objected. "I thought he'd be a kind ofwhitish color, eh?" appealing diffidently to Leon.
"So he was, when born; his hair is turning darker now, to a dull yellow;by and by it will be a brownish drab. See, Greerie! his spots arebeginning to appear!" Leon ran his finger down the seal's dog-like headand back, already faintly dotted with those round markings which gainfor his family the name of the "marbled seal."
"Isn't he a 'sprawly' pup, and so friendly? The other scouts will be'tickled to death' with him--" Nixon was beginning, when a shadowsuddenly fell across the boat and its three occupants, whose attentionwas entirely upon the young seal.
"Hi, there! You'll get pocketed in this little creek, you fellows--hungup aground here--if you don't look out! Can't you see that the water isleaving you?" cried a harsh voice from the bold marsh-bank whichoverhung the creek to the right of them, so suddenly that the threejumped.
Looking up, they saw the unkempt figure of a young man, short of statureand showing a hungry leanness about the neck and face. This suddenapparition which had approached noiselessly over the soft marshes, wasplainly outlined against the surrounding wildness of salt-marsh andtideway.
Had the little dog-fox which prowled among the moonlit dunes been near,he might have recognized in the shabby figure his brother-prowler of thenight before.
Recognition was springing from another source. Starrie Chase caught hisbreath with such a wild gasp that he rocked the Pill as if a gust hadstruck it. Something about that stocky figure and in the expression ofthe face, half wistful, half savage, reminded him overwhelmingly of anold woman whom he had seen issuing, lantern in hand, from her paintlesshome, and who had raised her trembling arm to her breast at sight ofhim, Leon.
"Forevermore! it's _Dave Baldwin_," he ejaculated in a whisper audibleonly to Nixon. "That's who it is--Nix!"
"Don't you see that the tide is leaving you?" snapped the strangeragain. "There won't be a teaspoonful of water in this creek presently."
He was looking down at the Pill and its occupants, with a gleam in hiseyes fugitive and phosphorescent as a marsh-light, which revealed a newexpression upon his mud-smeared face, one of passionate envy--envy ofthe boy scouts healthily rejoicing over their captive pup-seal.
"Tide leaving us! S-so it is!" Nixon seized an oar as if awakening froma dream. "Thank you for warning us! We don't want to be hung up
in thepocket of this little creek--until it rises again!"
"Then pull for all you're worth! Your boat--she's a funny one," brokeoff the stranger with the ghost of a boyish twinkle in his eye; "shelooks as if she was made from a flat-bottomed dory that had been cut intwo!"
"So she was, I guess!" Leon too found his voice suddenly.
"Well! luckily for you, she doesn't draw much water; you may scrape byan' get out into the open channel while there's tide enough left tofloat her!" And with an inarticulate grunt that might have beenconstrued into some sort of farewell, the stranger disappeared over themarshes abruptly as he had come.
Their own plight now engrossed the boys. It was clear that if they didnot want to be pocketed in this out-of-the-way creek with theiramphibious prize, grounded in the sand for the next five or six hours,without a hope of getting back to their camp on the dunes until the tideshould rise again, they certainly must row for all they were worth!
Even as it was, the two older scouts, divesting themselves of shoes andstockings, rolling up their khaki trousers, had to "get out and shove"ere they could propel the flat-bottomed Pill through the mouth of thecreek.
"If that fellow hadn't warned us just in time, we'd have been in a badscrape," said Scout Chase. "We're not out of the misery yet, Nix! Seethe old mud-shadow poking its nose up on either side of the mainchannel!"
"Yes, the water on those shallows looks like the inside of anoyster-shell,--thick and iridescent. 'Shove' is the word again,Starrie!" returned his toiling companion, arduously putting thatwatchword in practice, pushing the little boat containing Harold and thepup-seal (the latter being the only member of the party placidlyunmoved by the situation) through the iridescent opaqueness of theebbing ripples that now barely covered vast silvery stretches of tidalmud.
"CAN'T YOU SEE THE TIDE IS LEAVING YOU?"]
"Look at that old clam-digger, who has his shack on the white beach,about quarter of a mile from our camp! He's left his boat behind and iswading out to the clam-flats." Nixon paused, with his breast to theboat's stern, in the act of propelling it. "Goody! I'd like to stop anddig clams with him. But we'd never get back to camp! What ho! she sticksagain. There! that brings her."
By dint of alternately propelling and rowing the three scouts, withtheir prize, finally reached the white beach of the dunes before thetide completely deserted them. They brought a full cargo of excitementinto camp in their tale of the stranger who had warned them; who, withworthless vagrancy stamped all over him, they felt must be the_vaurien_, Dave Baldwin; and in their engaging prize, the flipperedpup-seal.
The latter quite eclipsed the interest felt in the former. Never wasthere a more docile, fatter, or more amiable puppy. He enjoyed beingfondled in a scout's arms, under difficulties, as, for a pup, he wasquite a heavy-weight and slippery too, on account of the amount ofblubber secreted under his creamy skin. His oily brown eyes were softlytrustful.
But the tug-of-war came with feeding-time. Vainly did the boy scoutsoffer him of their best, vainly did Marcoo and Colin tramp a mile overthe dunes to bring back a quart of new milk for him from the nearestfarm, and try to pour it gently down his infant throat!
He set up a dove-like moaning that was plainly a call for his mother ashe lay sprawled out on the white sands. And, at nightfall, by order ofthe scoutmaster, Scouts Warren and Chase rowed out into the channel andreturned him to the water in which he was quite at home.
But he was possessed of a contradictory spirit, for he swam after thePill, crying to be taken aboard again. They could hear his dulcet"Oo-oo-ooo!" as they gathered round their camp-fire in the white hollowamong the sand-hills.
At the powwow to-night the encounter with Dave Baldwin, if the vagrantof the marshes was really he, came in for its share of discussion.Guesses were rife as to the probability of the scouts running across himagain, and as to how he might occupy his time in the lazy vagabond lifewhich he was leading.
It was here that Harold broke through the semi-shy reserve which stillencrusted him and contributed a remark, the first as a result of hisobservations, to the powwow.
"Well! he had an _awful_ sorry face on him," he said impulsively,alluding to the vagrant. "It just made me feel badly for a while!"
"You're right, Greerie, he had!" corroborated Leon. "Whatever he'sdoing, it isn't agreeing with him. We'll probably come on him again sometime on the marshes or among the dunes."
But eleven days went by, eleven full days for the scout campers, goldenwith congenial activity, wherein each hour brought its own interesting"stunt," as they called it; and they saw no more of the _vaurien_, theworthless one, who had caused his mother's heart to "break in pieces."
And they gave little thought to him. For those breezy days, the last ofAugust and the first of September, were spent in observation tours overmarsh and dune or on the heaving river, in playing their exciting scoutgames among the sandhills, in clam-bakes, in practising signaling withthe little red-and-white flags according to the semaphore or wig-wagcode--one scout transmitting a message to another posted on a distanthill--and in the various duties assigned to them in pairs, of cooking,and keeping the camp generally in order.
The more fully one lives, the more joyously one adventures, the morequickly flutters the present into the past, like a sunny landscapeflitting by a train! It had come to be the last night but one in camp.Within another two days the Sugarloaf Dunes would be deserted so far ascampers were concerned.
School would presently reopen. And at the end of the month the Owlswould lose their brother and patrol leader: during the first days ofOctober Scout Nixon Warren's parents were expected home from Europe, andhe would rejoin his former troop in Philadelphia.
To-night, every one was bent upon making the end of the camping trip aseason of befitting jollity. They sang their scout songs as theygathered round the camp-fire. They retailed the last good joke fromtheir magazine. They challenged the darkness with their heartymotto,--both in the strong sweet mother tongue wherein it had been givento the world, and in the pretty _Estu preta!_ form, which two of theirnumber thought might serve as a universal link.
But the night refused to rejoice with them. It was chilly, colder thanon the same date one year ago when four lost boys camped out in theBear's Den. The inflowing tide broke on the beach with sobbing clamor.There was no moon, few stars. The white sand-hills were wild-lookingsable mounds waving blood-red plumes of beach-grass or beach-peawherever the light of camp-fire or camp-lantern struck them.
The clusters of gray birches and ash-trees scattered here and thereamong the dunes cowered like ebony shadows fearful of the rising wind.
"Bah! De night she's as black as one black crow," declared Toiney with ashrug as he threw another birch log on the camp-fire and set one of thetwo bright oil-lanterns on a sand-hill where it spied upon the gusty,secretive darkness like a watchful eye.
With the exception of a few small carbide lamps attached to tent-posts,those lanterns were the only luminaries in camp.
"An' de win' she commence for mak' noise lak' mad cat! Saint Ba'tiste!I'll t'ink dis iss night for de come-backs--me." And Toiney glancedhalf-fearfully behind him at the sable mounds so milky in daylight.
"He means it's a night for spooks--ghosts! He doesn't believe much in'come-backs,' though: look at his face!" Leon pointed at the assistantscoutmaster's black eyes dancing in the firelight, at the tassel of hisred cap capering in the breeze. "By the way, Nix and I saw one'come-back,' about an hour ago--a human one!" went on Corporal Chasesuddenly, after a minute's pause: "that rough customer, Dave Baldwin, aswe suppose him to be, turned up again this evening near the summerbungalows away over on the beach. He was acting rather queerly, too!"
"He certainly was!" chimed in Nixon, looking thoughtfully at a littletopknot of flame that sprouted upon the blazing log nearest to him as helay, with his brother Owls, prone upon his face and hands, gazing intothe fire.
"What was he doing?" asked Jesse Taber, a member of the Seal Patrol.
"Why, he was up on
the high piazza of the largest bungalow--that housebuilt just on the edge of the dunes which looks as if it was standing onstilts, and getting ready to walk off! He seemed to be trying one of thewindows when we came along as if attempting to get in."
"The summer people who own that house left there this morning; we sawthem going," broke in Godey Peck of the Fox Patrol. "I guess all thethree houses are empty now; those dandified 'summer birds' don't likestaying round here when the wind 'makes noise like mad cat'!" Godeyhugged himself and beamed over the wild noises of the night, and at thevoice of the tidal river calling lustily.
"Well! did he get into the house?" asked Jemmie Ahern of the Seals.
"No, as we came along over the dunes he saw us and scooted off!" ThusCorporal Leon Chase again took up the thread of the story. "But Nix an'I looked back as we walked along the beach; it was getting dusk then,but we made out his figure disappearing into a large shed belonging tothat bungalow."
"I hope he wasn't up to any mischief," said the scoutmaster gravely."Now! let's forget about him. Haven't any of you other scouts somecontribution to make to to-night's powwow about things you've observedduring the day?"
"Mr. Scoutmaster, I have!" Marcoo lifted his head upon the opposite sideof the camp-fire where he lay, breast downward, on the sand. "Colin andI and two members of the Seal Patrol, Howsie and Jemmie Ahern, saw an_awfully_ big heap of clam-shells between two sand-hills on theshore-edge of the beach. They were partly covered with sand; but we dugthem out; and--somehow--they looked as if they had been there forages."
"Likely enough, they had! The Indians used to hold clam-bakes here." Thefirelight danced upon the scoutmaster's white teeth; he greatly enjoyedthe camp-fire powwow. "You see, fellows, this fine, white sand issomething like snow--but snow which doesn't harden--the wind blows itinto a drift; then, perhaps, another big gale comes along, picks up thedrift and deposits it somewhere else. That's what uncovered yourclam-shells."
"Then how is it these white dunes aren't traveling round the country?"Colin waved his arm toward the neighboring sand-hills with a laugh.
"Because they are held in place by the vegetation that quickly sprang upon and between them. That beach-grass has very coarse strong roots whichinterlace under the surface. Now! let's listen to Toiney singing; wemust be merry, seeing it's our second last night in camp." ScoutmasterEstey waved his hand toward his assistant in the blue shirt and tasseledcap.
Toiney, tiring of the conversation which it was an effort for him tofollow, was crooning softly an old French ditty wherewith he had beensung to sleep by his grandfather when he was a black-eyed babe in asaffron-hued night-cap and gown:--
"A la clair-e fontain-e M'en allant promener, J'ai trouve l'eau si belle, Que je m'y suis baigne!"
"Oh! you took a walk near the fountain and found the water so fine thatyou went in bathing!" cried one and another of the scouts who were intheir first year in high school. "Must have been a pretty big fountain!Go ahead: what did you do next, Toiney?"
But the singer had suddenly sprung to his feet and stood, an alert,tense figure, in the flickering twilight.
"_Gard' donc!_" he cried gutturally, while the cat-like breeze caperedround him, flicking his short red tassel, catching at his legs in theirqueer high boots. "_Gard' donc!_ de littal light in de sky--engh? _Sapretonnerre!_ I'll t'ink shee's fire, me. No camp-fire, _non_! Beegfire--engh? _V'la! V'la!_"
He glanced round sharply at his scout comrades, and pointed, withexcited gesticulations, across the sable dunes in the direction of thoserecently erected summer residences.
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