Isabel Hornibrook

“ Like a knight of old he is brave and bold,
And chivalry he knows.
Then hurrah for the brave, hurrah for the good!
Hurrah for the pure in heart!
At duty’s call, with a smile for all,
The Scout will do his part!”
“Sing! Harold. Do your part, and sing!” urged Nixon, the patrol leader. “Oh, go on: that isn’t a scout’s mouth, Harold!” looking at the weak brother’s fear-tightened lips. “A scout’s mouth turns up at the corners. Smile, Harold! Smile and sing.” ”

“ WIGWAG “He has something in his hand--something that shimmers in his hand! See! See, Betty! It--it’s like the radio-powder in that little bottle--Olive’s secret that shines in the dark--only you can see it farther off--much farther off--where we are!”
“Like--like the radio-dials facing the aviator in his tiny cock-pit!” corroborated Betty, in low response to the flaming whisper which scorched her ear, as Sara’s lips hissed into it amid the rustling beach-grass.
“Mer-cy! He’s whirling it--doing something with it--spinning it round in a circle. It is--it is a radio-dial! A big one! ”

“ Herb and the Farrars responded to it with heart-eager “Amens!” the fervor of which was new to their lips.
“I thank you as if he were my own brother, boys,” said the woodsman, while he filled in the grave, and planted Neal’s cross at its head. “Sho! when it comes to a time like we’ve been through to-day, a man, if he has anything but a gizzard in him, must feel as how we’re all brothers,—every man-jack of us,—white men, red men, half-and-half men, whatever we are or wherever we sprung.”
“A fellow is always hearing that sort of thing,” said Neal Farrar to Cyrus. ”

“ Oh-h! you don’t mean to say–you don’t tell me–that you’re anything to the great inventor, of whom the whole world is talking: the professor who has invented an apparatus to–to travel anywhere through the air, through space–even to reach the moon?... Ah-h, there she is now! I wonder if she’s listening to us!”
It was, indeed, at that moment that Yachune herself, the Silver Queen, showed her placid face above the Pinnacle pines, pale on the rim of the waning sunset. Did she dream of the Earth-valentine in store for her, mild old Mammy Moon? ”

“ 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 analyze 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! ”

“ The dory’s blunt, unromantic nose was bewitched into radiating light in the darkness, too. Down it shone a narrow streak, bright as a Milky Way!
“What is it? Who--who could have done it? Could--could it be the phosphorescent trail of some creature thrown up by the tide?”
But the high tide sobbed, “Not guilty!” as the girl--her flesh beginning to creep upon her bones--turned towards it with the question on her lips.
“No! It doesn’t look like any ordinary phosphorescent trail of a slimy thing!” So her chilling lips answered half aloud the question put by her quailing heart. ”

“ His figure was skeleton-like. His lips—the lips which at the entrance of the strangers never ceased their wild crooning—were swollen and fever-scorched. His black eyes, disfigured by a hideous squint, rolled with the sick fancies of delirium.
Cyrus and the Farrars, while they looked upon him, felt that, even if they had never heard Herb’s exclamation, they would have had no difficulty in identifying the creature, remembering that story which had thrilled them by the camp-fire at Millinokett. It was Herb Heal’s traitor chum—the half-breed, Cross-eyed Chris. ”

“ The eyes of Pemrose were a patchwork now, flame embroidered upon their shining blue; oh! if she were to give forth what Life gave to her, which of her Camp Fire Sisters would have such riches to reflect?
It had been hers–hers–to share the dream of a great inventor, to look forward with him to the pioneering moment–the beginning of that which would surely, in time, draw the Universe visibly together–the moment when the Thunder Bird should fly. ”

“ Corporal Chase was already lying flat on his stomach, working himself out over the infirm ice where, here and there, within the white map of lines and circles traced by the skates of the small boys, were small holes through which the captive water heaved like Ma’am Baldwin’s breast, under a thin, glassy fretwork.
After him crawled Nixon, grasping his ankles in a strong grip. And, performing a like service for the patrol leader, came Coombsie, and after Coombsie Colin; the four forming a human chain, trusting their lives to the unstable, saline ice, and to the grip of each other. ”

“ Lead your comrades to the field!” she caroled further, falling into step with the maid of the rake, and looking challengingly up into the dark eyes with the golden spark of fire--of fervor--in them.
“I confess I wish ’twas any other kind of field, for once; that we had any other hill to take this morning but that same old heart-breaker of a converted sand-peak--from which the enemies, the weeds--witch-grass, rank beach-grass, wild pea, wild vetch--have to be driven back again and again, with barb-weed, instead of barbed wire, for the worst of all!” ”

“ The moose, reminded that there was a second enemy, charged the other tree; stood off for a minute to get breath, then charged it again, snorting, bellowing, and knocking his jaws together with a crunching, chopping noise.
“Ha! that’s how he makes the row like a man with an axe—by hammering his jaws on each other. Well, well! but this is a regular picnic, Dol,” sang out Cyrus jubilantly, caring nothing for the shocks, and forgetting camp, water, peril, everything, in his joy at getting a chance to leisurely study the creature he had come so far to visit. ”

“ No coveted log shanty, where at least they could encamp for the night, decorated it.
But on its opposite side there loomed before the boys’ eyes as they issued from the woods a great, lichen-covered rock, over twenty feet high, with a deep cavernous opening that yawned like a sleepy mouth at sunset as it swallowed the rays streaming into it.
“Glory halleluiah! it’s the Bear’s Den—at last,” ejaculated Leon, pain momentarily eclipsed. “Thanks, Nix: you’re a horse!” as he withdrew his arm from his comrade’s shoulders. “But that cave is about five miles from anywhere—from any opening in the woods! ”

“ The girls, blanching, shrank against the opposite cave-wall, which shuddered behind them.
A bat, flying low, a winged Fear, brushed Tanpa’s cheek, as she stood, transfixed,–and her cry was almost as hysterical as theirs.
In the blackness of that Tinker’s Pot behind the looming fissure, were there other things–other things besides a boy, a broken braggart of a boy?
Was Death in the pot with him? Had he sipped of its mystery–only to perish? Death–it seemed a raving possibility–in the shape of some wild animal, perhaps–a live, a clutching claw! ”

“ If I can’t rally ‘the light that’s in me,’ pass it on to others, what good am I as a leader?... Hitherto I have not been a slacker!”
The feathery luxuriance of the carrot-plants, bending like green foam before the sea-wind, the far-off rows of sweet-corn, tall beans, taller than herself--Kentucky wonders--potatoes, and even the “giggling” beets, did a rural dance around her, to support that claim of the young soul.
And, yet--and yet--Olive knew that the “Joan” fire, with which she started out, had gone from her eyes, the Joan fervor from her heart. ”

“ I should say we are!” answered Garst. “You’re our captain now, Herb, and it’s a case of ‘Follow my leader!’ Take us anywhere you like, through jungles or mud-swamps. We won’t kick at hardships if we can only get a good look at his mooseship. Up to the present, except for that one moonlight peep, he has always dodged me like a phantom.”
“Are you going to be satisfied with a look?” The guide’s eyes narrowed into two long slits, on which the firelight quivered, as he gazed quizzically down upon Cyrus. “If the moose comes within reach of our shots, ain’t anybody going to pump lead into him? ”

“ I don’t know what we may find on any other–that’s ‘banner’, it’s a marshmallows toast out-of-doors–isn’t it?” chanted Una, intoning her delight to the trees, the low spruce and pine scrub, as she skipped among them, an evergreen sprite, herself, for she, too, now wore the “bonnie green”, the Camp Fire short skirt, middy blouse and captivating Tam-o’-shanter–most nymph-like note in dress for daughters of the woodland.
“And–and I just know the dear-est, loveliest pin-ey nook,” she went on in a choir-boy sing-song; “half-way down the Pinnacle’s softer side it is, where we may build our fire. ”

“ Now, Starrie Chase was by Nature’s gift more quick-witted than his companions, even than the trained boy scout.
“If we try to wade in toward him, we’ll sink ourselves!” he cried. “I’ll try to haul him out with that birch-tree.”
A leaping, plunging run, sinking to his ankles, and with the long bound of a gray squirrel he alighted upon the supple trunk of a tall white-birch sapling that grew within the borders of the swamp!
No squirrel ever climbed more rapidly than did he to its middle branches. ”

“ Now, Neal, what do you say about the beaver’s intelligence?”
“If I didn’t know you, Cyrus, I’d say you were making up as you went along,” answered Neal. “It seems one of those things which a fellow can scarcely believe in. Hulloa! What’s that?”
A loud report, like the bang of a gun, made all the boys, who had been standing very quietly, gazing at the dam, suddenly jump.
“It’s only a beaver striking the water with his tail,” laughed Cyrus. “He has been swimming about somewhere up-stream, and has scented us, and dived. ”

“ Thus he challenged the observer, with his dangling binoculars.
“Well! I do admit it’s ‘low tide’ inside me, Ned; every little creek bare as a sand-pocket; I shan’t object to being filled up,” acknowledged the older air-man. “Only I feel rather”--he smiled through the flash-light’s luminous ring upon the picturesque maidens in ceremonial dress--“rather as if we had been sailing by the star-chart and landed upon some more romantic planet than old Mother Earth, which hits some of us such hard knocks at times. ”

“ I think the woods are just dandy at this time o’ year!” Leon led a whistling onslaught upon the vividly laden black alder bushes, while the white gusts of the boys’ breath floated like incense through the coral and evergreen sanctuary of beauty, guarded by the silvery pillars of white birch-trees, where, in the bare forest, Nature had not left herself without a witness to joy and color.
“These berries are as red as Varney’s Paintpot,” laughed Colin by and by, as the two scouts retraced their steps across the salt-marshes, crunching underfoot the frozen spikes of yellow marsh-grass. ”

“ And Life would do the rest–oh! surely–in the case of her father and herself, was the dewy thought of Pemrose Lorry as she planted her baby tree in honor of that novel Wayfarer, that would first traverse space and conquer it–bridge the gulf which made Earth a hermit amid the heavenly bodies–of the great invention, whereof poets in future ages would sing, that daringly took the first step towards linking planet with planet.
And the tender sapling was rooted in the hope that long before it was a mature tree that comet-like Wayfarer would start,–the Thunder Bird would fly. ”

“ If a spirit has got into my dory, it’s a mighty short-sighted one.... ’Twould be easy to dodge it!”
She broke into a low chuckle, sharpened by rising anger.
“It--it’s the work of somebody! That--that seal-hunter! Could he be the--Blighter?”
Strange how, out of the stirred waves of her subconscious self, the epithet used by her soldier-brother, when the gas, catching a disobedient “doughboy,” had temporarily withered a fiery officer’s holiday, sprang--a kindred flame now--to her parted, stiffening lips, as she turned to the night-breeze for an answer! ”

“ Royal’s tear-away tongue, his brothers’ racket, Joe’s racy talk, Uncle Eb’s kind, dark face, and more than all, Doc’s companionship, which was as tonic to the hearts of those who travelled with him, were missed.
But spirits must be elastic in forest air. When they halted at noon to eat their “snack” on the side of a breezy knoll, with a tiny brook purling through a pine grove beneath them, with Katahdin’s rugged sides and cloud-veiled peaks looming in majesty to the north, the thought of what lay behind was inevitably lost in what lay before. Enthusiasm replaced depression. ”

“ Camp-fires we light and by embers bright
We sleep the whole night through.
Hurrah for the sun, hurrah for the storm,
Hurrah for the stars above!
We feel secure, safe, sane and sure,
For we know that God is Love.”
“Why have you that knot in your tie?” asked Leon after the last note had died away in forest-echo, while the scout was wetting the bandages round his inflamed ankle before they crept into the cave to sleep. ”

“ Jack at a Pinch had made gorgeous his incivility and was parading it before her eyes.
“Oh, boy! Look at that middle fellow. He’d have a grosbeak ‘skun a mile’!” gasped Stud, following the direction of her glance, with a virtuous consciousness of his own cave-soiled khaki, moderately lit by merit badge and service stripe.
“‘Grosbeak!’ Oh, but I love grosbeaks! And all that color–why! it paints the landscape,” came flutteringly from Aponi, the White Birch Butterfly, least Priscilla-like in her tastes of the Group, when she was not in Camp Fire green, or soft-toned ceremonial dress. ”

“ But Herb has had so many hairbreadth escapes that I believe the animal has yet to be born which could get the better of him. And he can find his way anywhere without a compass. Every handful of moss on a trunk or stone, every turn of a woodland stream, every sun-ray which strikes him through the trees, every glimpse of the stars at night, has a meaning for him. He reads the forest like a book. ”

“ Olive burst into a low laugh.
“Oh-h! We know that no ghost fazes you, not even the ghost of chlorine gas. You don’t knuckle under to it!”
The kneeling artist slapped her brush suddenly against her dory’s side, drew it vehemently across the bow in a great white, dazzling smear, then turned impulsively and gazed along the still more dazzling beach upon which the stranger had passed, her gold-tipped eyelashes twinkling, her brown eyebrows drawn together hard, as if thought were dipping a paint-brush into some camouflaging pot of memory and trying to produce a picture--trying with all its might. ”

“ Lighthouse men may take the glare in the sky to mean only a brush-fire,” added the scoutmaster, sotto voce, as he stationed himself upon the crest of the sandy slope that led from the burning shed to the dim lapping water.
That doomed shed was now blazing like a mammoth bonfire. The flames flung their gleeful arms out, seizing a solemn gray birch-tree for a partner in their wild dance, scattering their rosy fire-petals broadcast until they lodged in the roof of the wood-shed adjacent to the house, and upon the piazza of the bungalow itself. ”

“ My Wise Woman sitting in the Devil’s Chair! Why! ’twould take a daredevil nickum, indeed, to do that.”
The inventor threw up his hands, laughing again, as he beat a retreat to his hardware den, his laboratory, where there was ever a magnet, potent by night or day, to draw him back.
Yet when still another six weeks had passed and Pemrose, with all the green world of spring in her heart, stood, breathless, upon that Lenox pinnacle–a pine-clad mountainette some thirteen hundred feet above sea-level–lo and behold! there was a nickum sitting coolly in the Devil’s Chair. ”

“ Not a syllable passed the lips of the boys as they followed Herb into the log hut, but feeling seemed wagging a startled tongue in each finger-tip which convulsively pressed the rifles.
And not another articulate sentence came from the guide; only his throat swelled with a deep, amazed gurgle as he reached the interior of the shanty, and dropped his eyes upon the individual who raised that queer chanting.
On a bed of withered spruce boughs, strewn higgledy-piggledy upon the camp-floor—mother earth—lay the form of a man. ”

“ And, worst of all, Olive, the captaining Maid, the Torch-Bearer, felt as if, at the moment, she could give forth no fuel from her own spirit to feed the waning spark.
“If--if I don’t ‘pucker’ up--if I’m not true to my service-pin--the day is lost.” She glanced down at the red, white, and blue button upon her overalls. “Mercy! it is hot--getting hotter. We’re none of us in the mood for work; our legs are telling us that it’s time to fall in for a march back to camp, when it isn’t. ”

“ See! the squirrel looks all red mouth,” laughed Nixon.
The mouth of the little tree-climbing fury yawned, indeed, like a tiny coral cave decorated with minute ivories as he sat bolt upright on the dry branch, scolding the dog.
“Oh! come on, Blink, you can’t get at him. You can chase a woodchuck or something else that isn’t quite so quick, and kill it!” cried his master.
The “something else” was presently started in the form of a little chipmunk, ground brother to the squirrel, which had been holding solitary revel with a sunbeam on a rock. ”