During the final week of August and the first of September their scoutmaster, a rising young naval architect, had a respite from designing wooden vessels, from considering how he could best combine speed and seaworthiness in an up-to-date model; and he arranged to devote the whole of that holiday to camping out with his boy scout troop upon the milky Sugarloaf Dunes.
A more ideal camping-ground could scarcely have been found than among the white sand-hills, capped with plumy vegetation which formed the background for an equally dazzling line of beach, where the gray-and-white gulls strutted in feathered rendezvous, and were hardly to be scared away by the landing in their midst of the first patrol of scouts, put ashore from Captain Andy’s motor-boat in a light skiff, a more capacious rowboat than the Pill.
But they had brought the tubby Pill down the river too, in tow of the launch; and Captain Andy, who was partial to scouts, had arranged to leave that rotund little rowboat with them, so that, two or three at a time, they might explore the tidal river with the creeks that intersected the marshes in the neighborhood of the white dunes.
“Just look at that gray gull, will you?” laughed Patrol Leader Nixon, as he landed from the skiff. “He’s made up his mind that we Owls have no rights here: that this white beach is his stamping-ground, and he won’t be frightened away!”
Other gulls had reluctantly taken wing and wheeled off during the prolonged process of landing the eight members of the Owl Patrol, with their scoutmasters and camp outfit, in various detachments from the launch, which was too large to run right in to the beach.
But this one youthful sea-gull, a mere boy in plumage gray, held his ground, parading the lonely beach with head turning alertly from side to side, as if he were admonishing his wheeling brothers with: “These are boy scouts! Look at me: I tell you, you have nothing to fear!”
So bold was his mien, so peaceful the attitude of the human invaders, that presently the regiment of sea-gulls fluttered back to a point of rendezvous only a little removed from their former one.
“We won’t have much company beyond ourselves and the birds, I guess!” remarked Nixon presently. “There are no houses in sight except those three fine bungalows about quarter of a mile off on the edge of the dunes. And the fisherman’s shack on the beach below them!”
“Yes, that belongs to an old clam-digger,” said Kenjo Red. “He keeps his pails there. Don’t you remember my telling you about his letting us—my uncle an’ me—have his boat one day last November, so’s we could row over to the sand-spit opposite, and take a look at some seals that were sunning themselves there?”
“Oh! yes, we remember, Kenjo; you’ve told about that at half a dozen camp-fire powwows, at least.” Starrie Chase plucked off Kenjo’s cap and combed his ruddy locks with a teasing forefinger. “They say Dave Baldwin, the vaurien,” with guttural mimicry of Toiney’s accents, “hangs out among the dunes here, when he isn’t loafing in the woods up the river,” added Corporal Chase, peering off among the white sand-hills, capped with biscuit-colored plumes of dry beach-grass, and the more verdant beach-pea, as if he expected to see young Baldwin’s head pop up among them.