One was already erected, a large canvas shelter, to contain four boys, another went up like unto it for the other four members of the patrol, then a smaller tent for the scoutmaster, and the cook-tent which sheltered the “commissariat,” stocked with cans of preserved meats, vegetables, and all that went to make up the scouts’ daily rations.
“Where are you going to sleep, Toiney?” asked Patrol Leader Nixon.
“Me—I’ll lak’ for sleep out in de air, me—wit’ de littal star on top o’ me!” Toiney shrugged his shoulders complacently at the summer sky, now taking on the hues of evening, as if the firmament were a blanket woven for his comfort.
“Oh! I’ll sleep out with you.—And I!—Me, too!” Each and every member of the patrol, from the leader downward, longed to feel the white sand beneath him as a mattress, to have the stars for canopy, to hear the night-tide as it broke upon the near-by beach crooning his lullaby.
| IN CAMP |
“You may take it in turns, fellows—each sleep out with him one night, when the weather is fine,” decided the scoutmaster. “Now! I’m going to appoint Scouts Warren and Chase cooks for to-night.”
A first-rate supper did those cooks turn out, of flapjacks and scrambled eggs, the latter stirred with a peeled stick, while the great coffee-pot, brooding upon its rosy nest of birch-logs, grinned facetiously when a stray flame wreathed its spout, then broke into bubbling laughter.
Night fell upon the pale dunes that turned to silver monuments under the smile of a moon in its third quarter. A gentle, lowing sound came to the scouts’ ears from the tide at far ebb upon the silvery beach, as, the cook-fire abandoned, they gathered round a blazing camp-fire that cast weird reflections upon the surrounding white hillocks.
The holding of a calm powwow on this first night in camp, when each heart was thrilling tumultuously to the novelty of the surroundings, was impossible. Toiney sang wild fragments of songs that found a suitable accompaniment in the distant, hoarse barking of the harbor seal, and in the plaintive “Oo-oo-ooo!”—the dove-like call of the creamy pup-seal to its marbled mother in some lonely tidal creek.