And the soft purr of the low tide, with the breeze skipping among pallid dunes that looked like capped haystacks in the darkness, flung back the cheer for the “Scouts of the U.S.A.”
“Aghrr-r!” snarled the testy dog-fox, his distant petulant growl much resembling that of Leon’s terrier, who, unfortunately, was not present upon the dunes to-night. Blink had already added the word “Scout” to his limited human vocabulary, but the wild fox had no such linguistic powers. The foreign music upon the lonely dunes was irritating, alarming to him.
It seemed to have something of the same effect upon his brother-prowler, upon the man who skulked among the sand-hills within hearing of the song: at any rate, the semi-articulate sound which from time to time he uttered, deepened into an unmixed groan that escaped from his lips again later when the clear notes of a bugle rang over the Sugarloaf Dunes, warning the scouts by the “first call” that fun was at an end for to-night, and sleep would be next upon the programme.
Then when lights were out, came the sweet sound of “Taps,” the wind-up of the first day in camp, the expert bugler being Corporal Chase.
For the Exmouth doctor had kept his word: Leon had been given the “bugle” literally and figuratively since he enlisted as a scout, symbol of the challenge to all the energy in him to advance along new lines, instead of the “foghorn” reproofs and warnings that had been showered on him prior to his scouting days.
Then, at last, stillness reigned, indeed, upon the moonlit dunes.
The bark of the dog-fox melted into distance, becoming indistinguishable from the voice of the returning tide.
The man-prowler among the sand-hills slipped away to some lair as lonely as the fox’s.
And Toiney, with Scout Nixon Warren wrapped in his camper’s blanket beside him, slept out upon the white sands “wit’ de littal star on top o’ them!”