But he was possessed of a contradictory spirit, for he swam after the Pill, crying to be taken aboard again. They could hear his dulcet “Oo-oo-ooo!” as they gathered round their camp-fire in the white hollow among the sand-hills.
At the powwow to-night the encounter with Dave Baldwin, if the vagrant of the marshes was really he, came in for its share of discussion. Guesses were rife as to the probability of the scouts running across him again, and as to how he might occupy his time in the lazy vagabond life which he was leading.
It was here that Harold broke through the semi-shy reserve which still encrusted him and contributed a remark, the first as a result of his observations, 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’s doing, it isn’t agreeing with him. We’ll probably come on him again some time on the marshes or among the dunes.”
But eleven days went by, eleven full days for the scout campers, golden with congenial activity, wherein each hour brought its own interesting “stunt,” as they called it; and they saw no more of the vaurien, the worthless 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 of August and the first of September, were spent in observation tours over marsh and dune or on the heaving river, in playing their exciting scout games among the sandhills, in clam-bakes, in practising signaling with the little red-and-white flags according to the semaphore or wig-wag code—one scout transmitting a message to another posted on a distant hill—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 more quickly flutters the present into the past, like a sunny landscape flitting 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 as campers were concerned.
School would presently reopen. And at the end of the month the Owls would lose their brother and patrol leader: during the first days of October Scout Nixon Warren’s parents were expected home from Europe, and he would rejoin his former troop in Philadelphia.