“We haven’t got any matches to start a fire with!” Coombsie sat down in a pool of gold with the well-nigh empty basket beside him, and turned baffled eyes upon the others.
“I have a few in a safety box in my pocket. Thank goodness! I didn’t go back on our scout motto: ‘Be Prepared!’ so far as matches are concerned, anyway.” Nixon felt in each pocket of his Norfolk jacket with a face that lengthened dismally under the smears of Varney’s Paintpot. “Gone!” he ejaculated despairingly. “I must have lost the box!”
“It probably dropped out of your pocket into the grass when I tied our coats round the chest-nut-tree, to prevent that young coon from ‘lighting down,’” suggested Leon, and his face grew pinched; it was not a refreshing memory that conjured up a picture of Raccoon Junior limping back to the hole among the ledges near Big Swamp, with a leg broken by his stone, at the moment when a fellow had a whole thunderstorm in his ankle.
“Well! we’re up against it now,” gasped the scout. “We can’t get out of the woods to-night; that’s sure! We could sleep in the cave and be jolly comfortable too”—he stooped down and examined its wide interior—”if we only had a fire. But, without a camp-fire or a single blanket, we’ll be uncomfortable enough when it comes on dark; these September nights are chilly.”
He threw his hat on the ground, drew his coat-sleeve across his ruddy forehead, rendering his bedaubed countenance slightly more grotesque than before. He had forgotten that it was smeared, forgotten paint and frolic. An old look descended upon his face.
He was desperately tired. Every muscle of his body ached. His head was confused too from long wandering among the trees; his thoughts seemed to skip back into the woods away from him; he felt himself stalking them as Blink would stalk a rabbit. But there was one thing more alive in him at that moment than ever before, a sense of protective responsibility.
With Leon disabled and the two younger boys completely worn out, it rested with him alone to turn a night in the Bear’s Den into a mere “corking” adventure, or to let it drag by as a dark age of discomfort with certainly bad results for two of the party. Nixon had felt Leon’s hand as it slipped from his neck at the edge of the clearing, it was clammy as ice; his first-aid training as a scout told him that the injured lad would feel the cold bitterly during the night.
Starrie Chase would probably “stick it out without squealing,” as in such circumstances he would try to do himself. But it would be a hard experience. And young Colin’s clothing was still sodden from his partial immersion in Big Swamp. It was one of those moments for the Scout of the U.S.A. when the potential father in the boy is awake.
“I’ve got to fix things up for the night, somehow,” he wearily told himself aloud. “I wonder—I wonder if I could manage to start a fire without matches—with ‘rubbing-sticks’? I did it once when we were camping out with our scoutmaster. But he helped me. If I could only get the fire, now, ’twould be a—great—stunt!”
“’Start a fire without matches!’ You’re crazy!” Colin and Coombsie looked sideways at him; they had heard of people being “turned round” in their heads by much woodland wandering.