“Shut up, you two!” commanded Leon, suddenly imperious. “He knows what he’s about. He did a good stunt in helping me along here.”
“If I could only find the right kinds of wood to start a friction fire—balsam fir for the fireboard and drill, and a little chunk of cedarwood to be shredded into tinder!” The boy scout was eagerly scanning the trees on either side of the grass-grown logging-road, trees which at this moment seemed to have their roots in the forest soil and their heads in Heaven’s own glory.
“There’s a fir-tree! Among those pines—a little way along the road!” Leon spoke in that slow, stiff voice, sprained by pain. “Perhaps I can help you—Nix?”
“No, you lie still, but chuck me your knife, it’s stronger than mine! I ought to have two tools for preparing the ‘rubbing-sticks,’ so the Chief Scout tells us in our book, but I’ll have to get along somehow with our pocketknives.”
Nix Warren was off up the road as he spoke; hope, responsibility, and ambition toward the performance of a “great stunt,” forming a fighting trio to get the better of weariness.
The glory was waning from the tree-tops when he returned, bearing with him one sizeable chunk of balsamic fir-wood and a long stick from the same tree.
“Any sort of stick will do for the bent bow which is attached to the drill and works it; that’s what our book says,” he murmured, as if conning over a lesson. “Who’s got a leather shoe-lace? You have—cowhide laces—in those high boots of yours, Colin! Mind letting me have one?”
The speaker was excitedly setting to work, now, fashioning the flat fireboard from the chunk of fir-wood, carving a deep notch in its side, and scooping out a shallow hole at the inner end of the notch into which the point of the upright drill would fit.
In feeling, he was the primitive man again, this modern boy scout: he was that grand old savage ancestor of prehistoric times into whose ear God whispered the secret, unknown to beast or bird, of creating light and warmth for himself and those dependent on him, when the sun forsook them.