CHAPTER VII
MEMBERS OF THE LOCAL COUNCIL
And thus the new patrol was started.
Three weeks after the September morning when an anxious search-party led by Asa Chase, Leon’s father, and by that clever woodsman Toiney Leduc, had started out at dawn to search the dense woods for four missing boys, and found a grotesque-looking quartette with faces piebald from the half-effaced smears of Varney’s Paintpot, breakfasting on blueberries and water by a still ruddy camp-fire,—three weeks after those morning woods had rung with Toiney’s shrill “Hôlà!” the first meeting for the formation of the Owl Patrol was held.
In virtue of his being already a boy scout with a year’s training behind him, Nixon Warren was elected patrol leader; and Leon Starr Chase who still limped as a result of his reckless descent of that freak pine-tree, was made second in rank with the title of corporal—or assistant patrol leader.
Among the half-dozen spectators, leading men of the small town, who had assembled to witness the inaugural doings at this first meeting and to lend their approval to the new movement for the boys, there appeared one who was lamer than Leon, his halting step being due to a year-old injury which condemned him to limp somewhat for the remainder of his life.
This was Captain Andrew Davis, popularly known as Captain Andy, who had been for thirty years a Gloucester fishing-skipper, one of the present-day Vikings who sail forth from the Queen Fishing City at the head of its blue harbor.
He had commanded one fine fishing-vessel after another, was known along the water-front and among the fishing-fleet as a “crackerjack” and “driver,” with other more complimentary titles. He had got the better of the sea in a hundred raging battles on behalf of himself and others. But it partially worsted him at last by wrecking his vessel in what he mildly termed a “November breeze”—in reality a howling hurricane—and by laming him for life when at the height of the storm the schooner’s main-boom fell on him.
He was dragged forth from under it, half-dead, but, “game to the last,” refused to be carried below. Lashed to the weather main-bitt—one of the sawed-off posts rising from the vessel’s deck to which the main-sheet was made fast—in order to prevent his being swept overboard by the great seas washing over that deck, he had kept barking out orders and fighting for the lives of his crew so long as he could command a breath.