“That’s just it! Ours is a slow little town—not much doing for the boys! Not even a male teacher in our graded schools to organize hikes and athletics for them! I am afraid that more than one lad with no natural criminal tendency, has got into trouble, been ultimately sent to a reformatory, owing to a lack in the beginning of some outlet safe and exciting for that surplus energy of which you speak. Take the case of Dave Baldwin, for instance, son of that old Ma’am Baldwin who lives over on the salt-marshes! ” The doctor’s face took on a sorry expression. “There was nothing really bad in him, I think! Just too much tide rip! He was the counterpart of this boy Leon, with a craving for excitement, a wild energy in him that boiled over at times in irregular pranks—like the rip—as you say.”
“And you know what makes that so dangerous?” Captain Andy’s sigh was heaved from the depths of past experience. “Well! with certain shoals an’ ledges in the ocean there’s too much water crowded onto ’em at low tide, so it just boils chock up from the bottom like a pot, goes round and round in a whirl, strings out, foamy an’ irregular, for miles. It’s ‘day, day!’ to the vessel that once gets well into it, for you never know where ’twill strike you.
“And it’s pretty much the same with a lively boy, Doc: at low tide, when there’s nothing doing, too much o’ something is crowded onto the ledges in him, an’ when it froths over, it gets himself and others into trouble. Keep him interested—swinging ahead on a high tide of activity under all the sail he can carry, and there’s no danger of the rip forming. That’s what this Boy Scout Movement aims at, I guess! It looks to me—my word! it does look to me—as if Leon was already ‘deepening the water some,’ to-night,” wound up Captain Andy with a gratified smile, scrutinizing the face of Starrie Chase, which was at this moment marked by a new and purposeful eagerness as he discussed the various requirements of the tenderfoot test, the elementary knowledge to be mastered before the next meeting, ere he could take the scout oath, be invested with the tenderfoot scout badge and be enrolled among the Boy Scouts of America.
“A movement such as this might have been the saving of Dave Baldwin,” sighed the Doctor. “He was always playing such wild tricks. People kept warning him to ‘cut it out’ or he would surely get into trouble. But the ‘tide rip’ within seemed too much for him. No foghorn warnings made any impression. I’ve been thinking lately of the saying of one wise man: ‘Hitherto there has been too much foghorn and too little bugle in our treatment of the boys!’ Too much croaking at them: too little challenge to advance! So I said to the new scoutmaster, Harry Estey, Colin’s brother,” nodding toward a tall young man who was the centre of the eager ring of boys, “I said, ‘give Leon the bugle: give it to him literally and figuratively: you’ll need a bugler in your boy scout camp and I’ll pay for the lessons; it will be a better pastime for him than fixing my doorbell.’”
“I hope ’twill keep him from tormenting that lonely old woman over on the marshes; the boys of this town have made her life a burden to her,” said Captain Andy, thinking of that female recluse “Ma’am Baldwin,” to whom allusion had been made by Colin and Coombsie on the memorable day which witnessed their headstrong expedition into the woods. “She has been regarded as fair game by them because she’s a grain cranky an’ peculiar, owing to the trouble she’s had about her son. He was the youngest, born when she was middle-aged—perhaps she spoiled him a little. Come to think of it, Doc, I saw the young scape-grace a few days ago when I was down the river in my power-boat! He was skulking like a fox round those Sugar-loaf Sand-Dunes near the bay.”
“How did he look?”
“Oh, shrunken an’ dirty, like a winter’s day!” Captain Andy was accustomed to the rough murkiness of a winter day on mid-ocean fishing-grounds. “He made off when he saw me heading for him. He’s nothing but an idle vagrant now, who spends his time loafing between those white dunes and the woods on t’ other side o ’ the river. He got work on a farm after he was discharged from the reformatory, but didn’t stick to it. Other fellows shunned him, I guess! Folks say that he’s been mixed up in some petty thefts of lumber from the shipyards lately, others that he keeps a row-boat stowed away in the pocket of a little creek near the dunes, and occasionally does smuggling in a small way from a vessel lying out in the bay. But that’s only a yarn! He couldn’t dodge the revenue officers. Anyhow, it’s too bad that Dave should have gone the way he has! He’s only ‘a boy of a man’ yet, not more’n twenty-three. When I was about that age I shipped on the same vessel with Dave’s father—she was a trawler bound for Gran’ Banks—we made more than one trip together on her. He was a white man; and—”
“Captain Andy!” A voice ringing and eager, the voice of the scoutmaster of the new patrol who had just received his certificate from headquarters, interrupted the captain’s recollections of Dave Baldwin’s father. “Captain Andy, will you undertake to instruct these boys in knot-tying, before our next meeting, so that they may be able to tie the four knots which form part of the tenderfoot test, and be enrolled as scouts two weeks from now? ”
“Sakes! yes; I’ll teach ’em. And if any one of ’em is such a lubber that he won’t set himself to learn, why, I’ll spank him with a dried codfish as if I had him aboard a fishing-vessel. Belay that!”
And the ex-skipper’s eye roved challengingly toward the scout recruits from under the heavy lid and short bristling eyelashes which overhung its blue like a fringed cloud-bank.