“Well!” the doctor cleared his throat, “after Harold’s mother received the news that her husband’s vessel was lost with all hands, on Quero Bank, when her little boy was about five years old, she became more unbalanced; she wouldn’t see any of her relatives even, if she could avoid it, save those who lived in the house with her. I attended her when she was ill and begged her to try and get the better of her foolishness for her boy’s sake—or to let me send him away to a school of some kind. Both Harold’s grandfather and she opposed the latter idea. She lived until her son was nine years old; by that time she had communicated all her queer dread of people—and a hundred other scares as well—to him. But in my opinion there’s nothing to prevent his becoming in time a normal boy under favorable conditions where his companions would help him to fight his fears, instead of fastening them on him—conditions under which what we call his ‘inhibitory power of self-control’ would be strengthened, so that he could command his terrified impulses. And if the Boy Scout Movement can, under God, do this, Andy, why then I’ll say—I’ll say that knighthood has surely in our day come again—that Scout Nixon Warren has sallied forth into the woods and slain a dragon more truly, perhaps, than ever did Knight of the Round Table by whose rules the boy scouts of to-day are governed! ”
The doctor’s last words were more to himself than to his companion, and full of the ardor of one who was a dragon-fighter “from way back”: day by day, for years, he had grappled with the many-clawed dragons of pain and disease, often taking no reward for his labors.
As his glance studied one and another of the seven boyish faces now forming an eager ring round the tall scoutmaster, while the date of the next meeting—the great meeting at which eight new recruits were to take the scout oath—was being discussed, he was beset by the same feeling which had possessed Colin Estey on that September morning in the Bear’s Den. Namely, that the Owl Patrol would have a big contract on hand if it was to get the better of that mischievous “tide rip” in Leon and prove to the handicapped “Hare” what imaginary bugaboos were his fears!
But Leon’s face in its purposeful interest plainly showed that, according to Captain Andy’s breezy metaphor, to-night he was really deepening the water in which his boyish bark floated, drawing out from the shoals among which he had drifted after a manner too trifling for his age and endowment.
And so the doctor felt that there might be hope for the eighth Owl chosen, and not present, being still a scared fledgling on that little farm-clearing in the woods, having never yet shaken a free wing, but only the craven white feather.
CHAPTER VIII
THE BOWLINE KNOT
Scout Nixon Warren, henceforth to be known as the patrol leader of the Owls, was himself possessed by the excited feeling that he was faring forth, into the October woods to tackle a dragon—the obstinate Hobgoblin of confirmed Fear—when on the day following that first boy scout meeting in Exmouth he took his way, accompanied by Coombsie, over the heaving uplands that lay between the salt-marshes and the woodland.