The starry flaglet waving from the scout’s planted staff, might have been a gorgeous, drifting leaf from the surrounding woods for all the attention he paid to it!
“Say! but it’s hard to land him, isn’t it?” Nixon suspended the parade with a sigh almost of despair. “Well, here goes, for one more attempt to get him interested! Chuck me that rope-end, Marcoo! I’ll show you how to tie a bowline knot; perhaps, as his father was a sailor—a deep-sea fisherman—knot-tying may be more in his line than flag-raising.”
The next minute Coombsie’s fingers were fumbling with the rope rather blunderingly, for Marcoo was by nature a bookworm and more efficient along lines of abstract study than at anything requiring manual skill.
“Pass the end up through the bight,” directed Scout Warren when the bight or loop had been formed upon the standing part of the rope. “I said up, not down, jackass! Now, pass it round the ‘standing part’; don’t you know what that means? Why! the long end of the rope on which you’re working. Oh! you’re a dear donkey,” nodding with good-humored scorn.
Now both the donkey recruit and the instructing scout had become for the moment genuinely absorbed in the intricacies of that bowline knot, and forgot that this was not intended as a bona-fide lesson, but as mere “show off” to awaken the interest of a third person.
Their tail-end glances were no longer directed furtively at Harold to see whether or not he was beginning to “take notice.”
So they missed the first quiver of a peculiar change in him; they did not see that his sagging chin was suddenly reared a little as if by the application of an invisible bearing-rein.
They missed the twitching face-muscles, the slowly dilating eye, the breath beginning to come in quick puffs through his spreading nostrils, like the smoke issuing from the punky wood, heralding the advent of the ruddy spark, when in the woods they started a fire with rubbing-sticks. And just as suddenly and mysteriously as that triumphant spark appeared—evolved by Nixon’s fire-drill, from the dormant possibilities in the dull wood—did the first glitter of fascinated light appear and grow in the eye of Harold Greer, the prisoner of Fear, disparagingly nicknamed the “Hare”!
“I—I can do that! I c-can do it—b-better than he can!” Stuttering and trembling in a strange paroxysm of eagerness, the poltron addressed, in a nervous squawk, not the absorbed scouts, but Toiney, his friend and protector.
“I can t-tie it better ’n he does! I know—I know I can!” The shrill boyish voice which seemed suddenly to dominate every other sound on the clearing was hoarse with derision as the abnormally shy and timid boy pointed a trembling finger at Marcoo still, like a “dear donkey,” blundering with the rope-end.