Had the gray rabbit, which suddenly at that moment whisked out of the woods and across a distant corner, opened its mouth and addressed them, the surprise to the two scouts could scarcely have been greater.
“Oh! you can, can you?” said Nixon thickly. “Let’s see you try!” He placed the rope-end in Harold’s hand, which received it with a fondling touch.
“Here you make a small loop on this part of the rope, leaving a good long end,” he began coolly, while his heart bounded, for the spark in the furtive eye of the twelve-year-old “scaree” was rapidly becoming a scintillation: the scouts had struck fire from him at last.
A triumph beside which the signal achievement of their friction fire in the woods paled!
The intangible dragon which held their brother boy a captive on this lonely clearing, not permitting him to mingle freely with his fellows for study or play, was weakening before them.
“That’s right, Harold! Go ahead: now pass the end up through the loop! Bravo, you’re the boy! Now, around the standing part—the rope itself—and down again! Good: you have it. You can beat him every time at tying a knot: he’s just a blockhead, isn’t he?”
And Scout Warren pointed with much show of scorn at Marcoo, the normal recruit, who looked on delightedly. Never before did boy rejoice so unselfishly over being beaten at a test as Coombsie then! For right here on the little farm-clearing a strange thing had happened.
In the gloom of every beclouded mind there is one chink by which light, more or less, may enter; and a skillful teacher can work an improvement by enlarging that chink.
Harold’s brain was not darkened in the sense of being defective. And the gray tent of fear in which he dwelt had its chink too; the scouts had found it in the frayed rope-end and knot.