For while the timid boy watched Coombsie’s bungling fingers, that drab knot, upon which they blundered, suddenly beckoned to him like a star.
And, all in a moment, it was no longer his fear-stricken mother who lived in him, but his daring fisherman-father whose horny fingers could tie every sailor’s knot that was ever heard of, and who had used that bowline noose in many an emergency at sea to save a ship-wrecked fellow-creature.
The bowline was the means of saving the fisherman’s son now from mental shipwreck, or something nearly as bad. Harold’s eager thoughts became entangled in it, while his fingers worked under Nixon’s directions; he forgot, for once, to be afraid.
Presently the noose was complete, and Nixon was showing him how to tighten it by pulling on the standing part of the rope.
This achieved, the timid human “Hare” raised his brown eyes from the rope in his hand and looked from one to another of his three companions as in a dream, a bright one.
For half a minute a rainbowed—almost awed—silence held the three upon the clearing. Toiney was the first to break it. He flung his arms rapturously round the hitherto fear-bound boy.
“Bravo! mo’ fin,” he cried, embracing Harold as his “cute one.” “Bravo! mo’ smarty. Grace à bon Dieu, you ain’ so scare anny longere! You go for be de boy—de brave boy—you go for be de scout—engh?” His eyes were wet and winking as if, now indeed, he felt “lak’ cry”!
“Certainly, you’re going to be a scout, Harold,” corroborated Nixon, equally if not so eloquently moved. “Now! don’t you want to learn how to tie another knot, the fisherman’s bend? You ought to be able to tie that, you know, because your father was a great fisherman.”
Harold was nothing loath. More and more his father’s spirit flashed awake in him. Through the rest of that afternoon, which marked a new era in his life, he seemed to work with his father’s fingers, while the October sky glowed in radiant tints of saffron and blue, and a light breeze skipped through the pine-trees and the brilliant maples that flamed at intervals like lamps around the clearing.