He was an expert in first-aid and primitive cooking. He had prepared a fair map of a certain section of the marshy country near the tidal river. He could state upon his honor that he had accurately judged with his eye a certain distance in the woods—namely, from the top of that towering red-oak-tree which, when lost, he had chosen as a lookout point, to the cave called the Bear’s Den—on the never-to-be-forgotten day when four painted boys and a dog finally took refuge in that rocky cavern; the boy scout’s judgment of the distance being subsequently confirmed by lumbermen who knew every important tree in that section of the woods.
He had passed tests in swimming, tree-felling, map-reading, and so forth! But he would not be entitled to wear, instead of the second-class scout badge, the badge of the first-class rank, beneath the two white bars of the patrol leader upon his left arm, until he produced the tenderfoot whom he had trained.
But would that timid recruit from the little woodland clearing—that half-fledged Owlet—appear?
“Suppose he should ‘funk it’ at the last minute?” whispered Marcoo tragically to the patrol leader. “No! No! As I’m alive! here they come—Toiney, with Harold in tow. Blessings on that Canuck!” he added fervently.
It was a strange-looking pair who now entered the little town hall: Toiney, in a rough gray sweater and those heelless high boots, removing his tasseled cap and depositing in a corner the lantern which had guided him with his charge through the woods, as facile to him by night as by day; and Harold, timidly clinging to his arm.
The brown eyes of the latter rolled up in panic as he beheld the big lighted room wherein the boy scouts and those interested in them were assembled. All his mother’s unbalanced fear of a crowd returning upon him in full force, he would have fled, but for Toiney’s firm imprisonment of his trembling arm, and for Toiney’s voice encouraging him gutturally with:—
“Tiens! mo’ beau. Courage! Gard’ donc de scout wit’ de flag on she’s hand! V’là! V’là!” pointing to Nixon, the patrol leader, supporting the Stars and Stripes. “Bon courage! you go for be de scout too—engh?”
His country’s flag, blooming into magnificence under the electric light, had, to-night, a smile for Harold, as he saw it the centre of saluting boys.
Something of his brave father’s love for that National Ensign, the “Color” as the fisherman called it, which had presided over so many crises of that father’s life, as when on a gala day in harbor he ran it to the masthead, or twined it in the rigging, at sea, to speak another vessel, or sorrowfully hoisted it at half-mast for a shipmate drowned,—something of that loving reverence now began to blossom in Harold’s heart like a many-tinted flower!
“Well! here you are, Harold.” Coombsie was promptly taking charge of the new arrival, piloting him, with Toiney, to a seat. “I knew you’d come; you’ve got the right stuff in you; eh?”