He added the last words to himself. There was something about the rugged strength of the stripped trees, with the stealing blue haze of evening softening their bareness, about the evergreen grandeur of pine and hemlock lording it over their robbed brethren, about the drab, parchment-like leaves clinging with eerie murmur to the oak-tree, and the ruddy twigs of bare berry-bushes, that appealed to the element of rugged daring in the boy himself.
He could not so soon break away from the woods as he had intended, though he only explored their outskirts.
Dusk was already falling when he found himself on the open uplands again, bound back toward the distant town.
“The scouts are to start for Sparrow Hollow at six o’clock: we must hustle, if we want to start with them,” he said to the dog. “The only way we can make it is by taking a short cut across the marshes and wading through the river; that would be a quick way of reaching the town and the butcher’s shop, to buy our beefsteak,” muttering rapidly, partly to himself, partly to his impatient companion. “The tide is full out now, the water will be shallow; I can take off my shoes and stockings and carry you, pup. Who cares if it’s cold?”
The boy scout, with an anticipatory glow all over him, felt impervious to any extreme of temperature as he bounded down the uplands, with the breeze—the freshening, freakish breeze—driving across the salt-marshes directly in his face, racing through every vein in him, stirring up a whirligig within, presently bringing waste things to the top even as it stirred up dust and refuse in the roadway.
“Hullo! there’s the old baldfaced house,” he cried suddenly to the dog. “Here we are on our old stamping-ground, Blink! Wonder if ‘Mom Baldwin’ is doing her witch stunts still? We haven’t said ‘Howdy!’ to her for a long time; have we, pup?”
Slackening pace, for that fickle breeze was blowing away many things that he ought to have remembered, among them the lateness of the hour, he turned aside a few steps to where a lonely old house stood at the foot of the slope as the uplands melted into the salt-marshes.
It was a shallow shell of a dwelling—all face and no rear apparently—and that face was bald, almost stripped of paint by the elements. Just as storm-stripped was the heart of the one old woman who lived in it, and whom Leon had been wont to call a “solitary crank!”
To the neighborhood generally she was known as Ma’am Baldwin, mother of the young scape-grace, Dave Baldwin, who had so troubled the peaceful town by his pranks that he had finally been shut up in a reformatory, and who was now, a year after his release, a useless vagrant, spending, according to report, most of his time loafing between the white sand-dunes on one side of the river and the woods on the other—incidentally breaking his mother’s heart at the same time.
She had lived here in the old baldfaced house, with him, her youngest boy, the child of her middle age, until his wild doings brought the law’s hand upon him. After his imprisonment shame prevented her leaving the isolated dwelling and going to live with her married daughter near the town, though that daughter’s one child, her little grandson Jack, possessed all the love-spots still green in her withered heart.