CHAPTER XI
ESTU PRETA!
“Hullo! here’s Starrie. Well! it’s about time you turned up. We waited quarter of an hour for you before leaving town.—Hey! Starrie, we’ve got our six cook-fires all going. I only used two matches in lighting mine; I’ve passed one half of to-night’s test.—So’ve I! Whoopee! I ‘went the jolly test one better’: I lit my fire with a single, solitary match.”
Starrie Chase, bounding down the grassy side of Sparrow Hollow, with these lusty cries of his brother Owls greeting him, stood for a moment in the brilliant glare of a belt of fires, as if dazed by the ruddy carnival, while his dog, making a wild circuit of the ring, bayed each bouquet of flames in turn.
“Yaas; we’ll get heem littal fire light lak’ wink—sure! We ar-re de boy! We ar-re de scout, you’ll bet!” supplemented the merry voice of Toiney, the assistant scoutmaster, who, with the tassel of his red cap bobbing, and the flame-light flickering on his blue homespun shirt, was on his knees before Harold’s cook-fire, using his lungs as a pair of bellows.
“Hurrah! I’m in this: I’ll light my fire with one match, too. Kenjo Red shan’t get ahead of me: no, sir!” Corporal Leon Chase was now working like lightning, piling dry leaves, pine splinters, dead twigs into a carefully arranged heap in a gap which had been left for him in the ring of half a dozen fires kindled by six tenderfoot scouts, ambitious of being admitted to a second-class degree.
But he, the behind-time tenderfoot, was abruptly held up in his tardy labors by the voice of the tall scoutmaster, who with Scout Warren, the patrol leader of the Owls, was superintending the tests.
“I want to speak to you for a minute, Leon,” said Scoutmaster Estey, with a gravity that dropped like a weighty pebble into the midst of the fun.
And Corporal Chase, otherwise Scout 2, of the Owls, obediently suspended fire-building, approached his superior officer and saluted.