“I’d like to know where you have been for the last hour,” began the scoutmaster with the dignity of a brigadier-general holding an investigation, while his keen eyes from under the drab broad-brimmed hat searched Leon’s face in the sixfold firelight. “Jimmy Sweet,” nodding toward a squatting Owl, “said he caught a distant glimpse of you nearly an hour ago over on the edge of the salt-marshes near Ma’am Baldwin’s old house. I hope you haven’t been plaguing her again?”
The voice of the superior officer was all ready to be stern, as if he had visions of a corporal being requested to hand over his scout-badge of chivalry until such time as he should prove himself worthy of wearing it.
“Have you?”
“No!” Leon cleared his throat hesitatingly. “No,”—he suddenly lifted steady eyes to the scoutmaster’s face,—”I have been chopping wood and doing a few other little things for her; that made me late!”
A moment’s breathless silence enveloped the six cook-fires. The face of the scoutmaster himself was set in lines of amazement: genially it relaxed.
“Good for you, Corporal!” He clapped the late-comer approvingly on the shoulder, and in his voice was a moved ring.
For, as he scanned the boy’s face in the sixfold glow, he read from it that, to-night, Leon had really become a scout: that, back there on the salt-marshes, the inner and chivalrous grace of knighthood, of which his oath was the outward and heralding sign, had been consciously born within him.
The scoutmaster was feeling round in his broad approval for other words of commendation, when Toiney’s sprightly tones broke the momentary tension.
“Ha! dis poor ole oomans,” he grunted, vivaciously pitying Ma’am Baldwin. “She’s lif’ all alone en she’s burst she’s heart for she haf such a bad boy, engh? She’s boy, Dave, heem canaille, vaurien—w’at-you-call, good-for-nodings—engh?”
“I’m afraid he is,” agreed the scoutmaster regretfully. “Yet I pity Dave too. His elder brother went West when he was a little fellow; his father, who was a deep-sea fisherman, like Harold’s father, was away nearly all the year round. Dave grew up without any strong man’s hand over him; out of school-hours he had to work hard on a farm, and I suppose in his craving for fun of some kind he played all sorts of foolish pranks. After he left school and was old enough to know better, he kept them up—ran a locomotive out of the little railway station one night, came near killing a man and was sent to a reformatory!”