“Bah! heem jus’ vagabond—errant—how-you-say-eet—tramp-sonne-of-a-gun—vaurien, engh?” declared Toiney, gutturally contemptuous, while he poked Harold’s fire with a dry stick.
“Yes, he’s a mere vagrant now, loafing about the Sugarloaf Sand-Dunes and the woods; and likely to get into trouble again through petty thefts, so people say. When he had served his sentence he seemed to think there wasn’t much of a future before him, and didn’t stick to the job he got. I pity his old mother! I think that every boy scout should make it a point to do a good turn for her when he can.”
“Ah! oui; shes break in pieces, engh?” murmured Toiney, the irrepressible, still punching up the fire, to prepare it for the cooking tests.
Somehow, his eloquent sympathy sent a stab through Leon—whom everybody was at the moment regarding with admiration—for it brought a sharp recollection of an old woman backing away from him in fear, with her right arm laid across her breast in piteous self-defense.
“Gee! I wish I could do something more for her than chopping wood—something that would make up for being mean to her,” thought Corporal Chase, as he returned to his fire-building, arranging the fuel methodically so as to allow plenty of draught, and then triumphantly rivaling Kenjo’s feat by lighting his cook-fire with one match.
The tiny, snappy laughter of that matchhead, seeming to rejoice that another baby light was born into the world, as he drew it along a dry stick, restored his towering good spirits.
“And now for the cooking test!” cried the scoutmaster. “Each scout to put his two potatoes to roast in the embers of his fire, and make a contrivance for broiling his beefsteak! And look out that you don’t ‘cook the black ox,’ boys, as Captain Andy would say!”
“What do you mean by ‘cooking the black ox’?” from two or three excited and perspiring scouts.
“Why! that’s what the sailors say when their beef is burnt to the color of a black-haired ox,” laughed the superior officer. “Scout Chase, haven’t you brought any beefsteak and potatoes?”
“No, I meant to go back to the town for them an’ meet you there. Blink an’ I don’t want any supper; we’ll get it when we go home,” returned Leon nonchalantly, swallowing his mortification at not being able to complete the outdoor test, this evening.