Connover Breaks Loose
Advancing stealthily, our young hero raised his rifle and leveled it at the chief of the howling Zulus, who clustered threateningly on the farther shore. The young girl whom they had kidnapped lay bound hand and foot, and Dan Dreadnought clenched his teeth with anger as he heard her cries for help. The poisoned spears of the infuriated Zulus were flying all about him, but they did not cower the brave lad. He was resolved at any cost to rescue that girl.
“I am a Boy Scout,” he called, “and I can handle a hundred savages if need be.” Then, uttering the cry of the Eureka Patrol, he dashed into the dugout which lay drawn up on the shore, and using the butt end of his rifle for a paddle, he guided his unsteady boat across the raging torrent amid a fusillade of spears and arrows with which the frantic Zulus vainly sought to stay his approach.
“I am Lieutenant of the Eureka Patrol!” called Dan. “Untie those fetters, or every one of you shall die!”
His trusty companion, Ralph Redgore, tried to hold him back, but all in vain.
Connover Bennett laid down the copy of The Eureka Patrol in South Africa, by Captain Dauntless, U. S. A., and dragging himself from the hammock, entered the house. He was breathing hard as if he had been running.
The bungalow was deserted save for the maid in the kitchen, and Connover was monarch of all he surveyed.
Quietly, he crept upstairs and into the “den.” In the corner among his father’s fishing-rods and golf sticks stood a rifle. It was forbidden to Connover, but unfortunately The Eureka Patrol in South Africa dealt not with scout honor and made no mention of the Seventh Law, which stipulates that a “scout shall be obedient.” Nor had Captain Dauntless thought it worth while to mention Law One, which says that a “scout’s honor is to be trusted.”
Connover glanced up and down the road from the bay-window to see if by any chance his mother might have forgotten something and was coming back. Reassured in this particular, he took up the rifle and, standing before the large pier-glass, he adopted a heroic attitude of aiming. Then he looked from the window down into the woods through which he could see little glints of the river.
It was not glints of Salmon River that he saw, but the “Deadly Morass River” of South Africa; the woods were not quiet, fragrant pine woods where the First Bridgeboro Troop of real scouts was encamped, but the deadly morass itself; and he was not Connover Bennett, but Dan Dreadnought, and this was the trusty rifle with which he would—