COBWEB WEED
"Well! you certainly are the laziest bunch; you'd carry a whole bakery
in your knapsacks rather than do any cooking--especially if there are
girls around. Lazy as Ludlam's dog you are! Next time--next time, I'll
set you to peeling potatoes."
It was the chaffing voice of the Scoutmaster, Malcolm Seaver, which
spoke, addressing some twenty scouts who were scattered about the
vine-draped entrance to Snowbird Cave, where, yearly, the little
gray-white junco birds--otherwise snow-birds--fluffy balls, with no
heads to speak of, wintered among the low hemlocks near the cavern's
mouth and fed upon the spicy hemlock bark.
"I--I wonder if you could tell me of what breed Ludlam's dog was, sir?
If he could burn up daylight chasing his tail any better than this crowd
can, lolling around on a picnic, he must be the limit."
The answer came with the low, drawling laugh of Stud Bennett, otherwise
Studart, brother to Jessie, the "merle's" calling mate, who was himself
playing fiddle-faddle in the sunshine, after a four-mile hike.
"Humph! Well, _I'm_ off to locate a spring--where's the blue
bucket? When I get back you'll _have_ to turn to, you dummies,
build a fire and unpack the commissariat--otherwise rolls by the dozen.
The 'duff' and Frankforts are in the 'Baby', I guess." The Scoutmaster
shot a glance at a big, brown duffle bag reposing on a mound, capable of
containing ten bags of rations, each pertaining to individual scouts on
a long hike, yet hardly sufficient to transport the "cates", the
luncheon for eighteen Camp Fire Girls and twenty scouts, plus a couple
of invited guests, on a Together picnic.
"Are there any boys and girls who are dying to come with me, to prospect
for water?" he put forth alluringly, to the rhythmic swing of the big
water bucket in his right hand, painted bright blue.
There was an instant volunteering flutter among certain green-clad girls
and lads in khaki, breezing up from the grass where they had languished;
others held back.
"I'd rather explore the cave--I love creepy caves--and we haven't been
half through it yet," said Pemrose Lorry.
Forthwith Stud, the Henkyl Hunter, decided that cave-exploiting was the
pastime for him; there was rarely a younger boy--Studart was barely
fifteen--who did not become the captive knight of this older girl with
the sky in her eyes under jet-black lashes!
Jessie, sister of Stoutheart, she of the thrush-song in her heart,
wanted to be near to the girl who was mate to a Thunder Bird, too; and
others were drawn by the same abstract birdlime--or else the bat-stirred
cave had lures.
"There--there's a secret lobby in it," said Stud, "a dark, rocky passage
leading off from that queer black, three-cornered fissure in the right
wall, ten feet from the ground--I guess nobody has ever explored it;
nobody has cracked the nut of what's behind that triangular crevice, so
high up!"
"Come--come; that sounds exciting, very exciting!" remarked Tanpa, the
Guardian, remaining behind too, as chaperon.
But her husband wheeled upon his jog-trot off after water, swinging his
galvanized iron bucket after a manner to give the air the blues.
"Well! I wouldn't try to crack the nut, solve the riddle, of what's
behind that queer-shaped crevice, Stud," he said. "It's black--black as
a tinker's pot in there. You wouldn't know what you were heading into!"
"Aw, gammon! I wouldn't be afraid to tackle that fissure--find out
what's back of it--although I'm not a Tin Scout--ha! ha!--out with the
whole toyshop to-day; all my monkey trappings," exploded a rough voice
suddenly from among a trio of clownish-looking boys who hovered,
vulture-like, on the edge of the picnic ground, transfixing with a
sanguinary eye the Baby, whose soft heart was of blueberry "duff."
"An' I tell you what's more, if I were to climb up an' in there, I'd
trust to my own 'bean' and a few matches, 'thout any gimcracks," craked
the boastful voice further, the special gewgaw on which the braggart
fixed his eye, at the moment, being the little Baldwin safety lamp, four
inches high, which Stud was just lighting, attached to the front of his
olive-green scout hat.
"Tr-rust to your own 'bean'--your own head--an' what's inside it! Well!
I'll admit it's fiery enough," flouted the Henkyl Hunter, piqued even in
the presence of girls into giving back tit for tat. "But you're carrying
too many eggs in one basket, let me tell you, and you're likely enough
to take a leap in the dark an' smash 'em all."
"Ha! Am I now," snarled the other, resenting the implication that his
brick-red head was a brash basket into which to pack all his chances of
safety, such as were not anchored to the poor stay of a few fickle
matches.
"Am I now-ow?" he chortled, very red in the face--and tongue-tied--as he
shadowed the picnic party through the cave.
At his wits' end for a verbal retort, he presently proceeded, after the
manner of his kind, to throw a stone in his own garden.
"See here! you kids, if you'll let me stand on your shoulders, you two,
I'll give those Tin Scouts an eye-opener," he said, retaliating after a
manner to hurt only himself, as he addressed the two younger boys with
him, his eyes cast up to that mysterious fissure, outlined, a rocky
tripod, above his head, of which the Scoutmaster had remarked that all
behind it was black as a tinker's pot.
Into that ebony pot, forthwith, climbing by the willing step-ladder of
his companions' bodies, Ruddy, the rashling, presently thrust his
head--that flaming head with all his chances in it!
His body followed, finding entrance through the crevice amidships, so to
speak, where it broadened out to some three feet across from the
tapering point of the lowest corner.
"Oh-h! look at him. Do look at him!" panted the girls, held up in their
search for pale-faced cave flowers and strange fungi by the "derring-do"
act.
"Gracious! some of you scouts ought to stop him--re-al-ly ought to stop
him," shrilled Jessie, catching her breath at the shock of darkness
visible in the yawning fissure's mouth, where the brief flicker of a
match now chased bogies.
"Humph! We can't head him off, Jess." Her brother disclaimed
responsibility with a shrug--while the little lamp winked sarcastically
from his hatbrim--but in the heedful tone of the boy who had been
trained to feel--as Toandoah did with his little petticoated pal--that
Life was a game in which two could hunt together, even upon the trail of
a Thunder Bird, and make good headway. "We can't turn him back!" Stud
shrugged his khaki shoulders. "But he'll strike a blind bargain in
there. Ha! There goes another 'niggling' match!"
A frippery flame, indeed, its reflection flickered a moment, a gold
tooth in the fissure's grinning mouth--darkness followed!
Two or three of the boy scouts--those who did not, like Stud, show
incredulity, sarcasm gleaming, hawk-eyed, from a ruby lamp hooked to a
hatband, and from a level eye beneath it--held their breath, dazzled;
for the moment beaten at their own brave game of exploring.
So did the girl who had been piqued and dared into sitting in the
Devil's Chair--with a sheer abyss beneath her!
Again did her wide-open, staring eyes, under their black lashes, sport a
Blue Peter, the flag of adventure.
"Oh! he's plucky, anyhow. I wonder what he'll find in there?" her palms
were laid together upon a spicy filling of excitement. "He really is
daring--awfully daring, you know!"
"Ha! Courage cobweb-weed!" muttered Stud laconically. "Well--well, he'll
have tears in his eyes before I go after him!"
And--with that--there was the rasp of a third "niggling" match,
faintly-heard, far in, a momentary reflection, a tiny glance-coal, in
the fissure's leering mouth! And--and, following that, a shriek!
A shriek, headlong, sinking and pitching--dying like a falling star, as
if some clutch were stifling it.
"Hea-vens!" The girls, blanching, shrank against the opposite cave-wall,
which shuddered behind them.
A bat, flying low, a winged Fear, brushed Tanpa's cheek, as she stood,
transfixed,--and her cry was almost as hysterical as theirs.
In the blackness of that Tinker's Pot behind the looming fissure, were
there other things--other things besides a boy, a broken braggart of a
boy?
Was Death in the pot with him? Had he sipped of its mystery--only to
perish? Death--it seemed a raving possibility--in the shape of some wild
animal, perhaps--a live, a clutching claw!
Tales were always current among the mountains, trappers' tales--and most
of them airy "traveler's yarns", too--of strange tracks seen in lonely
spots, of lynx and bobcat; and even of the young and roving panther.
To be sure, a three-cornered tunnel, the second floor back of a lofty
cave, would be the last place to look for such an ambush, unless there
was some fly-trap opening to it from above. But there might be!
Boys and girls, both, their blood flamed upon the fear, then
froze--until the silence, the bat-churned cave silence, was hung with
icicles above them.
Then, once more, it was ripped from on top by that perishing
shriek--passing strange, remote--but now it was as if the fissure's
three-cornered mouth filled with it, faintly gibbered the one word:
"C-caught!"
"'_Caught!_' Oh! Stud, you warned him; it's his own doing. Let
those other two boys--his friends--climb up to him! Well--if you
feel--you--must?"
Jessie's cry gibbered in agony in her throat, too, liquid as the
thrush-tone in terror for its mate. But it struck a high note at the
end.
For Stud's hand was groping mechanically for the bright little lamp
above his forehead, as if for inspiration, his left for the lariat at
his waist, in defiance of his threat that the desperado in the "pot"
might have tears in his eyes before he would help him.
But there was something worse than cave-tears in question now--of that
Studart felt sure.
And Pem, watching,--Jessie, too--caught from an entering shaft of
day-light which shivered as if aghast, the reflection of the tightening
glow upon his young face--the waggish features of the Henkyl Hunter!
And she recognized it, by the feeling of her stiff, cold cheeks, as she
clapped her hands to them--did Toandoah's little chum--for the glow
which had electrified her own when she fought her way out of a swamped
Pullman, saving her friend, driving it into the teeth of the flood, and
of the World, too, that neither her father's honor, nor his
invention--nor anything he ever turned out--was a Quaker gun; letting
fly with it faintly at a rescuing youth, too, when she bade him "take
Una first."
For by that glow as by an altar-lamp, in whose gleam she had worshiped
before she saw as the strong boy's hand went automatically to his
equipment that lamp and lariat were nothing--nothing--"without the heart
of a Scout!"