STOUTHEART
"W-wedged!... Wedged!"
Now--now it was another word which jabbered faintly in the dark
fissure's mouth! A girl caught it--or thought she did.
"_Wedged!_" she echoed wildly. "Caught! Oh, maybe--maybe--there's
nothing in there but Ruddy himself!"
"Maybe--so!" Stud panted heavily while, across an inner, gaping hollow,
the next words took a giant stride to his lips: "Anyhow--I'm going up!"
"Oh--Studley!" But beyond this one faint cry, Jessie, stanch little
partner,--the girl behind the lines,--said no more to hinder him now, as
she watched the scout detach his little lamp from his hatbrim and hook
it on to his khaki breast.
With it glowing there, a headlight for his gallant heart, Stud set
himself to climb. Standing upon the shoulders of two brother scouts, in
his belt a club snatched from one of them, he reached the lowest point
of the tapering fissure.
"Ha! There he goes, in spite of his teeth," tremored a younger boy.
"His teeth aren't chattering!" Pem's eyes--lightning-blue--hurled back
the charge.
The denial rang in Stud's ears as he thrust his head into the black
opening, entering, amidships, as the former muddle-headed explorer had
done.
"That girl's a trump--the girl with eyes the color of the little
'heal-all', that blue flower we pick up here in May! A trump! But so's
little Jess, too!"
Thus did Stoutheart, a knight of to-day, pay tribute to the world he
left behind him, when he felt in his exploring knees, now creeping along
the bottom of the Tinker's Pot, that there was a chance of his leaving
it behind forever.
"I don't see what else he _could_ have done," said Tanpa, the
Guardian, her fingers hysterically interlocking. "Somebody had to go up;
and he's the oldest boy--a Patrol Leader. But, oh! I wish my husband
were here. Run and meet him, a couple of you!" She glanced appealingly
at the scouts. "Oh! do--and hurry him back--back from the spring."
Meanwhile Stud had forgotten even his backers in the feminine hearts
below and was banking all on just one trusty ally--the headlight on his
breast.
"Without the light, the little safety lamp, I couldn't do-o it," he told
himself. "Gee! but it is as black in here as Erebus, a Tinker's Pot,
indeed--the blindest passage--blindest bargain--I ever struck! So--so
sharp underneath, too!"
Yes, difficulty masked was in the "bargain", yet he crept on over
tapering ridges of rock that now and again buckled like teeth. But he
knew by the parched sound of his own voice, as he shouted a question,
that his courage might have ended in smoke, there and then, if it
weren't for the little lamp at his breast.
So rosily it burned now, in here, that its feeding oil seemed the red
blood of his heart!
"Anyhow--anyhow, with it, I'll be able to see which way the cat jumps!"
Here, Stoutheart more tightly gripped the club; the last words might
prove more than mere figure of speech.
From ahead came strange, gurgling, choking sounds, rising from
somewhere--growing weaker.
"Where--where are you, Ruddy? Answer! R-rap--rap out something, if you
can!" he adjured.
And it was--truly--a rapping reply that reached him; a queer, hollow
knocking at the door of some throat that semed shutting.
"My word! What on earth ... what in thunder's got him?" Stud felt his
own breath blow hot and cold together, but--this crucial moment it came
back to him--the eyes of a girl out there had driven it home, with blue
lightnings, that he did not _have_ to defy his teeth.
"Humph! I'm no quitter," he told the piloting breast-ray, blazing its
ruby trail ahead. "Well-ll! for the love of Mike! Well! what do you know
about that?... What have we h-here?"
In answer to his gasping snort, as he gaped and gasped there in the
darkness, the little safety lamp told him what it made of it--of the
staggering sight--it made a pair of big feet in rough cowhide boots
tightly wedged by the ankles in a buckling switch of rock where two
sharp, narrow ridges that formed the bottom of the Tinker's Pot
dovetailed into each other,--after the manner of rails at a switch.
Ruddy, the slipslop explorer, had gone in heels over head, so to speak.
He was hanging by the heels now. Nothing visible of him but those
pinioned feet!
"_Hea-vens!_ he did strike a blind bargain. S-such a snag! The
passage ends here. A drop! A--blank--fall of rock! Gee-ee!"
Dank--dank as cave-tears now was the moisture upon Stud's forehead. For
the first time his teeth almost chattered. What would he see when he
held the lamp over the edge of the Tinker's Pot into the horror of that
empty space beyond where the passage broadened into blankness and the
rock shelved sharply down? A dead boy? Or one so far gone from hanging
that he could not be rescued?
At the first sight of those wedged feet he had felt inclined to laugh.
Now he was laughing at the wrong side of his mouth, as he peeped over
the brink.
"Oh-h! the rock _isn't_ perpendicular; it slants down, though,
pretty sharply--down into an inner cave--by gracious! And Ruddy, the way
he's hanging his nose, is within an inch or two o' the floor of that
other cave!... And, yet, he's helpless! Helpless as if he had a halter
round his neck! Oh-h! if some of the other fellows were here."
But Stud did not seem to be quite alone; he was one and a half; for the
hearts of two girls were pendent from _his_ neck; outside he knew
they were backing him,--praying for him.
Also, that frenzied gurgle from the victim's throat, his choking cry as
the light struck him, the squirming body and up-rolling eyes told the
boy scout that he was just in time; although the foam was pink upon
Ruddy's lips and his congested head was a fire-ball, indeed,--that brash
head with all his chances in it.
"Ha!
"No Loyal Scout gives place to doubt,
But action quick he shows!"
The song, his own, the original march-song of his troop, sang itself
through Stud's brain, seethed in the low whistle upon his lips, as,
guided by his ruby breast-eye, he slid down into that strange and secret
dungeon in which the black passage ended and, thrusting his sturdy
shoulders under the pendent body of the victim whose convulsed hands
clutched vainly at the bare slab, raised it so that the choking boy
could breathe freely again--and in due time shake off the dizziness of
his awful plight, hung up by the heels by the rock itself.
But not until the Scoutmaster came to his patrol leader's assistance
could those pinioned feet be really freed and their owner brought to
daylight again, not by a return via the fissure route, but hoisted in a
rope-noose, as Pem had been from the Devil's Chair, through a
grass-covered opening discoverable in the roof of that inner cave.
"Goodness! after all, he wasn't so much more foolish--headstrong--than I
was. But Una! Una! If you ever-r tell them!" Thus did the maiden of the
chowchow name spill her spice into her friend's ear,--burning spice,
for, privately, she was shocked at seeing her own folly, parodied,
vulgarized, as it were.
"Well! I should say! He was hanging between hawk and buzzard--if ever a
fellow was," happened to be Stud's moved comment as, clinging to that
lowered rope, he was hoisted, too, through that covert opening, the
loyal little lamp upon his breast paling now into a penny candle held
towards the sun.
But the rescuer's halo did not pale.
It burnished the picnic luncheon which followed, encircling,
rainbow-like, little Jessie who basked in it more than did the
rebellious hero, pelted with wild flowers by the girls--as symbolic of
other bouquets.
"Oh! let up--let up--will you? Those big fellows will take me for the
'goat'--somebody's 'goat'!" protested Stud helplessly, striving to
direct attention from himself by training it upon a straggling group of
distant youths, really too far off to take stock of what was going on
among the merry picnic party.
But Pemrose was taking stock of them. Her widening eyes, her reddening
cheeks, the little piqued shiver that electrified her chin, told that
one figure--one figure--called for recognition; called for it, indeed,
so loudly that it couldn't be denied him.
Every member of that group--a canoeing party, a wading party, it was,
just landed from the near-by river, the blue Housatonic--was a blaze of
color.
But the sturdiest among them was simply barbaric. The warm sunlight of
May dripped golden from his nickum shoulders, bronzed to the hue of a
statue, bathed his bare knees and feet, his khaki shorts, the flame of
an apricot jersey, the black and yellow cap,--the sheaf of mayflowers
within his arm.
"Oh! how boys--big boys--do revel in color. A girl--any girl I ever
knew--is demure in her taste beside them," murmured the Camp Fire
Guardian, with amused, motherly tolerance.
"Pshaw! I think it's hor-rid. So flashy!" snapped Pemrose; Jack at a
Pinch had made gorgeous his incivility and was parading it before her
eyes.
"Oh, boy! Look at that middle fellow. He'd have a grosbeak 'skun a
mile'!" gasped Stud, following the direction of her glance, with a
virtuous consciousness of his own cave-soiled khaki, moderately lit by
merit badge and service stripe.
"'Grosbeak!' Oh, but I love grosbeaks! And all that color--why! it
paints the landscape," came flutteringly from Aponi, the White Birch
Butterfly, least Priscilla-like in her tastes of the Group, when she was
not in Camp Fire green, or soft-toned ceremonial dress.
"Maybe 'twill paint the blues in old Tory Cave, if we run across them
there," put in Tomoke, maiden of the flambeau and the fire-talk. "They
certainly are a perfect 'scream', those big boys," her eyes merrily
following that clamor of color now wending back towards the canoes.
"Humph! they'd have to 'go some' to leaven the blues of Tory Cave,"
remarked the Scoutmaster, laughingly addressing himself to a roll. "The
biggest bonfire on earth wouldn't half dry the cave-tears there."
"Yes, that's the den of the Doleful Dumps--their diggings!" laughed a
younger scout, flourishing aloft a mess-mug, the gray of his rolling
eyes. "Bats--bats as big as saucers--no, soup-plates! And, far in--far
in--the sound of running water, like a weak wind!"
"Running water! Invisible running water! A--weak--wind! Oh-h! do let us
hurry and go on there. We have to cross the river; haven't we?" The
gurgle of that cloistered brooklet was already in Pem's heart as her
dilating gaze spanned the Housatonic, broad and open, "warbling" amid
its soft meadow slopes, as she had looked upon it from the Devil's
Chair. "But, goody! I hope we _won't_ run across him there--Jack at
a Pinch! Flaunting round like a grosbeak!" She bit the thought into an
olive. "Stud's no grumpy riddle--if he is a Stoutheart, like the other!"