YOUNG MR. BLYTHE
It was soon apparent to the scouts that their coming had saved the
enterprise for Blythe. He would not have been able to superintend the
job with other helpers and even with the scouts he was rather their
companion than their leader.
His attempts at sustained labor were pitiful. Yet he was never idle. But
he moved from one unfinished task to another, never realizing apparently
that each job he started was left undone. He was quite unequal to the
harder part of the work, and the scouts, both kind and observant, could
see that, and were content to let him gather and pile the fallen lumber
and sometimes to rake up the smaller pieces for their evening fire,
which he looked forward to with keen delight. What was the matter with
him, they did not know. But this they did know, that he was their friend
and that he took a kind of childish delight in their camping. He became
excited easily and would sometimes seem almost at the point of crying.
He would throw down his saw or hammer in a kind of despair.
But these traits were not noticeable except in the working hours and not
always then. The boys kept up the fiction of his leadership, conferring
with him and consulting him about everything. And with open hearts they
took him into their scout life and liked him immensely.
The nearest they could get to a solution of his peculiarities was that
he was not well and that a long course of unemployment and privation had
resulted in his losing his grip. They took him as they found him, like
the good scouts that they were, and their enterprise to earn a little
money for improving their picturesque meeting-place at home seemed
transformed into a collective, splendid good turn in which their scout
loyalty shone like a light.
And so the days of strenuous, cheerful toil, and the nights around the
companionable blaze, passed, and Blythe who seemed always fearful and
apprehensive of something appeared to be haunted with a kind of dread
that this remote and pleasant rustic life would come to an end.
"We won't be finished next week?" he would say with a kind of simple air
of wishing to put off that evil time. "You don't think so, do you?" And
Pee-wee would answer, "That's all right, you leave it to me. I'll fix
it."
And evidently he did succeed in fixing it, for it rained steadily for
three days.