RACCOON JUNIOR
"Scout or no scout, you are not going to boss me!"
Thus Starrie Chase broke the breathless silence that reigned for half a
minute in the woods, following upon Nixon's declaration that he was a
boy scout, bound by the scout law to protect the weak among human beings
and animals.
For the space of that half-minute the tormenting stick had ceased to
probe the hole. The wretched chipmunk, cowering in the farthest corner
of its once neat retreat, had a respite.
But Leon--who was not inherently cruel so much as thoughtlessly teasing
and the victim of a destructive habit of mind, now felt that should he
yield a point to this fifteen-year-old lad from a distant city, the
leadership which he so prized, among the boys of Exmouth, would be
endangered. He was the recognized head of a certain youthful male gang,
of which Colin and Coombsie--though the latter occasionally deplored his
methods--were leading representatives.
"Go ahead, scout, prevent my doing anything I want to do--if you can!"
he flung out, his brown eyes winking upward with that snapshot quickness
as if he were photographing on their retina the figure of that new
species of animal, the scout of the U.S.A. "I've heard of your kind
before; you know a lot of things that nobody else knows--or wants to
know either!"
The last words were to the accompaniment of the goading stick which
began to move vehemently to and fro in the hole again. That neat little
hole, which had been one of the humbler miracles of the woods, now gaped
as an ugly, torn fissure beneath its roof of rock.
Before it was a defacing debris of torn grass and earth in which Blink
scratched impatiently, whining over the delay in the chip-squirrel's
exit.
"Oh! give it up, Leon; I believe I can hear him stirring in the hole!"
pleaded Colin Estey.
Simultaneously the scout flung himself on his knees before the
chipmunk's fortress, well-nigh captured, and seized the cruel goad.
"Let go of this stick or I'll lick you with it! I can; I'm as old--older
than you are!" Leon was now a red-eyed savage.
"That would be like your notion of fair play! Oh! drop the stick an'
come on with your fists! I'm not afraid of you."
The probable result of such a duel remains a problem; any slight
advantage in age was on Leon's side, but each alert movement of the boy
scout showed that he possessed eye, mind, and muscle trained to the
fullest to cope with any situation that might arise. Whoever might prove
victor, the expedition to Varney's Paintpot would have been abruptly
frustrated by a fight among the exploring party, had not Marcoo the
tactful interfered.
"Oh! what's the use of fighting about a chip'?" he cried, thrusting a
plump shoulder between the bristling combatants. "It's just this way,
Leon: Nix is right; it's a mean business, trying to force that chipmunk
out of its hole for the dog to catch it! You can withdraw the stick
right now, come with us an' share our luncheon; or you can go off on
your own hook--and you don't get a crumb out of the basket--we'll find
the Paintpot without you!"
Leon drew a long wavering breath, looking at Colin for support.
But Public Opinion as represented by the two younger boys, was by this
time entirely with the scout. For it is the genius among boys, as among
grown-ups, who voices what lies hidden and unexpressed, in the hearts of
others; we are always moved by the bold utterance of that which we have
surreptitiously felt ourselves.
Both Colin Estey and Marcoo had known what it was to feel their sense of
pity and justice outraged by Leon's persecuting methods. But it needed
the trained boldness of the boy scout to put the sentiment into words;
to be ready to fight for his knightly principles and win. For he had
won.
Leon Chase fairly writhed at the choice set before him--at the necessity
of yielding a point to the stranger! But he felt that it would be still
more obnoxious to his feelings to be deserted by his companions, left to
beat a solitary retreat homeward with his dog or wander--alone and
fasting--through the woods, a boy hermit!
"All right! Have your way! Come along," he cried crossly. "We'll never
get anywhere--that's sure--if we waste any more time on a chipmunk!"
Withdrawing the stick from the enlarged aperture, he flung it away and
scrambled to his feet, whistling to the dog.
It needed much moral suasion on the part of all four boys to lure the
terrier away from the raided hole with whose earth his slim white legs
were coated. But he presently consented to explore the woods further in
search of diversion.
And the incident ended without any torn fur flying its flag of pain on
the summer air.
The flag of feud between the two boys, Starrie Chase and Nixon, was not,
however, immediately lowered. Coombsie--a studious, thoughtful lad--had
the unhappy feeling of having brought two strange fires together which
might at any moment result in an explosion that would be especially
disastrous on this the first day of his cousin's visit to him.
But as one lad has remarked: "Two boys cannot remain mad with each other
long: there's always too much doing!"
And everybody knows that sawdust smothers smouldering fire! It did in
this instance. After about ten minutes of "grouchy" but uneventful
tramping, the forest explorers came to a logging camp, a rude shanty,
flanked by a yellow mountain of sawdust where a portable sawmill had
been set up during the preceding winter and taken down in spring.
In spite of the fact that so much lay before them to be seen in the
woods--if haply they might arrive at the various points of heart's
desire--it was not in boy-nature to refrain from scaling that unstable,
shelving sawdust peak for a better view onward into those shadowy woods.
And a lusty sham battle ensued, in the midst of which Leon found
occasion to repay the trick played on him with the pitchfork seeds by
slipping a handful of sawdust inside the scout's khaki collar.
"Whew! that's worse than the devil's pitchforks," groaned the latter,
writhing and squirming in his tan shirt.
But does not a trifling discomfort under such circumstances enhance
while curbing the enjoyment of a boy, tying him to earth, when his young
spirit like an aeroplane, winged with sheer joy of life and youthful
daring, feels as if it could spurn that earth sphere as too limited,
and, riding on the breeze of heaven, seek adventure among the clouds?
In such a mood the four boys, drinking in the odor of the pine-trees as
a fillip to delight, were presently exploring the loggers' shanty, with
its rude bunks, oilcloth-covered table, here an old magazine, there a
worn-out stocking, relics of human habitation.
"Nobody occupies this camp during the summer," said Leon. "I think
Toiney Leduc and another man worked up here last winter."
"I'm pretty sure that Toiney did! Look there!" The scout was unfolding a
piece of charred paper pinioned in a corner by a tomato can; it was a
printed fragment of a French-Canadian _voyageur_ song, at sight of which
the boys made the shanty ring with:--
"Rond! rond! rond! peti' pie pon' ton'!"
"But I'm not so sure that nobody is using the shanty now," remarked
Nixon presently. "See that tobacco ash and the stains on the white
oilcloth!" pointing to the dingy table. "Both look fresh; the ash
couldn't possibly have remained here since last winter; 'twould have
been blown away long ago by the wind sweeping through the open shanty.
There's some more of it on the mattress in this bunk," drawing himself
up to look over the side of the rude crib built into the wall. "I guess
somebody _does_ occupy the camp now--at night anyway!"
"Oh! so you set up to be a sort of Sherlock Holmes, do you?" jeered
Leon.
"I don't set up to be anything! But I can tell that the men ground their
axes right here." The scout was now kicking over a small wooden trough
that had reposed, bottom uppermost, amid the long grass before the
shanty.
"How can you make that out?" It was Colin who spoke.
"Because, look! there's rust on the inside of the trough, showing that
there are steely particles mixed with the dust of the interior and that
water has dripped into it from the revolving grindstone."
"Pshaw! anybody could find that out who set to work to think about it,"
came in a chorus from his three companions.
But that "thinking" was just the point: the others would have passed by
that topsy-turvy wooden vessel, which might have been used for sundry
purposes, with its dusty interior exactly the hue of the yellow sawdust,
without stopping to reason out the story of the patient axe-grinding
which had gone on there during winter's bitter days.
"But, I say, what good does it do you to find out things like that?"
questioned Starrie Chase, kicking over the trough, his shrewd young face
a star of speculation. "If one should go about poking his nose into
everything that had happened, why! he'd find stories in most things, I
guess! The woods would be full of them."
"So they are!" replied the scout quickly. "That's just what we're
taught: that every bird and animal, as well as everything which is done
by men, leaves its 'sign!' We must try to read that 'sign' and store up
in our minds what we learn, as a squirrel stores his nuts for winter, so
that often we may find out things of importance to ourselves or others.
And I'll tell you it makes life a jolly lot more interesting than when
one goes about 'lak wit' eye shut'! as Toiney says. I've never had such
good times as since I've been a scout:--
Then hurrah for the woods, hurrah for the fields,
Hurrah for the life that's free,
With a heart and mind both clean and kind,
The Scout's is the life for me!
And we'll shout, shout, shout,
For the Scout, Scout, Scout,
For the Scouts of the U.S.A.!"
The speaker exploded suddenly in a burst of song, throwing his broad hat
into the air with a yell on the refrain that woke the echoes of the log
shanty, while the breezy orchestra in the tree-tops, like noisy reed
instruments, came in on the last line:--
"For the Scouts of the U.S.A.!"
Colin and Coombsie were enthusiastically shouting it too.
"Say! Col, that fellow suits me all right," whispered Marcoo, nudging
his chum and pointing toward the excited scout.
"Me, too!" returned Colin.
"Pshaw! he thinks he's It, but I think the opposite," murmured Leon
truculently.
"To what troop or patrol do you belong, Nix?" questioned his cousin.
"Peewit Patrol, troop six, of Philadelphia! I was a tenderfoot for six
months; now I'm a second-degree scout--with hope of becoming a
first-class one soon. Want to see my badge?" pointing to his coat. "Each
patrol is named after a bird or animal. We use the peewit's whistle for
signaling to each other: Tewitt! Tewitt!"
Again the woods rang with a fairly good imitation of the peewit's--or
European lapwing's--whistling note.
"Oh! I'd put a patent on that whistle if I were you," snapped Leon
sarcastically: "I'm sure nothing like it was ever heard in these--or any
other--woods! We'd better be moving on or the mosquitoes will eat us
up," he added hastily. "There hasn't been any frost to get rid of them
yet."
But as the quartette of boys left the log-camp behind and, with the
terrier in erratic attendance, plunged again into the thick woods, it
by and by became apparent to each that, so far as a knowledge of their
exact whereabouts went or an ability to locate any point of destination,
they were approaching the truth of Toiney's words and wandering "lak
wit' eye shut!"
For a time they kept to a logging-road that branched off from the
shanty, a mere grass-grown, root-obstructed pathway, over which, when
that great white leveler, Winter, evened things up with his mantle of
snow, the felled trees were drawn on a rough sled to some point where
stood the movable sawmill.
The dense woods were intersected at long intervals by such
half-obliterated paths; in their remote recesses lurked other rough
shanties where a scout might read the "sign" that told of the hard life
of the lumbermen.
But neither vine-laced road nor shanty was easy of discovery for the
uninitiated.
"Whew! it kind o' brings the gooseflesh to be so far in the woods as
this without having the least idea whether we're getting anywhere or
not." Thus spoke Coombsie at the end of half an hour's steady tramping
and plowing through the underbrush. "Are you sure that you know in which
direction lies the cave called the Bear's Den, Leon? A logging-road
runs past that, so I've heard."
"Oh, we'll arrive there in time, I guess; Varney's Paintpot is somewhere
in the same direction as the cave," replied the pseudo-leader evasively.
"They're some distance apart, but we've made a bee-line from one to the
other when I've been in the woods with my father or brother Jim."
But these woods were a different proposition now, without an older head
and more experienced woodlore to rely upon: Leon, who had never before
posed as a guide through their mazes, secretly acknowledged this.
He had not imagined that it would be so difficult to find one's way,
unaided, in this wilderness of endless trees and underbrush, through
whose changing aspects ran the same mystifying thread as if the
gold-brown gloom of a shadowy hill-slope,--where only the sunbeams
waltzing on dry pine-needles seemed alive,--or the jeweled twilight of a
grassy alley bound a gossamer handkerchief about one's eyes, so that one
groped blindfold against a blank wall of uncertainty.
"Say! but I wish I had brought my pocket compass with me," groaned the
scout. "Guess I didn't live up to our scout motto: BE PREPARED! But
then--" he looked at his cousin--"we started out with the intention of
going down the river and you objected to my trotting back for it,
Marcoo, when we determined on a hike through the woods."
"I was afraid that if the men knew what we were planning, they'd have
headed us off as Toiney tried to do," confessed Marcoo candidly.
"Well, I wish now that I had gone back; I could have packed the luncheon
into my knapsack; it would have been much more easily carried than in
this basket. I miss my staff too!" Nixon deposited the lunch-basket,
with which he was now impeded, on the ground in a green woodland glade
where the noble forest trees, red oak, cedar, maple, interspersed with
an occasional pine, hemlock, or balsam fir, rose to a height of from
sixty to a hundred feet, bordering a patch of open ground, starred with
wildflowers, dotted with berries.
Delicate queen's lace, purple gentians, starry wood-asters, waxen Indian
pipes, made it seem as if this must be the wood-fairies' dancing-ground,
where at night they rode a moonbeam from flower to flower, and sipped
juice from the milk-berries, bunch-berries or scarlet fox-berries that
strayed at intervals along the ground.
"I'd like to stay _here_ forever." Colin stretched himself upon a bank
of moss, his mind going back to the explorer's longing, to the
wood-hunger which had consumed him, as he lay upon the fragrant
marsh-grass some hours before. He was getting his wish now--and not
everybody gets that without having to pay for it. "The trees look kind
o' fatherly an' protecting; don't they?" he murmured lazily.
Yes, here one felt admitted to the companionship of those noble
trees,--the greatest story-tellers that ever were, when one listens and
interprets their conversations with the breeze. A "Hurrah for the
woods!" was on every tongue as the boys chewed a berry or smoked a
pearly orchid pipe.
Moods changed a little as they took up their wandering again and
presently waded, single file, through a jungle of bushes, scrub oak,
dwarf pine, pigmy cedar and birch, laced with brambles. Here the trees
overhead were of less magnitude and the tall leafy undergrowth foamed
about their ears, giving them somewhat the distracted feeling of being
cast away on a trackless sea--each sequestered in his own little
boat--with emerald billows shutting out all view of port.
"Three cheers! We're almost through with this jungle. I guess we're
coming to more open ground again--none too soon, either!" cried Leon who
led, with his dog. "Shouldn't wonder if we were approaching a swamp: it
may be Big Swamp, as the men call that great alder-swamp that's all
spongy in parts and dotted with deep bog-holes, where one might sink out
of sight quick!
"For goodness' sake! look at the crows," he whooped three minutes later,
as, leaving the wavy undergrowth behind, he plunged out on a mossy slope
strewn with an occasional boulder. "_The crows!_ What do you suppose
they're after? They're teasing something! 'Hollering' at something!"
The same amazed exclamation broke from his companions' lips. Halfway
down the slope was an old and leafy chestnut tree. Around this the crows
were circling, now alighting on the branches, now fluttering off again
on sloping sable wing, their yellow beaks gleaming.
A cawing din filled the air, with an occasional loud "Quock!" of alarm
or indignation.
"They're teasing something--perhaps it's a squirrel! I've seen them do
that before; they're regular pests!" exclaimed Leon, inconsistently
finding fault with the crows for being birds of the same feather with
himself.
"Whew! there's something doing here. Let's see what it is!" Nixon was
equally excited.
With the terrier scampering ahead, the four boys set off at a run toward
the crow-infested tree.
"I believe there's something--some animal--hidden in the hollow between
the branches!" Leon gave vent to a low shout, his brown eyes yellow with
excitement. "It's round that the crows are hovering!"
"There is! There is! I see the end of a big, bushy tail. It isn't a
squirrel's tail either!" returned the scout in a fever of mystification.
"Let's go softly, so that we won't frighten the thing whatever it
is--then we can have a good look at it!"
"Suppose it should be a wildcat, then we'd 'scat'!" gasped Colin,
feeling his wildest hopes and tremors fulfilled. "I see its nose--a
black nose--over the edge of the hollow! It's like--Gee! it can't be
another coon from the swamp--like the dead one that Toiney found in the
hencoop?"
Simultaneously the terrier, Blink, was launching himself like a white
arrow toward the spreading nut-tree, which stood upon a grassy knoll,
while the woods rang with his fusillade of barking.
And from the hollow in the tree came a shrill whimpering cry, remarkably
like that of a small and frightened child.
Starrie Chase fairly gambolled with excitement: "That's where you're
right, Col," he panted. "If it isn't a coon--another young coon--I'm a
Dutchman! I hunted one in the woods, by night, with my brother, last
year!"
"He keeps on singing," breathed Coombsie. "Isn't his cry like a
two-year-old child's?"
"Oh! if we only had my brother's coon dog here--and could get him down
from the tree--the dog might finish him!" Leon seemed emitting sparks of
excitement from his pointed elbows and other quivering joints. "Go for
him, Blink!" he raved, hardly knowing what he said. "You're not afraid
of anything--you feel like a mastiff! Oh! we _must_ get him out of that
tree-hollow on to the ground."
"Caw! Caw!... Caw!... Quock! Quock!" At the approach of the boys and dog
the crows set up a wilder din, describing broader circles round the tree
or fluttering upward to its loftier branches.
Again came that petulant whimpering cry from the hollow of the
chestnut, where a young raccoon (probably brother to the intruder which
had made a short bee-line through the woods, guided by instinct and its
nose, to Toiney's hencoop) now wailed and quailed, finding himself
between two sets of enemies: the barking dog and excited boys below, the
pestering crows above.
Abandoning the wise nocturnal habits of his forefathers, with the
rashness of youth, he too had strayed at sunrise from that secluded hole
among the ledges on the borders of Big Swamp, filled with dreams of
juicy cornfields and other delicacies.
Not readily finding such a land of milk and honey, he climbed into the
hollow of this chestnut tree, flanked by a young ash upon the knoll, and
there composed himself to sleep.
But thither the crows, flocking, found him; and recognizing in him an
hereditary enemy of their eggs and nestlings, set to work to make his
life a burden.
Nevertheless Raccoon Junior preferred their society to that of the boys
and dog which instinct warned him to dread above all other foes.
As the well-bred terrier--game enough to face any foe, though it might
prove a sorry day for him if he should tackle that young
raccoon--reared on his hind legs, and clawed the bark of the trunk in
his excitement, the rash Junior climbed swiftly out of the hollow and
fled up among the branches of the tall chestnut tree, seeking to hide
himself among the long thick leaves amid a stormy "Quock!" and "Caw!
Caw! Caw!" from the crows.
"Oh! there--there he goes! See his stout body and funny little legs!"
"And his long gray hair and the black patch over his eyes--makes him
look as if he wore spectacles!"
"And his bushy tail! Huh! there's some class to that tail--all ringed
with buff and black."
Such cries broke from three wildly excited throats. Leon spent no breath
in admiration. Like lightning, he had snatched up a stone and sent it
flying up the tree after the fugitive with such good aim that it struck
one of the short, climbing legs.
Another whimpering cry--sharp and shrill as that of a wounded
child--rang down among the thick leaves.
"What did you do that for? You've broken one of his legs, I think!"
exclaimed the scout.
"So much the better! If he should light down from the tree, he can't run
so fast! I want that dandy tail of his--and his skin!" Starrie Chase
was now beside himself with the greedy feeling, that possessed him
whenever he saw a wild animal, that its own skin did not belong to it,
but to him.
"Say, fellows!" he cried wildly, "if you'll stay right here by the tree
and prevent his coming down, I--I'll run all the way back to that
farm-clearing--I guess I can find my way--and bring back Toiney's gun,
and shoot him. Say--will you?"
No such promise was forthcoming.
"Well, I know what I'll do!" Leon tore off his jacket. "I'll tie the
sleeves of my coat round the trunk of the tree; that will prevent his
coming down, so I've heard my father say. Bother! they won't meet. I'll
have to use your coat too, Nix!"
He snatched up the scout's Norfolk jacket, thrown down beside the basket
at the foot of the tree, and was knotting it to his own, when there was
a wild shriek from Colin:--
"Look! Look! He's jumped over into the other tree. Oh! he's come down;
he's on the ground now--there beyond the ash tree--rolling over like a
ball! Oh, he's going--going like a slate sliding downhill!"
While Leon had been so cleverly knotting the coats round the
tree-trunk, and his terrier barking up it, the young coon had outwitted
them and dropped like an acrobat to the ground, having gained the odds
of a dozen yards in his race for safety.
Off went the terrier after him, now! Off went the four boys, hot on the
trail too, madly rushing down the hill clear to the edge of the
alder-swamp toward which it sloped--yes! and into its quagmire borders
too, while the crows, raving like a foghorn, supplied music for the
chase.
But the speed of the limping wild animal enabled it, having gained its
short legs--despite the injury of the stone--to reach the shelter of a
quivering clump of alders where Blink worried in and out in vain, nose
to the ground--sniffing and baffled.
"Oh, we've lost sight of him now! He's given us the slip," cried Colin,
recklessly dashing for the alders.
Suddenly the air cracked with his cry that raved with terror like the
crows: "Help! _Help!_ I'm into it now--into it plunk--into Big Swamp!
I'm sinking--s-sinking above my waist! Help! Help!"