"YOU MUST LOOK OUT!"
The four boys did not linger long before that lonely grave; the fears it
evoked were too unpleasant. They pushed on again through the woods, each
one clearing his throat of a husky tickling that was third cousin to a
weary sob.
The scout was inwardly combating the depressing memory of Toiney Leduc's
warning with the advice of the Chief Scout that if he should ever find
himself lost in the woods, Fear, not hunger or cold, would prove his
worst enemy.
"I mustn't lose my grip! I must keep my head--not be fogged by fear! I'm
a boy scout of America," he reminded himself.
Still the shadow of that gray cairn stalked him as well as the others.
Even Leon was subdued by it. His manner had lost the last trace of its
shallow cocksureness. The mantle of bluff had melted from him, leaving
him a distracted, temper-tried boy like his three companions.
"I know that the cave called the Bear's Den is not quite a mile from
Bishop's grave, but I haven't the least idea of how to go about
reaching it," he admitted. "A logging-road passes the cave; that might
lead us somewhere. I wish we could strike a stream."
"So do I! My mouth is dry as dust; I'm parched with thirst." Nixon, as
he spoke, stooped, picked up a round pebble, inserted it between his dry
palate and tongue and began sucking on it, as on a gum-drop.
"What on earth are you doing that for?" questioned Leon sharply; the
nerves in his tired body were now jangling like an instrument out of
tune; together with his three companions he was cross as a thorn--ready
to quarrel with his own shadow.
"'What am I doing it for?' Why! to start the saliva," quavered the
scout, sucking hard; "to prevent me from feeling the thirst so much."
"_Blamed_ rubbish!" Starrie Chase snorted. "As if sucking a stone like a
baby would do you any good!"
"Everything is 'rubbish,' except what you know yourself; and _that's_
next to nothing!" Nixon was now equally cross. "You don't know half as
much about the woods as your dog does. If it hadn't been for you, we'd
have been out of this place long ago!"
"Oh! you think you're It, because you're a boy scout, but I think the
opposite!"
"Shut up! Don't give me any of your 'jaw'!"
But there was a sudden, queer contortion of the scout's face on the last
word.
Abruptly he stalked on, humming to himself--a curious-looking being,
with his painted face and dazed eyes under the broad-brimmed hat.
"What's that you're singing, Nix?" Coombsie was catching at a straw to
divert thought from Bishop's grave.
"Oh! go on, let's hear it. Sounds lively!" urged Leon, whose temper had
sunk beneath the realization of their plight, a quenched flash.
The scout sidetracked his pebble between right cheek and gums and began
to sing with what cheerfulness he could muster, as much for his own
encouragement as that of his companions, a patrol song, the gift of a
poet to the boy scouts of the world:--
"Look out when your temper goes
At the end of a losing game;
And your boots are too tight for your toes,
And you answer and argue and blame!
It's the hardest part of the law,
But it's got to be learned by the scout,
For whining and shirking and 'jaw,'
All patrols look out!
These are our regulations,
There's just one law for the scout,
And the first and the last, and the present and the past,
And the future and the perfect is look out!"
Before Nixon had finished the chorus his three companions were shouting
it with him as a spur to their jaded spirits.
"Ours is a losing game in earnest--all because we didn't look out and
take proper precautions so that we might have some chance of returning
by the way that we came," remarked the soloist with a grim laugh. "Now,
we 'jolly well must look out!' as the song says. I'm going to climb the
next tree that's good an' tall, and see whether I can discover any
faraway smoke that would show us where a house might be,--or a gap in
the woods,--or anything."
"Good idea! I'll climb too," seconded Leon. "You choose one tree; I'll
take another, and see what we can make out!"
But they were toiling through a comparatively insignificant part of the
fine woods now, where the foamy undergrowth billowed about their ears.
Here the birch-trees, hickories, and maples, with an occasional pine and
hemlock, only averaged from thirty-five to forty feet in stature. Not
for another half-mile or so did Nixon sight a tall stately trunk
towering above its forest brethren, its many-pointed leaves proclaiming
it to be a fine red oak.
"Whoo'! Whoo'! It's me for that oak-tree!" he cried. "I'll shin up that,
right to the top and scour the horizon. 'Twill be easily climbed too!"
"See that freak pine with the divided trunk a little farther on? I'm
going to climb that," announced Leon Chase. "It's a fine tree, if it is
a freak--like the Siamese Twins."
In another minute with the agility of a cat he had climbed to the crotch
of the freak tree where its twin trunks divided.
"Look out! those lower branches are brown an' rotten, Starrie. I
wouldn't trust to them if I were you!" shouted Colin, indicating the
drooping pine-boughs about ten feet from the ground; he kicked a similar
large drab branch, as he spoke, which had fallen and lay decaying at the
foot of the freak tree.
"Right you are! I won't." Leon was a wonderful climber; twining his arms
and legs round one olive-green trunk of the divided pine he managed to
reach the firm boughs above through whose needles the late afternoon
breeze crooned a sonorous warning.
The scout, meanwhile, had clambered like a squirrel nearly to the top
of the splendid oak-tree. Presently the two boys upon the ground heard a
shrill "Tewitt! Tewitt!" the signal-whistle of his peewit patrol, fully
sixty feet above their heads, followed by Nixon's voice shouting: "Can't
see smoke anywhere, fellows--or any sign of a real break in the woods.
But there seems to be some sort of little clearing about two hundred
yards from here, I should say!" He was carefully scanning the space over
intervening tree-tops with his eye, knowing that if he could judge this
distance in the woods with approximate accuracy it would count as a
point in his favor toward realizing the height of his ambition and
graduating into a first-class scout.
Leon, a moment later, was singing out blithely from the pine-tree's top:
"I see that gap between the trees too, just a little way farther on. I
guess it's a logging-road at last--probably a shanty as well--the road
will lead somewhere anyhow. Hurrah! We'll be out o' the misery in time.
Race you down, Nix?" he challenged exuberantly at the top of his voice.
Then began a swift, racing descent, marked on Leon's part by the touch
of recklessness that often characterized his movements; he was
determined that though the boy scout might excel him in certain points
of knowledge, he should not outdo him in athletic activity.
"There! I knew I could 'trim' you anywhere--in a tree or on the ground,"
he cried all in one gasping breath as--caution to the winds--he stepped
on one of the lower dead boughs which he had avoided going up.
It snapped under his hundred and twenty-five pounds of sturdy weight,
like a breaking twig. He crashed to the ground, alighting in a huddle
upon the decayed branch, the crumbling wind-fall, at the foot of the
tree.
"Gracious! are you hurt, Starrie?" Coombsie and Colin rushed to him.
"I--think--not! I guess I'm all here." Leon made a desperate attempt to
rise, and instantly sank back, clutching at the grass around him with
such a sound as nobody had ever heard before from the lips of Leon Starr
Chase--the moan of a maimed creature.
"My ankle! My right ankle!" he groaned. "I twisted it, coming down on
that rotten branch. It feels as if every tree in the woods had fallen on
it together! Ouch! I--can't--stand." Drops of agony stole out upon his
forehead.
"You've sprained it, I guess!" Nixon was now bending over the victim.
"Here, let me take your shoe off, before the foot swells! Perhaps, with
Col and me helping you, you can limp along to that clearing?"
Leon made another attempt, with the leather pressure removed, but sank
down again and began to relieve himself of his stocking too, in order to
examine the injury.
"Ou-ouch!" he groaned savagely. "My ankle is as black as a thundercloud
already. It feels just like a thunderstorm, too--all heavy throbs an'
lightning shoots of pain!"
The trail of those fiery darts could be traced in the livid blue and
yellow streaks that were turning the rapidly swelling ankle, in which
the ligaments were badly torn, to as many hues as Joseph's coat, against
a background of sullen black.
"Well! this is the--limit!" Coombsie dropped the lunch-basket, to which
he had clung faithfully, into a nest of underbrush: with a probable
logging-road within reach that might serve as a clue to lead them
somewhere, here was one of their number with a thunderstorm in his
ankle!
And then the hero that dwelt in the shadow of the savage in that
contradictory breast of Leon Chase flashed awake again in a moment, as
at Big Swamp; the real plucky boyhood in him shone out like a star!
"'Twill be dark--in the woods--before very long," he said, his voice
sprained too by pain, while his clammy face, still coated with the
red-ochre pigment of Varney's Paintpot, smeared by the drops of agony
and his coat-sleeve, was a lurid sight. "You fellows will have to hustle
if you want to reach that road--if it is a logging-road--and get out of
the woods before night! I can hardly--hobble. I'd better stay here:
Blink will stay with me; won't you, pup? When you boys get home--let my
father know--he and Jim will come out an' find me; they know every inch
of the woods."
"And leave you alone in the woods for hours? Not I, for one!" The
scout's answer was decisive, so were the loyal protests of the other two
lads.
Blink, with a shrewd comprehension that something was wrong with his
master, had been alternately licking Leon's ear and the inflamed pads of
his own paws. At the mention of his name he pressed so close to the
victim's side, sitting bolt upright on his haunches, that their two
bodies might have been joined at one point like the trunks of the freak
tree. And the purple fidelity lights in his brown eyes said plainly
that not hunger, thirst, or lonely death itself, could separate him from
the being who was a greater fellow in his eyes than any scout of the
U.S.A.
The other three boys were at that stage of fatigue and discomfiture when
the well of emotion is easily pumped; their eyes grew moist at the dog's
steadfast look.
But the scout shook himself brusquely as if trying to awake something
within.
"We ought to be able to fix you up so that you can get along to that
little clearing, anyhow!" he said, his mind busy with the sixth point of
the scout law and how under these circumstances he could best live up to
it and help an injured comrade. "We might form a chair-carry, Col and I,
but the undergrowth ahead is too thick; we couldn't wrestle
through--three abreast. Ha! we'd better make a crutch for you; that's
the idea! There's a birch sapling, neat an' handy, as an Irishman would
say!"
And the ubiquitous white birch, the wood-man's friend, came into play
again. Its slim trunk, being wrenched from the ground, roots and all,
and trimmed off with Nixon's knife, formed a fair prop.
"Chuck me your handkerchiefs!" said the crutch-maker to the other two
uninjured boys. "We'll pad the top of it, so that it won't dig into his
armpit. Now then, Leon! get this under your right arm and put your left
one round my neck--that will fix you up to hobble a short distance."
A half-reluctant grin, distorted by agony, convulsed Leon's face as,
leaning hard upon the white-birch prop, he arose and limped a few steps;
he recollected how at odd moments in the woods--whenever there wasn't
too much doing--he had believed that he held a grudge against the scout
for making him yield one sharply contested point and that about such an
infinitesimal thing in his eyes as the brief life of a chipmunk.
"Oh! I guess I can limp along with the crutch," he said, smearing the
dew of pain over his bedaubed face, now ghastly under the paint.
"Go on; you're only wasting time!" Nixon drew the other's left arm with
its moist cold hand around his neck--all the heat in Leon's body had
gone to swell the thunderstorm in his ankle.
And thus plowing, stumbling through the undergrowth, the scout's right
hand keeping the impudent twigs from poking his companion's eyes out,
they reached the narrow clearing along which the ambient light of a
September sunset flowed like a golden river.
No coveted log shanty, where at least they could encamp for the night,
decorated it.
But on its opposite side there loomed before the boys' eyes as they
issued from the woods a great, lichen-covered rock, over twenty feet
high, with a deep cavernous opening that yawned like a sleepy mouth at
sunset as it swallowed the rays streaming into it.
"Glory halleluiah! it's the Bear's Den--at last," ejaculated Leon, pain
momentarily eclipsed. "Thanks, Nix: you're a horse!" as he withdrew his
arm from his comrade's shoulders. "But that cave is about five miles
from anywhere--from any opening in the woods! What on earth are we going
to do now?"
"Why! light a fire the first thing, I guess," returned the boy scout
practically.