THE CAMP ON THE DUNES
And when those fervently anticipated last days of August did in due time
dawn, they brought with them many opportunities to Nixon and his brother
scouts of watching Spotty Seal and his kindred in the enjoyment of their
mundane paradise, whose pavement of gold was a wave-washed reef and its
harpings the mild bluster of a northwesterly breeze.
During the final week of August and the first of September their
scoutmaster, a rising young naval architect, had a respite from
designing wooden vessels, from considering how he could best combine
speed and seaworthiness in an up-to-date model; and he arranged to
devote the whole of that holiday to camping out with his boy scout troop
upon the milky Sugarloaf Dunes.
A more ideal camping-ground could scarcely have been found than among
the white sand-hills, capped with plumy vegetation which formed the
background for an equally dazzling line of beach, where the
gray-and-white gulls strutted in feathered rendezvous, and were hardly
to be scared away by the landing in their midst of the first patrol of
scouts, put ashore from Captain Andy's motor-boat in a light skiff, a
more capacious rowboat than the Pill.
But they had brought the tubby Pill down the river too, in tow of the
launch; and Captain Andy, who was partial to scouts, had arranged to
leave that rotund little rowboat with them, so that, two or three at a
time, they might explore the tidal river with the creeks that
intersected the marshes in the neighborhood of the white dunes.
"Just look at that gray gull, will you?" laughed Patrol Leader Nixon, as
he landed from the skiff. "He's made up his mind that we Owls have no
rights here: that this white beach is his stamping-ground, and he won't
be frightened away!"
Other gulls had reluctantly taken wing and wheeled off during the
prolonged process of landing the eight members of the Owl Patrol, with
their scoutmasters and camp outfit, in various detachments from the
launch, which was too large to run right in to the beach.
But this one youthful sea-gull, a mere boy in plumage gray, held his
ground, parading the lonely beach with head turning alertly from side
to side, as if he were admonishing his wheeling brothers with: "These
are boy scouts! Look at me: I tell you, you have nothing to fear!"
So bold was his mien, so peaceful the attitude of the human invaders,
that presently the regiment of sea-gulls fluttered back to a point of
rendezvous only a little removed from their former one.
"We won't have much company beyond ourselves and the birds, I guess!"
remarked Nixon presently. "There are no houses in sight except those
three fine bungalows about quarter of a mile off on the edge of the
dunes. And the fisherman's shack on the beach below them!"
"Yes, that belongs to an old clam-digger," said Kenjo Red. "He keeps his
pails there. Don't you remember my telling you about his letting us--my
uncle an' me--have his boat one day last November, so's we could row
over to the sand-spit opposite, and take a look at some seals that were
sunning themselves there?"
"Oh! yes, _we_ remember, Kenjo; you've told about that at half a dozen
camp-fire powwows, at least." Starrie Chase plucked off Kenjo's cap and
combed his ruddy locks with a teasing forefinger. "They say Dave
Baldwin, the _vaurien_," with guttural mimicry of Toiney's accents,
"hangs out among the dunes here, when he isn't loafing in the woods up
the river," added Corporal Chase, peering off among the white
sand-hills, capped with biscuit-colored plumes of dry beach-grass, and
the more verdant beach-pea, as if he expected to see young Baldwin's
head pop up among them.
"I wonder if we'll run across him?" said Nixon. "He can't 'make camp'
among the dunes. Nobody is allowed to camp out here, without special
permission. Boy scouts are privileged persons; they know we won't set
fire to the brush."
"Oh! when he needs a fire--when he knocks a woodchuck on the head and
wants to cook it--I suppose he rows over to one of those little islands
there; they say he has an old rowboat here." Leon pointed to two small
islets rising from the plains of water a little higher up the river.
"Well, I don't envy him!" Marcoo shrugged his shoulders. "He must have a
bitter time of it in winter, when the river is frozen over down to the
bay, an' you don't hear a sound here beyond the occasional pop of a
sportsman's gun, or the barking of the seals--and even they're pretty
quiet in midwinter. Hey! Look at that spotted sandpiper. 'Teeter-tail'
we call him: see his tail bob up and down!" exclaimed Coombsie, who was
an enthusiast about birds.
In watching the sandpiper rise from the white beach and dart across the
water, in listening to his sweet, whistling "peet-weet!" note,
speculations about the habits of the _vaurien_, the good-for-nothing
young vagrant, were forgotten.
He, Dave Baldwin, faded completely from the campers' thoughts as the
narrow skiff grounded its sharp nose for the fourth time on the beach,
landing the remainder of their camp dunnage and commissariat; and the
work began of selecting a site for the camp amid the milky sand-hills,
interspersed with a few trees, slender and short of stature.
Those gray birches and ash-trees formed pleasant spots of shade amid the
dazzling whiteness of the dunes. But there was other and more unique
vegetable growth to be considered.
"Say! but will you just look at the cranberry patch, growing out of the
white beach?" shrieked young Colin after an ecstatic interval,
addressing no one scout in particular.
"Cranberries there near the tide!"--"Growing out of the
sand!"--"Tooraloo!"--"Nonsense!" came from his brother Owls who were
already getting busy, erecting tents.
But cranberries there were, in ripening beauty--as the workers presently
saw for themselves--cranberries whose roots underran the dazzling beach,
whose crimson creepers trailed delicately over its whiteness, whose
berries nestled their rosy cheeks daintily, each upon its snowy pillow.
"_Gee!_" The one united ejaculation--the little nondescript, uncouth
monosyllable which expresses so many emotions of the boyish heart, from
panic to panegyric--was all that the scouts could find voice for in
presence of this red-and-white loveliness secreted by Nature upon a
lonely shore.
"Hey! fellows, Captain Andy is going," the voice of the busy scoutmaster
broke in upon their bliss. "He's to bring the Foxes down to-morrow in
his motor-boat," alluding to the Fox Patrol, of which Godey was leader.
"The Seals will row over, to-morrow forenoon, from the other side of the
river; so our scout troop will be complete. We owe a lot to Captain
Andy. Don't you want to show him that you can make a noise: don't you
want to give your yell, with his name at the end? Now, all in line, and
together!"
And each scout with his arm around a comrade upon either side--Leon's
clasping the back of Harold Greer who, a year ago, had cowered at sight
of him--all in a welded line, swaying together where the ripples broke
upon the milky beach, they proved their prowess as chief noise-makers
and made the welkin ring with:--
AMERICA
Boy Scouts! Boy Scouts!
Rah! Rah! Rah!
Exmouth! Exmouth! Exmouth!
Captain Andy! Captain Andy! _Cap-tain An-dy!_
The weatherbeaten ex-skipper, standing "up for'ard" in his launch, which
was just beginning its panting trip up the river, waved his hand in
acknowledgment, while the Aviator's whistle returned a triple salute to
that linked line upon the water's edge.
"They're fine lads!" A little moisture gathered in the captain's
narrowed blue eye as he gazed back at the beach--moisture which did not
come in over the Aviator's rail. "Some one has spoken of this Boy Scout
Movement as the 'Salvation of England'--as I've heard! So here's to it
again as the Future of America!" And he sounded three more whistles--and
yet another three--giving the scouts three times three, until it seemed
as if his power-boat would burst its steel throat.
Then comparative silence reigned again upon the sands and certain
startled birds resumed their feeding avocations, notably that
white-breasted busybody, the sanderling or surf-snipe, called by
river-men the "whitey."
"See! the 'whitey' doesn't believe that 'two is company, three none':
they're chasing after their dinner in triplets! They run out into the
ripples and back again, pecking in the sand, so quickly that the larger
waves can't catch them: don't they, Greerie?" said Leon Chase, pointing
them out to Harold in the overflowing brotherliness established by that
yell.
Harold was no longer the "Hare." That nickname had been forbidden by the
patrol leader of the Owls under pain of dire penalties. The "poltron,"
or coward, as Toiney had once in pity called him, was "Greerie" now; and
was gradually learning what mere bugaboos were the fears which had
separated him from his kind and from boyhood's activities--something
which might never have come home to him thoroughly, save in the
stimulating society of other boys who aimed earnestly at helping him.
"We're going to have a splendid time here for the next two weeks,
Greerie, camping among the dunes," Leon assured him. "To-morrow Nix an'
you and I will go out in the little rowboat, the Pill, and hunt up a
creamy pup-seal and bring him back to camp for a pet. Now! you must come
and do your share of the work--help to set up the other tents among the
sand-hills."
One was already erected, a large canvas shelter, to contain four boys,
another went up like unto it for the other four members of the patrol,
then a smaller tent for the scoutmaster, and the cook-tent which
sheltered the "commissariat," stocked with cans of preserved meats,
vegetables, and all that went to make up the scouts' daily rations.
"Where are _you_ going to sleep, Toiney?" asked Patrol Leader Nixon.
"Me--I'll lak' for sleep out in de air, me--wit' de littal star on top
o' me!" Toiney shrugged his shoulders complacently at the summer sky,
now taking on the hues of evening, as if the firmament were a blanket
woven for his comfort.
"Oh! I'll sleep out with you.--And I!--Me, too!" Each and every member
of the patrol, from the leader downward, longed to feel the white sand
beneath him as a mattress, to have the stars for canopy, to hear the
night-tide as it broke upon the near-by beach crooning his lullaby.
[Illustration: IN CAMP]
"You may take it in turns, fellows--each sleep out with him one night,
when the weather is fine," decided the scoutmaster. "Now! I'm going to
appoint Scouts Warren and Chase cooks for to-night."
A first-rate supper did those cooks turn out, of flapjacks and scrambled
eggs, the latter stirred with a peeled stick, while the great
coffee-pot, brooding upon its rosy nest of birch-logs, grinned
facetiously when a stray flame wreathed its spout, then broke into
bubbling laughter.
Night fell upon the pale dunes that turned to silver monuments under the
smile of a moon in its third quarter. A gentle, lowing sound came to the
scouts' ears from the tide at far ebb upon the silvery beach, as, the
cook-fire abandoned, they gathered round a blazing camp-fire that cast
weird reflections upon the surrounding white hillocks.
The holding of a calm powwow on this first night in camp, when each
heart was thrilling tumultuously to the novelty of the surroundings, was
impossible. Toiney sang wild fragments of songs that found a suitable
accompaniment in the distant, hoarse barking of the harbor seal, and in
the plaintive "Oo-oo-ooo!"--the dove-like call of the creamy pup-seal to
its marbled mother in some lonely tidal creek.
Once and again from the shore side of the scouts' camp-fire, from among
the shimmering sand-hills, came the weaker, more snappy bark of the
little dog-fox, as he prowled the dunes.
The dazzling Sugarloaf Pillar near the mouth of the river was wrapped in
night's mantle. But lights flickered out in two of the handsome summer
bungalows which the boys had noticed, standing at some distance from
their camping-ground, looming high above the beach, erected upon
stilt-like props driven into the sandy soil.
"Those houses were only built last spring; they're occupied for the
first time this summer," said Kenjo Red, who was more familiar with this
region than the others. "Say! let's chant our African war-song, fellows.
This is just the night for it." And the barbaric chant rang weirdly
among the sand-hills, the leader shouting the first line, his companions
answering with the other three, to the accompaniment of the flames'
crackle and the night calls of bird and beast:--
"Een gonyama--gonyama.
Invoboo!
Yah bo! Yah bo
Invoboo!"
Presently the bark of the dog-fox was heard farther off. _He_ knew, the
stealthy slyboots, that he was not the only lone prowler among the pale
dunes that night who listened intently to the boisterous revelry round
the scouts' camp-fire.
His keen sense of smell informed him that behind one plumed sand-hill,
between his own trotting form and the noisy company in the firelight,
there lurked a solitary man-figure.
But he, the sandy-coated little trotter from burrow to burrow, could
neither hear nor interpret the sound, half groan, half oath, savagely
envious, that escaped from the other night-prowler's lips as he listened
to the boys' voices.
Silence, broken only by ringing snatches of laughter, reigned
temporarily over the dunes. Then once again it blossomed into song:--
"Hurrah for the brave, hurrah for the good,
Hurrah for the pure in heart!
At duty's call, with a smile for all,
The Scout will do his part!"
And the soft purr of the low tide, with the breeze skipping among pallid
dunes that looked like capped haystacks in the darkness, flung back the
cheer for the "Scouts of the U.S.A."
"_Aghrr-r!_" snarled the testy dog-fox, his distant petulant growl much
resembling that of Leon's terrier, who, unfortunately, was not present
upon the dunes to-night. Blink had already added the word "Scout" to
his limited human vocabulary, but the wild fox had no such linguistic
powers. The foreign music upon the lonely dunes was irritating, alarming
to him.
It seemed to have something of the same effect upon his brother-prowler,
upon the man who skulked among the sand-hills within hearing of the
song: at any rate, the semi-articulate sound which from time to time he
uttered, deepened into an unmixed groan that escaped from his lips again
later when the clear notes of a bugle rang over the Sugarloaf Dunes,
warning the scouts by the "first call" that fun was at an end for
to-night, and sleep would be next upon the programme.
Then when lights were out, came the sweet sound of "Taps," the wind-up
of the first day in camp, the expert bugler being Corporal Chase.
For the Exmouth doctor had kept his word: Leon had been given the
"bugle" literally and figuratively since he enlisted as a scout, symbol
of the challenge to all the energy in him to advance along new lines,
instead of the "foghorn" reproofs and warnings that had been showered on
him prior to his scouting days.
Then, at last, stillness reigned, indeed, upon the moonlit dunes.
The bark of the dog-fox melted into distance, becoming indistinguishable
from the voice of the returning tide.
The man-prowler among the sand-hills slipped away to some lair as lonely
as the fox's.
And Toiney, with Scout Nixon Warren wrapped in his camper's blanket
beside him, slept out upon the white sands "wit' de littal star on top
o' them!"