THE LOG SHANTY AGAIN
"This fire has been the work of some incendiary--that's what I think!"
was the opinion delivered later that night by the captain of the nearest
fire-brigade, who, with his company, had been summoned by Leon's
signaled message, passed on via telephone wires by the lighthouse men.
"Of course, it may have been a case of accident or spontaneous
combustion, but the former seems out of the question, seeing that the
houses were empty, and the latter not probable," went on the grizzled
chief. "Anyhow, I congratulate you on your boys, Mr. Scoutmaster! Under
your leadership they certainly did good work in saving this whole summer
colony."
"So they did; I'm proud of them!" returned the scoutmaster impulsively,
which made the three patrol leaders within hearing, Scout Warren of the
Owls, Godey Peck of the Foxes, and Jesse Taber of the Seals, straighten
their tired bodies, feeling repaid.
"Well! I expect you'll see one or two officers landing upon these
Sugarloaf Dunes to-morrow, to try and get at the cause of the fire,"
said the chief again. "It started in that shed where, so far as we know,
there was nothing inflammable."
"I ought to tell you," Scoutmaster Estey looked very grave, "that two of
my scouts saw a man entering the shed," pointing to what was now a mere
smouldering heap of ashes, "just about an hour, or a little over, before
the fire broke out. When they first caught sight of him he was on the
piazza of the bungalow itself, and seemed trying to get into the house."
"Ho! Ho! I thought so. This is a case for the district police, I guess!"
muttered the grizzled fire-chief.
That was the opinion also of the police representatives who landed upon
the white dunes from a motor-boat early the next morning. And when the
sharp questioning of one of the officers brought out the fact that the
individual who had lurked about the scene of the fire was believed to be
a youthful ne'er-do-weel, Dave Baldwin, with a prison record behind him,
whose name was known to the two policemen, though his person was not,
suspicion fastened upon that vagrant as possibly the malicious author
of the fire.
"That fellow first got into trouble through a morbid craving for
excitement," said one of the officers. "The same craving _may_ have led
him on from one thing to another until he hasn't stopped at
arson--especially if he had a spiteful motive for it, which is likely
with a tramp. That may have been his purpose in trying to enter the
house."
"I can scarcely imagine Dave's having become such an utter degenerate,"
answered the scoutmaster sadly. "I went to school with him long ago. And
Captain Andy Davis knew his father well; they were shipmates on more
than one trawling trip to the Grand Banks. Captain Andy speaks of the
elder David Baldwin as a brave man and a big fisherman. Even if the son
did start this fire, it may have been accidental in some way."
"Well! we must get our hands on him, anyhow," decided the officer. "I
wonder if he's skulking round among the dunes still; that's not
probable? I'd like to know whether any one of these observant boy scouts
of yours saw a boat leave this shore since daybreak?"
It transpired that Coombsie had: after a night of unprecedented
excitement--like his tossing brother scouts who sought the shelter of
their tents about one o'clock in the morning--he had been unable to
sleep, had crept out of his tent at daybreak and climbed a white
sand-hill, to watch the sun rise over the river.
"I saw a rowboat shoot out of a little creek farther up the river, I
should say about half a mile from the dunes," said Marcoo. "There was
only one person in it; seemed to me he was acting rather queerly; he'd
row for a while, then stand up in the stern and scull a bit, then row
again."
"Could you see for what point he was heading?"
"For the salt-marshes high up on the other side of the river, I guess! I
think he landed there."
"Then, he's probably hiding in the woods beyond the marshes. We must
search them. That French-Canadian, Toiney Leduc, who's camping with you,
has worked as a lumberman in those woods; he knows them well, and is a
good trailer. I'd like to have him for a guide this morning." Here the
officer turned to the scoutmaster. "And if you have no objection I think
it would be well that those two boys should come with us," he nodded
toward Scouts Warren and Chase. "They can identify the man whom they saw
trying to enter that bungalow last night."
There is nothing at all inspiriting about a man-hunt; so Nixon and Leon
decided when, within an hour, they landed from the police boat on the
familiar salt-marshes high up the river, and silently took their way
across them, in company with Toiney and the policemen, over the uplands
into the woods.
They had come upon the fugitive's boat, hidden among a clump of bushes
near the river. Using that as a starting-point, Toiney followed Dave
Baldwin's trail into the maze of woodland; though how he did so was to
the boy scouts a problem, for to them it seemed blind work.
But the guide in the tasseled cap, blue shirt, and heelless high boots,
would stop now and again at a soft spot on the marshes or uplands, or
when they came to a swampy patch in the woods; at such times he would
generally drop on all fours with a muttered: "Ha! _V'la ses pis!_" in
his queer patois. "Dere's heem step!" And anon: "Dere me fin his feets
again!"
When there was no footprint to guide him Toiney would stoop down and
read the story of the dry pine-needles, just faintly disturbed by the
toe of a rough boot which had kicked them aside a little in passing.
Or he would carefully examine a broken twig, the wood of which, being
whitish and not discolored, showed that it had been recently snapped by
a tread heavier than that of a fox; and again they would hear him mutter
in his quaint dialect: "_Tiens! le tzit ramille casse_: de littal stick
broke! I'll t'ink hees step jus' here--engh?"
It was a lesson in trailing which the two boy scouts never forgot as
they took their way through the thick woods, fairly well known to them
now, past Varney's Paintpot, Rattlesnake Brook, and other points of
interest.
Ere they reached the Bear's Den, however, the trail which Toiney had
been following seemed to turn off at an angle and then double backward
through the woods, in an opposite direction to that in which they had
been pursuing it.
"Mebbe she's no' de same trail?" pondered the guide aloud. "Mebbe dere's
oder man's feets, engh?"
It was now that a sudden idea, a swift memory, struck Scout Warren.
"Say! Starrie," he exclaimed in a low tone to his brother scout. "Do you
remember our looking all over that loggers' camp last year, the shanty
back there in the woods, with the rusty grindstone trough and mountain
of sawdust beside it? We found some fresh tobacco ash on the table and
in one of the bunks which showed that, though the shanty was deserted in
summer, somebody was using it for a shelter at night. That somebody may
have been Dave Baldwin."
"Yes, they say he has spent his time--or most of it--loafing among the
dunes or in the woods," returned Leon, well recalling the incident and
how, too, he had scoffed at the boy scout for taking the trouble to read
the sign story told by every article in and about the rough shanty,
including the overturned trough.
"Eh! what's that, boys?" asked one of the two policemen, catching part
of the conversation.
As in duty bound they told him; and the search party turned in the
direction of the log shanty.
As they surmised it was not empty. On the discolored mattress in the
lower bunk left there by the lumbermen who once occupied it, was
stretched the figure of a man, fast asleep. One foot emerging from a
charred, torn trouser-leg which looked as if it had come into contact
with fire, hung over the edge of the deal crib.
When the party filed into the shanty the sleeper started up and rubbed
his eyes. At sight of the two policemen his smudged face took on a
pinched pallor.
"I didn't do it on purpose!" he cried in the bewilderment of this sudden
awakening, without time to collect his senses. "So help me! I never
meant to set that shed on fire!"
"You were seen hanging round there an hour before the blaze broke out,
and trying to get into the house too," challenged the elder of the
policemen.
Dave Baldwin slipped from the bunk to the ground; he saw that his best
course lay in making a clean breast of last night's proceedings.
"So I was!" he said. "And these two fellows," he pointed to the boy
scouts, "saw me up on the piazza of the house, trying a window. I was
hungry; I'd had nothing to eat all day but the last leg of a woodchuck
that I knocked on the head day before yesterday. I thought the summer
people who had just gone away might have left some canned stuff or
remnants o' food behind 'em. I didn't want to steal anything else, or to
do mischief!" he went on with that same passionate frankness of a man
abruptly startled out of sleep, while the policemen listened patiently.
"I didn't, I tell ye! I'd been hangin' round those Sugarloaf Dunes for
nigh on two weeks, watching the boys who were camping there, having a
ripping good time--doing a lot o' stunts that I knew nothing
about--wishing I'd had the chanst they have now!"
"How came you to go into the shed that was burned down?" asked one of
the officers.
"I was hungry, as I tell you, an' I couldn't get into the house, so I
thought I'd lie down under the nearest cover, that shed, go to sleep an'
forget it. I guess I knocked the ashes out o' my pipe an' dozed. Smoke
an' the smell o' wood burning woke me. I found one side o' the shed was
on fire. Maybe, some one had left an oily rag, or one with turpentine on
it, around, and the spark from my pipe caught it. I don't know! I tried
to stamp out the fire--to beat it out with my hands!" He extended
blistered palms and knuckles. "I've made a mess o' my life I know! But I
ain't a crazy fire-bug!"
"Why didn't you try and get help to fight it?"
"I was too scared. I thought, likely as not, nobody would believe me,
seeing I had a 'reformatory record,'" the youthful vagrant's face
twitched. "I was afraid o' being 'sent up' again, so I hid among the
dunes and crossed to the woods this morning."
"Well, you can tell all that to the judge; you must come with me now,"
said the older policeman inflexibly, not unkindly; he knew that men when
suddenly aroused from sleep usually speak the truth; he was impressed by
the argument of those blistered palms; on the other hand, the youthful
vagrant's past record was very much against him.
But those charred palms were evidence enough for Toiney; though they
might leave the officers of the law unconvinced.
"Ha! _courage_, Dave," he cried, feeling an emotion of pity mingle with
the contempt which he, honest Antoine, had felt for the _vaurien_ who
had caused his old mother's heart to burst. "_Bon courage_, Dave! I'll
no t'ink you do dat, for sure, me. Mebbe littal fire fly f'om you' pipe.
I'll no t'ink you do dat for de fun!"
"We don't think you did it on purpose, Dave," struck in the two boy
scouts, seconding their guide.
Nevertheless, Dave Baldwin passed that night in a prison cell and
appeared before the judge next morning with the certainty confronting
him that he would be remanded to appear before the higher court on the
grave charge of being an incendiary.
And it seemed improbable that bail would be offered for the prisoner, so
that he would be allowed out of jail in the mean time.
Yet bail was forthcoming. A massive, weatherbeaten figure, well known in
this part of Essex County, stood up in court declaring that he was ready
and willing to sign the prisoner's bail bonds. It was Captain Andy
Davis.
And when all formalities had been gone through, when the prisoner was
liberated until such time as his case should come up for trial, Captain
Andy took him in tow.
"You come along home with me, Dave!" he commanded. "I'm going to put it
up to you straight whether you want to live a man's life, or not."
And so he did that evening.
"I've been wanting to get hold of you for some time, Dave Baldwin," said
the sea-captain. "Your father an' I were shipmates together on more'n
one trip. He was a white man, brave an' hard-working; it's hard for me
to believe that there isn't some o' the same stuff in his son."
The youthful ne'er-do-weel was silent. Captain Andy slowly went on:--
"As for the matter of this fire, I don't believe you started it on
purpose. I doubt if the policemen who arrested you do! It's your past
record that's against you. Now! if I see the district attorney, Dave
Baldwin," Captain Andy's eyes narrowed meditatively under the heavy
lids, "and succeed in getting this case against you _nol prossed_--I
guess that's the term the lawyer used--it means squashed, anyhow, do you
want to start over again an' head for some port worth while?"
"Nobody would give me the chance," muttered the younger man huskily.
"I will. I've bought a piece of land over there on the edge of the
woods, lad; it ain't more'n half cleared yet. I'm intending to start a
farm. But I don't know much about farming; that's the truth!" The grand
old Viking looked almost pathetically helpless. "But you've worked on a
farm, Dave, when you were a boy and since: if you want to take hold an'
help me--if you want to stick to work an' make good--this is your
chance!"
An inarticulate sound from the _vaurien_; it sounded like a sob bitten
in two by clenched teeth!
"The two boys who were with the officers who arrested you told me that
you declared you'd been hangin' round the Sugarloaf Dunes lately,
watching those scouts at their signaling stunts an' the like, an'
wishing that you'd had the chance they have now, when you were a boy.
Well! _theirs_ is a splendid chance--better than boys ever had before,
it seems to me--of joining the learning o' useful things with fun."
Captain Andy planted an elbow emphatically upon a little table near him.
"Now! Dave, you don't want to let those boy scouts be the ones to do the
good turns for your old mother that you should do? If you ain't set on
breaking her heart altogether--if you want to be a decent citizen of the
country that raises boys like these scouts--if you want to see your own
sons scouts some day--well, give us your fin, lad!"
The captain's voice dropped upon the last words, the semi-comical
wind-up of a peroration broken and blustering in its earnestness.
There was a repetition of the hysterical sound in Dave Baldwin's throat
which failed to pass his gritting teeth. He did not extend his hand at
Captain Andy's invitation. But his shoulders heaved as he turned his
head away; and the would-be benefactor was satisfied.
"And so Captain Andy is going to stand back of Dave Baldwin and give him
another chance to make good in life!" said the Exmouth doctor, member of
the Local Council of Boy Scouts, when he heard what had come of the
vagrant's arrest. "That's like Andy! And I don't think he'll have much
difficulty with the district attorney; nobody really believes that
Baldwin started that fire maliciously, and the district attorney will be
very ready to listen to anything Captain Andy has to say!"
Here the doctor's eye watered. He was recalling an incident which had
occurred some years before at sea, when the son of that district
attorney, who did not then occupy his present distinguished position,
and the doctor's own son, with one or two other young men of Dave
Baldwin's age, had been wrecked while yachting upon certain ragged rocks
of Newfoundland, owing to their foolhardiness in putting to sea when a
storm was brewing.
At daybreak upon an October morning their buffeted figures were sighted,
clinging to the rocks, by the lookout on the able fishing vessel,
Constellation, of which Captain Andrew Davis was then in command.
The furious gale had subsided. But as Captain Andy knew, the greatest
danger to his own vessel lay in the sullen and terrible swell of the
"old sea" which it had stirred up.
Nevertheless, the Constellation bore down upon the shipwrecked men,
getting as near to them as possible, without being swept on to the rocks
herself.
Then Captain Andy gave the order to put over a dory, stepped into it,
and called for a volunteer. Twice, to and fro through the towering swell
of the old sea, went that gallant little dory. She was smashed to
kindling wood on her second trip, but not before the men in her could be
hauled aboard the Constellation with ropes--not before every member of
the yachting party was saved!
"And I guess if Captain Andy wants a chance to haul Dave Baldwin off the
rocks where the old sea stirred up by the gusts of his own waywardness
and wrongdoing have stranded him, the district attorney won't stand in
the way!" said the doctor to himself.
His surmise proved correct.
* * * * *
It was just one month after the fire upon the dunes that the three
patrols of boy scouts, Owls, Foxes, and Seals, assembled at a point of
rendezvous upon the outskirts of the town, bound off upon a long
Saturday hike through the October woods.
But some hearts in the troop were at bottom heavy to-day, though on the
surface they rose above the feeling.
For it was the last woodland hike, for the present, that Scout Warren of
the Owls would take with his patrol. The return of his parents from
Europe was expected during the coming week; and he--now with two white
stripes upon his arm, signifying his two years of service in the Boy
Scouts of America, wearing also the patrol leader's bars and first-class
scout badge--would rejoin his Peewit Patrol in Philadelphia.
However, his comrades' regrets were softened by Nixon's promise that he
would frequently visit the Massachusetts troop with which he had spent
an exciting year, and which, unintentionally, he had been instrumental
in forming.
And on this brilliant October Saturday Assistant Scoutmaster Toiney
Leduc, perceiving that the coming parting was casting a faint shadow
before, exerted himself to banish that cloudlet as the troop started on
its hike.
"_Houp-e-la!_ We arre de boy! We arre de stuff! We arre de bes' scout
ev'ry tam'!" he shouted with an _esprit de corps_ which found its echo
in one breast at least--that of the terrier, Blink, who to-day capered
with the troop as its mascot. "We arre de bes' scout; _n'est-ce pas_,
mo' smarty?" And Toiney embraced Harold, marching at his side--Harold,
whose lips turned up to-day and every day now in the scout's smile, for
since the night of the dune fire had not each of his comrades and the
scoutmasters too, kept impressing on him that he had "behaved like a
little man and a good scout" at duty's call!
There were individuals among the onlookers, too, watching the three
patrols march out of the town that morning, who shared Toiney's
primitive conceit that they were the "best scouts"; or at least fairly
on the way to being a model troop.
Little Jack Baldwin, gazing at his rescuers, Scouts Warren and Chase,
Marcoo and Colin Estey, marching two and two at the head of the leading
patrol, clapped his hands and almost burst his heart in wishing that he
could be twelve years old to-morrow so that he might enlist as a
tenderfoot scout.
Whereupon his old grandmother smilingly bade him "take patience," for
the two years which now separated him from his heart's desire would not
be long in passing.
And the boy scouts, as they raised their broad-brimmed hats to old Ma'am
Baldwin, saw a happier look upon her face than it had ever worn before,
to their knowledge.
Farther on they came upon the explanation of this! They were taking a
different route to-day from that which they usually followed in entering
the woods. About a mile from the town they struck a partial clearing,
where the land, not yet entirely relieved of timber, was evidently being
gradually converted into a farm.
As the scouts approached they heard the ringing strokes of a woodsman's
axe, and presently came upon a perspiring young man, putting all his
strength into felling a stubborn oak-tree.
"Hullo, Dave; how goes it?" cried the scoutmaster, halting with his
troop.
"Fine!" came back the panting answer from the individual engaged in this
scouting or pioneering work, who was the former _vaurien_, Dave Baldwin.
"Find this better than loafing about the dunes, eh?"
"Well! I should say so," came the answer with an honest smile.
But the boy scouts were hardly noticing Dave Baldwin: Owls, Foxes, and
Seals, they were gazing in transfixed amusement at their hero-in-chief,
Captain Andy, owner of this half-cleared land.
He, who in his seagoing days had been known by such flattering titles as
the Grand Bank Horse, the Ocean Patrol, and the like, was seated in the
midst of a half-acre of pasture land, holding on like grim death to one
end of a twenty-foot rope coiled round his hand, the hemp's other
extremity being hitched to the leg of a very lively red cow which
presently dragged him the entire length of the pasture and then across
and across it, in obedience to her feminine whims.
"She'll be the death o' me, boys!" he shouted comically to the convulsed
scouts. "Great Neptune! I'd rather take a vessel through the breakers on
Sable Island Bar than to be tied to her heels for one day."
"For pity's sake! Hold on to her, Cap!" Dave Baldwin paused in his
energetic tree-felling. "Yesterday, she got into that little plowed
field that I'd just seeded down with winter rye, and thrashed about
there!"
"Ha! I'll t'ink you go for be good _habitant_--farmer--Dave," broke in
Toiney suddenly and genially. "I'll t'ink you get dere after de w'ile,
engh?"
It was plain to each member of the troop that so far as Dave himself was
concerned he was already "getting there,"--reaching the goal of an
honest, industrious manhood.
The triple responsibility of starting a farm, directing the energies of
his benefactor, and combating the cow, was rapidly making a man of him.
They heard the virile blows of his axe against the tree-trunk as they
marched on their woodland way. And their song floated back to him:--
"At duty's call, with a smile for all,
The Scout will do his part!"
Dave Baldwin paused for a minute to listen; then, as he swung his axe in
a tremendous, final blow against the tottering oak, he too broke
triumphantly into the refrain:--
"And we'll shout, shout, shout,
For the Scout, Scout, Scout,
For the Scouts of the U.S.A!"
THE END