COMFORTING TUBBY
“Hey! What does this mean, knocking our house to flinders that way? Hold
up, you, and tell us what you’re aiming at. A nice old farm bull you
are, to be treating strangers so rough! Say, look at the dead leaves
catching on fire, will you, boys!”
“Get busy, everybody!” called out Rob, already commencing to pull his
shoes on as fast as he could, so that he might creep out from the
wreckage of the brush shanty and prevent a forest fire from starting.
Andy followed suit. Tubby, not having been wise enough to keep his
footwear close to his hand, had some difficulty in finding his shoes.
Consequently when he did finally emerge, looking like a small edition of
an elephant down on its knees, he found that the others had succeeded in
gathering the scattered firebrands together again, and that some fresh
pine was already flaming up, so dispelling the darkness.
Indeed, the growing warmth of the resurrected fire did not feel
disagreeable in the least, for the night air was exceedingly chilly.
“Great Jupiter! Was that really a Jabberwock?” demanded Tubby, when he
joined the other pair by the fire, holding out his chubby hands to the
warmth as if the sensation felt very good.
“It was a bull moose,” replied Rob, without a moment’s hesitation.
“But what ailed the critter,” demanded Andy, “to make such a savage
attack on our brush shanty, and dash through the half-dead fire like he
did? That’s what I’d like to know. Rob, does a bull moose do such things
always?”
“I’m sure I can’t say,” replied the other. “They are stupid creatures,
I’ve always heard, and apt to do all sorts of queer stunts. It may be
one of the animals could be taken with a mad streak, just as I’ve read a
rhinoceros will do, charging down on a hunter’s camp, and smashing
straight through the white tent as if he felt he had a special grievance
against it. All I know is, that was an old bull moose, for I saw his big
clumsy horns.”
Tubby shook his head, not yet convinced, and mumbled:
“I never saw a Jabberwock. I’m not sure there is any such strange beast
in the world, but that didn’t resemble what I thought a moose was like.”
“You’ll have to prove it to him, Rob,” ventured Andy, “for when Tubby
doubts he is like a wagon stuck in the mud: it takes a mighty heave to
pry him loose.”
Thereupon Rob leaned forward and taking up a blazing brand that would
serve admirably as a torch, he walked around until he found what he was
looking for.
“Come here, both of you, and take a look at this track,” he told them.
“Huh! Looks like the spoor of a farmyard cow, only bigger. The cleft in
the hoof is there, all right; so if a moose really did make that track,
as you say, Rob, then they must belong to the same family of the cloven
hoofs.”
“Here’s another bit of evidence, you see,” continued Rob, bent on
rubbing it in while about the matter. “In passing under this tree the
animal must have scraped his back pretty hard. Here’s a wad of
dun-colored hair clinging to this branch. That proves it to be a moose,
Tubby.”
“What if the old rascal should take a sudden notion to make another
savage attack on our camp?” suggested Andy. “Hadn’t we better get ready
to give him a warm reception, Rob? The law is up on moose and deer now,
I believe. I’d like to drop that old sinner in his tracks. I’m going to
get my gun.”
“No harm in being ready, Andy, though there’s small chance of his
returning,” Rob replied. He, too, crept over to where his rifle lay, and
secured the weapon. “His fury expended itself in that mad rush, I
reckon. He would never dare attack us while the fire is jumping up.”
Nevertheless, the trio sat there for some time on guard. Andy, with the
plea for neutrality still before his mind, and recent events down along
the Mexican border, as read in the daily papers, occurring to him,
called it “watchful waiting.”
“But what are we going to do for a shelter?” bleated Tubby finally, as
if once more finding the temptation to sleep overpowering him.
“Oh, we’ll have to do without, and make the fire take the place of a
brush covering,” remarked Andy superciliously, as became an old and
hardened hunter. “Why, many times I’ve wrapped myself in a blanket, and
with my feet to the blaze slept like a rock! I wonder what time it is
now?”
While Andy was feeling around for his nickel watch, Rob shot a quick
look overhead, to note the position of certain of the planets, which
would give him the points he wanted to know.
“Close to three, I should say,” he hazarded, and presently Andy, on
consulting his dollar timepiece, uttered an exclamation of wonder.
“Why, Rob, you’re a regular wizard!” he broke out with. “It’s that hour
exactly. If you had eyes that could see into my pocket like the
wonderful Roentgen rays, you couldn’t have hit it closer. I guess you
know every star up there, and just where they ought to be at certain
times.”
“It’s easy enough to get the time whenever you can see certain stars,”
explained the scout leader modestly, “though you wouldn’t hit it so
exactly very often as I did then. But as there are some three and a half
hours before dawn comes we might as well soak in a little more of that
good sleep.”
He showed Tubby how to arrange his blanket, and even tucked him in
carefully, with his head away from the fire.
“You’re a mighty good fellow, Rob,” muttered Tubby sleepily, and they
heard no more from him until hours had expired and morning was at hand.
There was no further alarm. The singular old bull moose must have
wandered into other pastures after that mad break. They neither saw nor
heard him again. It was just as well for the same Mr. Moose that he
decided not to repeat his escapade, since he might not have gotten off
so cleverly the next time, with those scouts on the alert, and their
weapons handy for immediate service.
With the coming of morning the three boys awoke, and quickly prepared
breakfast. Rob did not mean to go very far on that day. He believed that
according to his chart and the verbal information he had received, they
were in the immediate vicinity of the deserted logging camp near the
border. He intended to circle around a bit, looking for signs that would
lead them to it. All the while they could also keep on the alert for any
rifle-shot that would indicate the presence of hunters in the
neighborhood.
“There’s that railway whistle again,” remarked Andy, pausing while in
the act of turning a flapjack, in the making of which he professed to be
singularly adroit, so that he seldom lost a chance to mix up a mess for
breakfast when the others would allow him.
“Guess the trains must have been passing all through the night, even if
I didn’t hear any,” confessed Tubby frankly.
“Do you know, fellows,” asked Andy, since confession seemed to rule the
hour, “the first thought that flashed through my head when we were so
suddenly aroused in the night by all that row, was that the bridge had
been dynamited by the German sympathizers, and the guards shot up
sky-high with it. Of course, I quickly realized my mistake as soon as I
glimpsed that pesky old moose lighting out, with the red embers of our
fire scattered among all the dead leaves, and a dozen little blazes
starting up like fun.”
“I wonder has any forest fire ever started in that same way?” ventured
Tubby.
“If you mean through a crazy bull moose ramming through a bed of hot
ashes,” Andy told him, “I don’t believe it ever did. For all we know no
moose ever carried out such a queer prank before last night; even if
such a thing happened, why the hunters would put the fire out, just as
we did.”
“I guess Uncle George would have been tickled to see a big moose at
close quarters like that,” said Tubby. “He’s shot one a year for a long
while past. He stops at that, because he says they’re getting thinned
out up here in Maine, and even over in Canada, too.”
Breakfast over, the boys loitered around for a while. None of them
seemed particularly anxious to be on the move, Andy feeling indifferent,
Rob because he knew they were not going far that day, and Tubby through
an aversion to once more shouldering that heavy pack. In truth, the only
gleam of light that came to Tubby he found in the fact that each day
they were bound to diminish their supply of food, and thus the burden
would grow constantly lighter.
Finally Rob said they had better be making a start.
“Understand, boys,” he told them, with a smile, “we needn’t try for a
record to-day. The fact is, I have reason to believe that old deserted
logging camp must be somewhere around this very spot. So, instead of
striking away toward the west, we’ll put in our time searching for signs
to lead us to it. At any minute we may run across something like a
trail, or a grown-up tote-road, along which we can make our way until we
strike the log buildings where Uncle George said he meant to make his
first stop.”
“Oh! thank you for saying that, Rob,” Tubby burst out with, as his face
radiated his happy state of mind. “For myself I wouldn’t mind if we just
stuck it out here for a whole week, and let Uncle George find us. But
then that wouldn’t be doing the right by my father, so we’ll have to
keep on hunting.”
“I don’t mean to get much further away from the boundary,” continued
Rob, “for what we saw yesterday bothers me. There’s certainly some
desperate scheme brooding; that’s as plain as anything to me.”
“Just to think,” said Tubby, looking around him with a trace of timidity
on his ruddy face and in his round eyes, “we may be close to a nest of
terrible schemers who mean to do something frightfully wicked, and get
poor old Uncle Sam in a hole with the Canadian authorities. Rob,
supposing this job is pulled off, and those Canadians feel mighty bitter
over the breach of neutrality, do you think they’d march right down to
Washington and demand satisfaction? I heard you say they had raised a
force of three hundred thousand and more drilled men, and that beats our
regular army.”
“I guess there’s small chance of such a thing happening, Tubby,” laughed
Andy. “You can let your poor timid soul rest easy. In the first place
nearly all the three hundred thousand men have already been sent across
the ocean to fight the Germans in the French war trenches, or else they
are drilling in England. Then again our cousins across the border are
far too sensible.”
“Don’t worry about that a minute,” he was told. “What we must keep in
mind is that our patriotism may be called on to prevent these men from
breaking our friendly relations with our neighbor, that have stood the
test of time so well. If only we could find your Uncle George, Tubby,
we’d put it up to him what ought to be done.”
“But even if we don’t run across him,” ventured Tubby bravely, “I guess
we’re capable as scouts of taking such a job in hand of our own accord;
yes, and carrying it through to a successful culmination.”
“Hear! hear!” said Andy, who liked to listen to Tubby when the latter
showed signs of going into one of his periodical spasms of
“spread-eagleism” as the thin scout was wont to call these flights of
oratory.
So the morning passed away, and while they had not covered a great
extent of territory by noon, at least the boys had kept up a persistent
search for signs that would tell of the presence near by of the
abandoned logging camp.