Chapter X: The Baldfaced House

But Leon did not study signaling and the Morse alphabet that afternoon. He was presently dispatched by his father, who owned a pleasant home on the outskirts of the town, on an errand to a farm some two miles distant on the uplands that skirted the woods.

The afternoon had all the spicy beauty of early November, with a slight frost in the air. The fresh breeze laughed like a tomboy as it romped over the salt-marshes. Each eddying dimple in the tidal river shone like a star sapphire, while the broad, brackish channel wound in and out between the marshes with as many wriggles as a lively trout.

"Those little creeks look like runaways," thought Leon as he paused upon the uplands and beamed down upon the wide panorama of golden marsh-land and winding water. "They're for all the world like schoolboys that have cut school, giggling an' running to hide!" His eye dreamily followed the course of many a truant creek that half-turned its head, looking under the tickling sunbeams as if it were glancing back over its shoulder, while it burrowed into the marshes vainly trying to hide where the relentless schoolmaster, called, for want of a better name, Solar Attraction, might not find it and compel its return to the ocean.

"And the Sugarloaf Sand-Dunes; don't they look fine?" reflected the boy scout further, his eye traveling off downstream to where the curving tidal channel broadened into pearly plains of water, bounded at one distant point, near the juncture of river and sea, by a dazzlingly white beach.

There the fine colorless sand, which when viewed closely had very much the hue of skim milk, the white being shot with a faint gray-blue tinge, had been piled by the winds of ages into tall sand-hills, into pyramids and columns: one dazzling pillar, in especial, being named the Sugarloaf from its crystalline whiteness, had given its name to the whole expanse of dune and beach.

The tall Sugarloaf gleamed in the distance now like a snowy lighthouse whose lamps are sleeping, presiding over the mouth of the tidal river; its brother sand-hills capped by vegetation might have been the pure bright cliffs of some fairy shore.

The boy scout stood for many minutes upon the uplands, gazing afar, his mouth open as if he were physically drinking in that distant beauty.

"Gee whiz! this is gr-reat; isn't it, Blinkie?" he murmured to the squatting dog by his side. "I never before saw that old Sugarloaf look as it does to-day; did you, Mr. Dog?"

It had appeared just as radiantly beautiful, off and on, during all the seasons of Leon's life. But his powers of observation had not been trained as was the case of late. In the years prior to his becoming a scout, when his inseparable companion on uplands and marsh had been a shotgun--from the time he was permitted free use of one--and the all-absorbing idea in his mind how to contrive a successful shot at shore bird or animal, he had gone about "lak wit' eye shut," so far as many things just now beginning to fill him with a wonderful, speechless gladness were concerned.

"Well, we're not heading for that farmhouse, are we, pup?" he said at length, turning from the contemplation of runaway creeks and radiant dunes to the completion of his father's errand.

But the sunlit beauty at which he had been gazing coursed through his every vein, finding vent in a curly, ecstatic whistle that ascended in spirals until it touched the high keynote of exultation and there hung suspended; while the rest of the trip to that upland farmhouse was accomplished in a series of broad jumps, the terrier being as wild with delight as his master.

The errand performed and the boy scout having put in half an hour condescendingly amusing the farmer's two small children, while Blink exchanged compliments with his kind, master and dog started upon the return walk.

"Oh! it's early yet; don't you want to come a little way into the woods, doggie?" said Leon, doubling backward after they had taken a few steps. "We haven't had many runs together lately. Your nose has been out of joint; poor pup!" stooping to caress the terrier. "Toiney says we can't take you on our scout hikes, because you'd scare every 'littal wil' an-ni-mal' within a mile. You would, too; wouldn't you? But there's an outdoor scout meeting to-night to be held over in Sparrow Hollow, each fellow lighting his own camp-fire--using not more than two matches--and cooking his own supper. And you may come. Yes, I said you might come!" as the dog, gyrating like a feather, seized his coat-sleeve between strong white teeth in his eagerness not to be excluded from any more fun that might be afoot.

They were soon on the sere skirts of the woodland, prancing through leafy drifts.

"We can't go far," said Leon. "We must get back to the town and buy our half-pound of beefsteak that we're to cook without the use of any ordinary cooking-utensil, and so pass one of the tests for becoming a second-class scout. I'll divvy up with you, pup! But whew! isn't this just fine?... The woods in November can put it all over the September woods to my mind."

He added the last words to himself. There was something about the rugged strength of the stripped trees, with the stealing blue haze of evening softening their bareness, about the evergreen grandeur of pine and hemlock lording it over their robbed brethren, about the drab, parchment-like leaves clinging with eerie murmur to the oak-tree, and the ruddy twigs of bare berry-bushes, that appealed to the element of rugged daring in the boy himself.

He could not so soon break away from the woods as he had intended, though he only explored their outskirts.

Dusk was already falling when he found himself on the open uplands again, bound back toward the distant town.

"The scouts are to start for Sparrow Hollow at six o'clock: we must hustle, if we want to start with them," he said to the dog. "The only way we can make it is by taking a short cut across the marshes and wading through the river; that would be a quick way of reaching the town and the butcher's shop, to buy our beefsteak," muttering rapidly, partly to himself, partly to his impatient companion. "The tide is full out now, the water will be shallow; I can take off my shoes and stockings and carry you, pup. Who cares if it's cold?"

The boy scout, with an anticipatory glow all over him, felt impervious to any extreme of temperature as he bounded down the uplands, with the breeze--the freshening, freakish breeze--driving across the salt-marshes directly in his face, racing through every vein in him, stirring up a whirligig within, presently bringing waste things to the top even as it stirred up dust and refuse in the roadway.

"Hullo! there's the old _baldfaced house_," he cried suddenly to the dog. "Here we are on our old stamping-ground, Blink! Wonder if 'Mom Baldwin' is doing her witch stunts still? We haven't said 'Howdy!' to her for a long time; have we, pup?"

Slackening pace, for that fickle breeze was blowing away many things that he ought to have remembered, among them the lateness of the hour, he turned aside a few steps to where a lonely old house stood at the foot of the slope as the uplands melted into the salt-marshes.

It was a shallow shell of a dwelling--all face and no rear apparently--and that face was bald, almost stripped of paint by the elements. Just as storm-stripped was the heart of the one old woman who lived in it, and whom Leon had been wont to call a "solitary crank!"

To the neighborhood generally she was known as Ma'am Baldwin, mother of the young scape-grace, Dave Baldwin, who had so troubled the peaceful town by his pranks that he had finally been shut up in a reformatory, and who was now, a year after his release, a useless vagrant, spending, according to report, most of his time loafing between the white sand-dunes on one side of the river and the woods on the other--incidentally breaking his mother's heart at the same time.

She had lived here in the old baldfaced house, with him, her youngest boy, the child of her middle age, until his wild doings brought the law's hand upon him. After his imprisonment shame prevented her leaving the isolated dwelling and going to live with her married daughter near the town, though that daughter's one child, her little grandson Jack, possessed all the love-spots still green in her withered heart.

In her humiliation and loneliness "Mom Baldwin," as the boys called her, had become rather eccentric.

She had more than once been seen by those town boys--Leon and his gang--stationed behind the smeared glass of her paintless window, doing strange signaling "stunts" with a lighted lantern, whose pale rays described a circle, dipped and then shot up as, held aloft in her bony old hand, it sent an amber gleam over the salt-marshes.

"She's a witch--a witch like Dark Tammy, who lived on the edge of the woods over a hundred years ago and who washed her clothes at the Witch Rock," whispered Starrie Chase and his companions one to another as they lay low among the rank grass of the dark marshes, spying upon her. "She's a witch, working spells with that lantern!"

Older people surmised that she was signaling to her vagabond son, who might be haunting the distant marshes, trying to lure him home; shame and grief on his account had half-unbalanced her, they said.

But the boys pretended to stick to their own superstitious belief, because, to them, it offered some shabby excuse for tormenting her.

Leon Chase in particular made her rank little garden his nightly stamping-ground, and was the most ingenious in his persecuting attentions.

He it was who devised the plan of anchoring a shingle or other light piece of wood by a short string to the longest branch of the apple-tree that grew near her door.

When the wind blew directly across the marshes, as it did this evening, and drove against that paintless door, it operated the impromptu knocker; the wooden shingle would keep up an intermittent tapping, playing ticktack upon the painted panels all night.

Sometimes Ma'am Baldwin had come to the door a dozen times and peered forth over the dark salt-marshes, believing that it was her vagrant son who demanded entrance, while the perpetrators of the trick, Leon Chase, Godey Peck and others of their gang--tickled in the meanest part of them by the fact that they "kept her guessing"--hid among the marsh-grass and watched.

Hardly any prank could have been more senseless, childish, and unfeeling. Yet Starrie Chase had actually believed that he got some sham excitement out of it.

And to-night as his feet pressed his old stamping-ground beneath that apple-tree beside the house, while the wind raked the marshes and whipped his thoughts into dusty confusion, the old waste impulses which prompted the trick were mysteriously whirled uppermost again.

The mischievous tide rip boiled in him once more.

Just as he became conscious of its yeasty bubbling, his foot touched something on the ground--a hard winter apple. He picked it up and threw it against the house, imposing silence on his dog by dictatorial gesture and word.

There was a stir within the paintless dwelling. Through the blurred window-panes he caught sight of a shrunken form moving.

"Ha! there's the old 'witch' herself. She looks like a withered corn-stalk with all those odds and ends of shawls dangling about her. Ssh-ssh! Blinkie. Down, doggie! _Quiet, sir!_"

Leon's fingers groped upon the ground, where twilight shadows were merging into darkness, for another apple. Since he enlisted as a boy scout mischief had been sentenced and shut up in a dark little cell inside him. But Malign Habit, though a captive, dies hard.

Those seeking fingers touched something else, a worm-eaten shingle blown from the old roof. He picked it up and considered it in the darkness, while his left hand felt in his pocket for some twine.

"Gee! it would be a great night for that trick to work," he muttered with a low chuckle that had less depth to it than a parrot's. "The wind is just in the right direction--driving straight through the house. Eh, Blink! Shall we 'get her on a string' again?"

The dog whined softly with impatience. Of late, in his short excursions with his master, he had not been used to such stealthy doings. With the exception of the trailing expeditions through the woods from which canines were debarred, movements had been open, manly, and aboveboard since the master became a boy scout.

But Leon had forgotten that he was a scout, had momentarily forgotten even the outdoor test in Sparrow Hollow, and the necessary preparations therefor.

His fingers trifled with the shingle and string. His brain going ahead of those fingers was already attaching the one to the other when--the paintless door opened and Ma'am Baldwin stepped out.

She did look like a wind-torn corn-stalk, short and withered, with the breeze catching at the many-colored strips of shawls that hung around her, uniting to protect her somewhat against that marsh-wind driving straight from the river through her home.

From her left hand drooped a pale lantern, the one with which boyish imagination had accused her of working spells.

It made an island of yellow light about her as she stepped slowly forth into the dusk. And Leon saw her raise her right arm to her breast with that timid, pathetic movement characteristic of old people--especially of those whom life has treated harshly--as if she was afraid of what might spring upon her out of the gusty darkness.

Not for nothing had Starrie Chase been for two months a boy scout! Prior to those eight weeks of training that feebly defensive arm would have meant naught to him; hardly would he have noticed it. But just as his eyes had been opened to consider at length, with a dazzled thrill, that distant Sugarloaf Sand-Pillar and other of Nature's beauties as he had seldom or never contemplated them before; so those scout's eyes were being trained to remark each significant gesture of another person and to read its meaning.

Somehow, that right arm laid across an old woman's breast told a tale of loneliness and lack of defenders which made the boy wince. The distance widened between his two hands holding respectively the shingle and string.

There was a wood-pile within a few yards of him. Ma'am Baldwin stepped toward it, breathing heavily and ejaculating: "My sen-ses! How it do blow!" While Leon restrained the terrier with a "_Quiet_, Blink! Don't go for her!"

Ma'am Baldwin, intent on holding fast to her shawls and procuring some chunks from the wood-pile--nearsighted as she was, to boot--did not notice the boy and dog standing in the blackness beneath the bare apple-tree.

She set the lantern atop of the pile. As she bent forward, groping for a hatchet, its yellow rays kindled two other lanterns in her eyes by whose light the lurking boy gazed through into her heart and saw for a brief moment how tired, lonely, and baffled it was.

At the glimpse he straightened up very stiffly. There was a gurgle in his throat, a stirring as of panic at the roots of his hair.

But not scare produced the rigidity! It was caused by a sudden great throe within which scraped his throat and sent a dimness to his eyes. The captive, Malign Habit, imprisoned before, was dying now in the grasp of the Scout.

To put it otherwise,--at sight of an old woman's arm pathetically shielding her breast, at a startled peep into her heart, the tight little bud of chivalry in Leon, watered of late by his scout training, fostered by the good turn to somebody every day, burst suddenly, impetuously into flower!

With a low snarl at himself, he thrust the coil of string deep into his pocket, and flung the shingle as far as he could into the night.

"Ughr-r-r! Guess I was meaner'n you'd be, Blink!" he muttered, swallowing the discovery that sometimes of yore, in his dealings with his own kind, he had been less of a gentleman than his dog.

To which Blink, freed from restraint, returned a sharp, glad "Wouf!" that said: "I'm glad you've come to your senses, old man!"

"Hullo! 'Mom Baldwin,'" Leon stepped forward as the bowed woman started at the monosyllabic bark, and peered fearfully into the darkness. "Don't you want me to split those chunks for you? You can't manage the hatchet."

Ma'am Baldwin's experience had taught her to distrust boys--Leon especially! As her peering eyes recognized him, she backed away, raising her right arm to her breast again with that helpless gesture of defense.

Starrie Chase blenched in turn. That pathetic old arm warding him off hurt him more at the core than a knockdown blow from a stronger limb.

But remembering all at once that he was a scout, trained to prompt action, he picked up the hatchet where she had dropped it, and set to work vigorously, chopping wood.

"Now! I'll carry these chunks into the house for you," he said presently. "Aw! let me. I'd just as soon do it!"

Ma'am Baldwin had no alternative. Leon pushed the paintless door open and carried the wood inside, while she hobbled after him, well-nigh as much astonished as if Gabriel's trump had suddenly awoke the echoes of the gusty marshland.

The scout went to and fro for another ten minutes, splitting more chunks, piling them ready to her hand within.

Meanwhile his beneficiary, the old woman, seemed to have got a little light on the surprising situation. Grunting inarticulately, chewing her bewilderment between her teeth, she disappeared into a room off the kitchen and returned holding forth a ten-cent piece to her knight.

"No, thanks! I'm a boy scout. We don't take money for doing a good turn." Leon shook his head. "Say! this old house is so draughty; you burn all the wood you want to-night; I'll run over to-morrow or next day an' split some more. Is there anything else I can do for you before I go? You've got enough water in from the well," he peered into the water-pail, which winked satisfactorily.

Ma'am Baldwin had sunk upon a chair, alternately looking in perplexity at the energetic boy, and listening to the frisky gusts: "My sen-ses! Whatever's come over you, Leon?" she gasped; and then wailingly: "Deary me! if it should blow up a gale to-night, some things in this house'll ride out."

"No, it isn't going to blow up a storm," Leon reassured her. "The wind's not really high, only it gets such a rake over the marshes. Here, I'll tie these old shutters together for you, the fastening is broken," and the coil of string was produced from his pocket for a new purpose. "But it must be _awful_ lonely for you, living here by yourself, Ma'am Baldwin. You'll be snowed in later on; we'll have to come and dig you out."

Still chewing the cud of her bewilderment, she stared at him, mumbling, nodding, and stroking the gray hair from her forehead with nervous fingers. But there was a humid light in the old eyes that spilled over on the boy as he worked.

"Why don't you go to live with your daughter an' your grandson in the town?" went on Leon as he tied together the last pair of flapping shutters. "And you're so fond of little Jack too; he's a nice kid!"

"So he is!" nodded the grandmother; a change overspread her entire face now, she looked tender, grandmotherly, half-hopeful, as if for the moment trouble on behalf of her ne'er-do-well son was forgotten. "Well! perhaps I will move there before the winter sets in hard, Leon. I'm not so smart as I was. I'm sure I don't know how to thank you! Good-night!"

"Good-night!" returned the scout. "You can untie those shutters easily enough in the morning."

And he found himself outside again upon the dark marshland, with the obedient terrier who had trotted at his heels during the late proceedings, waltzing excitedly at his side.

"Ah, la! la! as Toiney says, it's too late now, Blink, for us to put back to the town to buy our supper--half a pound of beefsteak and two potatoes, to be cooked over each one's special fire," muttered the boy, momentarily irresolute. "Well! we'll have to let the grub go, and race back across the uplands, over to the Hollow. Stir your trotters, Mr. Dog!"

As the two regained the crest of the hilly uplands, Leon paused for breath. On his left hand stretched the dark, solemn woods, where the breeze hooted weirdly among leafless boughs. On his right, beyond upland and broad salt-marsh, wound the silver-spot river in whose now shallow ripples bathed a rising moon.

Quarter of a mile ahead of him a rosy flush upon the cheek of darkness told that in the sheltered hollow, between a clump of pines that served as a windbreak and the woods, the Owls' camp-fires were already blazing.

"Tooraloo! I feel as if I could start my fire to-night without using a match at all--just by snapping my fingers at it, or with a piece of damp bark and a snowball, as the woodsmen say," he confided half-audibly to the dog.

Whence this feeling of prowess, of being a firebrand--a genial one--capable of kindling other and better lights in the world than a camp-fire?

Starrie Chase did not analyze his sensations of magnificence, which bloomed from a discovery back there on the marshes of the secret which is at the root of the Boy Scout Movement, at the base of all Christian Chivalry, at the foundation of golden labor for mankind in every age: namely, that the excitement of helping people is vastly, vitally, and blissfully greater than the spurious excitement of hurting them!