Chapter XII: The Christmas Brigade

"Estu preta!" During the days that followed, while the fall season was merged in winter, the Owls who had passed their outdoor tests in Sparrow Hollow, six of whom were tenderfeet no longer, but second-class scouts, did try to live up to their hearty motto. And this not only in the development of their strong young bodies by exercise and drill, so that every expanding muscle was under control, not only in the training of their mental faculties toward keen observation and alert action, but also in the chivalrous practice of the little every-day kindness to man or beast--almost too trivial to be noticed, perhaps, yet preparing the heart for the rendering of a supreme good turn!

Thus the Owl Patrol presently began to be recognized as a patriotic and progressive force. The Improvement Society of the little town sought its cooperation, and it soon became "lots more fun" to the boy scouts to lend a hand in making that too staid town a more beautiful and lively place to live in than to pile--as had often been the case formerly--destruction on its dullness.

Under the direction of their energetic young scoutmaster they engaged in other crusades too, besides that against things ugly and retarding, in crusades for the rescue of many a needless and undue sufferer of the animal kingdom, their most noted enterprise along these lines being an attack upon the use of the steel trap among boys, especially those of the woodland farms, whereby many a little fur-bearing animal met its slow end in suffering unspeakable.

The use of this steel-jawed atrocity was bad enough in the hands of the one or two adult professional trappers of the neighborhood who visited their traps regularly. (And it is to be hoped that the Boy Scouts of America, who champion the cause of their timid little brothers of the woods, will some day sweep this barbarous contrivance altogether from the earth!) But its use by irresponsible boys who set the traps in copse or thicket, and, in the multitudinous interests of boydom, frequently forgot all about them for days--leaving the little animal luckless enough to be caught to suffer indefinitely--is a cruelty too heinous to flourish upon the same free soil that yields such a fair growth of chivalry as that embodied in the Scouts of the U.S.A.

One or two of the Owls, who shall remain incognito, had possessed such traps in the past: now, they took them out into a back yard, shattered them with a hammer, relegated the fragments to a refuse heap, and instituted a zealous crusade against the use of the steel trap by non-scouts of the neighboring farms, such as Godey Peck and his gang.

There was a hand-to-hand skirmish over this matter before the Owl Patrol had its way; and the result thereof gave Godey cause for reflection.

"It hasn't made 'softies' of 'em anyhow, this scout movement," he soliloquized. "They got the better _of us_. And they seem to have such ripping good times, hiking an' trailing! But--"

The demurring "but" in this boy's mind sprang from the proviso that if he enlisted in the Boy Scouts of America, he would be obliged, like Leon, to part with his gun. Also, from a feeling that he would be debarred in future from the planning of such lawless escapades as playing stowaway aboard an unlaunched vessel; a scheme, it may be said, which was never carried through, being nipped in the bud by watchful shipwrights!

Godey Peck was on the fence with regard to the new movement. And he did not yet know on which side he would drop down. Meanwhile from his wavering point of indecision, beset with discomfort, he soothed his feelings by renewed and vehement shouts of "Tin Scouts! Tin Soldiers!" whenever a khaki uniform and broad drab hat hove in view.

He had ample opportunity to air his feeble-shafted malice during the week preceding Christmas, for scouts, in uniform and out of it, were constantly to be seen engaged in "hifalutin stunts," according to Godey, which meant that they had been organized into a brigade by the scoutmaster for the doing of sundry and many good turns befitting the season.

It might be only the carrying of parcels, for a heavy-laden woman, who had visited a distant city on a shopping expedition, from the little railway station on the edge of the yellow wintry salt-marshes to her home! Or the bearing of gifts from a benevolent individual or society to some poor or solitary human brother or sister who otherwise might forget the meaning of Christmas.

It was on behalf of one such person that Corporal Leon Chase--detailed for duty on this brigade--took counsel with his mother on the afternoon of Christmas Eve.

"You don't suppose that _she'll_ stay alone in that old baldfaced house to-day and to-morrow, do you, mother?" he said, rather ambiguously. "The town authorities ought to forbid her living on there all by herself; she'll be snowed in pretty soon if this cold snap continues. Why! the river is all frozen over--ice fairly firm too. I'm going skating by an' by."

"I'd wait until it is a little more solid, if I were you," returned the mother anxiously. "You know our brackish ice is apt to be treacherous; the salt in the water softens it, so your father says, renders it more porous and unsafe. I suppose you were speaking of old Ma'am Baldwin. I don't see what the authorities can do. They can't force her into an institution; she owns that old house. And I don't know that her daughter's husband--little Jack's father--wants her in his home. It's too bad that her son Dave should have turned out such a good-for-nothing! Trouble about him has aged her, I guess; she's not as old as she seems."

Then Starrie Chase inveigled his dimpling mother into a pantry and, while she made passes at him with a rolling-pin, proceeded to whisper in her ear--with a measure of embarrassment, for he was not accustomed to himself in the role of alms-bearer. But in a shadowy corner within him, once tenanted by Malign Habit, there still lurked a vision which sprang out on him at times, of an old woman raising her feeble arm to ward him off: it caused him to grit his teeth and mutter: "I wish I could do something more than to chop her wood occasionally!" And vaguely the mental answer would come: "_Estu preta!_ At a time when you least expect it, you may find yourself up against the Big Minute!"

And in the mean time Starrie cornered his mother in the pantry--floury shrine of Christmas culinary rites!--and presently listened, well-pleased, to her answer:--

"Yes! I'm glad that you put it into my head, son. I'll pack some things into a basket for her, and you can take it across the marshes now. It must be bitterly lonely for her, poor old woman! And oh! Leon, as you'll be in that direction, could you go on into the woods and get me some red berries for Christmas decorations?"

"Sure, mum!" And Leon stepped forth to speak to Colin Estey, who was awaiting him at the rear of the Chase homestead, exercising in a preliminary canter a new pedalomotor which Santa Claus, masquerading as the expressman, had dropped at his home a little too soon.

"Take care you don't run into a tree, smash it up, and drive a splinter through your nose, as Marcoo did when he got his, last year!" admonished Starrie. "Say! Col, I can't go skating for a little while: I'm bound for the woods first to get some alder-berries for decorations. Want to come?"

"Guess so!"

"You can leave that 'pedalmobile' here. Wait a minute! Mother's just putting some Christmas 'grub,' mince-pies an' things, into a basket for old Ma'am Baldwin; we'll deposit it at her door as we go along!"

"How'd it be to write on it, 'Merry Christmas from the Owls'?" suggested young Colin whimsically: "that would keep her guessing; she'd maybe think birds had come out o' the woods to feed her as they did Elijah or Elisha of old."

So a card was tacked to the basket, on which was traced with a stub-end of colored chalk the outline of a perching owl, highly rufous as to plumage, with the proposed salutation beneath it.

But the two Owls who placed the gift did not find the recipient at home. That baldfaced house beyond the frost-spiked marshes was empty, its paintless door, half screened by the icy boughs of the wind-beaten apple-tree, fast locked.

"I guess she's gone over to the town to spend Christmas Eve with her daughter," suggested Colin. "She dotes on her gran'son, little Jack Barry; he's quite a boy for nine years old! What shall we do with the basket?"

"Raise that kitchen window an' slip it inside--the fastening's broken!"

"Say! but you're as barefaced as the house." Colin hugged himself with a sense of having got off a good joke as he watched Leon boldly raise the loose window and deposit the present within. "Let's put for the woods now!" he added, the deed accomplished.

And the two scouts climbed the uplands toward those midwinter woods that crowned the heights in dismantled majesty.

But they were not robbed of beauty, the December woods: the frosty sunshine knew that as it picked out the berry-laden black alders displaying their coral branches against the velvet background of a pine, and embraced the regiment of hemlock bushes, green dwarfs which, together with their full-sized brothers, held the fort for spring against all the hosts of winter.

"Whee-ew! I think the woods are just dandy at this time o' year!" Leon led a whistling onslaught upon the vividly laden black alder bushes, while the white gusts of the boys' breath floated like incense through the coral and evergreen sanctuary of beauty, guarded by the silvery pillars of white birch-trees, where, in the bare forest, Nature had not left herself without a witness to joy and color.

"These berries are as red as Varney's Paintpot," laughed Colin by and by, as the two scouts retraced their steps across the salt-marshes, crunching underfoot the frozen spikes of yellow marsh-grass. "Well, we had a great time on that day when we found the old Paintpot--though we succeeded in getting lost!"

"We surely did! I wonder if the frost will hold, so that we'll have some good skating after Christmas? It's freezing now." Leon's gaze strayed ahead to the solid white surface of the tidal river, stained with amber by the setting sun.

They were within a hundred yards of it by this time, and caught the shrill cries and yells of boyish laughter from youthful skaters who careered and pirouetted at a short, safe distance from the bank. But a clear view of what was going on was shut off from the two berry-laden scouts, crossing the saffron marshes at a leisurely pace, by some tumble-down sheds that intervened between them and the river.

"Well, the kids seem to be having a good time on the ice anyhow--though I don't think it can be very firm yet. Whew! what's that?" exclaimed Colin suddenly, as a piercing cry came ringing from the river-bank whereon each blade of the coarse beach-grass glittered like a jeweled spike under the waning sunlight.

"Oh! _somebody_ is blowing off the smoke of his troubles," laughed Leon unconcernedly.

The afternoon was so sharply delectable, with the sky all pale gold in the west, flinging them a remote, lukewarm smile like a Christmas greeting from some half-reminiscent friend, the hearts of the two scouts reflecting the beauty of the Christmas woods were so elated that they could not all in a moment slide down from Mount Happiness into the valley where danger and pain become realities.

But _now_ a volley of cries, frenzied and appealing, rang out over the salt-marshes. Mingling with them--outshrilling them--came a call which made each scout jump as if an arrow had struck him.

It was the weird hoot of an owl uttered by a human throat, shrill with desperation, the signal call of the Owl Patrol--but with a violent note of distress in it such as to their ears had never sharpened it before.

"_Gee whiz!_ Something's wrong--something's up! I'll wager 'twas Nix Warren who hooted that time!"

Starrie Chase dropped his coral-laden branches upon the frozen ground.

"The Owls to the rescue!" he cried, and dashed toward the frozen river-bank.