Chapter XVI: The Pup-Seal's Creek

The music of "Taps" was eclipsed by the blither music of "Reveille," the morning blast blown by Leon standing in front of the white tents, the sands beneath his feet jeweled by the early sunshine, the blue ribbon attached to his bugle flirting with the breeze that capered among the plumy hillocks.

The tide which had ebbed and flowed again since midnight--when the last excited scout had fallen asleep lulled by its full purr--broke high upon the beach, where the white sands gleamed through its translucent flood like milk in a crystal vase.

Far away in dim distance, higher up the tidal river upon its other side, beyond the plains of water, the woods which enclosed Varney's Paintpot and the cave called the Bear's Den smiled remotely through a pearly veil of haze.

And all the waking glee of tide, dunes, and woods was personified in the boy bugler's face.

The sight of him as he stood there, face to the tents where his comrades scrambled up from cot or ground, his brown eyes snapping and flashing under the scout's broad hat, with the delight of having found an absorbing interest which stimulated and turned to good account every budding activity within him--that sight would have made the veriest old Seek-sorrow among men take heart and feel that a new era of chivalry was in flower among the Scouts of the U.S.A.

And the old religious reverence, that fortifying kernel of knighthood, was not neglected by this boy scout patrol.

Bareheaded, and in line with their scoutmasters presently, while their eyes gazed off over the sparkling dunes and crystal tide-stretches, they repeated in unison the Lord's Prayer, offering morning homage to the Power, dimly discerned, of whom and through whom and to whom are all things. Of his, the Father's, presence chamber, gladness and beauty stand at the threshold!

"_Now_, for our early swim! The tide's just right. Come along, Harold; I'm going to give _you_ your first swimming-lesson; and I expect you'll be a star pupil!" cried Nixon, the patrol leader, when the brief adoration was over. "What! you don't want to learn to swim? Nonsense! You _are_ going into that dandy water. Oh! that's not a scout's mouth, Harold."

And the corners of Harold's mouth, which had drooped with fear of this new experience, curled up in a yielding grin.

Once he was in the invigorating salt water, feeling the boisterous tidal ripples, fresh and not too cold, rise about his body, the timid lad underwent another lightning change, just as at the moment of his tying the bowline knot, the spirit of his fisherman father became uppermost in him, and he learned to swim almost as easily and naturally as a pup-seal.

The improvement in his condition was such that his brother Owls had won his promise to enter school when it should reopen after this jolly camping period was over. "And if any boy picks on you or teases you, Harold, mind you're to let us know at once, because we're your brother scouts--and he won't try it a second time!" So they admonished him.

Thus Harold, under the Owls' sheltering wing, was gradually losing his inherited and imbibed dread of a crowd, of any gathering of his own kind.

Although this bugbear fear returned upon him a little when, later on that morning, the Fox Patrol, with Godey Peck as its leader, was landed upon the Sugarloaf Dunes from Captain Andy's motor-launch, and still later in the day the Seals rowed across in two large rowboats from certain farms or fishermen's houses upon the opposite side of the river, to join the other two patrols. So that the boy scout troop was complete, and Harold found himself one of twenty-four boisterous, though good-natured, boys upon this strange white beach.

A little homesickness beset him for the farm-clearing in the woods and his grandfather's staid presence, to cure which Scouts Warren and Chase took him off with them in the little rowboat, the Pill, lent by Captain Andy, to explore the tidal river and the little truant creeks that escaped from it to burrow among the salt-marshes.

"We're going to try and hunt up a creamy pup-seal, Harold, and bring it back to camp," said Nixon; and in the excitement of this quest the still shy boy forgot his nervous qualms.

Fortune favored the expedition. It was now between one and two o'clock in the afternoon. The tide, which had been high at six in the morning and again at twelve, was once more on the ebb, as the two elder scouts rowing in leisurely fashion, turned the Pill's snub nose into a pearly creek whose shallow water was clear and pellucid, over its sandy bed.

Hardly half a dozen strokes had they taken between bold marshy banks when, from some half-submerged rocks near the head of the creek, they heard a prolonged and dulcet "Oo-oo-oo-ooo" that might have been the call of a dove, save that it was louder.

"_Hear him?_" cried Leon, shipping his oar in blinking excitement. "That's our pup-seal, Nix! We've got him cornered in this little creek; if he dives, the water is so shallow that we can pick him up from the bottom; and he can't swim fast enough to get away from us--though as likely as not he won't want to!"

The last conjecture proved true. The young seal, little more than two months old, which lay sprawled out, a creamy splotch, upon the low reef which the tide was forsaking, with his baby flippers clinging to the wet rock and his little eyes staring unwinkingly into the sunlight, had not the least objection to human company. He welcomed it.

When the scouts rowed up alongside the ledge he suffered Nixon to lift his moist fat body into the boat, where he stretched himself upon the bottom planks in perfect contentment, and took all the caresses which the three boys lavished upon him like any other lazy puppy.

"Isn't he 'cunning', though?" gasped Harold, trying to lift the youthful mammal into his arms, an attempt which failed because he, the weak one of the Owls, was not strong enough to do so without capsizing the Pill--not because the pup-seal objected. "I thought he'd be a kind of whitish color, eh?" appealing diffidently to Leon.

"So he was, when born; his hair is turning darker now, to a dull yellow; by and by it will be a brownish drab. See, Greerie! his spots are beginning to appear!" Leon ran his finger down the seal's dog-like head and back, already faintly dotted with those round markings which gain for his family the name of the "marbled seal."

"Isn't he a 'sprawly' pup, and so friendly? The other scouts will be 'tickled to death' with him--" Nixon was beginning, when a shadow suddenly fell across the boat and its three occupants, whose attention was entirely upon the young seal.

"Hi, there! You'll get pocketed in this little creek, you fellows--hung up aground here--if you don't look out! Can't you see that the water is leaving you?" cried a harsh voice from the bold marsh-bank which overhung the creek to the right of them, so suddenly that the three jumped.

Looking up, they saw the unkempt figure of a young man, short of stature and showing a hungry leanness about the neck and face. This sudden apparition which had approached noiselessly over the soft marshes, was plainly outlined against the surrounding wildness of salt-marsh and tideway.

Had the little dog-fox which prowled among the moonlit dunes been near, he might have recognized in the shabby figure his brother-prowler of the night before.

Recognition was springing from another source. Starrie Chase caught his breath with such a wild gasp that he rocked the Pill as if a gust had struck it. Something about that stocky figure and in the expression of the face, half wistful, half savage, reminded him overwhelmingly of an old woman whom he had seen issuing, lantern in hand, from her paintless home, and who had raised her trembling arm to her breast at sight of him, Leon.

"Forevermore! it's _Dave Baldwin_," he ejaculated in a whisper audible only to Nixon. "That's who it is--Nix!"

"Don't you see that the tide is leaving you?" snapped the stranger again. "There won't be a teaspoonful of water in this creek presently."

He was looking down at the Pill and its occupants, with a gleam in his eyes fugitive and phosphorescent as a marsh-light, which revealed a new expression upon his mud-smeared face, one of passionate envy--envy of the boy scouts healthily rejoicing over their captive pup-seal.

"Tide leaving us! S-so it is!" Nixon seized an oar as if awakening from a dream. "Thank you for warning us! We don't want to be hung up in the pocket of this little creek--until it rises again!"

"Then pull for all you're worth! Your boat--she's a funny one," broke off the stranger with the ghost of a boyish twinkle in his eye; "she looks as if she was made from a flat-bottomed dory that had been cut in two!"

"So she was, I guess!" Leon too found his voice suddenly.

"Well! luckily for you, she doesn't draw much water; you may scrape by an' get out into the open channel while there's tide enough left to float her!" And with an inarticulate grunt that might have been construed into some sort of farewell, the stranger disappeared over the marshes abruptly as he had come.

Their own plight now engrossed the boys. It was clear that if they did not want to be pocketed in this out-of-the-way creek with their amphibious prize, grounded in the sand for the next five or six hours, without a hope of getting back to their camp on the dunes until the tide should rise again, they certainly must row for all they were worth!

Even as it was, the two older scouts, divesting themselves of shoes and stockings, rolling up their khaki trousers, had to "get out and shove" ere they could propel the flat-bottomed Pill through the mouth of the creek.

"If that fellow hadn't warned us just in time, we'd have been in a bad scrape," said Scout Chase. "We're not out of the misery yet, Nix! See the old mud-shadow poking its nose up on either side of the main channel!"

"Yes, the water on those shallows looks like the inside of an oyster-shell,--thick and iridescent. 'Shove' is the word again, Starrie!" returned his toiling companion, arduously putting that watchword in practice, pushing the little boat containing Harold and the pup-seal (the latter being the only member of the party placidly unmoved by the situation) through the iridescent opaqueness of the ebbing ripples that now barely covered vast silvery stretches of tidal mud.

"Look at that old clam-digger, who has his shack on the white beach, about quarter of a mile from our camp! He's left his boat behind and is wading out to the clam-flats." Nixon paused, with his breast to the boat's stern, in the act of propelling it. "Goody! I'd like to stop and dig clams with him. But we'd never get back to camp! What ho! she sticks again. There! that brings her."

By dint of alternately propelling and rowing the three scouts, with their prize, finally reached the white beach of the dunes before the tide completely deserted them. They brought a full cargo of excitement into camp in their tale of the stranger who had warned them; who, with worthless vagrancy stamped all over him, they felt must be the _vaurien_, Dave Baldwin; and in their engaging prize, the flippered pup-seal.

The latter quite eclipsed the interest felt in the former. Never was there a more docile, fatter, or more amiable puppy. He enjoyed being fondled in a scout's arms, under difficulties, as, for a pup, he was quite a heavy-weight and slippery too, on account of the amount of blubber secreted under his creamy skin. His oily brown eyes were softly trustful.

But the tug-of-war came with feeding-time. Vainly did the boy scouts offer him of their best, vainly did Marcoo and Colin tramp a mile over the dunes to bring back a quart of new milk for him from the nearest farm, and try to pour it gently down his infant throat!

He set up a dove-like moaning that was plainly a call for his mother as he lay sprawled out on the white sands. And, at nightfall, by order of the scoutmaster, Scouts Warren and Chase rowed out into the channel and returned him to the water in which he was quite at home.

But he was possessed of a contradictory spirit, for he swam after the Pill, crying to be taken aboard again. They could hear his dulcet "Oo-oo-ooo!" as they gathered round their camp-fire in the white hollow among the sand-hills.

At the powwow to-night the encounter with Dave Baldwin, if the vagrant of the marshes was really he, came in for its share of discussion. Guesses were rife as to the probability of the scouts running across him again, and as to how he might occupy his time in the lazy vagabond life which he was leading.

It was here that Harold broke through the semi-shy reserve which still encrusted him and contributed a remark, the first as a result of his observations, to the powwow.

"Well! he had an _awful_ sorry face on him," he said impulsively, alluding to the vagrant. "It just made me feel badly for a while!"

"You're right, Greerie, he had!" corroborated Leon. "Whatever he's doing, it isn't agreeing with him. We'll probably come on him again some time on the marshes or among the dunes."

But eleven days went by, eleven full days for the scout campers, golden with congenial activity, wherein each hour brought its own interesting "stunt," as they called it; and they saw no more of the _vaurien_, the worthless one, who had caused his mother's heart to "break in pieces."

And they gave little thought to him. For those breezy days, the last of August and the first of September, were spent in observation tours over marsh and dune or on the heaving river, in playing their exciting scout games among the sandhills, in clam-bakes, in practising signaling with the little red-and-white flags according to the semaphore or wig-wag code--one scout transmitting a message to another posted on a distant hill--and in the various duties assigned to them in pairs, of cooking, and keeping the camp generally in order.

The more fully one lives, the more joyously one adventures, the more quickly flutters the present into the past, like a sunny landscape flitting by a train! It had come to be the last night but one in camp. Within another two days the Sugarloaf Dunes would be deserted so far as campers were concerned.

School would presently reopen. And at the end of the month the Owls would lose their brother and patrol leader: during the first days of October Scout Nixon Warren's parents were expected home from Europe, and he would rejoin his former troop in Philadelphia.

To-night, every one was bent upon making the end of the camping trip a season of befitting jollity. They sang their scout songs as they gathered round the camp-fire. They retailed the last good joke from their magazine. They challenged the darkness with their hearty motto,--both in the strong sweet mother tongue wherein it had been given to the world, and in the pretty _Estu preta!_ form, which two of their number thought might serve as a universal link.

But the night refused to rejoice with them. It was chilly, colder than on the same date one year ago when four lost boys camped out in the Bear's Den. The inflowing tide broke on the beach with sobbing clamor. There was no moon, few stars. The white sand-hills were wild-looking sable mounds waving blood-red plumes of beach-grass or beach-pea wherever the light of camp-fire or camp-lantern struck them.

The clusters of gray birches and ash-trees scattered here and there among the dunes cowered like ebony shadows fearful of the rising wind.

"Bah! De night she's as black as one black crow," declared Toiney with a shrug as he threw another birch log on the camp-fire and set one of the two bright oil-lanterns on a sand-hill where it spied upon the gusty, secretive darkness like a watchful eye.

With the exception of a few small carbide lamps attached to tent-posts, those lanterns were the only luminaries in camp.

"An' de win' she commence for mak' noise lak' mad cat! Saint Ba'tiste! I'll t'ink dis iss night for de come-backs--me." And Toiney glanced half-fearfully behind him at the sable mounds so milky in daylight.

"He means it's a night for spooks--ghosts! He doesn't believe much in 'come-backs,' though: look at his face!" Leon pointed at the assistant scoutmaster's black eyes dancing in the firelight, at the tassel of his red cap capering in the breeze. "By the way, Nix and I saw one 'come-back,' about an hour ago--a human one!" went on Corporal Chase suddenly, after a minute's pause: "that rough customer, Dave Baldwin, as we suppose him to be, turned up again this evening near the summer bungalows away over on the beach. He was acting rather queerly, too!"

"He certainly was!" chimed in Nixon, looking thoughtfully at a little topknot of flame that sprouted upon the blazing log nearest to him as he lay, with his brother Owls, prone upon his face and hands, gazing into the fire.

"What was he doing?" asked Jesse Taber, a member of the Seal Patrol.

"Why, he was up on the high piazza of the largest bungalow--that house built just on the edge of the dunes which looks as if it was standing on stilts, and getting ready to walk off! He seemed to be trying one of the windows when we came along as if attempting to get in."

"The summer people who own that house left there this morning; we saw them going," broke in Godey Peck of the Fox Patrol. "I guess all the three houses are empty now; those dandified 'summer birds' don't like staying round here when the wind 'makes noise like mad cat'!" Godey hugged himself and beamed over the wild noises of the night, and at the voice of the tidal river calling lustily.

"Well! did he get into the house?" asked Jemmie Ahern of the Seals.

"No, as we came along over the dunes he saw us and scooted off!" Thus Corporal Leon Chase again took up the thread of the story. "But Nix an' I looked back as we walked along the beach; it was getting dusk then, but we made out his figure disappearing into a large shed belonging to that bungalow."

"I hope he wasn't up to any mischief," said the scoutmaster gravely. "Now! let's forget about him. Haven't any of you other scouts some contribution to make to to-night's powwow about things you've observed during the day?"

"Mr. Scoutmaster, I have!" Marcoo lifted his head upon the opposite side of the camp-fire where he lay, breast downward, on the sand. "Colin and I and two members of the Seal Patrol, Howsie and Jemmie Ahern, saw an _awfully_ big heap of clam-shells between two sand-hills on the shore-edge of the beach. They were partly covered with sand; but we dug them out; and--somehow--they looked as if they had been there for ages."

"Likely enough, they had! The Indians used to hold clam-bakes here." The firelight danced upon the scoutmaster's white teeth; he greatly enjoyed the camp-fire powwow. "You see, fellows, this fine, white sand is something like snow--but snow which doesn't harden--the wind blows it into a drift; then, perhaps, another big gale comes along, picks up the drift and deposits it somewhere else. That's what uncovered your clam-shells."

"Then how is it these white dunes aren't traveling round the country?" Colin waved his arm toward the neighboring sand-hills with a laugh.

"Because they are held in place by the vegetation that quickly sprang up on and between them. That beach-grass has very coarse strong roots which interlace under the surface. Now! let's listen to Toiney singing; we must be merry, seeing it's our second last night in camp." Scoutmaster Estey waved his hand toward his assistant in the blue shirt and tasseled cap.

Toiney, tiring of the conversation which it was an effort for him to follow, was crooning softly an old French ditty wherewith he had been sung to sleep by his grandfather when he was a black-eyed babe in a saffron-hued night-cap and gown:--

"A la clair-e fontain-e
M'en allant promener,
J'ai trouve l'eau si belle,
Que je m'y suis baigne!"

"Oh! you took a walk near the fountain and found the water so fine that you went in bathing!" cried one and another of the scouts who were in their first year in high school. "Must have been a pretty big fountain! Go ahead: what did you do next, Toiney?"

But the singer had suddenly sprung to his feet and stood, an alert, tense figure, in the flickering twilight.

"_Gard' donc!_" he cried gutturally, while the cat-like breeze capered round him, flicking his short red tassel, catching at his legs in their queer high boots. "_Gard' donc!_ de littal light in de sky--engh? _Sapre tonnerre!_ I'll t'ink shee's fire, me. No camp-fire, _non_! Beeg fire--engh? _V'la! V'la!_"

He glanced round sharply at his scout comrades, and pointed, with excited gesticulations, across the sable dunes in the direction of those recently erected summer residences.