Chapter III: Raccoon Junior

"Scout or no scout, you are not going to boss me!"

Thus Starrie Chase broke the breathless silence that reigned for half a minute in the woods, following upon Nixon's declaration that he was a boy scout, bound by the scout law to protect the weak among human beings and animals.

For the space of that half-minute the tormenting stick had ceased to probe the hole. The wretched chipmunk, cowering in the farthest corner of its once neat retreat, had a respite.

But Leon--who was not inherently cruel so much as thoughtlessly teasing and the victim of a destructive habit of mind, now felt that should he yield a point to this fifteen-year-old lad from a distant city, the leadership which he so prized, among the boys of Exmouth, would be endangered. He was the recognized head of a certain youthful male gang, of which Colin and Coombsie--though the latter occasionally deplored his methods--were leading representatives.

"Go ahead, scout, prevent my doing anything I want to do--if you can!" he flung out, his brown eyes winking upward with that snapshot quickness as if he were photographing on their retina the figure of that new species of animal, the scout of the U.S.A. "I've heard of your kind before; you know a lot of things that nobody else knows--or wants to know either!"

The last words were to the accompaniment of the goading stick which began to move vehemently to and fro in the hole again. That neat little hole, which had been one of the humbler miracles of the woods, now gaped as an ugly, torn fissure beneath its roof of rock.

Before it was a defacing debris of torn grass and earth in which Blink scratched impatiently, whining over the delay in the chip-squirrel's exit.

"Oh! give it up, Leon; I believe I can hear him stirring in the hole!" pleaded Colin Estey.

Simultaneously the scout flung himself on his knees before the chipmunk's fortress, well-nigh captured, and seized the cruel goad.

"Let go of this stick or I'll lick you with it! I can; I'm as old--older than you are!" Leon was now a red-eyed savage.

"That would be like your notion of fair play! Oh! drop the stick an' come on with your fists! I'm not afraid of you."

The probable result of such a duel remains a problem; any slight advantage in age was on Leon's side, but each alert movement of the boy scout showed that he possessed eye, mind, and muscle trained to the fullest to cope with any situation that might arise. Whoever might prove victor, the expedition to Varney's Paintpot would have been abruptly frustrated by a fight among the exploring party, had not Marcoo the tactful interfered.

"Oh! what's the use of fighting about a chip'?" he cried, thrusting a plump shoulder between the bristling combatants. "It's just this way, Leon: Nix is right; it's a mean business, trying to force that chipmunk out of its hole for the dog to catch it! You can withdraw the stick right now, come with us an' share our luncheon; or you can go off on your own hook--and you don't get a crumb out of the basket--we'll find the Paintpot without you!"

Leon drew a long wavering breath, looking at Colin for support.

But Public Opinion as represented by the two younger boys, was by this time entirely with the scout. For it is the genius among boys, as among grown-ups, who voices what lies hidden and unexpressed, in the hearts of others; we are always moved by the bold utterance of that which we have surreptitiously felt ourselves.

Both Colin Estey and Marcoo had known what it was to feel their sense of pity and justice outraged by Leon's persecuting methods. But it needed the trained boldness of the boy scout to put the sentiment into words; to be ready to fight for his knightly principles and win. For he had won.

Leon Chase fairly writhed at the choice set before him--at the necessity of yielding a point to the stranger! But he felt that it would be still more obnoxious to his feelings to be deserted by his companions, left to beat a solitary retreat homeward with his dog or wander--alone and fasting--through the woods, a boy hermit!

"All right! Have your way! Come along," he cried crossly. "We'll never get anywhere--that's sure--if we waste any more time on a chipmunk!"

Withdrawing the stick from the enlarged aperture, he flung it away and scrambled to his feet, whistling to the dog.

It needed much moral suasion on the part of all four boys to lure the terrier away from the raided hole with whose earth his slim white legs were coated. But he presently consented to explore the woods further in search of diversion.

And the incident ended without any torn fur flying its flag of pain on the summer air.

The flag of feud between the two boys, Starrie Chase and Nixon, was not, however, immediately lowered. Coombsie--a studious, thoughtful lad--had the unhappy feeling of having brought two strange fires together which might at any moment result in an explosion that would be especially disastrous on this the first day of his cousin's visit to him.

But as one lad has remarked: "Two boys cannot remain mad with each other long: there's always too much doing!"

And everybody knows that sawdust smothers smouldering fire! It did in this instance. After about ten minutes of "grouchy" but uneventful tramping, the forest explorers came to a logging camp, a rude shanty, flanked by a yellow mountain of sawdust where a portable sawmill had been set up during the preceding winter and taken down in spring.

In spite of the fact that so much lay before them to be seen in the woods--if haply they might arrive at the various points of heart's desire--it was not in boy-nature to refrain from scaling that unstable, shelving sawdust peak for a better view onward into those shadowy woods. And a lusty sham battle ensued, in the midst of which Leon found occasion to repay the trick played on him with the pitchfork seeds by slipping a handful of sawdust inside the scout's khaki collar.

"Whew! that's worse than the devil's pitchforks," groaned the latter, writhing and squirming in his tan shirt.

But does not a trifling discomfort under such circumstances enhance while curbing the enjoyment of a boy, tying him to earth, when his young spirit like an aeroplane, winged with sheer joy of life and youthful daring, feels as if it could spurn that earth sphere as too limited, and, riding on the breeze of heaven, seek adventure among the clouds?

In such a mood the four boys, drinking in the odor of the pine-trees as a fillip to delight, were presently exploring the loggers' shanty, with its rude bunks, oilcloth-covered table, here an old magazine, there a worn-out stocking, relics of human habitation.

"Nobody occupies this camp during the summer," said Leon. "I think Toiney Leduc and another man worked up here last winter."

"I'm pretty sure that Toiney did! Look there!" The scout was unfolding a piece of charred paper pinioned in a corner by a tomato can; it was a printed fragment of a French-Canadian _voyageur_ song, at sight of which the boys made the shanty ring with:--

"Rond! rond! rond! peti' pie pon' ton'!"

"But I'm not so sure that nobody is using the shanty now," remarked Nixon presently. "See that tobacco ash and the stains on the white oilcloth!" pointing to the dingy table. "Both look fresh; the ash couldn't possibly have remained here since last winter; 'twould have been blown away long ago by the wind sweeping through the open shanty. There's some more of it on the mattress in this bunk," drawing himself up to look over the side of the rude crib built into the wall. "I guess somebody _does_ occupy the camp now--at night anyway!"

"Oh! so you set up to be a sort of Sherlock Holmes, do you?" jeered Leon.

"I don't set up to be anything! But I can tell that the men ground their axes right here." The scout was now kicking over a small wooden trough that had reposed, bottom uppermost, amid the long grass before the shanty.

"How can you make that out?" It was Colin who spoke.

"Because, look! there's rust on the inside of the trough, showing that there are steely particles mixed with the dust of the interior and that water has dripped into it from the revolving grindstone."

"Pshaw! anybody could find that out who set to work to think about it," came in a chorus from his three companions.

But that "thinking" was just the point: the others would have passed by that topsy-turvy wooden vessel, which might have been used for sundry purposes, with its dusty interior exactly the hue of the yellow sawdust, without stopping to reason out the story of the patient axe-grinding which had gone on there during winter's bitter days.

"But, I say, what good does it do you to find out things like that?" questioned Starrie Chase, kicking over the trough, his shrewd young face a star of speculation. "If one should go about poking his nose into everything that had happened, why! he'd find stories in most things, I guess! The woods would be full of them."

"So they are!" replied the scout quickly. "That's just what we're taught: that every bird and animal, as well as everything which is done by men, leaves its 'sign!' We must try to read that 'sign' and store up in our minds what we learn, as a squirrel stores his nuts for winter, so that often we may find out things of importance to ourselves or others. And I'll tell you it makes life a jolly lot more interesting than when one goes about 'lak wit' eye shut'! as Toiney says. I've never had such good times as since I've been a scout:--

Then hurrah for the woods, hurrah for the fields,
Hurrah for the life that's free,
With a heart and mind both clean and kind,
The Scout's is the life for me!

And we'll shout, shout, shout,
For the Scout, Scout, Scout,
For the Scouts of the U.S.A.!"

The speaker exploded suddenly in a burst of song, throwing his broad hat into the air with a yell on the refrain that woke the echoes of the log shanty, while the breezy orchestra in the tree-tops, like noisy reed instruments, came in on the last line:--

"For the Scouts of the U.S.A.!"

Colin and Coombsie were enthusiastically shouting it too.

"Say! Col, that fellow suits me all right," whispered Marcoo, nudging his chum and pointing toward the excited scout.

"Me, too!" returned Colin.

"Pshaw! he thinks he's It, but I think the opposite," murmured Leon truculently.

"To what troop or patrol do you belong, Nix?" questioned his cousin.

"Peewit Patrol, troop six, of Philadelphia! I was a tenderfoot for six months; now I'm a second-degree scout--with hope of becoming a first-class one soon. Want to see my badge?" pointing to his coat. "Each patrol is named after a bird or animal. We use the peewit's whistle for signaling to each other: Tewitt! Tewitt!"

Again the woods rang with a fairly good imitation of the peewit's--or European lapwing's--whistling note.

"Oh! I'd put a patent on that whistle if I were you," snapped Leon sarcastically: "I'm sure nothing like it was ever heard in these--or any other--woods! We'd better be moving on or the mosquitoes will eat us up," he added hastily. "There hasn't been any frost to get rid of them yet."

But as the quartette of boys left the log-camp behind and, with the terrier in erratic attendance, plunged again into the thick woods, it by and by became apparent to each that, so far as a knowledge of their exact whereabouts went or an ability to locate any point of destination, they were approaching the truth of Toiney's words and wandering "lak wit' eye shut!"

For a time they kept to a logging-road that branched off from the shanty, a mere grass-grown, root-obstructed pathway, over which, when that great white leveler, Winter, evened things up with his mantle of snow, the felled trees were drawn on a rough sled to some point where stood the movable sawmill.

The dense woods were intersected at long intervals by such half-obliterated paths; in their remote recesses lurked other rough shanties where a scout might read the "sign" that told of the hard life of the lumbermen.

But neither vine-laced road nor shanty was easy of discovery for the uninitiated.

"Whew! it kind o' brings the gooseflesh to be so far in the woods as this without having the least idea whether we're getting anywhere or not." Thus spoke Coombsie at the end of half an hour's steady tramping and plowing through the underbrush. "Are you sure that you know in which direction lies the cave called the Bear's Den, Leon? A logging-road runs past that, so I've heard."

"Oh, we'll arrive there in time, I guess; Varney's Paintpot is somewhere in the same direction as the cave," replied the pseudo-leader evasively. "They're some distance apart, but we've made a bee-line from one to the other when I've been in the woods with my father or brother Jim."

But these woods were a different proposition now, without an older head and more experienced woodlore to rely upon: Leon, who had never before posed as a guide through their mazes, secretly acknowledged this.

He had not imagined that it would be so difficult to find one's way, unaided, in this wilderness of endless trees and underbrush, through whose changing aspects ran the same mystifying thread as if the gold-brown gloom of a shadowy hill-slope,--where only the sunbeams waltzing on dry pine-needles seemed alive,--or the jeweled twilight of a grassy alley bound a gossamer handkerchief about one's eyes, so that one groped blindfold against a blank wall of uncertainty.

"Say! but I wish I had brought my pocket compass with me," groaned the scout. "Guess I didn't live up to our scout motto: BE PREPARED! But then--" he looked at his cousin--"we started out with the intention of going down the river and you objected to my trotting back for it, Marcoo, when we determined on a hike through the woods."

"I was afraid that if the men knew what we were planning, they'd have headed us off as Toiney tried to do," confessed Marcoo candidly.

"Well, I wish now that I had gone back; I could have packed the luncheon into my knapsack; it would have been much more easily carried than in this basket. I miss my staff too!" Nixon deposited the lunch-basket, with which he was now impeded, on the ground in a green woodland glade where the noble forest trees, red oak, cedar, maple, interspersed with an occasional pine, hemlock, or balsam fir, rose to a height of from sixty to a hundred feet, bordering a patch of open ground, starred with wildflowers, dotted with berries.

Delicate queen's lace, purple gentians, starry wood-asters, waxen Indian pipes, made it seem as if this must be the wood-fairies' dancing-ground, where at night they rode a moonbeam from flower to flower, and sipped juice from the milk-berries, bunch-berries or scarlet fox-berries that strayed at intervals along the ground.

"I'd like to stay _here_ forever." Colin stretched himself upon a bank of moss, his mind going back to the explorer's longing, to the wood-hunger which had consumed him, as he lay upon the fragrant marsh-grass some hours before. He was getting his wish now--and not everybody gets that without having to pay for it. "The trees look kind o' fatherly an' protecting; don't they?" he murmured lazily.

Yes, here one felt admitted to the companionship of those noble trees,--the greatest story-tellers that ever were, when one listens and interprets their conversations with the breeze. A "Hurrah for the woods!" was on every tongue as the boys chewed a berry or smoked a pearly orchid pipe.

Moods changed a little as they took up their wandering again and presently waded, single file, through a jungle of bushes, scrub oak, dwarf pine, pigmy cedar and birch, laced with brambles. Here the trees overhead were of less magnitude and the tall leafy undergrowth foamed about their ears, giving them somewhat the distracted feeling of being cast away on a trackless sea--each sequestered in his own little boat--with emerald billows shutting out all view of port.

"Three cheers! We're almost through with this jungle. I guess we're coming to more open ground again--none too soon, either!" cried Leon who led, with his dog. "Shouldn't wonder if we were approaching a swamp: it may be Big Swamp, as the men call that great alder-swamp that's all spongy in parts and dotted with deep bog-holes, where one might sink out of sight quick!

"For goodness' sake! look at the crows," he whooped three minutes later, as, leaving the wavy undergrowth behind, he plunged out on a mossy slope strewn with an occasional boulder. "_The crows!_ What do you suppose they're after? They're teasing something! 'Hollering' at something!"

The same amazed exclamation broke from his companions' lips. Halfway down the slope was an old and leafy chestnut tree. Around this the crows were circling, now alighting on the branches, now fluttering off again on sloping sable wing, their yellow beaks gleaming.

A cawing din filled the air, with an occasional loud "Quock!" of alarm or indignation.

"They're teasing something--perhaps it's a squirrel! I've seen them do that before; they're regular pests!" exclaimed Leon, inconsistently finding fault with the crows for being birds of the same feather with himself.

"Whew! there's something doing here. Let's see what it is!" Nixon was equally excited.

With the terrier scampering ahead, the four boys set off at a run toward the crow-infested tree.

"I believe there's something--some animal--hidden in the hollow between the branches!" Leon gave vent to a low shout, his brown eyes yellow with excitement. "It's round that the crows are hovering!"

"There is! There is! I see the end of a big, bushy tail. It isn't a squirrel's tail either!" returned the scout in a fever of mystification. "Let's go softly, so that we won't frighten the thing whatever it is--then we can have a good look at it!"

"Suppose it should be a wildcat, then we'd 'scat'!" gasped Colin, feeling his wildest hopes and tremors fulfilled. "I see its nose--a black nose--over the edge of the hollow! It's like--Gee! it can't be another coon from the swamp--like the dead one that Toiney found in the hencoop?"

Simultaneously the terrier, Blink, was launching himself like a white arrow toward the spreading nut-tree, which stood upon a grassy knoll, while the woods rang with his fusillade of barking.

And from the hollow in the tree came a shrill whimpering cry, remarkably like that of a small and frightened child.

Starrie Chase fairly gambolled with excitement: "That's where you're right, Col," he panted. "If it isn't a coon--another young coon--I'm a Dutchman! I hunted one in the woods, by night, with my brother, last year!"

"He keeps on singing," breathed Coombsie. "Isn't his cry like a two-year-old child's?"

"Oh! if we only had my brother's coon dog here--and could get him down from the tree--the dog might finish him!" Leon seemed emitting sparks of excitement from his pointed elbows and other quivering joints. "Go for him, Blink!" he raved, hardly knowing what he said. "You're not afraid of anything--you feel like a mastiff! Oh! we _must_ get him out of that tree-hollow on to the ground."

"Caw! Caw!... Caw!... Quock! Quock!" At the approach of the boys and dog the crows set up a wilder din, describing broader circles round the tree or fluttering upward to its loftier branches.

Again came that petulant whimpering cry from the hollow of the chestnut, where a young raccoon (probably brother to the intruder which had made a short bee-line through the woods, guided by instinct and its nose, to Toiney's hencoop) now wailed and quailed, finding himself between two sets of enemies: the barking dog and excited boys below, the pestering crows above.

Abandoning the wise nocturnal habits of his forefathers, with the rashness of youth, he too had strayed at sunrise from that secluded hole among the ledges on the borders of Big Swamp, filled with dreams of juicy cornfields and other delicacies.

Not readily finding such a land of milk and honey, he climbed into the hollow of this chestnut tree, flanked by a young ash upon the knoll, and there composed himself to sleep.

But thither the crows, flocking, found him; and recognizing in him an hereditary enemy of their eggs and nestlings, set to work to make his life a burden.

Nevertheless Raccoon Junior preferred their society to that of the boys and dog which instinct warned him to dread above all other foes.

As the well-bred terrier--game enough to face any foe, though it might prove a sorry day for him if he should tackle that young raccoon--reared on his hind legs, and clawed the bark of the trunk in his excitement, the rash Junior climbed swiftly out of the hollow and fled up among the branches of the tall chestnut tree, seeking to hide himself among the long thick leaves amid a stormy "Quock!" and "Caw! Caw! Caw!" from the crows.

"Oh! there--there he goes! See his stout body and funny little legs!"

"And his long gray hair and the black patch over his eyes--makes him look as if he wore spectacles!"

"And his bushy tail! Huh! there's some class to that tail--all ringed with buff and black."

Such cries broke from three wildly excited throats. Leon spent no breath in admiration. Like lightning, he had snatched up a stone and sent it flying up the tree after the fugitive with such good aim that it struck one of the short, climbing legs.

Another whimpering cry--sharp and shrill as that of a wounded child--rang down among the thick leaves.

"What did you do that for? You've broken one of his legs, I think!" exclaimed the scout.

"So much the better! If he should light down from the tree, he can't run so fast! I want that dandy tail of his--and his skin!" Starrie Chase was now beside himself with the greedy feeling, that possessed him whenever he saw a wild animal, that its own skin did not belong to it, but to him.

"Say, fellows!" he cried wildly, "if you'll stay right here by the tree and prevent his coming down, I--I'll run all the way back to that farm-clearing--I guess I can find my way--and bring back Toiney's gun, and shoot him. Say--will you?"

No such promise was forthcoming.

"Well, I know what I'll do!" Leon tore off his jacket. "I'll tie the sleeves of my coat round the trunk of the tree; that will prevent his coming down, so I've heard my father say. Bother! they won't meet. I'll have to use your coat too, Nix!"

He snatched up the scout's Norfolk jacket, thrown down beside the basket at the foot of the tree, and was knotting it to his own, when there was a wild shriek from Colin:--

"Look! Look! He's jumped over into the other tree. Oh! he's come down; he's on the ground now--there beyond the ash tree--rolling over like a ball! Oh, he's going--going like a slate sliding downhill!"

While Leon had been so cleverly knotting the coats round the tree-trunk, and his terrier barking up it, the young coon had outwitted them and dropped like an acrobat to the ground, having gained the odds of a dozen yards in his race for safety.

Off went the terrier after him, now! Off went the four boys, hot on the trail too, madly rushing down the hill clear to the edge of the alder-swamp toward which it sloped--yes! and into its quagmire borders too, while the crows, raving like a foghorn, supplied music for the chase.

But the speed of the limping wild animal enabled it, having gained its short legs--despite the injury of the stone--to reach the shelter of a quivering clump of alders where Blink worried in and out in vain, nose to the ground--sniffing and baffled.

"Oh, we've lost sight of him now! He's given us the slip," cried Colin, recklessly dashing for the alders.

Suddenly the air cracked with his cry that raved with terror like the crows: "Help! _Help!_ I'm into it now--into it plunk--into Big Swamp! I'm sinking--s-sinking above my waist! Help! Help!"