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Read Ebook: A Scout of To-day by Hornibrook Isabel
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Ebook has 1143 lines and 58973 words, and 23 pages
"There! I knew you wouldn't eat it," remarked his master indifferently. "You're a spoiled pup!" Simultaneously Leon caught sight of the three boys making toward him and burst into a complacent shout of recognition.
His left hand went out to a huddle of still quivering feathers on top of the fence in which five pairs of yellow spindle-legs were tangled like slim twigs.
Colin, as was expected of him, burst into an exclamation of wonder at this destructive skill. Coombsie's admiration was more forced.
Blink, the terrier, scornfully rolled over the feathered thing in the dust. He snapped angrily at the stranger, Nixon Warren, who tried to pick it up and examine it.
"That bird won't be fit to eat now, after the dog has played with it," suggested the latter, addressing Leon without the benefit of an introduction.
"I don't care. Probably I'll give the whole bunch of yellow-legs away, anyhow--Mother doesn't like their sedgy flavor. She'd rather I'd let the birds alone, I guess!"
"Why do you shoot so many if you don't want them?"
"Oh! partly for the sport and partly because these 'Greater Yellow-legs' are such telltales that they warn every duck and other bird within hearing by their noisy whistle."
Impulsively Nixon put out a finger and touched one slim leg with its limp claw that protruded from the fence. At the same moment he glanced upward.
A smothered exclamation broke from Coombsie as he followed the finger and the flight.
Leon snatched up the gun.
"One can't have too much of a good thing: I guess I could drop that 'telltale,' too!"
But Marcoo's hand fastened upon his arm with an impulsive cry.
"Eh! What's the matter with you--Flutter-budget?" Lowering the pointed shotgun, Leon whisked round; his restless brown eyes had a lightning trick of shutting and opening, as if he were taking a photograph of the person addressed, which was in general highly disconcerting to the boy who differed from him. "No need to make a fuss! I wouldn't let her off here, anyhow," he added, fondling the gun. "Father would be fined if I should fire a shot on the highroad."
The other's expression changed like a rocket: Starrie Chase enjoyed leading other boys, even more than he reveled in "popping yellow-legs"--for the former Nature had intended him.
"All right!" he responded with swift eagerness. "Just, you fellows, keep an eye on my gun while I run home with the birds; I'll be back in a minute!"
"Oh! you're not going to take your gun into the woods?"
"Sure--I am! I might get a chance at a fox!"
"Won't it be an awful nuisance carrying it all the way through the thick undergrowth--we want to go as far into the woods as the Bear's Den?" suggested Marcoo tactfully.
"Well, perhaps it would. I'll just scoot home then, and be back in no time!"
He snatched the dead birds from the fence, raced away and reappeared in three minutes, with the terrier barking at his heels.
"I'm going to let Blink come anyhow; he'll have a great time chasing things--eh, Blinkie?" Leon made a hurdle of his outstretched arm for the scampering dog to jump over it.
And the terrier replied in a volley of excited barks, saying in doggy talk: "Fellows! if there's fun ahead, I'm in with you. The woods are a grand old playground!"
He led the way, and the four boys followed, jostling each other merrily, rubbing their high spirits together and bringing sparks from the contact--bound for that mysterious forest Paintpot.
But the stranger, Nixon Warren, could not forbear throwing one backward glance from under his wide-brimmed hat at the poor dog-scorned yellow-legs, its joy-whistle silenced, stiffening in the dust.
ONLY A CHIP'
"Oh! I wish I had worn my tramping togs," exclaimed Nixon Warren as the four boys, after covering an easy mile along the highroad and over the uplands that lay between marsh and woodland, plunged, whooping, in amid the forest shadows roofed by the meeting branches of pines, hemlocks, oaks, and birches, with here and there a maple already turning ruddy, that formed the outposts of the dense woods.
A dwarf counterpart of the same trees laced with vines and prickly brambles made an undergrowth so thick that they parted with shreds of their clothing as they went threshing through it, in a fascinating gold-misted twilight, through which the slender sunbeams flashed like fairy knitting-needles weaving a scarf of light and shade around each tall trunk.
"Why! you're better 'togged' for the woods than the rest of us are," answered Leon Starr Chase, looking askance at the new boy. "That's a dandy hat; must shade your eyes a whole lot when you're tramping on open ground! I guess ours don't need any shading!"
A wandering sunbeam kindled a brassy spark in Leon's brown eye which looked as if it could face anything unabashed. In his mind lurked the same suspicion that had hovered over Colin's at first sight of Nixon, that this newcomer from a distant city might be somewhat of a flowerpot fellow, delicately reared and coddled, not a hardy plant that could revel and rough it in the wilderness atmosphere of the thick woods.
Nothing about the boy-stranger supported such an idea for a moment, except to Leon, as the party progressed, the interest which he took in the floral life of the woodland: in objects which Starrie Chase who invariably "hit the woods" as he phrased it, with destruction in the forefront of his thoughts, generally overlooked, and therefore did not consider worth a second glance.
He stood and gaped as Nixon, with a shout of delight, pounced upon some rosy pepper-grass, stooped to pick a wood aster or gentian, or pointed out to Coombsie the green sarsaparilla plant flaunting and prolific between the trees.
"What do you call this, Marcoo?" the strange boy would exclaim delightedly, finding novel treasure trove in the rare white blossoms of Labrador tea. "I don't remember to have seen this flower on any of our hikes through the Pennsylvania woods!"
To which Coombsie would make answer:--
"Don't ask me, Nix; I know a little about birds, but when it comes to knowing anything of flowers or plants--excepting those that are under our feet every day--I 'fall down flunk!' Hullo! though, here are some devil's pitchforks--or stick-tight--I do know them!"
"So do I!" Nixon stooped over the tall bristly flower-heads, rusty green in color, and gathered a few of the two-pronged seed-vessels that cling so readily to the fur of an animal or the clothing of a boy. "It's funny to think how they have to depend upon some passing animal to propagate the seeds. Say! but they do stick tight, don't they?" And he slyly slipped a few of the russet pitchforks inside Leon's collar--whereupon a whooping scuffle ensued.
"You're right. It's a fox-path!" Leon was examining the shadow-tracks too. "A fox trots along here to his hunting-ground where he catches shrews an' mice or grasshoppers even, when he can't get hold of a plump quail or partridge. Whew! I wish I'd brought my gun."
Dead silence for two minutes, while each ear was intently strained to catch the sound of a sly footfall and heard nothing but the noisy shrilling of the cicada, or seventeen-year locust, with the pipe of kindred insects.
"Look! there's been a partridge at work here," cried Nixon by and by, when the still game was over and the boys were forging ahead again.
He pointed to a decayed log whose flaky wood, garnished here and there with a tiny buff feather, was mostly pecked away and reduced to brown powder by the busy bird which had wallowed there.
"He's been trying to get at some insects in the wood. See how he has dusted it all up with his claws an' feathers!" went on the excited speaker. "Oh--but I tell you what makes you feel happy!" He drew a long breath, turning suddenly, impulsively, to the boys behind him. "It's when you're out on a hike an' a partridge rises right in front of you--and you hear his wings sing!"
Colin and Coombsie stared. The strange boy's look flashed with such frank gladness, doubled and trebled by sharing sympathetically, in so far as he could, each bounding thrill that animated the wild, free life about him! They had often been moved by the liquid notes from a songster's throat, but had not come enough into loving touch with Nature to hear music in a bird's wings.
If Leon had heard it, his one idea would have been to silence it with a shot. He stood still in his tracks, bristling like his dog.
"Ughr-r! 'Singing wings'!" he sneered. "Aw! take that talk home to Mamma."
"Say that once again, and I'll lick you!" The stranger's gaze became, now, very straight and inviting from under his broad-brimmed hat.
The atmosphere felt highly charged--unpleasantly so for the other two boys. But at that critical moment an extraordinary sound of other singing--human singing--was borne to them in faint merriment upon the woodland breeze, so primitive, so unlike anything modern, that it might have been Robin Hood himself or one of his green-coated Merry Men singing a roundelay in the woods to the accompaniment of a woodchopper's axe.
"Rond! Rond! Rond! peti' pie pon' ton'! Rond! rond! rond! peti' pie pon' ton'!"
"Houp-la! it's Toiney--Toiney Leduc." Colin broke into an exultant whoop. "Now we'll have fun! Toiney is a funny one, for sure!"
"He's more fun than a circus," corroborated Coombsie. "We're coming to a little farm-clearing in the woods now, Nix," he explained, falling in by his cousin's side as the four boys moved hastily ahead, challenges forgotten. "There's a house on it, the last for miles. It's owned by a man called Greer, and Toiney Leduc works for him during the summer an' fall. Toiney is a French-Canadian who came here about a year ago; his brother is employed in one of the shipbuilding yards on the river."
The merry, oft-repeated strain came to them more distinctly now, rolling among the trees:--
"Rond, rond, rond, peti' pie pon' ton'! C'?ta't une bonne femme, Qui garda't sex moutons, Rond', rond', rond, peti' pie pon' ton'!"
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