Woodcraft: or, How a Patrol Leader Made Good

Alan Douglas

Alan Douglas

Woodcraft; Or, How a Patrol Leader Made Good

CHAPTER I.

TWO SCOUTS IN A STORM

Crashes of thunder, sounding like the roll of heavy artillery in battle, echoed through the forest some miles above the town of Hickory Ridge on an August day.

Overhead, black, sullen clouds had covered the heavens, and at any moment now the ominous stillness of the woods might give way to the rushing sound of the wild wind, together with a downpour of rain.

Two half-grown lads, dressed in the usual khaki costume recognized as the official uniform of the Boy Scouts of America, were standing there in the midst of the heavy growth, casting uneasy looks around them.

It is one thing to watch the coming of a furious storm from the windows of one's home, and quite another to be caught napping, miles away from shelter. And the smaller of the comrades had a frightened look on his face.

"My goodness! hear that, will you, Larry?" exclaimed this rather timid fellow, as he instinctively caught hold of his more sturdy comrade's sleeve, when a particularly fierce flash of lightning was succeeded by a terrific crash. "Ain't you going to find a hollow tree somewhere, and climb in? Why, we'll get soaked to the skin if we don't look out, I tell you!"

"I reckon you're about right there, Jasper," replied the other, Larry Billings by name; and he made a wry face while speaking. "But then, you see, there are some things worse than getting wet, and being struck by lightning happens to be one of the same. Excuse me, if you please; I'll take my medicine the best I can, but you remember, Jasper, among a lot of other things we learned when we joined the scouts, we were warned never under any circumstances to get under a tree during a thunderstorm."

"But that meant out in the open, where there might be only one tree," remonstrated Jasper, whose last name happened to be Merriweather. "Here in the woods it's a heap different, I should think. Among so many big trees you don't think now for a minute that freak lightning's going to pick out the very one we're in, to knock it to flinders, do you, Larry?"

"I don't know, and what's more I ain't going to try to find out," went on the stockier built lad, with resolution in his manner. "You and me came away up here just to see how much we had learned about woodcraft, and it wouldn't look right if we shied at one of the rules the first chance. Besides," he went on, with a broad grin, for Larry was a good-natured fellow ordinarily, "if the experiment proved to be a dead failure, we wouldn't be given a chance to try it over again, you see. Lightning don't often knock at the same door twice."

"Ugh! you make me shiver, Larry!" exclaimed the smaller lad. "But what in the wide world can we just do to keep dry?"

"Oh! that's the least thing that bothers me," replied the other. "Being wet ain't anything much-a-much. I've tumbled in mill races, and been yanked out of ponds ever since I was knee high to a duck. But the worst is yet to come, Jasper."

"Now you're just trying to scare me, Larry, and you ought to be ashamed to do it. You know I used to be the most timid fellow ever, and that it was only after I joined the scouts, and went on that trip up the Sweetwater to Lake Solitude that I began to outgrow that failing. Now it's beginning to get a grip on me again. But tell me, whatever do you mean by saying the worst is something more than getting our new uniforms soaked through?"

"Why, you see, Jasper, we're lost, that's what!" remarked Larry, although the fact did not seem to frighten him very much, for he was chuckling while speaking as though it looked like a big joke to him.

But with poor Jasper the case was entirely different.

"Well, that beats the Dutch!" he cried with genuine disgust. "The two of us felt so dead sure we knew it all, that nothing would do for us but to come away up here five miles or so from home, just to show everybody that we could take care of ourselves. And now you deliberately