THE TENDERFOOT

If Specs had not stopped on his way to school that morning to play with Felix; and if Miss Seeby, the botany teacher, had not expressed a desire for a specimen of aspidium fragrans, which is a variety of fern; and if Professor Leland had not called a mass meeting for four o'clock that afternoon, there is no telling how the day might have ended for the Black Eagle Patrol.

Felix was the Magoons' dog. He included in his affections all friends of the family and particularly Roundy's brother Scouts. There were people, indeed, who claimed that Felix was the eighth member of the patrol. But that was ridiculous, of course; for how could a dog pass the tenderfoot tests of tying knots, or take the Scout oath, or know the history of the flag?

Felix probably didn't worry about his official position. What counted with him was the friendship of the Scouts; and that morning, when care-free Specs McGrew hove in sight, with a stick in his hand, Felix barked happily and said, as plainly as a dog can, "Throw it! I'll retrieve it for you!"

So Specs whipped the stick fifty feet away, and Felix rushed after it. As soon as he had thrown, Specs raced for the corner, to get out of sight before the dog could recover the bit of wood and return it. But Felix was too quick for him, too wise in the game. All the way to school they played it till, at the very door, with the last bell ringing, Specs hurled it farther than he had any time yet, and then took advantage of Felix by dodging into the hall and running upstairs to his seat in the big assembly room.

This was a mistake. The way to end a game with Felix was to stand sternly before him and say, "Go home, Felix; go home, sir!" and wait till the dog dropped his tail between his legs and crept away.

The school day started like any other for Specs. He answered "present" at roll call, joined the others in singing, and listened attentively to the five-minute address by Professor Leland. It was not until he had marched with the class to Room 4 for his botany recitation, indeed, that he thought of Felix again.

"The aspidium fragrans, or fragrant fern," Miss Seeby was saying, "is a rare and hardy little species, growing in clefts on the faces of precipices. It is aromatic, with an odor said to be like new-mown hay composed largely of sweet-briar rose leaves. This fern is to be found in our State, and I should like very much to have a specimen to show the class. Look for a place where there is a bare cliff, overhanging a little, perhaps, so the rain cannot reach the plant, and up above all the trees, so that it can have no shade at all. If you find a fern there, test it by its fragrance, its stickiness and its beautiful brown, curling fronds." She paused, walked toward Specs and said, in a wholly different voice, "Is that your dog?"

Specs looked down. Faithful Felix had evidently followed him through the hall when he left the assembly room and was now lying beside his desk, thumping an eager tail against the floor. His unexpected presence provoked discreet mirth from everybody except the teacher and Specs himself.

"No—no ma'am. It's the Magoons'." Common honesty made him add, "But he followed me to school, I guess. I was playing with him."

"Indeed!" said Miss Seeby, looking more offended than ever. "Indeed! Well, put him out—immediately!"

Specs coerced Felix into the hall and warned him to go home and behave himself like a good dog. But there must have been meekness and apology in the command; for, instead of obeying, Felix went only as far as the outer corridor, where he slunk into a dark comer. Two minutes later, in any event, he was scratching at the classroom door and whining for admittance.

Miss Seeby had just shown her pupils a drawing of the fragrant fern and asked again that any one who knew where it was to be found secure a specimen at the first opportunity. She paused suddenly, and her face hardened.

"Take that dog away," she ordered Specs; "yes, take him home. And you need not come back to school yourself until you have a note from your father to Professor Leland, stating that you are sorry for this outrage and promising that you will not bring that animal here again."

Very penitent, although somewhat confused over the exact nature of his guilt, Specs rose and made dizzily for the door. As he closed it behind him, he could hear the giggling of the class and a smothered reference—he credited it to Rodman Cree—about "Mary's little lamb", interrupted by the teacher's sharp admonition for silence.

To Specs' credit, be it recorded that he followed instructions to the best of his ability. With an affectionate twist of Felix's ear, he strode down the hall and outdoors, even forgetting his cap in his hurry, with the dog tagging at his heels. Straight to the Magoons' he led Felix; sternly he told him to stay there. Then he ambled downtown, to explain to his parent as best as he could the disgrace that had befallen him.

"Your father's out in the country," the clerk in the McGrew hardware store told him. "He'll be back in an hour or two, though."

Deep thought slowed Specs' steps on the return trip. In front of the Magoons' the forgiving Felix crept out and made it plain he was sorry and wanted to be friends again. The Scout stared at him with a slow smile.

"Come on!" he called. "I can't go back to school till I get that note, and I can't get that note till father comes back to town. Tell you what, Felix; you and I will chase out along the lake shore and find one of those smelly ferns for Miss Seeby. I know where they grow. Come on, old boy!"

Directly after school that afternoon, as has been intimated, Professor Leland called a mass meeting. After Marion Genevieve Chester, as president of the student association, rapped for order, the principal rose from his chair on the platform and stepped forward.

"To-morrow afternoon," he began, "Lakeville High School plays its second football game. I have called this meeting to suggest that we organize to encourage the team during the game. We made enough noise at the other; but some of us cheered at the wrong times, when it wasn't quite fair to our opponents, and not at the right times, when it might have heartened our own boys; and some of us cheered all by ourselves, without any attempt to swell the volume of applause and encouragement. What I wish to suggest is practicing the Lakeville cheer, till we can pour it forth like the boom-boom-boom of a cannon, and the appointing of cheer leaders for the different sections."

Nominations were promptly offered, and the candidates as promptly elected. Profiting by that other meeting, the Scouts made no attempt to win a place.

"I wonder," continued Professor Leland, "if all of us realize that we may help, even if we are not playing on the team itself. Let me show you what I mean."

And then, while Bunny and Buck listened just a little more intently than the others, perhaps, he told them of the drop-kicks that had failed in the first game because of wind and dust and bad passes, and how Rodman Cree had pointed out the handicaps and made possible the goal when the teams changed sides.

A little applause rippled over the room. Everybody squirmed about in his seat to see how Rodman took it, but it was soon evident that the boy had not attended the meeting.

"The Grant City team," went on the speaker, "had a curious and effective trick formation, which was solved by our boys in the nick of time, thanks to Captain Claxton. Now, if some one of us who was not playing had discovered that trick and warned our team, it would have helped."

"Mr. Chair—I mean, Miss Chairman!"

It was Buck Claxton who interrupted. Very embarrassed he looked as he stood there, and very white, but very determined, too.

"Mr. Claxton," recognized Marion Genevieve Chester.

"Somebody did discover that trick," blurted Buck. "Rodman Cree did. He told me about it between quarters. That was why I knew what to expect. That—that's all." He sat down with an audible thump.

Very wisely, Professor Leland dismissed the subject with a brief, "Then we have something more for which to thank Cree," and turned to another subject. "Suppose we practice the Lakeville cheer now," he said. "Let's shake the rafters."

If the cheers inspired by the new leaders did not actually shake the rafters, it was because the school building was new and rigid. They echoed and re-echoed from basement to attic; they forced Marion Genevieve Chester to thrust hurried fingers into her aristocratic ears; they made you believe that Lakeville was the best and biggest and most loyal high school in all the world. In some mysterious way, everybody seemed to think he could help win the morrow's game by yelling just a little bit louder than his neighbor.

At the door, as they filed out, Bunny Payton stopped each member of the Black Eagle Patrol long enough to say, "Scout meeting at the club house to-night. Seven sharp. Be sure and come."

Roundy was the last to leave. "Seen Specs?" Bunny asked him. The patrol leader was not in Miss Seeby's nine-o'clock botany class and knew nothing of the morning incident. "H'm! Neither have I. That's funny. Well, don't forget the meeting."

Rodman Cree was not a Boy Scout, but Felix may have overlooked this point. Perhaps he realized that Rodman was worthy of his friendship, or perhaps it was merely the cap in the boy's hand that drew him like a magnet. Whatever the reason, at four that afternoon, when school was dismissed, Felix ran straight to Rodman and tried to tell him, in dog language, that something was wrong, and that it had to do with somebody connected with Specs' cap, which Rodman had observed hanging in the coatroom, although he knew its owner had not returned since his exile from Miss Seeby's botany class.

Felix nuzzled Rodman, yelped sharply and trotted away. When the dog saw that he was not followed, he came back again, very patient with the dull human who couldn't understand plain signs, and repeated his actions. But it was not till the third time that the boy began to get an inkling of the truth. Felix clinched the matter by sniffing at the cap held toward him, barking excitedly, and racing off at full speed.

Rodman may not have been a Boy Scout, but he constructed this problem and its answer with a deft brain. Miss Seeby had asked for a specimen of the fragrant fern, which grew on the sides of cliffs. Specs had been sent away from school in disgrace, accompanied by Felix. He had not returned. The only cliffs near Lakeville were to the west, along the shore of the lake. Felix had smelled Specs' cap and run in that direction. It followed, as surely as two plus two make four, that he was endeavoring to lead somebody to the missing boy.

"Maybe poor Specs fell over a precipice and hurt himself," Rodman said, shivering uneasily. "All right, Felix, I'm coming. The old mass meeting can go hang!"

At first, while the dog kept to the road, there was nothing that Rodman could do save follow. But later, when Felix left the main highway where it curved to avoid the sandstone cliffs near the lake, and began pushing his eager nose through the underbrush and over tangles of grass, the boy recognized that this was virgin country. Specs could not have come that way without unconsciously leaving signs for anybody who came afterward.

Where some less observant boy might have found nothing, Rodman readily picked up the trail. A pebble, lying with its damp side up, proved that a careless foot had turned it over. A splatter of partially dried mud on the trunk of a tree revealed that the passer-by had left the spot some hours before. Broken branches, their tips toward the lake, pointed the way like arrows. Grass and leaves added their mute evidence by lying brushed forward till their under sides showed. It was comforting, at least, to be certain Specs had hiked over this very stretch.

"Yes, he came this way," Rodman told Felix. "Find him, old fellow!"

At the top of the wooded rise they had been ascending, the hill culminated in barren knobs, which broke off abruptly in sandstone cliffs, sheer to the lapping water of the lake. In places, the rock was solid, save for little dirt-filled crevices, from which hardy vegetation sprouted; in others, the stone had crumpled into fine sand, which day by day sifted downward till a niche had been formed in the solid wall. It was toward the top of one of these indentations that Felix raced, with Rodman hard on his heels.

Throwing himself flat on his stomach, the boy wriggled to the edge and peered down. Some twelve or fifteen feet below him, squatting on a narrow patch of sand, Specs McGrew was engaged in disconsolately tossing pebbles upon the placid bosom of the lake. On either side of his little prison, the walls of the precipice fell straight to the water's edge, apparently extending for hundreds of yards in both directions. Specs was safe enough, to be sure, but he was as effectually cooped upon the tiny plot of sand by the smooth rock cliffs and the deep lake as if the iron bars of a cage encompassed him.

"Hello, Specs!"

The imprisoned boy looked up. "Oh, it's you," he said sullenly. "Got a rope?"

"No."

"Oh, of course not! You'd have one if you were a Scout. Well, what are you going to do about it?"

"How did you get down there?" Rodman asked.

"Fell down, you chump!" snapped Specs.

Rodman wanted to snap back, "Well, fall up here, then!" But he fought back the temptation. Instead, "Sit tight," he called, "and I'll have you out in a jiffy."

Back in the woods, wild grapevines twined over the trees. It was the work of only a few minutes to cut and trim one eight or ten feet long and lower it over the sandy cliff.

"Grab hold," he called to Specs, "and you can walk up the side of this sloping sand-pit as easy as falling off a log. Ready! Up you come! Steady there! Careful! Careful! There you are, safe and sound and on top of the world once more. Now, is there a fragrant fern anywhere around here?"

At seven o'clock that evening the Boy Scouts of the Black Eagle Patrol met in their clubhouse. Before seven-thirty they had threshed out the problem of electing another member, and there was not a dissenting vote when the name of Rodman Cree was proposed to fill the patrol roster.

"Which is just as it should be," Horace Hibbs approved. "Unless every single one of us thinks he is the best fellow for the place, he should not be invited to join. Now, if Specs—"

"Yes, Specs!" groaned Bi. "We'll never convert Specs; no, not in a thousand years. He says Rodman is no good, and I guess he'll grow long white whiskers before he'll admit he's wrong. No, siree, if we wait for Specs to make it unanimous, this patrol will be one man shy the rest of its life."

"I wish," began Bunny, "that Specs—"

The sentence was chopped short by the rattle of the latch. As the Scouts turned, the door flung wide, and Specs himself popped into the room.

"Come on in, Rodman," he called. "Say, fellows, Rodman is a whiz. You know the cliffs out near Old Baldy. Well, I fell down one of them this morning, reaching for a fragrant fern, and Rodman came looking for me. Found me, too, by following my trail and—"

"Felix led me to him," Rodman said depreciatingly.

"Rats!" scorned Specs. "You did it. Felix didn't make a grapevine rope, did he, and pull me up the cliff? I guess not. And who reached down and plucked this fern? Felix? Huh! Smell it, Bunny. Listen, fellows! Rodman knows all the things we do about trailing, and the woods, and the birds, and tying knots, and making fires without matches, and—oh, everything. I always told you he was all right!" Specs made this statement gravely and sincerely; he had forgotten his former opinion of the new boy. "Well, then, what's the matter with making him a Scout in the Black Eagle Patrol? Anybody object?"

He stared at them fiercely, defiantly, as if daring one of them to protest. Nobody did. Horace Hibbs stroked his chin in high glee.

"Rodman," the Scout Master said, "can you tie—let me see—these knots: the square or reef, sheet-bend, bowline, fisherman's, sheepshank, halter, clove hitch, timber hitch and two half hitches?"

"Yes, sir. I know some others, too."

"And do you know the Scout laws, motto, sign, salute and significance of the badge?"

"Yes, sir."

"How about your country's flag. Do you know its composition and history and the customary forms of respect due it?"

"Yes, sir." The boy was both eager and confident in his replies.

Horace Hibbs smiled. "One more question: Would you like to join the Black Eagle Patrol of Boy Scouts?"

There was no formal "Yes, sir!" this time. Instead, Rodman Cree gulped once or twice, as if it were difficult to speak, and then fairly shouted, "You bet I would!"

"In that case," pronounced Horace Hibbs judicially, fitting the tips of his fingers together, "I see no reason why you should not take the tenderfoot tests at once. Bunny, will you get us a rope?"

Twenty minutes later, when Specs rose to replenish the dying flames in the great brick fireplace, his eyes fell upon Rodman Cree.

"Shucks!" he laughed, "what's the use of wasting our wood when that fellow's head is a regular bonfire?" He paused to digest his remark. "Say—say, let's call Rodman 'Bonfire' after this. It's a dandy name for him."

Horace Hibbs glanced shrewdly across the table at the recruit. "Do you mind?" he asked.

The boy grinned happily. "Of course, I don't. I—I like it," said Bonfire Cree, tenderfoot of the Black Eagle Patrol.