Vitamins and Scouts
THE last thing at night Jamie again read his letter, He opened the envelope and unfolded the sheet, very carefully scrutinizing each written word. It was not in the least necessary that he should do this in order to know the contents of the letter. Some way he liked the feel of the paper in his fingers. If he had been buying stationery for the Storm Woman, who had stood shoulder to shoulder with him during an official marriage ceremony, he would have bought that kind of paper. He thought very likely that he would have been willing to stake a small wager on the fact that this particular woman would use green ink. A woman who carried about her a distinct odour of sage and of sand verbena and primroses would use green ink. He thought that a hand such as he had held would fashion the letters of the alphabet as they were fashioned in his letter. He thought that she would express herself clearly, tersely, and in excellent English such as had been used.
As he read it and re-read it and repeated it from memory when he was busy with the watering or occupying his hands with something that prevented him from taking it from his pocket lest he soil it, a doubt began to spring in his mind. The doubt had not the slightest reference to the girl who had written the letter. What he was vaguely beginning to distrust was his own judgment. He could not quite couple the feel of the woman he had held in his arms, the tones of her voice, the silken length of her hair, the agony of her cold, salt-encrusted face laid against his; he could not quite couple the brow and the eyes, the wide mouth and the firm chin that the meagre lightning flashes had revealed; he could not couple the quivering lips and the twitching cheeks and the tear-suppressing eyes with dishonour. He could not quite keep on, day after day, hour after hour, thinking over and over each least detail of his latest adventure and feel that this nameless, troubled girl was wanton. The real truth was that he did not want her to have been soiled. He did not want unbridled emotion ever to have swayed her. He did not want to feel that there was anywhere in all the world a man who could sully her honour. Sometimes he tried to figure on what manner of man it was that could have brought such trouble into the life of a girl who so filled his conception of exactly what a girl should be. He kept thinking about what a wonderful companion she would make; what a journey along the trail through the canyon of hurrying water would mean with her for a comrade.
Without the slightest knowledge of what had happened to him, Jamie’s thoughts had taken a new turn. When he awoke in the night and shifted his position to rest his wounded side, he answered the demands of pain and immediately fell to thinking of the Storm Girl.
It probably would not be a debatable question with doctors as to whether Jamie’s journey and his subsequent experiences were the best thing for a sick man. From their books, from their teachings, from their practice, they would simply know that such an experience would kill a man in Jamie’s condition, and Jamie, in the little ones and twos of the night, stretched his long frame on the Bee Master’s bed, moved either leg and either arm and twisted his spine and felt that the soreness had thoroughly gone out of him. The pain of the long march had left his feet and legs; his hands and arms seemed to have sufficient strength for one day more. Then his attention was attracted by the rhythmical sweep of the waves as they came washing up the sands below his window and rolled back to the mother of big waters again.
Jamie turned his head and listened to the song of the Pacific Ocean. He decided that there was a reason why it had been called the Pacific Ocean, the peaceful ocean. From the window beside which he lay, his vision carried for miles across the moon-silvered water, water so calm that it was scarcely ruffled by the waves that kept it in undulation almost as regular as breathing. Just when Jamie had decided that the Pacific Ocean had been well named he remembered the Storm Girl. That recalled to his mind the storm and he reflected further that perhaps the ocean was like a woman, that it was the still waters that ran deep; that after many days of peace, when the storm finally came, it really was a storm to make even the God of Storms look down and take notice.
The thing that a doctor never could or would have figured on about the entire circumstance was the thing that happened. Breathing in unison with the sweep of the waves, Jamie very shortly went to sleep again. His last conscious thought was not about himself. It was a commingling of lazy, sunlit waves, a feeling of being drawn somewhere by a rope of hair across his face. He went over the top into dreamland in imagination clutching a letter in one hand, and in the final drop into unconsciousness, the last thought that he sensed in his brain had something to do with a bathing suit and a gorgeous big red tomato. When Margaret Cameron finished dusting and entered the kitchen to gather up the dishes from which Jamie had eaten his breakfast, she found that long, lean individual sitting at the table and looking at her speculatively. There was a question in his eyes, a humorous quirk around his mouth. His fingers were drumming the table. Then he spoke.
“Margaret Cameron,” he asked, “are you a lady?”
Margaret Cameron took hold of a wooden chair back, and leaning forward, studied Jamie intently, but she answered him quietly and readily enough:
“I try to be.”
“Oh, I don’t mean,” said Jamie, “have you got a long line of highly bred ancestors; are you skilled in the fine arts of society; do you wear exquisite clothing and live a life elegant leisure. What want to know, to put it briefly and bluntly, is, would you faint at the sight of a drop of blood, if it happened to be human blood?”
Margaret swung a chair around and sat down on it.
“Can’t you manage your dressings?” she asked, quietly. It was Jamie’s turn to be disconcerted.
“You know,” said Margaret, “when you bend over to reach the hose and going through the garden, the bandages across your back and the straps over your shoulders show, and they look to me to be cumbersome things. I’ve wanted to speak to you for a week. I believe I could take some unbleached muslin and make a kind of jacket and fold some supports across your shoulders that would hold it up exactly as well and not be half so uncomfortable.”
Jamie sat silently staring at her.
At last he said: “I think what I had in my mind was this: I was going to ask you, if you could stomach it, if you would take one good look at a decoration I wear on my left breast, and then I thought I’d go to work and put a kind of schedule that I’ve thought out for myself into practice for, say one month; and then I’d ask you if you would look again and see if I’d done any good. I’ve got a shrapnel wound and it must have been particularly filthy shrapnel. It carried with it some sort of damnable poison that defied the best doctors at the base hospitals and passed me on to London and then to this country and clear across the continent. I’ve had a year of boiling in hot water and fussing with nurses and doctors and I’m worse than I was when I began their treatment. Just as a little secret between you and me, I’ll tell you this. They were going to put me in a tuberculosis place when they knew and admitted I didn’t have tuberculosis yet, and I wouldn’t stand for it. I got up and walked out, and I’ve come this far. From the minute I started, and for long before, when that hot, chemically saturated boiling spring water soaked into me, I couldn’t help feeling that it was fostering germs and breeding more. For six months I’ve wakened in the night thinking about the sea, and I’d gotten to the place where, when I decided to walk out, I headed for a cooler spot and for the ocean. Now I’ve gotten here and I’ve made up my mind that I’m going to try it. I want to go over a list of food with you; I want you to cook me plain, simple, nourishing stuff, something that’s got iron in it, something that will have a tendency to purify and to clean up blood saturated with poison.
“When I finish my morning rounds with the bees, I am going to put on that bathing suit at the back door; I am going down the back walk and I’m going to squeeze a tumbler level full of the juice of a couple of those big red tomatoes and drink it, and then I’m going on down to the sea and I am going in mighty close to the edge of those bandages. I’m not so sure that I am not going heels over. Then I’m coming out and I’m going to lie on the hottest sand in the hottest stretch of sun I can find and cover the bare parts until I get toughened enough that I won’t blister. I’m going to let the sun dry that salt water into my anatomy, I’m not going to rinse it off. Then I’m coming up and eat whatever you prepare for me in the kind of combinations we agree on that will go toward the making of a man. Then I’m going to take a nap. Then I’m going to get up and drink a glass of orange juice. Then I’m going to go out in the garden and see what I can do for the flowers. There are some dead leaves on the lilies that need to come off and there are some that need propping. I could clip the seed pods from the roses that have bloomed to help keep up the succession. I can find a world of things to do. Then we will arrange a dinner that will have at least a tendency to be what you might call a gesture in the direction of making a real man out of particularly big bones and peculiarly flabby muscle. I’m going to walk down to a place on the beach that I call the throne and I am going to sit there, and thoroughly wrapped in the Master’s eiderdown dressing robe and his old working overcoat on top of it so that I cannot possibly chill, I am going to breathe fog and mist and salt water until my tongue tastes salty in my mouth. I am going to lie down there and go to sleep, if I take the notion.”
Margaret Cameron stretched out her hand.
“Now, look here, Jamie,” she said, “you’re all right up to that point, but you had better cut that right out. You had better not try sleeping outdoors in fog and mist. Maybe it’s all right to go and breathe it for an hour, but don’t go to sleep and let your circulation run down and the fog settle over you and wet you and chill you to the bone. That’s a wrong idea. Change that part of your programme, and as for the rest, I’ll think hard all day, and you think hard, and this evening we’ll talk it over and see if we cannot make out the menu you want to follow. You try with all your might and I’ll try with all my might and we’ll see what we can do, with the help of the good God and all outdoors, to put you on your feet. Now, come on, let’s have a look at that sick side of yours.”
So Jamie stretched himself on the bed and uncovered his breast. Margaret Cameron, bending over him, could feel the blood slowly receding from her face.
“My, but that’s an angry wound!” she said, at last. “The flesh looks as if it had been burned. It’s almost angry enough for what we used to call ‘proud’ fesh, And it is deep and it’s wide.”
She stood staring an instant. Then she shifted her eyes to Jamie’s.
“Are you good for a strenuous diet and a stiff pull?” she asked.
“If you mean have I got the courage, yes,” said Jamie. “If you mean have I got the strength or have I got a chance—I don’t know. All I know is that I am going in the ocean. All I know is that I am going to soak in sunshine. All I know is that I am going to be a calamity to the tomato patch. Why I want these things, I don’t know. But I am ravenous for all of them, and since they are here, why shouldn’t I have them?”
“Where’d you get that tomato idea?” asked Margaret Cameron.
“T ate one yesterday and it seemed to fill a long-felt want. It seemed to hit the exact spot. I had a feeling that it was cleansing and cooling. I got the idea that if I’d squeeze the juice from a couple of them and drink it at a time when my stomach is empty, it might do something for me from the interior out, that medicines and boiling springs have not accomplished.”
“It’s a queer thing,” said Margaret Cameron, “but there may be something in it. There’s a housekeeping magazine I take that has a health department in it that I have been reading for several years, and in the last year or two they have been stressing nothing in all the world but just the thing you have hit on. Just tomatoes. I didn’t think I’d ever pay much attention to what the little Scout would call ‘bunk’ about vitamines and calories and the like, but the other day something funny happened to me. I went down to the city to do some shcpping and to have a visit with a niece of mine who teaches in the schools there and she took me to lunch in a lovely big room in one of those enormous department stores. At a table right adjoining us there sat a woman whose name Molly whispered tomeacross the table, and I remembered that wherever English is spoken all over the world her songs are sung. She had a noble face, a kindly face, an intelligent face. I couldn’t keep my eyes from the efficiency of her hands, and the beauty and individuality of her clothes. With her therewas a little dumpling of a girl. You couldn’t imagine anything healthier; you couldn’t imagine anything prettier or more appealing. At one timewhen I was feasting myeyes on the child,because she reminded me so ofmy own girl when she was a little roly poly thing like that, just when I was looking straight at her, with her spoon poised halfway to her mouth and her eyes very serious, she asked, ‘Grandma, how many calorith ith there in thith jello?’
“And ‘Grandma’ threw back her head and laughed until half the diners in the room looked in her direction. Then she took off her glasses and wiped her eyes and said, ‘Lord love you, child, your old Grandma wouldn’t know a calory from a calumet! You’ll have to ask your up-to-date mother.’
“Then the youngster laid down her spoon and announced very positively, ‘I can’t eat thith jello leth I know if it’s got the right number of calorith!’
“And the white-haired lady answered, ‘Well, my dear, I am a pretty good physical specimen myself, and I’ve gotten along all my life without knowing whether I was eating calories or vitamines or rattlesnakes. I just go ahead and eat food that is what I want and tastes right and nothing happens to me, There won’t anything happen to you if you eat what you want for one day while you are lunching with me, and to-morrow Mother can tell you whatever it is that you want to know.’
“The baby thought that over and then she said cheerfully, ‘All right. I’ll dust eat it and thee what it doth to me! Maybe it will reduthe my hipths. Don’t you think they sthick out a little too much?’
“I looked at the little person carefully. She had the brightest eyes and the finest skin. You could see away down into her cheeks, Her lips were so red and her flesh looked so firm that I thought to myself, ‘Well, whatever calories and vitamines may be, they have certainly done very perfect work on you. If I were your mother, I’d keep you right straight on the path you’re going.’
“I asked Molly something about it and she tells me that she broke down a little with her school work last year and she took a trip to Denver. There she heard about a doctor who cures everything that ails you with what youeat. The idea seems to be that there are certain food combinations that you can’t safely mix. The point Molly brought out was that the great American breakfast, eggs and toast and bacon and coffee, is about a deadly combination. Molly said that doctor proved that the yeast of bread and the albumen of egg and the fat of bacon and what caffeine you get in coffee would kill a guinea pig in short order. It seems that you may eat all the eggs you want cooked any conceivable way, but you must not take them in combination with the yeast of bread and the acids of meat. You may eat all the starch you please at one meal; but you must not take it in combination with the acids of meat or albumen. You must keep the bread and potatoes and starchy things confined to one meal. Then for dinner you may have any kind of meat you want; but you must take it with vegetables that are not starchy. You must cut off the bread, beans, potatoes, any starch. You must confine the desserts to fruits and jellos and leave out the pastry. It is simple; it iseasy. Merely a slightly different arrangement in combinations of the same things you have been eating all your life. But Molly says it makes alli the difference in the world. She’s been trying it for a year and she says her flesh is so hard and her muscles work so fine, and her brain functions better and she doesn’t know she has a stomach. She thinks it’s wonderful. What I am going to do is to make a point of seeing her and get her to write out the combinations and then I am going to try them on myself and I can try them on you at the same time. And on your own hook you can try the sand and sunshine and the salt water and the sea fog and the tomato and oranges and we’ll see how we come out.”
“At any rate,” said Jamie, “it will be more interesting to put in time planning a fight to live than to spend months moping around figuring on how soon I am going to die. In the meantime, if you would be so good as to fix up that arrangement you talked about for bandaging, I’d be very grateful. If I could get out of the weight of all this harness, I’d almost feel as if I’d been redeemed spiritually as well as physically.”
So Margaret went home to bring her sewing basket and her measuring tape, and Jamie sat on a chair while she took his measurement for the length and width the bandages need be and figured on the shoulder straps to support them. Then Jamie returned to his work.
At exactly ten o’clock he came up the back walk and selected two of the biggest, ripest tomatoes he could see on the Bee Master’s vines. He carried them to the kitchen and worked the juice from them through a small round sieve he found hanging on the wall, and when he had a tumbler overflowing, he lifted it and drank it with the keenest relish.
“That certainly hits the spot!” he said.
Then, being Jamie, and his early rearing being ingrained, he emptied the pulp into the sink basket and turned the faucet on the sieve and when it was thoroughly cleaned, he wiped it on a towel hanging above the sink and laid it in the sunshine of the window sill to be quite sure that it dried thoroughly without rusting. From the hook beside the door he took down the Master’s bathing suit, and going to his room, divested himself of his clothing and stepped into the suit, and when he drew it up to button it over his shoulders, he was not wearing anything by way of dressings for his wound save a pad of gauze fastened in place with such binding as he could secure from a face towel pinned with safety pins. His bare shoulders felt wonderfully released. He was as elated as a woman with a hair-cut.
In old slippers to protect his tender feet, and with an old Indian blanket to keep his unaccustomed flesh from burning, and a handful of towels, Jamie went down the back walk, travelling slowly, out through the gate, and standing there he selected one spot where the waves of the bay stretched before him looked peculiarly clean and foamy white. Then he made his way between the mounds of gold primrose and the verbena that waited for the cool of the evening to show the loveliness of its face and to distil on the air its delicate perfume.
Gingerly Jamie set his bare feet on the wet sand, Slowly he advanced on the ocean. When the first cold waves broke over his feet he could have shouted with delight. They were not nearly so cold as he had imagined they would be. Only cold enough to give a refreshing feeling of exhilaration. A little farther out, a little farther out, he was in to his knees; then halfway to his waist; then to a point where he began to feel top heavy, to realize that he must either swim or go back. He could not feel that swimming was exactly the thing he should undertake, so he contented himself for the beginning with walking up and down at the greatest depth he could manage and preserve his equilibrium. He could not always tell exactly how the waves were going to run, and sometimes he stumbled on an unseen rock. Once he fell headlong and felt a cold wave, half of terror, half of delight, run through his blood while a colder wave of salty water washed clear over him. He stumbled to his feet and shook back his head. He reached down and scooped up handfuls of water and rubbed it up and down his arms and over his shoulders. He swung his long arms in it and kicked out his feet, and when he found that he was panting, he walked out and, purposely, in the cleanest, bluest place he could select, thoroughly immersed himself. Then he arose and went back to his blanket. He arranged it, and the towels he had brought, in such a way as to cover his arms and legs and his head, and to leave his trunk clad with the wet suit exposed, and he stretched himself on the hot sands and let the sun of California come raying straight down until it dried the salt water in the dressing pad and the suit into and around the wound on his breast. The amazing thing was that it did not sting nearly so badly as he had thought it would—nothing to compare with the severity of many of the different dressings that had been used until his flesh was cooked almost to the point where it would endure no further punishment.
Jamie found himself saying: “Salt. Saline solution.” It struck him that he had heard of natives in uncivilized countries using salt for the healing of wounds. He remembered institutions that advertised salt baths. There must be something pretty fine about salt used medicinally. Then he remembered that the little Scout had told him that every gallon of water dipped from the Pacific Ocean contained three and one half per cent. of salt.
When he had lain for an hour in the sun, Jamie got up and went to his lunch, and afterward twenty minutes on his feet in the garden, and then a nap. Then he drank the juice of two ripe oranges, drank it cool from the ice of the small refrigerator. It struck him, as he closed the refrigerator, that it might be a good idea to work up enough tomato juice to fill two or three glasses and consign that to the ice so that he could have it cool. So he went down to the garden and gathered the tomatoes and put that thought into action.
It was while he was in the kitchen working with the tomatoes that there came a rush of feet under the window and a blood-curdling series of yells broke on the air. Jamie dropped the tomato that he had been using extreme care not to drop and muttered an exclamation as he recovered it, drenched it under the faucet, and laid it on a plate. Then he stepped to the back door to see what the commotion might be.
Drawn up in front of him at a particularly erect angle and pulling off as snappy a salute as he was accustomed to seeing anywhere, stood the little Scout. Ranged along the walk there were three children concerning whose sex there could not be the slightest doubt.
The little Scout indicated the first youth in line.
“Eleven, possibly twelve,” said Jamie to himself.
The introduction, accompanied by a wave of the hand, and a flourish of a wooden sword, was this: “Fat Ole Bill!”
Jamie’s quick eyes went to the face of the youngster. Fat Ole Bill had not the slightest objection to being “Fat Ole Bill.” He grinned, did his best at a salute, and stepped aside.
The Scout Master waved a sword, and a boy—“Possibly ten,” commented Jamie—a boy lean, slender, with olive skin and red lips, with black hair and big liquid black eyes, a boy unusually beautiful, stepped up, trimly saluted the Scout Master and then Jamie. The introduction that accompanied him was, “Pa’s and Ma’s Nice Child.”
Again Jamie’s eyes searched the face of the youngster, and it was evident that the “Nice Child” did not give a darn what the ScoutMaster called him.
The sword waved for the third time as the Nice Child stepped aside and the next boy fell into line—“Possibly thirteen and maybe fourteen,” was Jamie’s comment—a boy taller than either of the others, with enough flesh amply to cover his bones, red hair, blue eyes, and immaculate and unusually expensive and carefully selected clothing. There was a peculiar arch to the boy’s lips, a slight projection of the teeth, a flock of dancing lights shining in his eyes. The wooden sword waved a wide circle and grounded. The red-haired youngster executed a salute for the Scout Master so gracefully that it was a picture to see. His heels drew together, his chin lifted, his shoulders squared. The salute was wonderful. The Scout Master waved him on to Jamie with the introduction, “Angel Face.”
For the third time Jamie looked inquiringly and discovered that Angel Face was so accustomed to the title that he probably would have been annoyed if it had not been used.
Then, with little gray points of malice in his eyes, Jamie squared his shoulders and executed a for-sure, honest-to-goodness, four years in a bleedingly bloody war salute for the youngsters, and all of them pricked up their ears and recognized the real thing when they saw it.
“Gentlemen of the Scout Company,” said Jamie, “I am exceedingly gratified to be introduced to you. No doubt the Bee Master has been accustomed to welcoming you in his garden. In his absence, I extend the same welcome.” He turned to Angel Face. “Would you be good enough,” he said, “to give me an introduction to the Scout Master?”
The red-haired boy opened his eyes wide.
“The Scout Master knows you!” he said, defiantly.
“Sure!” said Jamie. “The trouble with me is that I don’t know the Scout Master.”
At that minute a badly battered wooden sword circled through the air.
“Attention! Scouts to order!”
The boys lined up and saluted beautifully.
“Ready!” came the order of the Master. “Tell the world the name of your Scout Master!”
The boys squared themselves and paused ready. The eyes of each of them were focussed on the point of the sword.
“Altogether now!” said the Scout Master. The sword waved through the air and in unison, at the tops of their voices, the boys began, each letter bitten off with a snap that fairly hurled it in the face of Jamie: “T-H-E, The. L-I-M-I-T, Limit—The Limit!”
They saluted and dropped back and the Scout Master stepped before Jamie, sheathed the sword, straightened the right hand down the seam of the pantaloons, laid the left across the breast, and the figure swayed forward in a profound bow. Jamie knew exactly as much as he did at the beginning—slightly more, for he saw that the Scouts really were obedient and really were well trained.
Then the Scout Master addressed Jamie: “The Bee Master lets us fight Indians here.”
“All right,” said Jamie.
“Whatever he allowed goes with me.”The Scout Master turned to the Scouts.
“Disband!” came the sharp order. “Prepare for attack!”
Jamie looked the Scout Master over. He had no notion when the Dutch bob had been brushed. It was ornamented with quite a collection of the wild oats of California and a few small twigs and leaves. The face might have been clean some time that morning. It certainly was not clean then. He saw a different shirt, but equally as disreputable, and the same breeches and shoes that had been worn on the first visit. The Scout Master marched down the length of the walk, heading straight toward an opening in the whitewashed board fence that separated the grounds of the Bee Master from those of Margaret Cameron. Jamie watched while the right hand of the Scout Master went into a protruding pocket and from a mass of things that it contained selected a piece of red chalk. By that time Jamie had taken a seat on the bench under the jacqueranda and concentrated on the Scout Master. He had forgotten the Scouts. He had even forgotten to wonder why they had disappeared and where they went. With deft strokes, quick and sure, the Scout Master was executing on the white painted fence, with sufficient skill that the intention was recognizable, the figures of four Indians. The first was limned as leaning forward peering ahead. The second was more erect. The third faced front and the fourth followed.
When the Scout Master reached the girders to which the boards of the fence were nailed, he merely lifted the chalk, made a line on the edge, and dropped back again to the boards. By the time the four figures were blocked in sufficiently to be recognized, the Scout Master came back to Jamie and from a breast pocket of the shirt produced a genuine police whistle through the ring of which a leather string was knotted that passed around the neck. Lifting the whistle, the little Scout blew a shrill note, and bounding past bushes and over flowers, from different directions came the Scouts. Each of them was armed with a gaudily trimmed bow, a leather quiver on the back filled with crudely fashioned arrows. Most of the arrows were roughly dressed splinters of wood.
The Scout Master saluted.
“Scout One, my weapons!”
The imperative command was instantly answered by Angel Face. He saluted before the Scout Master and offered an extra bow and quiver of arrows. Gravely, the arrow pouch was slung over the shoulder and the strap fastened on the breast. Gravely, the bow was taken possession of and the sword sheathed.
“Scout Two!”
Fat Ole Bill grinned the salute he could not make as he appeared around a lilac bush his arm loaded with big, dead-ripe tomatoes.
“Scout Two, advance and do your duty!” came the command, and Fat Ole Bill waddled to the fence and set a big red tomato on the girder exactly where the heart might have been supposed to be in the anatomy of each crudely drawn Indian.Then action began suddenly, whirlwind action. The voice of the Scout Master was shrill with excitement.
“Attention, Scouts! The Redskins are upon us. Our homes, our children, our firesides are in danger! Keep in ambush. When you see the whites of their eyes, if you are ready, Griggsby, you may fire! Aim at the bloody red hearts of them! Fire to kill!”
The Scout Master darted behind a clump of Scotch broom, fitted an arrow to the string of the bow, and selected the tomato heart of the first Redskin for a personal target. Bill and the Nice Child and Angel Face chose for themselves different bushes and trees of the garden and at the Scout Master’s shrill cry: “Fire!” with various success in aiming, the arrows whanged against the fence.
Jamie sat watching the proceedings. He was in doubt as to what his position in the circumstances might be. The fence that had been particularly and shiningly white was most objectionably decorated in consideration of the beauty of the garden. Jamie wanted a liberal supply of those red tomatoes himself and he had been thinking when he gathered the ones he was preparing in the kitchen, that instead of allowing quantities of them to waste, it might be possible for him to carry them to the nearest corner vegetable stand and secure for them at least enough to buy a box of blackberries or red raspberries or some other necessary food that he might want. There was a possibility that such fine fruit as those tomatoes could be sold for enough money to replenish the cash drawer from which he was supposed to buy the milk and ice and the daily paper.
While he was meditating on these things, the air awoke to a series of shrill cries. If Jamie had been blindfolded, he would have sworn that there were twenty-five youngsters on the job instead of four. It was no longer possible to tell Fat Ole Bill from Angel Face. The Scout Master was lost in a series of wildly revolving gyrations which included deftly leaping over flower beds, dodging behind trees, circling bushes, crawling belly to earth. A hail of arrows pinged against the fence, and presently, the wilder the excitement grew, the straighter the arrows seemed to be aimed, and tomatoes began flying far and wide. In the midst of the din a particularly well-aimed arrow hit a particularly large tomato rather from below and jarred it from the fence. Among the wild cries Jamie could distinguish the voice of the Scout Master shouting, “Ha! Another Redskin bit the dust!” And return shouts, “Call the ambulance!” “Put him on ice!” Suddenly Jamie sat back and began to laugh quietly, began to enjoy himself. The first thing he knew he was down on his hands and knees. He had gathered a handful of pebbles from the walk before him and then, screened by the jacqueranda, he began shooting the pebbles with accuracy and precision at the tomato hearts of the Redskins. Seeing this the Scout Master went wild. “Soak ’em!” came the shout. “Pep up! This is where the West begins!”
Angel Face sent an arrow over the fence.
“Foul Ball!” shouted the Scout Master. “Aim below the belt. You’ll scalp the early settlers.”Having exhausted his arrows Angel Face disappeared for an instant and returned to the fray beating the bee drum and shouting, “Atta boy! Keep your powder dry!”
Flying down the walk came the Nice Child with a fresh instalment of tomatoes.
“First aid to the injured!” yelled the Scout Master.
“Ki-yi-ki, yi-ye, huh-huh!” Fat Ole Bill forgot which side he was on and essayed a war-whoop.
“Listen to the rain crow warble,” shouted the Scout Master, and in an excess of frenzy, lacking arrows, joined Jamie in throwing stones.
When the last tomato had disappeared from the girders, the Scouts appeared breathless and panting before the Scout Master, who stood with sword at attention while the Scouts fell in line for orders. “Scouts, our thanks to the noble stranger who has so ably assisted us in vanquishing our ancient enemies.”
Three small boys, embarrassed at the unexpectedness of the situation, faced Jamie. Fat Ole Bill hung his head and, with his eyes rolled obliquely, muttered, “Thank you!” The Nice Child looked at him straight and said, “Much oblige!” Angel Face brought his heels together, saluted with dignity, and said, “Deeply obligated, sir!” and the Scout Master swept the sword in a wide circle and repeated the hand on the chest bow, and then straighten- ing, faced Jamie. “I thank you! My Scouts thank you! Your country thanks you! Everybody in this darned neighbourhood thanks you! Scout One, get the hose! Scout Two, bring the broom! Scout Three, turn on the water!”
When the line was laid, the Scout Master took charge. The water spanged against the white fence. Fat Ole Bill wielded the broom. The Nice Child and Angel Face gathered up the scraps of tomato and carried them back to the garbage can. When they had finished and everything was neat again and the late afternoon sun began with a few last rays to dry and whiten the fence, Jamie noticed in passing close to it that there were dozens of almost invisible red lines all through the white, and he realized that the sham battle was probably a weekly affair in the garden of the Bee Master. he went back to the bene under the jacqueranda with the feeling that in permitting the encounter he had not exceeded the limit of his privileges. While his back was turned, exactly what happened he was not able to decide. When he turned to take his seat, his gaze encountered a heap of flying legs and arms. Arms and legs everywhere. A big ball of humanity was rolling over the gravel walk, and in it the fat, bare legs of Bill, and the olive-brown legs of the Nice Child, and the silk-stockinged, kid-shod feet of Angel Face were intermixed. Presently, the Dutch bob of the Scout Master appeared on top and the leader, with deft hands, began separating the mass, disintegrating it, expertly flinging it in different directions.
“Get a pacifier for the babies!” shouted the Scout Master. “Grabbing and fighting over a hose like that! I said, ‘Scout One, put the hose away!’”Angel Face was sputtering.
“You didn’t said no such thing! You said, ‘Scout Three,’ and I’m Scout Three, myself! You wouldn’t a-told One to put it away when you’d told One to bring it!”
The Scout Master fell into deep meditation. The sword handle was used to scratch the tumbled head.
“Fellows,” said the Scout Master, dropping into a confidential tone, “I guess Angel Face is right. I guess, by Gum and by Golly! I did tell him to put away the hose, and I guess I told Two to put away the broom, and I guess I didn’t tell One to do anything, which is for the reason Ole Bill’s so fat it’s cruelty to animals to make him move anyway!”
The Scout Master sheathed the sword, combed the Dutch hair with soiled fingers, wiped the face on a particularly dirty sleeve, and stuffed in the tail of a shirt very much in evidence.
“Scouts, use your lipsticks and disband for the day!” came the order.
Then the Scout Master walked up in front of Jamie, took a decided stand and looked at him inquiringly, while Bill and the Nice Child and Angel Face ranged themselves near, their eyes highly expectant.
Jamie, sick though he might have been, Scot though he surely was, remembered back dimly to the time when he was a boy and fought imaginary Indians and hunted with wooden guns and flourished wooden swords and made wagons with rocking wheels and carried in his anatomy a stomach that was for ever empty. The stomach that was for ever empty was the keynote of the present situation he felt sure. Jamie rose up and extended one hand to the Scout Master and the other to Angel Face, who happened to be such a particularly attractive young gentleman that Jamie succumbed to the light of his eyes and the charm of his smile the first instant he had a square look at him.
“Come on, fellows,” he said, casually. “Let’s go down to the corner stand and clean out the hot dogs and strawberry pop!”
The shrill cheering that greeted Jamie’s ears was perfect compensation for the amount of the hole that the treat would make in the very meagre bunch of loose change that he carried in his breeches pocket.
Lined before the stand, while their diverse orders were being attended to, the visiting Scouts looked Jamie over critically. They liked the twinkle in his eyes. They liked the lean smile that crept over his white face. They liked the accuracy with which he had whizzed the pebbles and the dexterity with which he had gathered more when his supply ran short. Above everything else, they liked the fact that he had worked from behind a tree. If he had stood in the open and picked up stones and thrown them, it would not have meant much to the Scout Master and that particular band of Scouts; but the fellow that played the game hard, that played it according to the rules, that made it not a game but a reality by playing it as they played it, was nothing short of a real fellow and the youngsters crowded close and began to ask questions.Jamie sat down in the shade of a live oak and put one arm around the Scout Master and the other around Angel Face, and saw to it that there was room for Ole Bill and the Nice Child; and while the buns were being toasted and the onions fried, and the wienies split and browned and the mustard beaten smooth and the dill pickles sliced, and the pop brought from the ice, he told the boys something about what scouting meant when a man started on a night as black as a hat, on his stomach, crawling over shell holes big as a house, through broken rock and the débris of a sodden battlefield with a rain of shells and shrapnel bursting over him, trying to get close enough to steal a secret from the enemy, searching for the odour that attached to a beloved Buddy, hunting for the body of an officer.
The Nice Child and Cle Bill came and pressed close to Jamie’s knees. The Scout Master leaned the Dutch head against the wound on his breast and trained unblinking eyes on him and Angel Face laid violent hands on his arm and paid not the slightest attention when the stand man said: “Your hot dogs are ready!” and the popping of corks began.
“Tell us some more!” they shouted in unison. “Tell us some more!” And Fat Ole Bill kicked the olive shin of the Nice Child and said: “Gee! we never got a chance like this before, did we? He’s been where the ground’s all soggy with real blood and swords things cuttin’ into him, and shootin’ goin’ on above him! Gee! ain’t he wonnerful?”
It was Jamie himself who wrecked the party with his sensitive nostrils. He had talked about vitamines and calories. He had agreed with Margaret Cameron that they would start a régime that he would follow religiously, but since the régime had not started as yet, and since it seemed to him that he never in all his life had smelled anything quite so alluring as the odour of the hot dogs, he reached a long arm over the heads of the youngsters and with one hand gathered up the plumpest hot dog he could see and with the other a particularly pink bottle of pop. What he said was: “Fall to chow! Help yourselves, Buddies!”
Half an hour later he came up the grassy sidewalk past Margaret Cameron’s door and grinned at her. His white face was flushed peculiarly and Margaret Cameron peered at him over the load of clippings she was carrying and then stared reprovingly. “I’ll wager two bits you went down to the corner stand and ate hot dogs with those youngsters,” she accused.
Jamie smiled at her joyously.
“You win!” he said, enthusiastically. “Holy smoke! but they were jewlicious!”