CHAPTER I.

KHAKI BOYS IN THE SUNNY SOUTHLAND.

“That’s always the way it goes!”

“Why, what’s the matter with you now, Step Hen; you seem in a peck of trouble?”

“Who wouldn’t be, when some fellow went and hid his hat away? Didn’t you all see me hang the same on this peg sticking out from the trunk of the pine tree, when we-all came ashore to eat lunch; because that’s what I did, as sure as anything?”

“Oh! you think so, do you?”

“I know it as well as I know my name. Think because I’ve got a stuffy cold in my head just like Bumpus here says he has, and can’t smell, that I don’t know beans, do you? Well, you can see for yourself, Davy Jones, my nice new campaign hat ain’t on the peg right now.”

“Do you know why that’s true, Step Hen? Because a thing never yet was known to be in two places at the same time. And unless my eyes are telling me what ain’t so, you’ve got your hat on right at this minute, pushed back on your head! Told you, boys, Step Hen ought to get a pair of specs; now I’m dead sure of it.”

The boy who seemed to answer to the queer name of Step Hen threw up a hand, and on discovering that he did have his hat perched away back on his bushy head of hair, made out to be quite indignant.

“Now, that’s the way you play tricks on travelers, is it? I’d just like to know who put that hat on my head so sly like! Mr. Scout-master, I wish you’d tell the fellows who love to play pranks to let me alone.”

“I’d be glad to, Step Hen, only in this case I happened to see you take your hat down, and clap it on your own head, though I reckon you did it without thinking what you were doing; so the sooner you forget it the better.”

A general laugh arose at this, and Step Hen, subsiding, continued to munch away at the sandwich he gripped in one hand. There were just eight lads, dressed in the khaki suits of Boy Scouts, some of which were new, and others rather seedy, as though they had seen many a campaign. But those who wore the brightest uniforms did so because their others had become almost disreputable, and fit only to be carried along for use in case of absolute necessity.

While they sit there, enjoying their midday meal, with two pretty good-sized paddling boats tied up, showing just how they managed to reach this lonely place on the border of one of the almost impenetrable swamps in Southern Louisiana, let us take advantage of the stop to say a few words concerning these lively lads.

Of course the boy reader who has had the pleasure of possessing any or all of the previous volumes in this series, will readily recognize these sturdy fellows as the full membership of the Silver Fox Patrol connected with Cranford Troop of Boy Scouts.

Under the leadership of Assistant Scout-master Thad Brewster they had been having some pretty lively outings for the last two years; at one time in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina; then up in Maine; afterwards finding a chance to pay a hunting and exploring trip to the far distant Rocky Mountains, and finally on the preceding summer cruising upon the vast stretches of Lake Superior.

Besides the patrol leader, Thad, there were Allan Hollister, who had seen much actual life in the woods, and was perfectly at home there; a tall lanky fellow, with such a long neck that his chums had long ago named him “Giraffe;” a dumpy, fat scout, whose jolly red face was almost the color of his hair, and who came when any one called “Bumpus;” a very neat and handsome boy who had been christened Edmund Maurice Travers Smith, but who did not object when all that was shortened to just plain, every-day “Smithy;” an acrobatic chap who loved to stand on his head, and play monkey, Davy Jones by name; Step Hen himself, otherwise Stephen Bingham; and last but not least one Robert Quail White, a native of the South, and whose rather odd name was soon happily changed among his mates to plain “Bob White,” which, as all boys know, is the popular way a quail is designated in the country.

It might as well be said right here in the start that Bumpus was also occasionally at school and at home addressed as Cornelius Hawtree; and that Giraffe would come to a meal if some one called softly “Conrad Stedman;” because he was very, very fond of responding to any sort of a summons that had something to eat along with it.

These eight boys did not constitute the whole of Cranford Troop, for there was another full patrol enlisted, and part of a third; but they were all boon companions; and chancing to have a snug amount of hard cash in the treasury of the patrol, separate from the troop amount, they were enabled to take advantage of a golden opportunity to visit the far South in the dead of winter.

It chanced that they were talking about this right then and there, so that by listening for a bit we may learn what unusual circumstances had arisen to give the scouts this wonderful chance to take a vacation, when they apparently should be industriously working at their books in the Cranford High School, to which all of them belonged.

“You can say what you like,” Giraffe was remarking, as he carefully drained the coffee-pot into his tin cup, that being his third allowance; “I think the Silver Fox Patrol was hatched out under a lucky star. We’ve had heaps and heaps of good things happen to us in times past; and now just to think that the old frame building we’ve been using for a high school for years, should go and take fire and burn to the ground, a month or six weeks before the new brick schoolhouse could be furnished and heated, compelling the Board to dismiss school for that time. Let me tell you it’s a mighty bad wind that blows good to nobody.”

“But that’s only a part of our great good luck, and you forget that, Giraffe,” insisted Davy Jones, nodding his head, eagerly, as he looked around at the live oak trees, in the crooked and wide spreading branches of which he expected to soon be sporting, holding on with his toes, and swinging from limb to limb with the abandon of an ape.

“Why, to be sure, I had ought to enumerate the rest!” declared the lanky member of the patrol. “Think of it, how just after that sad catastrophe—excuse me, boys, while I wipe a tear away in memory of that poor old schoolhouse—there was that strange letter came to Thad’s bully old guardian, Daddy Caleb Cushman Brewster, from a man he used to know years ago. It was written from down here in Southern Louisiana, and told how the writer had seen one Felix Jasper, with a very pretty if ragged little girl in his company, hurrying along a lonely trail that led into old Alligator Swamp, and acting like he had recognized the gentleman, and was afraid to let him come any closer.”

“Yes,” spoke up Thad, who in the absence of the regular scout-master, Dr. Philander Hobbs, always acted as the leader of the troop, “and all of you chance to know that years ago, when I was much smaller, and lived in another town, that man Felix Jasper was the manager of my mother’s estate, and was found to be stealing from her, so he was discharged. Later on my only little sister, Pauline, strangely disappeared, and could never be found. It was believed at the time that Jasper in a spirit of revenge had stolen the little child, but he could not be located; and the grief of that loss I really believe hastened the death of my dear mother.”

Thad was so overcome with emotion that he could not go on. His chums cast sympathetic looks at him, for they were very fond of their leader; then Allan Hollister took up the narrative by saying:

“And his gentleman who happened to glimpse the man and girl, and who had known of the circumstances in the past, wrote that he felt almost certain he had been looking on the face of the long-lost little Brewster girl. Daddy was laid up with one of his attacks of rheumatism; and besides, he could never have stood such a trip. So he put up an unlimited amount of spending money, enough to allow the whole patrol to make the trip by rail; and here we are, determined to stand by our chum, and penetrate this dismal Louisiana swamp to find out whether it is Thad’s sister and Felix Jasper who are living somewhere about here; or if the gentleman made a bad mistake.”

“Yes,” went on Bob White, impulsively, for he was a true, warm-hearted Southern boy, a little touchy with regard to his “honor,” but a splendid and loyal comrade for all that, “and we’re bound to do it, I reckon, suh, or know the reason why.”

“The first thing we did when we got down here,” Giraffe went on to say, “was to pick up all the information connected with this swamp we could, which was not a great lot, because they seem to think it’s a terrible place, and few persons ever dream of penetrating its unexplored depths, except now and then a muskrat trapper, or an alligator-skin collector; though they do say it’s been an asylum for occasional negro convicts who broke away from the turpentine camps and were pursued by the dogs.”

“Huh! looks some like we might be up against the toughest proposition we ever tackled, believe me,” Step Hen observed.

“Well,” remarked Bumpus, composedly, “we’ve pretty nearly always come out on top, haven’t we; and according to my notion we’re strong enough to do it again.”

“There’s something pretty strong around here, and that’s a fact,” spoke up Giraffe as he changed his seat. “I wonder, now, if the decaying vegetation in these here old Louisiana swamps always tone up the air like that. Smells to me kind of like rank onions that have got past the useful and respectable stage. I can see how we’re bound to have a high old time if this is a specimen of swamp air, and we expect to breathe it for mebbe two whole weeks.”

“Oh! say, that ain’t hardly fair!” remarked Davy Jones; “alaying it all on the poor old swamp, when, honest Injun, I’ve been asniffing that same queer odor all day.”

He looked straight and hard at Bumpus as he said this. The fat scout immediately frowned as though he felt hurt.

“I know what you’re ahinting at, Davy Jones,” he remarked, hotly; “just because I choose to continue wearing my old suit, and keep the new one for another day you like to make out this outfit ain’t all right. I admit she looks a mite greasy, because I’ve helped cook many a fine meal while wearing the same. There’s _associations_ wrapped up with every inch of this faded cloth, and you can laugh all you want to, but I decline to throw it away while on this trip. What’s a swamp but a muddy hole, and I don’t choose to spoil my brand new suit, if you do. Besides, Step Hen and me, we’ve got such stuffy colds in our heads we can’t smell a single thing.”

“Then for goodness sake, change places with me, and be a chum of Step Hen’s during the remainder of this whole trip. Besides,” added Giraffe, as he saw Bumpus getting as red as a turkey gobbler with indignation, “it’ll balance the two boats better, I’m thinking. How about that, Mr. Scout-master?”

“I was figuring that we could do better than we have so far; and if Bumpus is willing to change with you, let him,” replied Thad. “That will bring him in my boat with Davy and Step Hen. They say colds like that are catching, so perhaps both Davy and myself will soon have one.”

“Huh! I hope so,” muttered the Jones boy, sniffing the air suspiciously when poor Bumpus happened to move to windward of him; but the usually good-natured fat boy pretended not to notice the slur.

“Well, as we’re all through lunch, let’s make a start, for we expect to be deep in Alligator swamp long before night comes on,” said Allan, who had the second paddling boat, fashioned somewhat after the pattern of the old-fashioned dug-out canoe made from a log, in his charge, being the assistant patrol leader of the Silver Fox band.

Ten minutes later, and having packed all their stuff away, the boys were ready to continue their journey into the depths of the thickening wilderness where the hanging Spanish moss that draped the trees proved such a strange sight to them all, and gave such a graveyard look to their surroundings that more than one of them felt a little shiver of apprehension, as though they fancied all manner of mysteries must presently arise to confront them.

The boat containing Giraffe, Allan, Bob White and Smithy happened to be ahead when they came to where their progress was hindered somewhat by floating logs and other stuff; so Giraffe, without being told to do the same, stood up in the bow to punch his way clear. He made a vicious stab at what he thought was a floating log, but had no sooner struck his paddle against it than the seemingly harmless object made a sudden lunge, splashed water all over the boat, and disappeared from sight; while the astonished boy, losing his balance as his paddle slipped off the scaly armor of the old mossback alligator that had been sleeping so placidly on the surface of the lagoon that it had not noticed their approach, fell in with a tremendous splurge.