He pointed to Colin Estey who came swinging along out of the distance, his quick springy step and upright carriage doing credit to the scouts' drill.
Colin halted ere crossing the bridge to hail a street-car for an old gentleman who was making futile attempts to stop it, and then courteously helped him to the platform.
Godey shook his head over the action. "Cock-a-doodle-doo!" he crowed scornfully. "Ain't we acting hifalutin?"
Yet there was nothing at all bombastic about the simple good turn or in Colin's bright face as he joined the other scout upon the bridge and marched off homeward with him, their rhythmic step and erect carriage attracting the attention of more than one adult pedestrian.
Godey lolled on the parapet, looking after them, racking his brain for some derisive epithet to hurl at their backs; he longed to shout, "Sissies!" and "Spongecakes!" But such belittling terms clearly didn't apply.
The only mocking shaft in his quiver that would come anywhere near hitting the mark of those well-drilled backs--straight as a rod--was one which even he felt to be feeble:--
"Oh! you Tin Scouts," he shouted maliciously. "Tin Soldiers! _Tin Scouts!_" sustaining the cry until the two figures disappeared from view in the direction of the Chase homestead.
But Leon did not study signaling and the Morse alphabet that afternoon. He was presently dispatched by his father, who owned a pleasant home on the outskirts of the town, on an errand to a farm some two miles distant on the uplands that skirted the woods.
The afternoon had all the spicy beauty of early November, with a slight frost in the air. The fresh breeze laughed like a tomboy as it romped over the salt-marshes. Each eddying dimple in the tidal river shone like a star sapphire, while the broad, brackish channel wound in and out between the marshes with as many wriggles as a lively trout.
"Those little creeks look like runaways," thought Leon as he paused upon the uplands and beamed down upon the wide panorama of golden marsh-land and winding water. "They're for all the world like schoolboys that have cut school, giggling an' running to hide!" His eye dreamily followed the course of many a truant creek that half-turned its head, looking under the tickling sunbeams as if it were glancing back over its shoulder, while it burrowed into the marshes vainly trying to hide where the relentless schoolmaster, called, for want of a better name, Solar Attraction, might not find it and compel its return to the ocean.