A little homesickness beset him for the farm-clearing in the woods and his grandfather's staid presence, to cure which Scouts Warren and Chase took him off with them in the little rowboat, the Pill, lent by Captain Andy, to explore the tidal river and the little truant creeks that escaped from it to burrow among the salt-marshes. "We're going to try and hunt up a creamy pup-seal, Harold, and bring it back to camp," said Nixon; and in the excitement of this quest the still shy boy forgot his nervous qualms. Fortune favored the expedition. It was now between one and two o'clock in the afternoon. The tide, which had been high at six in the morning and again at twelve, was once more on the ebb, as the two elder scouts rowing in leisurely fashion, turned the Pill's snub nose into a pearly creek whose shallow water was clear and pellucid, over its sandy bed. Hardly half a dozen strokes had they taken between bold marshy banks when, from some half-submerged rocks near the head of the creek, they heard a prolonged and dulcet "Oo-oo-oo-ooo" that might have been the call of a dove, save that it was louder. "_Hear him?_" cried Leon, shipping his oar in blinking excitement. "That's our pup-seal, Nix! We've got him cornered in this little creek; if he dives, the water is so shallow that we can pick him up from the bottom; and he can't swim fast enough to get away from us--though as likely as not he won't want to!" The last conjecture proved true. The young seal, little more than two months old, which lay sprawled out, a creamy splotch, upon the low reef which the tide was forsaking, with his baby flippers clinging to the wet rock and his little eyes staring unwinkingly into the sunlight, had not the least objection to human company. He welcomed it. When the scouts rowed up alongside the ledge he suffered Nixon to lift his moist fat body into the boat, where he stretched himself upon the bottom planks in perfect contentment, and took all the caresses which the three boys lavished upon him like any other lazy puppy. "Isn't he 'cunning', though?" gasped Harold, trying to lift the youthful mammal into his arms, an attempt which failed because he, the weak one of the Owls, was not strong enough to do so without capsizing the Pill--not because the pup-seal objected. "I thought he'd be a kind of whitish color, eh?" appealing diffidently to Leon. "So he was, when born; his hair is turning darker now, to a dull yellow; by and by it will be a brownish drab. See, Greerie! his spots are beginning to appear!" Leon ran his finger down the seal's dog-like head and back, already faintly dotted with those round markings which gain for his family the name of the "marbled seal." "Isn't he a 'sprawly' pup, and so friendly? The other scouts will be 'tickled to death' with him--" Nixon was beginning, when a shadow suddenly fell across the boat and its three occupants, whose attention was entirely upon the young seal.