And as the boy scouts fell into line, while Toiney was muttering, aghast: "Ah, _quel gros feu_! She's beeg fire! How we put shes out--engh?" the alert brain of the American scoutmaster had outlined his plan of campaign; and the air cracked with his orders:-- "Toiney, take the Owls and break into that clam-digger's shack on the beach: get his pails! Foxes and Seals form a line to the beach; fill the pails as you get them an' pass 'em along to me! Tide's high; you need only wade in a little way! Hey! Leon,"--to Corporal Chase, who was obeying the first order with the rest of his patrol,--"you're good at signaling: take these lanterns, get up on the tallest sand-hill an' signal Annisquam Lighthouse; tell them to get help! Men there can probably read semaphore!" "_We_ may not be able to prevent the fire's spreading. And if it attacks that bungalow, the others will go too--the whole colony! Lighthouse men may take the glare in the sky to mean only a brush-fire," added the scoutmaster, _sotto voce_, as he stationed himself upon the crest of the sandy slope that led from the burning shed to the dim lapping water. That doomed shed was now blazing like a mammoth bonfire. The flames flung their gleeful arms out, seizing a solemn gray birch-tree for a partner in their wild dance, scattering their rosy fire-petals broadcast until they lodged in the roof of the wood-shed adjacent to the house, and upon the piazza of the bungalow itself. But they had a trained force to reckon with in the boy scouts. In the clam-digger's shack were found more than a dozen pails which their owner had cleaned and set in order before he went home that evening. And among the excited raiders who seized upon them with wild eagerness was Harold Greer--Harold who a year ago was called "poltron" and "scaree" even by the friend who protected him--Harold, with the last wisp of bugbear fear that trammeled him burned off by the contagious excitement of the moment--acquitting himself sturdily as a Scout of the U.S.A! Under his patrol leader's direction he took his place in the chain of boys that formed from the conflagration to the wave-edge of the beach, where half a dozen of his comrades rushed bare-legged into the howling tide, filled the pails and passed them along, up the line, to their scoutmaster on the hill. And he held to his place and to his duty stanchly, did the one-time "poltron," even when Toiney, his mainstay, was summoned to the hill-top, to aid the commander-in-chief in his direct onslaughts upon the fire. Seeing which, Scout Warren touched his shoulder once proudly, in passing, and said in a voice huskily triumphant: "Well done, Harold! I always knew you were a boy!" The dragon which had held sway upon that woodland clearing was slain at last, and the scars which he had left upon his victim were being cauterized by the fire.