"'Twill be dark--in the woods--before very long," he said, his voice sprained too by pain, while his clammy face, still coated with the red-ochre pigment of Varney's Paintpot, smeared by the drops of agony and his coat-sleeve, was a lurid sight. "You fellows will have to hustle if you want to reach that road--if it is a logging-road--and get out of the woods before night! I can hardly--hobble. I'd better stay here: Blink will stay with me; won't you, pup? When you boys get home--let my father know--he and Jim will come out an' find me; they know every inch of the woods." "And leave you alone in the woods for hours? Not I, for one!" The scout's answer was decisive, so were the loyal protests of the other two lads. Blink, with a shrewd comprehension that something was wrong with his master, had been alternately licking Leon's ear and the inflamed pads of his own paws. At the mention of his name he pressed so close to the victim's side, sitting bolt upright on his haunches, that their two bodies might have been joined at one point like the trunks of the freak tree. And the purple fidelity lights in his brown eyes said plainly that not hunger, thirst, or lonely death itself, could separate him from the being who was a greater fellow in his eyes than any scout of the U.S.A. The other three boys were at that stage of fatigue and discomfiture when the well of emotion is easily pumped; their eyes grew moist at the dog's steadfast look. But the scout shook himself brusquely as if trying to awake something within. "We ought to be able to fix you up so that you can get along to that little clearing, anyhow!" he said, his mind busy with the sixth point of the scout law and how under these circumstances he could best live up to it and help an injured comrade. "We might form a chair-carry, Col and I, but the undergrowth ahead is too thick; we couldn't wrestle through--three abreast. Ha! we'd better make a crutch for you; that's the idea! There's a birch sapling, neat an' handy, as an Irishman would say!" And the ubiquitous white birch, the wood-man's friend, came into play again. Its slim trunk, being wrenched from the ground, roots and all, and trimmed off with Nixon's knife, formed a fair prop. "Chuck me your handkerchiefs!" said the crutch-maker to the other two uninjured boys. "We'll pad the top of it, so that it won't dig into his armpit. Now then, Leon! get this under your right arm and put your left one round my neck--that will fix you up to hobble a short distance." A half-reluctant grin, distorted by agony, convulsed Leon's face as, leaning hard upon the white-birch prop, he arose and limped a few steps; he recollected how at odd moments in the woods--whenever there wasn't too much doing--he had believed that he held a grudge against the scout for making him yield one sharply contested point and that about such an infinitesimal thing in his eyes as the brief life of a chipmunk.