"A movement such as this might have been the saving of Dave Baldwin," sighed the Doctor. "He was always playing such wild tricks. People kept warning him to 'cut it out' or he would surely get into trouble. But the 'tide rip' within seemed too much for him. No foghorn warnings made any impression. I've been thinking lately of the saying of one wise man: 'Hitherto there has been too much foghorn and too little bugle in our treatment of the boys!' Too much croaking at them: too little challenge to advance! So I said to the new scoutmaster, Harry Estey, Colin's brother," nodding toward a tall young man who was the centre of the eager ring of boys, "I said, 'give Leon the _bugle_: give it to him literally and figuratively: you'll need a bugler in your boy scout camp and I'll pay for the lessons; it will be a better pastime for him than fixing my doorbell.'" "I hope 'twill keep him from tormenting that lonely old woman over on the marshes; the boys of this town have made her life a burden to her," said Captain Andy, thinking of that female recluse "Ma'am Baldwin," to whom allusion had been made by Colin and Coombsie on the memorable day which witnessed their headstrong expedition into the woods. "She has been regarded as fair game by them because she's a grain cranky an' peculiar, owing to the trouble she's had about her son. He was the youngest, born when she was middle-aged--perhaps she spoiled him a little. Come to think of it, Doc, I saw the young scape-grace a few days ago when I was down the river in my power-boat! He was skulking like a fox round those Sugar-loaf Sand-Dunes near the bay." "How did he look?" "Oh, shrunken an' dirty, like a winter's day!" Captain Andy was accustomed to the rough murkiness of a winter day on mid-ocean fishing-grounds. "He made off when he saw me heading for him. He's nothing but an idle vagrant now, who spends his time loafing between those white dunes and the woods on t' other side o' the river. He got work on a farm after he was discharged from the reformatory, but didn't stick to it. Other fellows shunned him, I guess! Folks say that he's been mixed up in some petty thefts of lumber from the shipyards lately, others that he keeps a row-boat stowed away in the pocket of a little creek near the dunes, and occasionally does smuggling in a small way from a vessel lying out in the bay. But that's only a yarn! He couldn't dodge the revenue officers. Anyhow, it's too bad that Dave should have gone the way he has! He's only 'a boy of a man' yet, not more'n twenty-three. When I was about that age I shipped on the same vessel with Dave's father--she was a trawler bound for Gran' Banks--we made more than one trip together on her. He was a white man; and--"