Such was not the case, however. At one word which he, the blue-shirted woodsman, had used in his harangue, Nixon started, and a strange look shot across his face. He knew enough of French to translate literally that word _éclaireur_, the French military term for scout. He knew that it meant figuratively a light-spreader: one who marches ahead of his comrades to enlighten the others. Could any term be more applicable to the peace scout of to-day who is striving to bring in an advanced era of progress and good will? Somehow, it stimulated in Scout Warren the desire to be an _éclaireur_ in earnest to the darkened boy overshadowed by his bugbear fears, now skulking behind the berry-bushes. "I guess it's no use our trying to get hold of him," Coombsie was saying meanwhile in his cousin's ear. "See that old dame over there, Nix?" he pointed to a portly, elderly woman with an immense straw hat tied down, sunbonnet fashion, over her head. "Well! she took care of Harold's mother before she died; now she keeps house for his grandfather, and she, that old woman, told my mother that up to the time Harold was seven years old he would often run and hide his head in her lap of an evening as it was coming on dark. And when she asked what frightened him he said that he was 'afraid of the stars'! Just fancy! Afraid of the stars as they came out above the clearing here!" "Gee whiz! What do you know about that?" exclaimed Nixon with a rueful whistle: that dark hobgoblin, Fear, was more absurdly entrenched than he had thought possible. Yet Harold's seemed more than ever a case in which the scout who could once break down the wall of shyness round him might prove a true _éclaireur_: so he advanced upon the timid boy and addressed him with a honeyed mildness which made Coombsie chuckle and gasp, "Oh, sugar!" under his breath; though Marcoo set himself to second his patrol leader's efforts to the best of his ability. Together they sought to decoy Harold into a conversation, asking him questions about his life, whether he ever went into the woods with Toiney or played solitary games on the clearing. They intimated that they knew he was "quite a boy" if he'd only make friends with them and not be so stand-offish; and they tried to inveigle him into a simple game of tag or hide-and-seek among the bushes as a prelude to some more exciting sport such as duck-on-a-rock or prisoner's base. But the hapless "_poltron_" only answered them in jerky monosyllables, cowering against the bushes, and finally slunk back to the side of the blue-shirted farmhand with whom he had become familiar--whose merry songs could charm away the dark spirit of fear--and there remained, hovering under Toiney's wing.