The next minute Coombsie's fingers were fumbling with the rope rather blunderingly, for Marcoo was by nature a bookworm and more efficient along lines of abstract study than at anything requiring manual skill. "Pass the end up through the bight," directed Scout Warren when the bight or loop had been formed upon the standing part of the rope. "I said _up_, not down, jackass! Now, pass it round the 'standing part'; don't you know what that means? Why! the long end of the rope on which you're working. Oh! you're a dear donkey," nodding with good-humored scorn. Now both the donkey recruit and the instructing scout had become for the moment genuinely absorbed in the intricacies of that bowline knot, and forgot that this was not intended as a _bona-fide_ lesson, but as mere "show off" to awaken the interest of a third person. Their tail-end glances were no longer directed furtively at Harold to see whether or not he was beginning to "take notice." So they missed the first quiver of a peculiar change in him; they did not see that his sagging chin was suddenly reared a little as if by the application of an invisible bearing-rein. They missed the twitching face-muscles, the slowly dilating eye, the breath beginning to come in quick puffs through his spreading nostrils, like the smoke issuing from the punky wood, heralding the advent of the ruddy spark, when in the woods they started a fire with rubbing-sticks. And just as suddenly and mysteriously as that triumphant spark appeared--evolved by Nixon's fire-drill, from the dormant possibilities in the dull wood--did the first glitter of fascinated light appear and grow in the eye of Harold Greer, the prisoner of Fear, disparagingly nicknamed the "Hare"! "I--I can do that! I c-can do it--b-better than he can!" Stuttering and trembling in a strange paroxysm of eagerness, the _poltron_ addressed, in a nervous squawk, not the absorbed scouts, but Toiney, his friend and protector. "I can t-tie it better'n _he_ does! I know--I know I can!" The shrill boyish voice which seemed suddenly to dominate every other sound on the clearing was hoarse with derision as the abnormally shy and timid boy pointed a trembling finger at Marcoo still, like a "dear donkey," blundering with the rope-end. Had the gray rabbit, which suddenly at that moment whisked out of the woods and across a distant corner, opened its mouth and addressed them, the surprise to the two scouts could scarcely have been greater. "Oh! _you can_, can you?" said Nixon thickly. "Let's see you try!" He placed the rope-end in Harold's hand, which received it with a fondling touch. "Here you make a small loop on this part of the rope, leaving a good long end," he began coolly, while his heart bounded, for the spark in the furtive eye of the twelve-year-old "scaree" was rapidly becoming a scintillation: the scouts had struck fire from him at last. A triumph beside which the signal achievement of their friction fire in the woods paled!