The hikes were generally conducted after this manner: seven of the Owls with their tall scoutmaster would leave the town bright and early on a Saturday morning, a goodly spectacle in their khaki uniforms, and, staff in hand, take their way through the woods to the little farm-clearing where they were reinforced by the assistant scoutmaster in his rough garb--Toiney would not don the scout uniform--and by Harold, the still weak brother. Their coming was generally heralded by modified shouting. And the impulsive Toiney would suspend some farm task and stand erect with an explosive "_Houp-là!_" tickling his throat, to witness that most exhilarating of present-day sights, a party of boy scouts emerging from the woods into a clearing, with Mother Nature in the guise of the early sunshine rushing, open-armed, to meet them, as if welcoming her stray children back to her heart. Then Toiney, as forest guide, would assume the leadership of the party, and not only was his thorough acquaintance with "de bird en de littal wil' an-ni-mal" valuable; but his fund of knowledge about "heem beeg tree," and the uses to which the different kinds of wood could be put, seemed broad and unfailing, too. The most exciting discovery of that season to the boys was when he pointed out to them one day the small hole or den amid some rocky ledges near Big Swamp where the Mother Coon--as sometimes happens, though she generally prefers a hollow tree--had brought forth her intrepid offspring; both the one which had raided Toiney's hencoop, and Raccoon Junior who had come to a warlike issue with the crows. Toiney, as he explained, had investigated that deep hole amid the ledges when the woods were green with spring, and had discovered some wild animal which by its size and general outline he knew to be a coon, crouching at the inner end of it, with her young "littal as small cat." He had beaten a hasty retreat, not willing to provoke a possible attack from the mother rendered bold by maternity, or to disturb the infant family. He was radiant at finding the coon's rocky home again, though tenantless, now. "Ha! I'll know we fin' heem den"; he beamed upon his comrades with primitive conceit. "We arre de boy--engh? We arre de bes' scout ev'ry tam!" And that was the aim of each member of the Owl Patrol, with the exception, perhaps, of Harold, not indeed to be the "best scout," but to figure as the equal in scoutcraft of any lad of his age and a corresponding period of service, in the United States. To this end he drilled, explored and studied, somewhat to the mystification of boys who still held aloof from the scout movement!