As the two regained the crest of the hilly uplands, Leon paused for breath. On his left hand stretched the dark, solemn woods, where the breeze hooted weirdly among leafless boughs. On his right, beyond upland and broad salt-marsh, wound the silver-spot river in whose now shallow ripples bathed a rising moon. Quarter of a mile ahead of him a rosy flush upon the cheek of darkness told that in the sheltered hollow, between a clump of pines that served as a windbreak and the woods, the Owls' camp-fires were already blazing. "Tooraloo! I feel as if I could start my fire to-night without using a match at all--just by snapping my fingers at it, or with a piece of damp bark and a snowball, as the woodsmen say," he confided half-audibly to the dog. Whence this feeling of prowess, of being a firebrand--a genial one--capable of kindling other and better lights in the world than a camp-fire? Starrie Chase did not analyze his sensations of magnificence, which bloomed from a discovery back there on the marshes of the secret which is at the root of the Boy Scout Movement, at the base of all Christian Chivalry, at the foundation of golden labor for mankind in every age: namely, that the excitement of helping people is vastly, vitally, and blissfully greater than the spurious excitement of hurting them! CHAPTER XI ESTU PRETA! "Hullo! here's Starrie. Well! it's about time you turned up. We waited quarter of an hour for you before leaving town.--Hey! Starrie, we've got our six cook-fires all going. I only used two matches in lighting mine; I've passed one half of to-night's test.--So've I! Whoopee! _I_ 'went the jolly test one better': I lit my fire with a single, solitary match." Starrie Chase, bounding down the grassy side of Sparrow Hollow, with these lusty cries of his brother Owls greeting him, stood for a moment in the brilliant glare of a belt of fires, as if dazed by the ruddy carnival, while his dog, making a wild circuit of the ring, bayed each bouquet of flames in turn. "Yaas; we'll get heem littal fire light lak' wink--sure! We ar-re de boy! We ar-re de scout, you'll bet!" supplemented the merry voice of Toiney, the assistant scoutmaster, who, with the tassel of his red cap bobbing, and the flame-light flickering on his blue homespun shirt, was on his knees before Harold's cook-fire, using his lungs as a pair of bellows. "Hurrah! I'm in this: I'll light my fire with one match, too. Kenjo Red shan't get ahead of me: no, sir!" Corporal Leon Chase was now working like lightning, piling dry leaves, pine splinters, dead twigs into a carefully arranged heap in a gap which had been left for him in the ring of half a dozen fires kindled by six tenderfoot scouts, ambitious of being admitted to a second-class degree. But he, the behind-time tenderfoot, was abruptly held up in his tardy labors by the voice of the tall scoutmaster, who with Scout Warren, the patrol leader of the Owls, was superintending the tests.