"Estu preta!" During the days that followed, while the fall season was merged in winter, the Owls who had passed their outdoor tests in Sparrow Hollow, six of whom were tenderfeet no longer, but second-class scouts, did try to live up to their hearty motto. And this not only in the development of their strong young bodies by exercise and drill, so that every expanding muscle was under control, not only in the training of their mental faculties toward keen observation and alert action, but also in the chivalrous practice of the little every-day kindness to man or beast--almost too trivial to be noticed, perhaps, yet preparing the heart for the rendering of a supreme good turn! Thus the Owl Patrol presently began to be recognized as a patriotic and progressive force. The Improvement Society of the little town sought its coöperation, and it soon became "lots more fun" to the boy scouts to lend a hand in making that too staid town a more beautiful and lively place to live in than to pile--as had often been the case formerly--destruction on its dullness. Under the direction of their energetic young scoutmaster they engaged in other crusades too, besides that against things ugly and retarding, in crusades for the rescue of many a needless and undue sufferer of the animal kingdom, their most noted enterprise along these lines being an attack upon the use of the steel trap among boys, especially those of the woodland farms, whereby many a little fur-bearing animal met its slow end in suffering unspeakable. The use of this steel-jawed atrocity was bad enough in the hands of the one or two adult professional trappers of the neighborhood who visited their traps regularly. (And it is to be hoped that the Boy Scouts of America, who champion the cause of their timid little brothers of the woods, will some day sweep this barbarous contrivance altogether from the earth!) But its use by irresponsible boys who set the traps in copse or thicket, and, in the multitudinous interests of boydom, frequently forgot all about them for days--leaving the little animal luckless enough to be caught to suffer indefinitely--is a cruelty too heinous to flourish upon the same free soil that yields such a fair growth of chivalry as that embodied in the Scouts of the U.S.A. One or two of the Owls, who shall remain incognito, had possessed such traps in the past: now, they took them out into a back yard, shattered them with a hammer, relegated the fragments to a refuse heap, and instituted a zealous crusade against the use of the steel trap by non-scouts of the neighboring farms, such as Godey Peck and his gang. There was a hand-to-hand skirmish over this matter before the Owl Patrol had its way; and the result thereof gave Godey cause for reflection. "It hasn't made 'softies' of 'em anyhow, this scout movement," he soliloquized. "They got the better _of us_. And they seem to have such ripping good times, hiking an' trailing! But--"