“It’s a Boy!” Both girls burst forth simultaneously, explosively, with the discovery. The explosion was followed by an inarticulate rumble made up of mirth, that was one part trepidation at this boy’s very singular behavior, and of the gratification which variety always brings in its train, for in three weeks and three days of camping they had not seen a boy, saving at long range.

One of Captain Andy’s wooden camps upon the Sugarloaf beach, flanking their own Camp Morning-Glory, was unoccupied. The other sheltered an elderly naturalist and his wife—young people there were none, outside of their own group.

“But what a fat boy!” Penelope’s gaze was measuring the padded breadth of the yellow-brown shoulders, hunched and bowed. “Ever see such a fat thing in your life?” The hills rang with her giggle, half-hysterical now, for the sun was departing, shadows creeping among the dunes; she was not absolutely sure that this bloated yellowish back, persistently toward her, was human.

Was it a swollen spectre of the Sugarloaf?

And while the girls stood clinging to each other in nervous indecision they became definitely conscious of a distant, organ-like volume of sound coming from no point in sight; they had heard it right along, but, knowing whence it boomed, paid no attention to it. It was the roar of the breakers at high tide, breaking upon the sand-bar, half a mile off, where the tidal river met the open bay, or sea.

It sounded louder here than on the beach near their camp and the incessant, invisible sobbing added to the mystery enveloping that surly back.

All of a sudden the Mystery turned plump around and addressed them.

“For the love o’ Mike!” it burst forth irritably, “why do you stand there staring; why don’t you offer to do something for a fellow who’s a ‘goner,’ eh?”

“Are you a ‘goner’?” Penelope plucked up heart to ask; the yellow-brown Mystery was presenting not a back, but a shoulder to her now, together with a short, thick neck, a double chin and the fat profile of a head, covered with clammy hair, which, inclining to one side like a bird’s, looked up at her sidelong.

That slanting gaze became an amazed one presently; the owner of the flesh-cushioned back, whether human or goblin, was evidently struck for a moment by the unique spectacle of two fringed and moccasined maidens, with their hair in long braids, head-bands on their foreheads, colored beads upon their necks, looking down at him from under the waving wing of dusk, their pedestal a white sand-hill.

But his interest in anything outside himself and his clump of basswood was evidently momentary.

“Of course I’m a goner,” he reaffirmed glumly. “Can’t you see it to look at me?” in the tone of one whose plight exempts him from the civilities of life. “I’m just making my will.”

He pointed with the dignity of a dying sage to a little grey book upon his knee and waved a stub of pencil.

“Gee! he’s crazy,” ejaculated Penelope—and Olive was deaf to her slang now.

“No, I’m not ‘crazy,’” came up from the basswood. “I’m poisoned.”

“Poisoned! With—what?” It was Olive’s startled lips which put the question.

“Arsenate of lead.”

Here was a thunderclap, indeed, which shook the sands under the girls’ feet; neither of them knew much about poisons, but this sounded deadly.

“Yes, I guess I’m done for. If you can’t do anything for me, don’t stand staring down at me! I want to make my will in peace.” The fat fingers which held the stubby pencil waved it solemnly and then began to write again in the little grey book which had a vivid colored picture on the cover.

“If I’m to go”—the youthful testator looked up with something like a sob of self-admiration—“if I have to go, I want to die like a plucky—Scout.”

“Ho! He’s a Boy Scout.” Penelope caught her breath. She squeezed Olive’s hand in a convulsive grip. She rose to tiptoe on the sand-peak. Something was rising up in Penelope, stretching itself like a body of fire within her own frame so that she felt it in every extremity of her actual body, something was queening it within her, the motherly impulse, the mothering impulse fed and fostered by the care of three younger brothers.

This fat Scout called himself a “goner.” His puffy cheeks looked pale, too, in the waning golden light; so did the double chin bent over the pencil.

But just so, a year ago, had her thirteen-year-old brother Jim moaned that he was a “goner” when he fell fifteen feet from a tin roof that he was painting and broke his arm in three places.

Jim’s father was away, his deaf mother could not hear the doctor’s requests—the doctor whom Pen hastily summoned; it was Penelope, herself, not then fifteen, who had waited upon the surgeon, furnished safety-pins, etc., while he manipulated his ether bottle and bandages.

It was Penelope who had shrunk into a corner and sobbed and prayed while Jim was taking the ether, but it was Penelope, too, who, when that surgeon needed further help, had stumbled forth from her corner, had bravely stretched herself on the bed beside Jim and held the ether pad to his nostrils and mouth, sticking to the task even when she felt her own senses reeling off into dizzy sickness.

And it was Penelope, now, who tossed Olive’s arm which was around her away, as if it were a lifeless limb of juniper, who in another moment was crouching by the clump of basswood, beside the boy who had made up his mind that he had to “go” and was scribbling his boyish bequests.

Fiercely she grasped his arm in its khaki uniform and shook it!

“Listen to me! Look at me!” she gasped. “Where did you get the arsenic or lead or whatever it was?”

“Arsenate of lead!” corrected the testator, mildly now. “Dead-deadly poison—poisons you some if it only trickles over your body!”

Penny’s cheeks lost a good deal of their color which ebbed away into a hard little island of red under each cheek-bone.

“Where did you get it?” she repeated.

“In the woods over there, beyond the creek, where the trees and the berries and the ground an’ all were sprayed with it.”

“Were you alone? Was anybody with you?”

“Kenjo was. He’s another Scout. He’s gone off over the dunes to try an’ find a house, or camp, to get something to give me. But I guess it’s no use!” with a deep gulp that in a girl would have been a collapsing sob.

“Mercy!” The fingers of Penelope’s left hand distractedly clawed her cheek; her eyes, sharpened to a glittering point, pierced the victim’s face as she thrust her own near to it.

Suddenly she wheeled and changed her tactics.

“Here! let me see the will you’re making: ‘To my brother Basil I leave my push-mobile, stern wheel is off, he can fix it, to my chum Snuffy I leave my mandolin, it has two strings busted, b-but——’” read Penelope aloud in high, strained tones which exploded in a quavering shriek.

She flung the book—it was a Boy Scout diary, with the will scrawled and misspelt upon a blank page headed Memoranda—she flung it from her into the heart of the basswood.

“Look here!” Like a hurricane she turned on the victim. “I don’t say you’re making all this up, but I do believe that, down deep, you’re not sure you’re poisoned an’ are going to die right away. You only think you think you are!”

How on earth Penelope’s girlish intuition leaped to the fact that there was more of melodrama than of hopeless tragedy in this strange scene among the pale dunes Olive did not know, but at heart she felt herself going down on her shaking knees to Penelope for the way in which the younger girl handled the situation, even though Penny’s next words were delivered with her crudest gust.

“Where do you feel bad, anyhow?” She leveled her forefinger at the victim who, deprived of the melancholy satisfaction of making his will and bequeathing his lame treasures, slanted his gaze up at her, his short neck with its double chin thrust forward; there was a fat quiver of that chin now as if he were uncertain whether to follow her hopeful lead, or not.

“‘Ba-ad!’” he echoed waveringly. “Why! I’ve got a circus in my head or a merry-go-round—something that’s wheeling an’ spinning.”

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