Tom Slade at Black Lake.
by Percy Keese Fitzhugh.
PREFACE.
Several persons have asked me when Tom Slade was ever going to grow up and cease to be a Scout. The answer is that he is already grown up and that he is never going to cease to be a Scout. Once a Scout, always a Scout. To hear some people talk one would think that scouting is like the measles; that you get over it and never have it any more.
Scouting is not a thing to play with, like a tin steam-engine, and then to throw aside. If you once get caught in the net of scouting, you will never disentangle yourself. A fellow may grow up and put on long trousers and go and call on a girl and all that sort of thing, but if he was a Scout, he will continue to be a Scout, and it will stick out all over him. You"ll find him back in the troop as a.s.sistant or scoutmaster or something or other.
I think Tom Slade is a very good example. He left the troop to go and work on a transport; he got into the motorcycle messenger service; he became one of the greatest daredevils of the air; he came home quite "grown up" as you would say, and knuckled down to be a big business man.
Then, when it came to a show down, what did he do? He found out that he was just a plain Scout, shouldered his axe, and went off and did a big scout job all alone. So there you are.
I am sorry for those who would have him too old for scouting, and who seem to think that a fellow can lay aside all he has learned in the woods and in the handbook, the same as he can lay aside his short trousers. It isn"t as easy as all that.
Did you suppose that Tom Slade was going to get acquainted with nature, with the woods and streams and trees, and make them his friends, and then repudiate these friends?
Do you think that a Scout is a quitter?
Tom Slade was always a queer sort of duck, and goodness only knows what he will do next. He may go to the North Pole for all I know. But one thing you may be sure of; he is still a Scout of the Scouts, and if you think he is too old to be a Scout, then how about Buffalo Bill?
The fact is that Tom is just beginning to reap the real harvest of scouting. The best is yet to come, as Pee-wee Harris usually observes, just before dessert is served at dinner. If it is any satisfaction to you to know it, Tom is more of a Scout than at any time in his career, and there is a better chance of his being struck by lightening than his drifting away from the troop whose adventures you have followed with his.
It is true that Tom has grown faster than his companions and found it necessary to go to work while they are still at school. And this very circ.u.mstance will enable us to see what scouting has done for him.
Indeed if I could not show you that, then all of those eight stores of his adventures would have been told to little purpose. The chief matter of interest about a trail is where it leads to. It may be an easy trail or a hard trail, but the question is, where does it go to?
It would be a fine piece of business, I think, to leave Tom sitting on a rock near the end of the trail without giving you so much as a glimpse of what is at the end of it.
So you may tell your parents and your teachers and your uncles and your aunts not to worry about Tom Slade never growing up. He is just a trifle over eighteen years old and very strong and husky. Confidentially, I look upon him as nothing but a kid. I keep tabs on his age and when he has to go on crutches and is of no more interest to you, I shall be the first to know it. He is likely to have no end of adventures between eighteen and twenty.
Meanwhile, don"t worry about him. He"s just a big overgrown kid and the best Scout this side of Mars.
P. K. F.
TOM SLADE AT BLACK LAKE
CHAPTER I
TOM LOOKS AT THE MAP
Tom Slade, bending over the office table, scrutinized the big map of Temple Camp. It was the first time he had really looked at it since his return from France, and it made him homesick to see, even in its cold outlines, the familiar things and scenes which he had so loved as a scout. The hill trail was nothing but a dotted line, but Tom knew it for more than that, for it was along its winding way into the dark recesses of the mountains that he had qualified for the pathfinder"s badge. Black Lake was just an irregular circle, but in his mind"s eye he saw there the moonlight glinting up the water, and canoes gliding silently, and heard the merry voices of scouts diving from the springboard at its edge.
He liked this map better than maps of billets and trenches, and to him the hill trail was more suggestive of adventure than the Hindenburg Line. He had been very close to the Hindenburg Line and it had meant no more to him than the equator. He had found the war to be like a three-ringed circus--it was too big. Temple Camp was about the right size.
Tom reached for a slip of paper and laying it upon the map just where the trail went over the hilltop and off the camp territory altogether, jotted down the numbers of three cabins which were indicated by little squares.
"They"re the only three together and kind of separate," he said to himself.
Then he went over to the window and gazed out upon the busy scene, which the city office of Temple Camp overlooked. He did this, not because there was anything there which he wished particularly to see, but because he contemplated doing something and was in some perplexity about it. He was going to dictate a letter to Miss Margaret Ellison, the stenographer.
Tom had seen cannons and machine guns and hand grenades and depth bombs, but the thing in all this world that he was most afraid of was the long sharply pointed pencil which Miss Margaret Ellison always held poised above her open note book, waiting to record his words. Tom had always fallen down at the last minute and told her what he wanted to say; suggesting that she say it in her own sweet way. He did not say _sweet_ way, though he may have thought it.
So now he stood at the open window looking down upon Bridgeboro"s surging thoroughfare, while the breath of Spring permeated the Temple Camp office. If he had been less susceptible of this gentle influence in the very air, he would still have known it was Spring by the things in the store windows across the way--straw hats and hammocks and tennis rackets. There were moving vans, too, with furniture bulging out behind them, which are just as certain signs of merry May as the flowers that bloom in the Spring. There was something too, in the way that the sun moved down which bespoke Spring.
But the surest sign of all was the flood of applications for cabin accommodations at Temple Camp; that was just as sure and reliable as the first croaking of the frogs or the softening of the rich, thick mud in Barrel Alley, where Tom had spent his childhood.
He moved over to where Miss Margaret Ellison sat at her machine. Mr.
Burton, manager of the Temple Camp office, had told Tom that the only way to acquire confidence and readiness of speech was to formulate what he wished to say and to say it, without depending on any one else, and to this good advice, Peewee Harris, mascot of Tom"s Scout Troop had made the additional suggestion, that it was good to say it whether you had anything to say or not, on the theory, I suppose, that if you cannot shoot bullets, it is better to shoot blank cartridges than nothing at all.
CHAPTER II
HE SENDS A LETTER
"Help him, but encourage him to be self-confident; let him take responsibilities. He understands everything well enough; all he needs is to get a grip on himself." That is what Mr. Burton had told Margaret Ellison, and Margaret Ellison, being a girl, understood better than all the army surgeons in the country.
You see how it was; they had made a wreck of Tom Slade"s nerves as a trifling incidental to making the world safe for democracy. He started at every little noise, he broke down in the middle of his talk, he hesitated to cross the street alone, he shuddered at the report of a bursting tire on some unlucky auto. He had never been at ease in the presence of girls, and he was now less at ease than before he had gone away.
He had fought for nearly two years and Uncle Sam liked him so much that he could not bring himself to part company with him, until by hook or crook, Mr. Burton and Mr. Temple managed to get him discharged and put him in the way of finding himself at his old job in Temple Camp office.
It was a great relief to him not to have to salute lieutenants any more.
The shot and sh.e.l.l he did not mind, but his arm was weary with saluting lieutenants. It was the dream of Tom Slade"s life never to see another lieutenant as long as he lived.
He leaned against the table near Miss Margaret Ellison and said, "I--I want--I have to send a letter to a troop that"s in Ohio--in a place called--called Dansburg. Shall I dic--shall I say what I want to tell them?"
"Surely," she said cheerily.
"Maybe if it isn"t just right you can fix it up," he said.
"You say it just the way you want to," she encouraged him.
"It"s to the Second Dansburg Troop and the name of the scoutmaster is William Barnard," Tom said, "and this is what I want to say...."
"Yes, say it in your own words," she reminded him.
"We got--I mean received," he dictated hesitatingly, "your letter and we can give you--can give you--three cabins--three cabins together and kind of separate like you say--numbers five, six, and seven. They are on the hill and separate, and we hope to hear from you--soon--because there are lots of troops asking for cabins, because now the season is beginning.
Yours truly."
"Is that all right?" he asked rather doubtfully.
"Surely it is," she said; "and don"t forget what Mr. Burton told you about going home early and resting. Remember, Mr. Burton is your superior officer now."