TOM SHOT ANOTHER DENSE PILLAR OF BLACKNESS INTO THE MOONLIT SKY.
TOM SHOT ANOTHER DENSE PILLAR OF BLACKNESS INTO THE MOONLIT SKY.
A few straggled after him, smiling, doubting. And others followed after those few. These last would not have admitted that they were following Spiffy. They did not rally about him as he sped into the night; they straggled along, laughing among themselves. One said that Spiffy had been seeing things, and this created a chorus of laughter.
I can’t tell you how glad I am that the young camp manager went. He hurried along with the others, the big boy who knew the Morse code so well running at his side. In the intervals of his panting he said, “When’s he going home, anyway?”
“To-morrow, I guess—poor kid,” the young manager panted.
Yes, I am glad that those two went along; I wouldn’t have had them miss it for anything....
Into the Hawkeye Spoke Trail he sped, hatless, abandoned. And they followed, not because they trusted him, but because he seemed possessed. At least they would see the fun of an anti-climax. Over the edge of Pine Hill he sped and across the Sloatsburg road and past Breakneck Pond and into the valley. He had picked his way at night before, the unruly little rascal, and he knew his ground now. No one asked him where he was going, but the moon beyond the signal hill smiled upon him and guided him.
On he sped, stumbling, pausing in doubt, then plunging forward again with maniacal desperation. He had been denied the pathfinder’s badge, this boy. It was quite all right and according to the handbook. Only they took credit afterward for his fine spirit. But it was not the Bear Mountain camps that stirred the soul within him as he ran headlong through the night. What bore him on in this perfect frenzy was a spirit from another camp, the personality of Tom Slade of Temple Camp which had knocked him flat and set him on his feet again. He knew what he knew. And he sped on....
And so it happened that a couple of score of Scouts swarmed into the wild, narrow valley and felt the heat which filled the place and saw the fast-approaching flames. They faced the infantry of the blaze and the rushing cavalry of the wind. And then indeed was fulfilled Brent Gaylong’s rueful prediction,They shall not pass.
And they did not pass.
The Scouts found Brent in the upper end of the valley pulling up brush and throwing water across the path of the advancing flames. But the fire would have given its horrible, soulless, crackling laugh at his poor efforts. It was like a sharpshooter attacking an army.
“The—the brook is—over there,” Brent panted.
“Use your hats, Scouts,” their camp manager said. “Some of you pull up brush.”
Hatful after hatful of water was thrown upon the ground across the narrow, precipitous way. Working was hard, for the heat was terrific. Stones were rolled into the path of the flames. Brush was pulled up with a rapidity that set Brent’s poor striving at naught. And the land for a width of ten feet or more was soaked.
“Keep busy, we’ll make it,” the camp manager panted.
From the cabin a couple of Scouts came running with the barrel which was Tom’s and Brent’s dining table. As they approached the scene of action they were as clear as figures seen by day. The cabin stood in an area of red light, and the old elm near Conner’s well stood out with strange clearness in the surrounding brightness. That end of the valley where the little gulch was seemed like an inferno, bathed, as it was, in vivid red.
But between that spot and the consuming flames the Scouts had drawn their dead-line. Here the careering flames hissed and paused. Here they tried to get across and failed. And they sent volleys of sparks across the dead-line, and these were stamped out by ready feet, and the little patches of fire which they started here and there were drowned out with water from the barrel. And so the fight in the big gulch was fought and won, and the flames diminished and died, hissing as they abandoned their triumphal march.
Against the half-filled barrel leaned Spiffy Henshaw, panting and resting. And as sure as you live he had a big black smear upon his freckled countenance. They were still too busy to bother with him, and it was Tom Slade who first approached him.
“You’re all right, Spiff,” he said sociably. “You got my message?”
“I wouldn’t have got it if I hadn’t been breaking a crazy rule,” Spiffy announced, with a look of challenge at his camp manager.
Seeing Tom there the camp manager approached, and presently Spiffy was the center of a throng. He lifted himself and sat upon a bit of wood that lay across the barrel.
“Defiance on a monument,” said Brent. “Do you know,” he said, “I think somehow a barrel is the ideal pedestal for him. When they make a statue of Spiffy some day I hope they’ll have him on a barrel. So you read the sky even if you don’t read your book, hey, Spiff, old boy?”
“This is Spiff,” said Tom, his arm about his protégé.
“Oh, yes, we know him,” said the camp manager. “His acts are better than his reasoning.”
“Actions speak louder than reasoning,” said Brent.
“He certainly did a stunt to-night,” said the tall boy who knew the Morse code so well.
But Tom did not condescend to discuss the triumph of his little hero. Instead, he took out his handkerchief and wiped the smear off Spiffy’s cheek. “The honorable wounds of service,” he said. Then he patted him on the shoulder and let his hand rest there.
“Spiff,” said he, “you’re the best little Scout that ever got himself in dutch. And you’re wrong as usual. You say if you hadn’t broken a rule you wouldn’t have seen the message. If you hadn’t gone back to camp as I told you to do, you wouldn’t have all these Scouts standing around and staring at you now—as if they really thought you were a hero.”
“Can I stay with you?” Spiff asked.
“No, you cannot. You’ve got them started now. Haven’t they just given you help without you asking for it? And now they’ll fall all over themselves to help you. There’s no chance for advancement, kid, at our cabin. A kid like you wants a wider field, big opportunities. We’re just a couple of campers here. This gulch is no place for ahero. What you want is aworldto conquer—not a cabin. How about that—am I right?” Tom laughed at the camp manager.
And the camp manager winked at Tom. I don’t know what he meant by it. But I do know that Spiffy Henshaw didn’t go home till school opened, and when he did he took the stalking badge and the pathfinder’s badge with him. I only hope his teachers in school understood him as well as Tom Slade did. But perhaps that would be too much to expect....
It was several weeks after the fire when a half dozen or more Scouts from up around the lakes appeared at the cabin escorting a tottering old white-haired man, clustering about him and rather frightening him with vociferous and conflicting information. Boys are usually ready with information whether they have it or not, and they told this poor old native that Buck had died, that he hadn’t died, that he had gone away to New York, that he had a job as gate-tender somewhere on a railroad. Probably all these and other morsels of advice had a certain vague foundation in rumor. I doubt if any of the boys had ever really known old Buck. But they brought this returning Rip Van Winkle to his forest home, and so he fell into the hands of Tom and Brent.
No one at the lakes knew at what point old Mink Havers had entered the reservation. He must have been astonished at seeing the seething Scout life, for scouting was a thing undreamed of when he had wandered away. He said he had left the road at Ben Harlowe’s place and struck into the hills. But as no one of that name is known for miles around it may be inferred that Ben Harlowe, and perhaps his place, are things of the remote past.
The old man, his memory restored (or at least in process of restoration) had escaped from kindly confinement in Missouri and in the course of time made his way to within three miles of his old cabin in Rattlesnake Gulch. Here, at the lakes, the new life had startled and confused him. It seems odd that after his long and devious journey the old hunter had been forced to submit to the guidance of Boy Scouts. Thus the old pathfinder of that region was taken to his primitive cabin by the young pathfinders of this present time.
I think old Mink’s imperfectly restored memory was a blessing; a complete restoration of it would have wrung his old heart. As it was he took everything for granted (the discovered treasure included), and he did not seem to grieve over the death of his old partner. “Bucky, he went with the lung ail, huh?” was all he said. By which I suppose he meant pneumonia.
Actions speak louder than words, indeed, with an old man who has achieved a pilgrimage more by instinct than intelligence. So it was not necessary, nay, it was not even possible, to give him an account of the happenings which I have tried faithfully to record in these pages. He hesitated a little when Tom explained to him about June Sanderson’s just claim to half the money and declined to give up so much of the precious horde. “There weren’t no sech gal,” he said. “’Tain’t no claim o’ her’n ’cause they wern’t no sech gal,” he said.
The difficulty of explaining to him the rule about those who die intestate and the claims of unknown heirs was too much for poor Tom and even for Brent, so they sent for me (whom they had ridiculed because of my prosaic habits) to help them out of this rather puzzling sequel to their adventure. I drove up because I apprehended certain other difficulties as well. Here was an old, homeless man escaped from an institution and living, unknown to the authorities, with two young treasure-seekers at Rattlesnake Gulch. Clearly a mature intelligence was needed there, and I think I have that, even if I am not a seeker of wild adventure.
I left my car in Sandyfield, parked where I had parked it on that fateful first visit to the Gulch, and Tom met me and piloted me to the cabin. That part of the neighborhood which had not been burned was so thickly grown with brush that I hardly knew it for the same place I had visited in the spring. I think I never saw a spot so wild, so forbidding, so apparently remote; it was terrible. Old Mink seemed to fit well in those surroundings, but, of course, it was out of the question to leave him there.
We did, however, leave him in his beloved old cabin in the care of several Boy Scouts, while we pushed our way back through wood and jungle to Sandyfield and drove to Kingston. Heaven help the poor old man, he had questions enough to answer that day.
Well, there is little more to tell you. I wired out west that we had old Mink and was able, I am glad to say, to inaugurate certain arrangements which resulted in his being placed in the Pinewoods Home for old people, of which my good friend Mr. John Temple was the founder. There he is living in patriarchal glory and his fifteen hundred dollars has gone to the institution. Whenever I drive past the beautiful place, almost hidden in the fragrant pines, I stop and see him, and sometimes I think his memory grows more clear. But he remembers things only in mass (if I may use such an expression) which is all that is to be hoped for, I suppose, considering his ninety-two years. I always take him tobacco for the pipe which I think is the only thing of my acquaintance older than he.
We found little June Sanderson to be another one of those unfortunates (of which Spiffy is the shining type) that the world does not understand. At least, the orphan asylum in Kingston did not understand her. I think that she never ceased to think of her forest home—and her beloved rattlesnakes, as Brent says. Even the knowledge that she was an heiress to the amount of fifteen hundred dollars did not seem to comfort her. She cried when she saw me, and cried more when I reminded her how she had “scared me about snakes,” and clung to me and did not want me to go.
So then we went to Aunt Martha’s. She was sitting on her little porch and seemed quite overwhelmed as we stopped before the house.
“Aunt Martha,” said I, “I blame you for some perplexities I have. I always knew that no good could ever come of the visit I made you, and now I am dickering with the authorities out west and visiting orphan asylums and dividing a fortune, and here are my two friends, Tom Slade and Brent Gaylong, and one of them knocked down a thief in the woods. The other nearly got killed by a rattlesnake and allIhave as my personal swag in these adventures is a program of the Gayety Museum of the Bowery. I blame you for all this. You invited me up here. You stood in back of that rattlesnake. It was you, strictly speaking, it wasyou, who pushed my friend Brent Gaylong into a well!Youare the accessory before the fact in a chain of harrowing and very dark adventures. I am not denouncing you for your part. Perhaps you didn’t realize what you were doing. But tell me this, so I can close up a very dark chapter in my career. Could you use (I spoke deliberately) a thoroughly first class little girl, as good as new, fully guaranteed? Just answer yes or no.”
Oh, well, to put an end to the nonsense, my Aunt Martha not only fell, but actually demanded, her share of the booty—“swag,” we told her she ought to call it. So I suppose I must consider her one of the gang of treasure-seekers, and like the pirate chief, she got the best part of the treasure. She is visiting me now, as I finish the record of these happenings, and chiding me for writing on this Christmas Eve, when I should be decorating the tree for her “swag,” which is just pretty little June Sanderson.
But I cannot stop till I have finished, for Tom and Brent are coming around to hear these last chapters and say whether I have told the plain truth. I have certainly tried to. And since they have been so much concerned with trees, I will let them try their hands at decorating while they “jolly” my poor old Aunt Martha as they always do, telling her that she was the cause of Brent’s mishap and Lawton’s thievery and the forest fire and all that. Well, it all sounds good in the home of a lonely bachelor. And my Aunt Martha will lay down her knitting, as she always does, and tell them that they should not make such charges against her in front of June, and try in her gentle way to show them how their reasoning and conclusions are defective....
THE END
THE END