Читать книгу Tom Slade: Forest Ranger - Percy Keese Fitzhugh - Страница 3

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In a momentary lull of the storm the baying of a dog could be heard in the heavy darkness at the base of the lonely lookout station—a weird, long moan seeming like one of the many voices of the raging wind. It lasted for only a few seconds, then was drowned in the furious tempest. The structure trembled as the frenzied gale swept through the steel framework.

Up in the little surmounting enclosure Tom Slade stood aghast. Could it have been the voice of the spectral dog that he had heard? What nonsense! The very thought aroused all Tom’s common sense and he laughed to think that the wild elements could play such a trick on him. If it had not been for the weird stories he had heard, the moaning would never have sounded like the voice of a dog at all. He laughed good-humoredly, as he had laughed when the people of the distant village had edified him with those ghostly yarns.

“It’s blamed funny the different noises the wind can make,” he reflected aloud. It was so lonesome in that high, storm-swept wilderness that almost unconsciously he spoke aloud to keep himself company.

Yet the sound of his own cheery voice, bespeaking his common sense, did not quite reassure him. And in spite of himself he listened again for that moaning voice amid the storm. He waited; he was almost ashamed of himself for his credulity, but yet he waited for another lull in the black hurricane.

Then in a brief subsidence of the gale he heard again the baying in the darkness below him. To be sure, it seemed unreal, intangible, a part of the furious storm. Yet he could distinguish it as something different. If it was not the robust voice of a dog heard clearly above the clamorous elements, that only bore out the stories told by the people down in Watson’s Bend. For was it not the whining of a spectral dog of which they had spoken? Was it not this that had caused the place to be deserted and shunned? The whining of a spectral dog and the terrifying presence of a ghostly master.

Tom stood motionless, gazing at the candle which cast its faint glow over the large, round map that covered the table in the center of the little, lofty shelter. The electric wires had gone down in the storm and this candle was all that stood between Tom and utter darkness. And the little box of a shelter standing high upon its trestled pedestal was all that stood between him and the tempestuous night.

Now and again, as the shrieking, furious demon shook the tower, the tin candlestick joggled and the light flickered on the glass which covered the map. And the field-glass, which stood there too, ready for scanning those rugged mountain slopes and distant hills in the daytime, danced a little jig with its two stout legs with every fresh gust of the hurricane. There was something uncanny in the way those two connected cylinders would start and cease to joggle on the sounding glass to the uproarious accompaniment without. It was odd and disturbing how, whenever they ceased their ghoulish dancing, that ominous baying could be heard below.

“And then the ghost of his dead master comes out up there in the tower and tries to call the dog, only he can’t make out to speak, so the ghost of the dog never knows he’s up there.” That was what they had told Tom off in the village. “No, siree, you couldn’t get none of us ter go up and mind that tower—not us.” And Tom had tried to laugh them to shame.

But he did not laugh now, for just then he saw the face.