Читать книгу Tom Slade: Forest Ranger - Percy Keese Fitzhugh - Страница 4

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If any one in Watson’s Bend had been willing to take charge of the fire lookout station on Tempest Peak, that lonely job would never have fallen to Tom Slade.

Even Tom, with all his adventurous spirit, would have balked at the isolation of the tower far up in the mountain wilderness, had it not been that his companion in former adventures, Brent Gaylong, had agreed to spend the summer with him in his wild retreat. But Brent could not join his friend until the summer was well on and, meanwhile, the job must be filled.

“Look for me around the first of July,” Brent had said. “Keep scanning the horizon with your trusty field-glass and you’ll espy me in the distance approaching up the rugged slopes with my knitting. I’ll spend the summer doing crossword puzzles while you’re fire-lookouting. I only hope we have some good conflagrations. Keep the forest fires burning. If we don’t I’m going in for floods on the Mississippi next summer. My soul craves adventure. How about the ghost?”

“Oh, he pokes his head out now and then, so I’m told,” Tom had answered laughingly.

“That’s great,” Brent had answered with a kind of drawling relish, “but I’m afraid he’ll be away on his vacation while I’m there. I kind of like the idea of a spectral dog, don’t you? Don’t know as I ever heard of one.”

“You’ll hear enough about one if you go to Watson’s Bend,” Tom had laughed.

“I hope he’s not a spectral mut,” Brent had answered. “Anyway, we won’t have to feed him.”

“I’m not worrying about the ghost and his ghostly dog,” Tom had said, “but if you don’t show up I’ll kill you.”

“Never fear, Tommy,” Brent had laughed. “It’s always been the dream of my young life to meet a ghost. I feel like Hamlet already.”

That conversation had occurred a couple of months prior to the tempestuous night when Tom’s adventures on Tempest Peak began. During April he had driven up to Temple Camp in his outlandish flivver. As assistant manager of the big Scout community in the Catskills, it was his custom to run up from Bridgeboro each spring to look about and help old Uncle Jeb Rushmore open up the cabins and pavilions and get ready for the rush to camp which would begin as soon as school closed.

During the winters Tom was in the Temple Camp office, which was maintained in Bridgeboro under the supervising eye of Mr. John Temple, Bridgeboro’s most public-spirited citizen as well as founder of the famous Scout camp. The Temple Camp office was in the fine building which Mr. Temple owned and in which his bank was housed.

Tom was particularly anxious to make an early flying trip to camp this spring, for he was to have the summer off, and he wished to see Uncle Jeb and find out how that old hickory nut of a scout had enjoyed his own summer off in his old familiar Rockies. Old Uncle Jeb had returned to the closed-up camp in March, and Tom was to have his turn in the summer now approaching. Mr. Temple had insisted on Tom’s taking a summer off, as his old superior had done. “Get out among grown-ups for a while and then you’ll appreciate the kids when you get back,” Mr. Temple had said.

We need not concern ourselves with Tom’s visit with Uncle Jeb. He stayed there two days, then bade a regretful good-by to the beloved camp and to the old man who was its very spirit. As he drove home in his dilapidated nineteen-ten flivver, he had not the slightest idea how he was going to spend the summer. He was a little sorry that he had not insisted on staying at camp, his camp, where the thunderous voice of Pee-wee Harris could be heard to the bantering accompaniment of Roy Blakeley.

As he drove down the state road, one loose fender waving like some martial emblem in the breeze, he thought that perhaps he would go out and surprise his sister in Missouri. He had not seen her since he was a little boy in Barrel Alley. She had renounced the alley and had married and gone west. Then it occurred to him that he would take a flyer over the water and see the old battlefields where he had fought. He would hunt up Frenchy (you remember Frenchy?) and they would have an old-time hike in the Black Forest. Then he thought he would like to go up to Overlook Mountain, just for memory’s sake, and see——

Whoa! That was a narrow escape. His daydreaming had almost brought him plunk into a big red sign which stood across the road. And upon that sign perched Tom’s good little angel of adventure. ROAD CLOSED. TAKE DETOUR TO LEFT. FOLLOW ARROW, he read. Around went the rickety little Ford down into a sequestered country road, over bumps and into puddles, and into a country where it seemed to Tom that no automobile had ever gone before. Soon he was in a wilderness. And his own particular little angel of adventure perched upon the leaky radiator of his car. But of course Tom could not see her. Lickety-split, he went, down into the loneliest and wildest region he had ever seen, cursing the autocratic signs and bone-racking detours.

And that is how Tom Slade came to Watson’s Bend.