Читать книгу Tom Slade: Forest Ranger - Percy Keese Fitzhugh - Страница 9

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Tom had intended to look up Dennison and take shelter with him for the night. It was rather characteristic of him that at the last minute he decided not to seek hospitality at Watson’s Bend, even from the young schoolmaster. Since Watson’s Bend would view his coming as an act of bravado, he would make the bravado complete. The first they would know of his coming would be that he was on the job.

The State Warden who had sent Tom his appointment had told him that the trail up the mountain began alongside the schoolhouse; he had said that it was not hard to follow since the electric wire above would guide him in places where the disused trail might be overgrown. Watson’s Bend enjoyed no light from this wire; the power was relayed from Connington.

The schoolhouse was a little box of a building somewhat apart from the group of houses. Tom thought it could not possibly have housed more than a dozen of the Bend’s younger set. An unruly shutter was blowing back and forth, but the unruly children had long since gone home, if indeed there had been any school on that wretched day.

Tom drove his Ford across the open space adjacent to the schoolhouse and poked its nose into the very edge of the woods. Before alighting he donned his suit of oilskins and oilskin hat which had done duty on rough water during many a motor-boat trip. Then he selected a few provisions from the store which he had brought, put them in his duffel bag and wrapped this in a piece of balloon-silk tenting. With this slung over his back he looked equal to the weather and was ready for his journey. But he lingered long enough to throw a dilapidated old tent (souvenir of Temple Camp) over his Ford. His Lizzie was not unaccustomed to being parked for weeks at a time under the clinging shelter of this old tent. He then set out upon the trail into the woods behind the schoolhouse.

But this trail soon became overgrown and indistinguishable and it was fortunate for Tom that he found his way to the power line before dark. A mile or so up into the woods he saw that the storm had beaten down the wire and in one place it lay broken at his feet. But he was still able to follow it.

Soon, however, he realized that his adventurous spirit had brought him into a predicament. The darkness became so dense that he could not see the wire and even had to grope for the supporting poles which stood far apart. This sent him on many futile detours and he paused now and again in the rain and darkness, utterly baffled.

Once, in a prolonged flare of lightning, he saw where the poles were down for some distance and both poles and wire sunk in underbrush. He thought this wreckage must have dated from a former day. In any case the glare was too transitory to permit him to see beyond the point of wreckage and now he had lost his one fitful means of guidance altogether. He plunged into a yawning gully of soaking brush, descended on its drenched and yielding network, down, down, then scrambled up and out, he knew not how.

He stood in utter blackness with no better means of guidance than there is upon the ocean. It is all very well to talk about what to do if lost in the wilds, as if it were a choice of going one way or another. But Nature in her savage wastes is full of pitfalls and death-traps and with the frightful ally of darkness, fills every step of the wayfarer with peril.

She had Tom in her clutches, this demon Nature; she had buried his trail in rank luxuriance, she had cast his guiding wire to the ground, and she laughed at him with her raging wind and rolling thunder as he stood there, baffled, helpless; all but panic-stricken.

Such a small thing is scouting. Such a tremendous thing is Nature.