Читать книгу Tom Slade in the North Woods - Percy Keese Fitzhugh - Страница 3

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One of the surest signs of approaching autumn in this suburban town of ours, is the reappearance in the main thoroughfares of my adventurous young friend Tom Slade after his summer sojourn in the mountains. When I see that familiar form in brown negligee attire careering down Main Street in the outlandish flivver which seems to be a very part of him, I know that Temple Camp has closed for the season, that the schools are again open, and that soon I shall be raking up dried leaves on the front lawn. The return of Tom Slade is just as much a harbinger of autumn as the coming of the first robin is a harbinger of spring.

My first glimpse of that dilapidated Ford always arouses a cheery feeling in my heart and I am not offended at the rather perfunctory wave of the hand with which Tom recognizes and greets me as he hurries by. I know that when he gets around to it he will run up to see me and beguile me with an account of the summer up at the big scout camp of which he is the very spirit.

Sometimes I think that there is no single character in this whole thriving town who would be as much regretted as Tom Slade, if he should go away. There is a breezy kind of picturesqueness about him that sets him apart and makes him a sort of local celebrity. I think I have never in my life seen him wearing a regular suit of clothes. He goes hurrying about town in the winter months quite hatless; he seems always on the go. I have seen a good many boys in this town, who were scouts not so long ago, grow up and become absorbed in the seething business of the growing community. Some of them are grown into ingratiating young fellows in banks, some are in the real estate “game” as they call it; they are all driving around in good cars and exhaling a distressing atmosphere of sophistication.

When I go into the Trust Company and am welcomed patronizingly by young Ellis Berrian I could almost choke him for his self-sufficiency. He used to caddie for me over at the Warrentown course. These white-collared young gentry are cutting a great swath and producing nothing. They buy cars on the installment plan and talk glibly about the rise in values when the new bridge shall span the Hudson.

The first I ever knew of Tom Slade was when he was a hoodlum down in Barrel Alley (since obliterated, praise be) and he got his name in our local newspaper for knocking down a heroic official who was placing the few Slade belongings in the street by way of executing a court order of eviction. Tom, then fourteen, knocked the official in the gutter—I think it was the gutter.

Then the local scout troop got hold of him and found (as the official had found) that he had an uncanny way of doing what he set his heart on doing. He made a record in scouting. His mother and father both died, and the scouts took him up to camp with them. His heroism up there brought him to the attention of Mr. John Temple, of whom this town may well be proud, and the outcome of the whole business was that Mr. Temple founded Temple Camp up in the Catskills which has grown into one of the biggest scout communities in this country.

When the war cloud broke Tom enlisted, and came back when it was over with a record that made him a celebrity in this young city. He was right then at the parting of the ways. He might have got a job in one of the banks or studied law (so I understand) on Mr. Temple’s bounty, and become another hapless member of that group of young ghouls who haunt the court-house and are sometimes driven back on real estate and title searching. It must be confessed Tom would have made a wretched lawyer. But the spirit of adventure was in him, the wind blew in his face, the woods called to him. He went up to Temple Camp and became a sort of assistant there.

I do not know exactly what are his duties, but when I visited Temple Camp a couple of years ago, he seemed to form a kind of link between the management and the scouts. He invited me up there and I hardly laid eyes on him during my whole week’s stay. All I can say is that he was always in a hurry, always hatless, and always had a group of scouts following him about. He had what none of the councilors or scoutmasters had, and that was picturesqueness. I think he is the only official up there who has anything bizarre about him. I suppose a big camp like that must have its hero, and he is that.

Temple Camp has a small office in this town, where there is a manager, a bookkeeper, and two or three girls who send out circulars and prospectuses. During the winter months, Tom identifies himself with this prosy department of the romantic scout community in the Catskills, and in the spring he is off again to get the boats in the water and repair the springboard or the observation tower, and fell trees for new cabins, and heaven knows what all. During his season in Bridgeboro I am likely to see him to talk with a dozen times more or less. He stays down at the old County Seat Hotel and comes up here for dinner occasionally. He is always welcome. Sometimes we play chess and I can always beat him at that. We talk into the wee hours.

In our fireside chats this winter we shall have more serious matters to recall than heretofore. The adventures we will discuss will seem like things seen in a dream. And when February gales whistle around the bay window in this cozy library, my little sanctum will seem the more secure and cheery because of our harrowing recollections of a wind-swept mountain in the north woods, where a wild voice that haunts me even now was drowned in the fury of the gale as it echoed in the ghostly fastnesses of that eery wilderness. We will live over again the chilling terrors of a night when wild eyes stared into mine, and clawing fingers groped toward my throat, and the wind moaned and was never still. Perhaps we may even fancy that we see the poor departed spirit that is said to haunt the neighborhood of Weir Lake over which the towering Hogback casts its brooding shadow; the wandering shade that is ever searching and never finding a living soul in whom to confide the appalling truth about the tragedy of Leatherstocking Camp.

If you would know this story as Tom and I know it, you may come here in imagination to my little sanctum, and welcome you will be. You may fancy that you have tumbled the books and papers from that littered couch before the open fire plunk on to the floor as Tom himself is wont to do. Then you may fancy that you are reclining comfortably among my numerous cushions listening to a winter’s tale about the lonely spaces of the North.