Читать книгу Tom Slade at Black Lake - Percy Keese Fitzhugh - Страница 6

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Next morning Tom had his breakfast in a dingy little restaurant and then started along Terrace Avenue for the bank building, in which was the Temple Camp office.

He still wore the shabby khaki uniform which had seen service at the front. He was of that physique called thick-set and his face was of the square type, denoting doggedness and endurance, and a stolid temperament.

There had never been anything suggestive of the natty or agile about him when he had been a scout, and army life, contrary to its reputation, had not spruced and straightened him up at all. He was about as awkward looking as a piece of field artillery, and he was just about as reliable and effective. He was not built on the lines of a rifle, but rather on the lines of a cannon, or perhaps of a tank. His mouth was long and his lips set tight, but it twitched nervously at one end, especially when he waited at the street crossing just before he reached the bank building, watching the traffic with a kind of fearful, bewildered look.

Twice, thrice, he made the effort to cross and returned to his place on the curb, interlacing his fingers distractedly. And yet this young fellow had pushed through barbed wire entanglements and gone across No Man’s Land, without so much as a shudder in the very face of hostile fire.

He always dreaded this street corner in the mornings and was thankful when he was safe up in his beloved Temple Camp office. If he had been on crutches some grateful citizen would have helped him across, and patriotic young ladies would have paused to watch the returned hero and some one might even have removed his hat in the soldier’s presence; for they did those things—for a while.

But such honors were only for those who were fortunate enough to have had a leg or an arm shot off or to have been paralyzed. For the hero who had had his nerves all shot to pieces there were no such spontaneous tributes.

And that was the way it had always been with Tom Slade. He had always made good, but somehow, the applause and the grateful tributes had gone to others. Nature had not made him prepossessing and he did not know how to talk; he was just slow and dogged and stolid, like a British tank, as I said, and just about as homely. You could hardly expect a girl to make much fuss over a young fellow who is like a British tank, when there are young fellows like shining machine guns, and soaring airplanes—to say nothing of poison gas.

And after two years of service in the thick of danger, with bombs and bullets flying all about him; after four months’ detention in an enemy prison camp and six weeks of trench fever, to say nothing of frightful risks, stolidly ignored, in perilous secret missions, this young chunk of the old rock of Gibraltar had come home with his life, just because it had pleased God not to accept the proffer of it, and because Fritzie shot wild where Tom was concerned. He couldn’t help coming back with his life—it wasn’t his fault. It was just because he was the same old Lucky Luke, that’s all.

That had been Roy Blakeley’s name for him—Lucky Luke; and he had been known as Lucky Luke to all of his scout comrades.

You see it was this way: if Tom was going to win a scout award by finding a certain bird’s nest in a certain tree, when he got to the place he would find that the tree had been chopped down. Once he was going to win the pathfinder’s badge by trailing a burglar, and he trailed him seven miles through the woods and found that the burglar was his own good-for-nothing father. So he did not go back and claim the award. You see? Lucky Luke.

Once (oh, this happened several years before) he helped a boy in his patrol to become an Eagle Scout. It was the talk of Temple Camp how, one more merit badge (astronomy) and Will O’Connor would be an Eagle Scout and Tom Slade, leader of the Elks, would have the only Eagle Scout at Camp in his patrol. He didn’t care so much about being an Eagle Scout himself, but he wanted Will O’Connor to be an Eagle Scout; he wanted to have an Eagle Scout in his patrol.

Then, just before Will O’Connor qualified for the Astronomy Badge, he went to live with his uncle in Cincinnati and the Buffalo Patrol of the Third Cincinnati Troop pretty soon had an Eagle Scout among their number, and the Cincinnati troop got its name into Scouting and Boy’s Life. Lucky Luke!

It was characteristic of Tom Slade that he did not show any disappointment at this sequel of all his striving. Much less had he any jealousy, for he did not know there was such a word in the dictionary. He just started in again to make Bert McAlpin an Eagle Scout and when he had jammed Bert through all the stunts but two, Uncle Sam deliberately went into the war and Tom started off to work on a transport. So you see how it worked out; Connie Bennett, new leader of the Elks presently had an Eagle Scout in his patrol and Tom got himself torpedoed. Mind, I don’t say that Uncle Sam went into the war just to spite Tom Slade. The point is that Tom Slade didn’t get anything, except that he got torpedoed.

One thing he did win for himself as a scout and that was the Gold Cross for life saving, but he didn’t know how to wear it, and it was Margaret Eillson who pinned it on for him properly. I think she had a sneaking liking for Tom.

Poor Tom, sometime or other in his stumbling career he had probably gotten out of the wrong side of his bed, or perhaps he was born on a Friday. That was what Roy and the scouts always said.

And so you see, here he was back from the big scrap with nothing to show for it but a case of shell-shock, and you don’t have bandages or crutches for shell-shock. There was young Lieut. Rossie Bent who worked downstairs in the bank, who had come home with two fingers missing and all of the girls had fallen at his feet and Tom had had to salute him. But there was nothing missing about Tom—except his wits and his grip on himself, sometimes.

But no one noticed this particularly, unless it was Mr. Burton and Margaret Ellison, and certainly no one made a fuss over him on account of it. Why should anybody make a hero of a young fellow just because he is not quite sure of himself in crossing the street, and because his mouth twitches? Boy scouts are both observant and patriotic, but they could not see that there was anything missing about Tom. All they had noticed was that in resuming his duties at the office he had seemed to be drifting away from them—from the troop. And when he came on Friday nights, just to sit and hear Roy jolly Pee-wee and to enjoy their simple nonsense, they thought he was “different since he had come back from France”—perhaps just a little, you know, uppish.

It would have been a lucky thing for Tom, and for everybody concerned, if Mr. Ellsworth, scoutmaster, had been at home instead of away on a business trip; for he would have understood.

But of course, things couldn’t have gone that way—not with Lucky Luke.