Читать книгу Tom Slade on Overlook Mountain - Percy Keese Fitzhugh - Страница 11

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AT CAMP

And so they came to Temple Camp. And there, as it turned out, the little weather-beaten derelict, cast adrift by the great, blind, heedless monster of a reservoir, found a home for many weeks to follow.

The scouts of Temple Camp respected his declaration of war against the vast, watery usurper which supplied that other monster, the metropolis, and refrained from making fun of his heroic posture. Old Caleb drank only the fresh, clear, sparkling water which trickled down from its innocent source among the hills. And who shall say that he was not as great in his iron-clad resolve as was the ruthless, seething, grasping Bedlam which he defied?

Old Caleb became a favorite—nay, a pet—at camp, and he was soon adopted as one of its regular institutions. It cannot be said that he was unappreciative but he was so mellowed by time and hardened by a variety of adventures incidental to his roaming life that he seemed incapable of accepting individuals as such. He took the camp and all its people for granted, he seemed unable to distinguish one boy from another, but he appeared to like them all and certainly he was contented.

He possessed, if any one ever did, the unconscious faculty of adapting himself to his surroundings. He gave the impression that he would be quite at home anywhere, that no one could disconcert or abash him.

It was amusing how he failed utterly to take special cognizance of high scout officials who visited camp and who were accustomed to bathing in the sunshine of homage, even of awe. Old Caleb would probably have trudged into the White House or the Vatican without the least hesitancy, jabbing his stick resoundingly on the floor, utterly unconscious of the fame or identity of his host.

This much his eccentricity and wandering life had done for him (and it was no small thing); he would not have distinguished between the Pope and Pee-wee Harris. Perhaps it was just because his mind did not perceive readily enough to make these distinctions. He seemed to be mentally near-sighted. The world was big and he could see it, but individuals he could not see.

He always carried his outlandish stick with him wherever he went as if to be ready for the Ashokan Reservoir in case he met it face to face. But he did not talk much about the matters with which he had beguiled Tom on the day of their first meeting. Nor did the scouts of camp encourage him to talk of these things for indeed they were not greatly interested in his past.

First and last old Caleb did enough odd jobs to earn his board. He was a prime favorite with Uncle Jeb Rushmore, the camp manager, and with that dread potentate before whom every scout did homage, Chocolate Drop, the colored emperor and autocrat of the cooking shack.

Hour after hour old Caleb would sit in a tilted chair outside this holy of holies whittling handiwork with a jack-knife while a continually shifting audience of scouts lolled about on the grass.

He could make boats, and linked wooden chains and even complicated wooden edifices miraculously assembled in bottles. Some of these marvels the scouts put on sale in the neighboring village of Leeds and they were bought by summer boarders and the proceeds turned over to old Caleb. Pop Dyker he came to be called and he seemed to like it, or at least not to care....

And so things might have gone on till the end of the season and old Caleb gone sturdily forth again upon his wanderings if it had not been for a shipment of provisions which had been put off the West Shore train down at Kingston instead of at Catskill, the nearest station to the camp. That was because somebody or other of the name of Templeton lived at Kingston and his home was called Templeton Lodge and in the language of freight men, Templeton Lodge sounds exactly like Temple Camp.

It fell to the young assistant to go down to Kingston and get this business straightened out and, because it concerned food, Pee-wee Harris generously volunteered to accompany him. It was remarkable how many proffers of assistance Pee-wee made in the face of continuous rejection of his services.

The scout who accompanied Tom in the camp flivver was Brent Gaylong, a tall, lanky, wise-looking young fellow, who was in fact a sort of unofficial scoutmaster to a one patrol troop. The two most conspicuous things about him were a dry sense of humor and a pair of spectacles which perched halfway down his nose, giving him a whimsically mature and studious look; they seemed to remove him quite irrevocably from the field of thrilling adventure. Tom liked “Old Doctor Gaylong” as everybody did, for he was good company and an ideal companion for a journey.