Читать книгу Tom Slade on Overlook Mountain - Percy Keese Fitzhugh - Страница 3

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TOM

If so it chance that you live in the city of New York and should, let us say, stop for a cooling drink of water in the interval of a ball game, pause for a few moments and consider this strange story of old Caleb Dyker and perhaps the water will not taste quite so good to you.

Old Caleb Dyker had never seen the great city of New York; he had never in all his life been away from the little village of West Hurley until he was put out, thrown out, or rather until his little village was taken away from him by the great city of New York.

If it is a good rule never to hit a fellow under your size, then the great city of New York is not a very good scout, for it knocked the poor little village of West Hurley clean off the map.

And that was because the great city of New York wanted a drink of water.

So poor Caleb Dyker, dazed and bewildered at this pathetic eviction from all that was near and dear to him, became a tramp and wanderer. And that is how Tom Slade fell in with him.

Tom Slade himself had something of the spirit of the tramp and wanderer. He was assistant at Temple Camp, the big scout community in the Catskills, and was the hero of every boy who spent the summer there. But he was restless. Perhaps his service overseas had made him so, and at the time of this singular chain of happenings the roving spirit was upon him.

Yet it is unlikely that he would have gone away from Temple Camp, that year at all events, if he had not fallen in with the queer personage who all unwittingly gave impetus to his dormant wanderlust.

It is funny, when you come to think of it, how these two, poor old Caleb Dyker and Tom, first met at a little crystal spring by the wayside where they had both paused for a drink of water. Because, you know, this whole story hinges on a drink of water as one might say....