COMPANY
Ordinarily Tom Slade would have stopped to think and would have kept his
nerve and acted cautiously; but he had not sufficiently recovered his
poise to meet this emergency wisely. He knew he could not swim away,
that capture was now inevitable, and instead of pausing to collect
himself he gave way to an impulse which he had never yielded to before,
an impulse born of his shaken nerves and stricken hope and the sort of
recklessness which comes from despair. What did it matter? Fate was
against him....
With a kind of defiant abandonment he limped to the little stone doorway
and stood there like an apparition, clutching the sides with trembling
hands. But whatever reckless words of surrender he meant to offer froze
upon his lips, and he swayed in the opening, staring like a madman.
For reclining upon a rough bunk, with knees drawn up, was Archibald
Archer, busily engaged in whittling a stick, his freckled nose wrinkling
up in a kind of grotesque accompaniment to each movement of his hand
against the hard wood.
"I--I thought----" Tom began.
"Well,--I'll--be----" countered Archer.
For a moment they stared at each other in blank amaze. Then a smile
crept over Tom's face, a smile quite as unusual with him as his sudden
spirit of surrender had been; a smile of childish happiness. He almost
broke out laughing from the reaction.
"Are you carvin' a souvenir?" he said foolishly.
"No, I ain't carrvin' no souveneerr," Archer answered. "Therre's fish
among those rocks and I'm goin' to spearr 'em."
"You ain't carvin' a _what_!" said Tom.
"I ain't carrvin' a souveneerr," Archer said with the familiar Catskill
Mountain roll to his R's.
"I just wanted to hear you say it," said Tom, limping over to him and
for the first time in his life yielding to the weakness of showing
sentiment.
"All night long," he said, sitting down on the edge of the bunk, "I was
thinkin' how you said it--and it sounds kind of good----"
"How'd you make out in the riverr?" Archer asked.
"You can't even say _river_," said Tom, laughing foolishly in his great
relief.
"It was some storrm, all right! But I got the matches safe anyway, and
they'll strike, 'cause I tried one."
"You ought to have made a whisk stick[A] to try it," said Tom, then
caught himself up suddenly. "But I ain't going to tell you what you
ought to do any more. I'm goin' to stop bossin'."
[Footnote A: A stick the end of which is separated into fine shavings
which readily catch the smallest flame, a familiar device used by
scouts.]
"I got yourr spy-glass forr you," said Archer. "I had to dive f'rr't.
Didn't you hearr me call to you it was lost and I was goin' down
f'rr't?"
"----lost----down----"
The tragic words flitted again through Tom's mind, and he reached out
and took Archer's hand hesitatingly as if ashamed of the feeling it
implied.
"What'd you do that for? You were a fool," he said.
"What you _got_ to do, you do," said Archer; "that's what you'rre always
sayin'. Didn't you say you wanted it so's you could see that fellerr
Blondel's house from the mountains? Therre it is," he said, nodding
toward an old ring-net that stood near, "and it's some souveneerr too,
'cause it's been at the bottom of the old Rhine."
Tom looked at the spy-glass which Archer had thrown into the net and the
net seemed all hazy and tangled for his eyes were brimming. He would not
spare himself now.
"I see I'm the fool," he stammered; "I thought I shouldn't have started
across because maybe you couldn't swim so good and didn't want to admit
it."
"Me? I dived in Black Lake before you werre borrn," said Archer. This
was not quite true, since he was two years younger than Tom, but Tom
only smiled at him through glistening eyes.
"I see now I was crazy to think about finding her--anyway----"
"You haven't forrgot how she treated us, have you?" Archer retorted,
quoting Tom's own words. "It came to me all of a sudden, when I dropped
the glove, and that's when I called to you. And all of a sudden I
thought how you walked back toward the house with herr that night
and--and--do you think I don't understand--you darrned big chump?"