THE WANDERING MINSTREL
With one exception the most patient scout at Temple Camp was Westy
Martin of the interesting Bridgeboro, New Jersey, Troop. He could sit
huddled up in a bush for an hour studying a bird. He could sit and fish
for hours without catching anything. But the turtle was too much for
him.
"We ought to name that guy Llewellyn," he commented, as he strolled
away; "that means _lightning_, according to some book or other. There
was an old Marathon racer a couple of million years ago named
Llewellyn."
"That's a good name for him," Tom admitted.
"You going to hang around, Slady?"
"I'm going to fight it out on these lines if it takes all summer," Tom
said.
Thus the two most patient, stubborn living things in all the world were
left alone together--the turtle and Tom Slade.
Tom sat on a rock and the turtle sat on the ground. Tom did not budge.
Neither did the turtle. The turtle was facing up toward the camp and
away from the lake. Tom rested his chin in his hands, studying the
initials on the turtle's shell. If they had been A. H. instead of T. H.
they would indeed have been the very initials of Master Anthony
Harrington, Jr. But a miss is as good as a mile, thought Tom, and T. H.
is no more like A. H. than it is like Z. Q.
This train of thought naturally recalled to his mind the letters he had
seen imprinted in the mud up in the woods. But those letters were H. T.
and there was therefore no connection between these three sets of
letters.
Tom knew well enough the habit of the Temple Camp scouts of carving
their initials everywhere. The rough bench where they waited for the
mail wagon to come along was covered with initials. And among them Tom
recalled a certain sprightly tenderfoot, Theodore Howell by name, who
had been at camp early that same season. Doubtless this artistic
triumph on the bulging back of Llewellyn was the handiwork of that same
tenderfoot.
And likely enough, too, those letters up in the woods were the initials
of Harry Thorne, still at camp. Tom would ask Harry about that. And at
the same time he would remind some of these carvers in wood and clay not
to leave any artistic memorials on the camp woodwork. It was part of
Tom's work to look after matters of that kind. About the only conclusion
he reached from these two disconnected sets of initials was that he
would have an eye out for specialists in carving....
But Tom's authority was as naught when it came to Llewellyn. The turtle
cared not for the young camp assistant. He sat upon the ground
motionless as a rock, apparently dead to the world.
Tom had now no more interest in the turtle than a kind of sporting
instinct not to be beaten. He could sit upon the rock as long as his
adversary could sit upon the ground. In a moment of exasperation he had
been upon the point of hurling the turtle into the lake, but had
refrained, and now he was reconciled to a vigil which should last all
night.
Llewellyn had met his match.
For fifty-seven minutes by his watch, Tom waited. Then the tip end of
Llewellyn's nose emerged slowly, cautiously, and remained stationary.
Eleven minutes of tense silence elapsed.
Then the tip end of Llewellyn's nose emerged a trifle more, stopped,
started again and lo, his whole head and neck were out, craned stiffly
upward toward the camp.
Tom did not move a muscle, he hardly breathed. Soon the turtle's tail
was sticking straight out and one forward claw was emerging slowly,
doubtfully.
Silence.
Another claw emerged and the neck relaxed its posture of listening
reconnoissance. Then, presto, Llewellyn was waddling around like a
lumbering old ferry boat and heading straight for the lake. As he
waddled along in a bee line something which Tom had once read came
flashing into his mind, which was that no matter where a turtle is
placed, be it in the middle of the Desert of Sahara, he will travel a
bee line for the nearest water.
But his recollection of this was as nothing to Tom now, when he saw with
mingled feelings of shame and excitement something which seemed to open
a way to the most dramatic possibilities.
As the turtle entered the muddy area near the lake Tom realized, what he
should have known before, that the tracks which Hervey Willetts had
followed from the mountain and which Skinny had followed from the lake
were the tracks of a turtle! _The tracks of a turtle coming from a
locality where it did not belong, straight for the still water which was
its natural element._
With a quick inspiration Tom darted forward into the mud catching the
turtle just as it was waddling into the water. He did not know why he
did this, it was just upon an impulse, and in making the sudden reach he
all but lost his balance. As it was he had to swing both arms to keep
his feet, and as he did so the turtle fell upside down in the drier mud
a few feet back from shore. As Tom lifted it, there, imprinted in the
mud were the letters H. T.
The initials T. H. on the creature's back had been reversed when he fell
upside down. And Tom realized with a thrill that what had just happened
before his eyes had happened at that log up in the woods.
Llewellyn, the Humpty-dumpty of the animal world, had slid off the log,
alighting upside down.
For a moment Tom Slade paused in dismay.
So Teddy Howell and Harry Thorne had nothing to do with this. This
lumbering, waddling creature had come flopping along down out of the
silent lower reaches of that frowning mountain, straight to his
destination. He was not the first printer to print something the wrong
way around.
Who, then, was T. H.? Not Master Anthony, Jr., at all events. But some
one afar off, surely. Abstractedly, Tom Slade gazed off toward that
towering mountain whence this clumsy but unerring messenger had come. It
looked very dark up there. Tom recalled how from those lofty crags the
great eagle had swooped down and met his match before the hallowed
little home of Orestes.
In a kind of reverie Tom's thoughts wandered to Orestes. Orestes would
be in bed by now. Orestes had lived away up near where that turtle had
come from. And the thought of Llewellyn and Orestes turned Tom's thought
to Hervey Willetts. He had not seen much of Hervey the last day or
two....
Tom fixed his gaze upon that old monarch where again the first crimson
rays of dying sunlight glinted the pinnacles of the somber pines near
its summit. How solemn, how still, it seemed up there. The nearer sounds
about the camp seemed only to emphasize that brooding silence. It was
like the silence of some vast cathedral--awful in its majestic solitude.
And this impassive, stolid, hard-shell pilgrim, knowing his business
like the bully scout he was, had come stumbling, sliding, rolling and
waddling down out of those fastnesses, because there was something right
here which he wanted. And he had brought a clew. Should the human scout
be found wanting where this humble little hero had triumphed?
"I never paid much attention to those stories," Tom mused; "but if
there's a draft dodger living up there, I'm going to find him. If
there's a hermit I'm going to see him. If there's...."
He paused suddenly in his musing, listening. It was the distant voice of
a scout returning to camp. He was singing one of those crazy songs that
he was famous for. Tom looked up beyond the supply cabin and saw him
coming down, twirling his hat on a stick, hitching up one stocking as
often as it went down--care-free, happy-go-lucky, delightfully heedless.
He looked for all the world like a ragged vagabond. The evening breeze
bore the strain he was singing down to where stolid Tom stood and he
smiled, then suddenly became tensely interested as he listened. Tom
often wondered where Hervey got his songs and ballads. On the present
occasion this is what the blithe minstrel was caroling:
Saint Anthony he was a saint,
And he was thin and bony;
His mother called him Anthonee,
But the kids they called him Tony.