THE NEW STRUGGLE
Tom did as he had promised Mr. Burton he would do; he went home and lay
down and rested. It was not much of a home, but it was better than a
dugout. That is, it was cleaner though not very much larger. But there
were no lieutenants.
It was a tiny hall-room in a boarding house, and the single window
afforded a beautiful view of back fences. It was all the home that Tom
Slade knew. He had no family, no relations, nothing.
He had been born in a tenement in Barrel Alley, where his mother had
died and from which his good-for-nothing father had disappeared. For a
while he had been a waif and a hoodlum, and by strict attention to the
code of Barrel Alley's gang, he had risen to be king of the hoodlums.
No one, not even Blokey Mattenburg himself, could throw a rock into a
trolley car with the precision of Tom Slade.
Then, on an evil day, he was tempted to watch the scouts and it proved
fatal. He was drawn head over ears into scouting, and became leader of
the new Elk Patrol in the First Bridgeboro Troop. For three seasons he
was a familiar, if rather odd figure, at Temple Camp, which Mr. John
Temple of Bridgeboro had founded in the Catskills, and when he was old
enough to work it seemed natural that these kindly gentlemen who had his
welfare at heart, should put him into the city office of the camp, which
he left to go to war, and to which he had but lately returned, suffering
from shell-shock.
He was now eighteen years old, and though no longer a scout in the
ordinary sense, he retained his connection with the troop in capacity of
assistant to Mr. Ellsworth, the troop's scoutmaster.
He had been rather older than the members of this troop when he made his
spectacular leap from hoodlumism to scouting, and hence while they were
still kicking their heels in the arena he had, as one might say, passed
outside it.
But his love for the boys and their splendid scoutmaster who had given
him a lift, was founded upon a rock. The camp and the troop room had
been his home, the scouts had been his brothers, and all the simple
associations of his new life were bound up with these three patrols.
Perhaps it was for this reason that among these boys, all younger than
himself, and with whom he had always mingled on such familiar terms, he
showed but few, and those not often, of the distressing symptoms which
bespoke his shattered nerves. Among them he found refuge and was at
peace with himself.
And the boys, intent upon their own pursuits, knew nothing of the brave
struggle he was making at the office where his days were spent, and in
the poor little shabbily furnished room where he would lie down on his
iron bed and try to rest and forget the war and not hear the noises
outside.
How he longed for Friday nights when the troop met, and when he could
forget himself in those diverting games!
Since the first few days of his return from France, he had seen but
little of the troop, except upon those gala nights. The boys were in
school and he at the office, and it seemed as if their two ways had
parted, after all his hopes that his return might find them reunited and
more intimate than ever before. But after the first joyous welcome, it
had not been so. It could not be so.
Of course, if they had known how he loved to just sit and listen to them
jolly the life out of Peewee Harris, they would doubtless have arranged
to do this every night for his amusement, for it made no difference to
them how much they jollied Peewee. If they had had the slightest inkling
that it helped him just to listen to Roy Blakeley's nonsense, they would
probably have arranged with Roy for a continuous performance, for so far
as Roy was concerned, there was no danger of a shortage of nonsense. But
you see they did not think of these things.
They did much for wounded soldiers, but Tom Slade was not a wounded
soldier. And so it befell that the very thing which he most needed was
the thing he did not have, and that was just the riot of banter and
absurdity which they called their meetings. At all this he would just
sit and smile and forget to interlace his fingers and jerk his head. And
sometimes he would even laugh outright.
I am afraid that everything was managed wrong from the first. It would
have been better if Mr. Burton or Mr. Ellsworth or somebody or other had
told the troop the full truth about Tom's condition. I suppose they
refrained for fear the boys would stare at him and treat him as one
stricken, and thereby, perhaps make his struggle harder.
At all events, it was hard enough. And little they knew of this new and
frightful war that he was struggling through with all the power of his
brave, dogged nature. Little they knew how he lay awake night after
night, starting at every chime of the city's clock, of how he did the
best he could each day, waiting and longing for Friday night, hoping,
_hoping_ that Peewee and Roy would surely be there. Poor, distracted,
shell-shocked fighter that he was, he was fighting still, and they were
his only hope and they did not know it. No one knew it. He would not let
them know.
For that was Tom Slade.