HE WHO HAS EYES TO SEE
Mr. Ellsworth did not respond to the call for supper that evening and
Artie, who was cookee for the week, did not go to his tent a second
time. The two patrols ate at the long board under a big elm tree; Tom's
vacant place was conspicuous, but very little was said about the
affair. It was noticeable that the Ravens made no mention of it out of
respect to the other patrol.
After supper Roy went alone to Mr. Ellsworth's tent. There was a
certain freedom of intimacy between these two, partly, no doubt,
because Roy's father was on the Local Council. The scoutmaster had no
favorites and the close relation between himself and Roy was not
generally apparent in the troop. It was simply that Roy indulged in a
certain privilege of intercourse which Mr. Ellsworth's cordial
relations at the Blakeley home seemed to encourage, and I dare say
Roy's own buoyant and charmingly aggressive nature had a good deal to
do with it. He also (though in quite another way than Tom) seemed a law
unto himself.
Arranging himself with drawn up knees upon the scoutmaster's cot, he
began without any introduction.
"Did you notice, Chief" (he often called the scoutmaster chief) "how he
kept saying, 'I am a scout'?"
"Yes, I did," said Mr. Ellsworth, wearily. "It's the one ray of hope."
"Did you notice how he said he was obeying the law?"
"Yes, he did; I had forgotten that."
"His wanting the Handbook, too," said Mr. Ellsworth, quietly, "had a
certain ring to it."
"Did you ever take a squint at that Handbook of his, Chief?"
"No," said Mr. Ellsworth, smiling wanly; "I'm not as observant as you,
Roy."
"He has simply worn it out--it's a sight."
"His mind is not complex," said Mr. Ellsworth, half-heartedly, "yet
he's a mystery."
"Everything is literal to Tom, Chief; he sees only two colors, black
and white."
There was another pause.
"Why don't you eat a little something, Chief?"
"No, not to-night, Roy. I can't. If that thing is true--if there's no
explanation, why, then my whole structure falls down; and John Temple
is right." His voice almost broke. "Tom is either no scout at all or
else----"
"Or else he's about the best scout that lives," interrupted Roy. "Will
you ever forget how he looked as he stood there? Hanged if I can! I've
seen pictures enough of scouts--waving flags and doing good turns and
holding staves and looking like trim little soldiers----"
"Like you, Roy," smiled Mr. Ellsworth.
"But I never saw anything like that! Did you notice his mouth? His----"
"I know," said Mr. Ellsworth, "he looked like a martyr."
"Whenever you see a picture of a scout," said Roy, "it always shows
what a scout can do with his hands and feet; he's tracking or
signalling or something like that. _There_ was a picture that
shows the other side of it. You never see those pictures in the books.
Cracky, but I'd like to have gotten a snap-shot of him just as he stood
there with his mouth set like the jaws of a trap, his eyes ten miles
away and his hand clutching that battered old Handbook."
"I'm glad you dropped in, Roy, it cheers me up."
"Oh, I'm a good scout," laughed Roy. "I'm not thinking about you; I'm
selfish. I'm the one that hauled Tom across, you know, and I've got
_my_ reputation to look after. That's all _I_ care about."
Mr. Ellsworth smiled.
"I'm going to dig out the truth about this between now and to-morrow
morning. I may have to trespass even, but _I_ should worry. What
are _you_ going to do?"
"Nothing to-night. In the morning I'll see Mr. Temple and also Tom, and
see if I can't get him to talk. What else _can_ I do? What are you
going to do?"
"I decline to be interviewed," Roy laughed.
"Well, don't you get into any trouble, Roy."
After the boy had gone, Mr. Ellsworth picked up his own copy of the
_Handbook for Boys_, and looked with a wistful smile at the
picturesque, natty youngster on the cover, holding the red flags. It
always reminded him of Roy.
Roy was satisfied that the only hope of learning anything was to visit
the scene of Tom's suspicious, or at least unexplained, departure from
the Temple house. About this he knew no more than what the constable
had said, but he firmly believed that whatever Tom had done and
wherever he had gone, it had been for a purpose. He did not believe
that Tom had taken the pin, but he felt certain that if he _had_
been tempted to, he (Roy) would have seen him do so. For a scout is not
only loyal, he is watchful. His confidence in Tom, no less than his
confidence in himself, made him morally certain that his friend was
innocent; and Tom's own demeanor at the time of his arrest made him
doubly certain.
A little before dark, Roy put on his Indian moccasins, took his pocket
flashlight and a good stock of matches, and started for Five Oaks.
Reaching there, he made sure the veranda was deserted (for which fact
he had to thank the chill air) and found it easy to trace Tom's
footprints around to the back of the house through the almost bare
earth of the new lawn.
In the little recess by the pantry window he felt more secure. The play
of his flashlight quickly discovered the painty smear on the windowsill
and he examined it closely, as Tom had recently done, but Roy's
mental alertness saved him time and trouble. Instead of trying to pick
out footprints across the back lawn, he hurried across it, ran along to
the end of the fence, and then back again, closely watching the upper
rail by the aid of his light. Sure enough, there was a faint smootch of
paint and by this easy discovery he had saved himself several hundred
feet of difficult tracking. Better still, his own suspicions and the
servants' original story were confirmed.
Tom might have gone around the house, but _someone else had climbed
through the pantry window_.
For a while Roy and his trusty ally, the pocket flashlight, had a
pretty rough tussle of it with the secretive floor of pine-needles in
the woods beyond the fence; but Tom's own uncertain pauses and turnings
and kneelings helped him, and he was thankful that his predecessor had
left these signs of his own movements to guide him. For he now felt
certain that Tom had passed here in the wake of someone else.
It was a long time before he found himself in the beaten path, having
covered a distance of perhaps an eighth of a mile where his tracking
had been, as he later said himself, like hunting for a pin on a carpet
in the dark. He had been on his hands and knees most of the time,
shooting his light this way and that, moving the pine-needles carefully
away from some fancied indentation, with almost a watchmaker's delicacy
of touch. It was not so much tracking as it was the working out of a
puzzle, but it brought him at last into the path and then he found
something which rendered further tracking unnecessary. This was the
flask which had lain beside Tom's father.
And now Roy, with no human presence to distract him as Tom had had,
noticed something lying near the flask which Tom had not seen. This was
a little scrap of pasteboard which had evidently been the corner of a
ticket, and holding his flashlight to it he examined it carefully.
There was the termination of a sentence, "...ers' Union," and the last
letters of a name, "...ade," which had been written with ink on a
printed line.
It meant nothing to him except as the slightest thing means something
to a scout, but he began searching diligently for more of the torn
fragments of this card. The breeze had been there before him and he had
crept on hands and knees many feet in every direction before his search
was rewarded by enough of these scattered scraps to enlighten him. But
the light which they shed was like a searchlight!
Using his membership card for a background and some pine gum to stick
the fragments to it, he succeeded in restoring enough of the card to
learn that it was a membership card of the Bricklayers' Union belonging
to one William Slade.
Then, all of a sudden, he caught the whole truth and understood what
had happened.