THE MOUNTAIN SHELTER
For a few moments they stared at the wreck and said nothing.
“Maybe it was Kinney,” suggested Doc, at last. “Do you remember about
Kinney?”
“Come on,” urged Tom.
Half reluctantly the others followed him, glancing back now and again
till the tattered mass became a shadowy speck and faded away in the
darkness.
“He started from somewhere above Albany,” said Doc, “and he was never
heard of again. I often heard my father speak about it and I read about
it in that aviation book that Roy loaned me.”
“He’s going to loan it to me when he gets it back from you,” said Connie;
“he says you’re a good bookkeeper.”
“Put away your little hammer,” laughed Garry.
“Some people in Poughkeepsie thought they heard the humming of the engine
at night,” said Doc, “and that’s what made people think he had got past
that point—but that’s all they ever knew. Some thought he must have gone
down in the river.”
“How long ago was it?” Garry asked.
Tom plodded on silently. It was well known of Tom that he could not think
of two things at once.
“Five or six years, I think,” said Doc.
“That would be too long a time for the wreck, seeing the condition it’s
in,” said Garry, “but anything less than that would be too short a time
for the skeleton.”
“Do you mean they were lost here at different times?” Connie asked.
“Looks that way to me.”
“If there are buzzards up here a skeleton might look like that in a month
or so,” Connie suggested.
“There aren’t any buzzards around here.”
“Sure there are,” said Doc. “Look at Buzzard’s Bay—it’s named for ’em.”
“It’s named for a man who had it wished on him,” said Garry. “You might
as well say that Pike’s Peak was named after the pikers that go there.”
“How long do you suppose that aeroplane’s been there?”
“Five or six years, maybe,” Doc said. “The frame’ll be as good as that
for ten years more. There’s nothing more to rot.”
“Well,” said Garry, “it looks to my keen scout eye as if that wreck had
been there for about six months and the skeleton for about six years.”
“Maybe if you had tried shutting your keen scout eye and opening it in a
hurry—— Hey, Tomasso?” teased Doc.
“Maybe they got here at the same time but the man lived for a while,” Tom
condescended to reply.
“You’ve got it just the wrong way round, my fraptious boy,” said Doc.
“The skeleton’s been here longer, if anything.”
“Did you see that hickory stick there—all worm-eaten?” Tom asked. “It had
some carving on it. None of these trees are hickory trees.”
“I saw it but I didn’t notice the carving,” said Doc, surprised.
“Didn’t you notice there weren’t any hickory trees anywhere around
there?” Tom asked.
“No, I didn’t—I’m a punk scout—I must be blind,” said Doc.
“You’re good on first-aid,” said Tom, indifferently.
“How’d you know it was hickory?” Connie asked.
“Because I can tell hickory,” said Tom, bluntly, “and it’s being all
worm-eaten proved it—kind of. That’s the trouble with hickory.”
They always had to make the best of Tom’s answers.
“I don’t know where he got the hickory stick,” he said, as he pushed
along through the underbrush, “but he didn’t get it anywhere around here,
that’s sure.”
“And he probably didn’t sit down that same day and carve things on it,
either,” suggested Garry; “Tom, you’re a wonder.”
“He might have lived up here for two or three years after he fell,” said
Doc reflectively. “Gee, it starts you thinking, don’t it?”
Connie shook his head. “It’s a mystery, all right,” said he.
The thought of the solitary man, disabled crippled, perhaps, living there
on that lonely mountain after the terrible accident which had brought him
there lent a new gruesomeness to their discoveries. And who but Tom Slade
would have been able to keep an open mind and to see so clearly by the
aid of trifling signs as to separate the two apparent catastrophes and
see them as independent occurrences?
“Tomasso, you’re the real scout,” said Doc. “The rest of us are only
imitations.”
Tom said nothing. He was used to this kind of talk and was about as proof
against such praise as a battleship is against a popgun. And just now he
was thinking of other things. Yet if he could have looked into the future
and seen there the extraordinary explanation of his discovery and known
the strange adventures it would lead to, he might have paused, even on
that all but hopeless errand of rescue, and looked again at those
pathetic remains. But those things were to be reserved for another
summer.
“Is there anything we can do? What do you suggest, Tom?” Garry asked,
dropping his half flippant manner.
“I say, let’s shout again,” said Tom. “We must be nearly a mile farther
on by now, and the brook’s getting around to the east, too.”
“Good and loud,” said Connie.
“All together—now!”
Again their voices woke the mountain echoes. A sudden rustling of the
underbrush told of some frightened wood creature. The brook rippled
softly as before. There was no other sound, and they waited. Then, from
somewhere far off came the faint answering of a human voice. It would
never have been distinguishable save in that deathlike stillness and even
there it sounded as if it might have come from another world. It seemed
to be uttering the letter L in a kind of doleful monotony.
They paused a moment in a kind of awe, even after it had ceased.
“It’s calling _help_,” said Garry.
“I can go there now,” said Tom. “The brook probably winds around that
way, but we can cut across and get there quicker. We’ll chop our way
through here. Let him rest his lungs now—I can go right for a ways. I got
to admit I was wrong.”
In the dim light of the lantern Garry looked at Tom as he stood there,
his heavy, stolid face scratched by the brambly thicket, his coarse shirt
torn, his thick shock of hair down over his forehead—no more elated by
triumph than he would have been discouraged by defeat, and as the
brighter, more vivacious and attractive boy looked at him he was seized
with a little twinge of remorse that he had made game of Tom’s clumsy
speech and sober ways.
“Got to admit you were wrong _how_—for goodness’ sake?” he said, almost
angrily. “Didn’t you bring us here? Didn’t you bring us all the way from
Temple Camp to where we could hear that voice calling for help? Didn’t
you?”
“I said I could find the trees that had the stalking marks last summer,”
said Tom, “and I got to admit I was wrong, ’cause I couldn’t.”
“Who was it that wouldn’t sit down and eat supper while somebody was
dying?” demanded Doc. “There’s a whole lot of good scouts, believe _me_,
but there’s only one Tom Slade!”
It was always the way—they made fun of him and lauded him by turns.
“There’s a kind of trail here,” said Tom, unmoved, “but it hasn’t been
used for a long time—see those spider webs across it? Lend me your axe,
will you, mine is all dulled.”
A hand-to-hand combat with more tangled underbrush, which they tore and
chopped away, brought them to comparatively open land which must have
been very high for they were surprised to see, far below, several
twinkling specks of light which they thought to be at Temple Camp. It was
the first open view they had had.
They called again, and again the voice answered, clearly audible now,
crying, “Help help!” and something more which the boys could not
understand. They called, telling the speaker not to come in search of
them, that they would come to him, and to answer them for guidance when
they called.
They plunged into more thicket, tearing it aside with a will, sometimes
going astray, then pausing to listen for the guiding voice, and pushing
on again through the labyrinth.
After a little they fell into a path and then could hear the brook
rushing over stones not far distant, and knew that it must verge to the
east as Tom had said and that the path did lead to it. It would have been
a long journey following the stream.
Soon a greater intercourse of speech was possible and they called
cheerily that they were scouts and for the waiter to cheer up for they
would soon be with him.
Presently, along the path they could hear the sound of footsteps. Tom,
who was leading the way, raised his lantern and just beyond the radius of
its flickering light they could see a dark figure hurrying toward them;
then a face, greatly distraught in the moonlight, and Tom stopped,
bewildered. As the stranger grasped his arm he held the light close to
the haggard, wild-eyed face.
“Hello,” he said, “I—I guess I know you. Let go—what’s the matter?
Weren’t you at Temple Camp last summer?”
The stranger, a young fellow of perhaps eighteen, shook his head.
“With one of the troops from——?”
“No,” said the young man.
“Hmn,” said Tom, still holding the lantern up; “I thought——Don’t you
fellows remember him?”
Connie shook his head; Garry also.
“Never saw him in my life,” said Doc.
“Hmn,” said Tom. “Maybe I——just for a minute I thought——I guess you
fellows are right.”
The stranger was dressed in the regulation camping outfit—the kind of
costume usually seen on dummies in the windows of sporting goods stores
in the spring, with a spick and span tent in the background, a model
lunch basket near by and a canoe crowded in. His nobby outfit was very
much the worse for wear, however, and he looked about as fresh as the
immaculate Phoebe Snow would look after a _real_ railroad journey.
“Maybe I can be rescued now,” he said imploringly, clinging to Tom. “I
saw the lights way down there. There was only one till tonight and
tonight I counted seven—little bits of ones. I tried to get to them, but
I got lost. You can’t go to them. It looks as if you can, but you can’t.
They’re just as far away, no matter how far you go—they get farther and
farther. Nobody can ever get away from here. Are you afraid of dead
people?”
“No,” said Doc. “We’re scouts. Is——”
“If a person looks very different, then he’s dead, isn’t he?”
“Come on,” said Doc. “We’ll see.”
“We’ll never get off this hill; I’ve tried every way——”
“Oh, yes, we will,” spoke up Garry, putting his arm over the boy’s
shoulder and urging him along.
They could see that he was hardly rational, and Garry, better than any of
the others, knew how to handle him.
“It’s terrible without a light,” he said; “I spilled all the oil—I’m glad
you’ve got a light.”
“What’s your name?” Garry asked.
“Jeffrey Waring—come on, I’ll show you the place.” He shuddered as he
spoke.
Once more Tom held his lantern up to the white, distracted face.
“_He_ was never at camp,” laughed Doc.
“Hmn,” said Tom, apparently but half convinced.
A few steps brought them to a little clearing where stood a rough shack.
Outside it, fastened against a tree, was a vegetable crate with bars
nailed across it—the silent evidence of departed pets. Several fishing
rods lay against a tree. Close by was a makeshift fireplace. On a rough
bunk inside the shack lay a man, no longer young, with iron gray hair.
His eyes were open and staring and one seemed larger than the other. Doc
felt his pulse and found that he was living.
“He fell on the rocks and hurt his arm—I think it’s broken,” said
Jeffrey. “It bled and I bandaged it.”
Doc raised the bandaged arm and it fell heavily. Removing the bandage
carefully he saw that the cut itself was not dangerous, but from
first-aid studies he thought the man was suffering from an apoplectic
stroke or something of that nature. He wondered if the injury to the arm
had not been incidental to the man’s seizure and sudden fall. People
sometimes lingered in an unconscious condition for days, he knew. It was
hardly a case for first-aid, but it was certainly a case for skill and
resource, for whatever happened the patient, dead or living, would have
to be taken away from this mountain camp.
With Garry’s help, he raised the victim into a recumbent posture, piling
everything available under the head while Connie hurried back and forth
to the brook, bringing wet applications for the head and neck.
There was no sign of returning consciousness and the question was how to
get the patient away down to Temple Camp where medical aid might be had,
and where any contingency might be best handled.
The four boys, greatly hampered in their discussion by Jeffrey, whose
long vigil had brought him to the verge of collapse, decided that it
would be quite useless to signal for help, since it would mean another
expedition with most of the difficulties of their own, even if attempted
after daybreak.
So they decided to wait for dawn, which happily would come soon, and with
the first sign of it to send a smudge signal that they were coming and to
have a doctor at camp. They believed that in the daylight they could
carry the patient back over the same path which they had so laboriously
opened and though delay was irksome this plan seemed the only feasible
one to follow.
Despite their weariness none could sleep, so they kindled a little fire
and sat about it chatting while they counted time, impatiently waiting
for the first streak of daylight.
It was then that they learned from the overwrought boy something of his
history, but they got it piecemeal and had to patch together as best they
could his rather disjointed talk.
“Is he your father?” Doc asked.
“No, he’s my uncle,” said Jeffrey. “He isn’t a real governor; I only call
him that. He’s eccentric—know what that is? If we hadn’t come trout
fishing it would have been all right. I could have sent my pigeons from
the boat—I’ve got a regular coop there—it cost thirty dollars.”
“But you like the stalking, don’t you?” Connie asked.
“Yes, but I can’t be quiet enough—I can’t sneak up to them. You have to
be quiet and stealthy when you stalk.”
They made out that Mr. Waring was something of a sportsman and was
wealthy and eccentric.
“We live in a big house in Vale Centre,” Jeffrey told them, “and we have
fountains and I have twenty-seven pigeons and two dogs—and I can have
anything I want except an automobile. I can’t have an automobile because
I’m nervous.”
“You don’t mean you live near Edgevale Village, down the Hudson?” Garry
asked in surprise. “I live about two miles from the Centre myself.”
“We live in a house that cost thousands and thousands of dollars, but I
like our boat best. If there’s a war we’re going to give it to the
government, but if there isn’t any war it’s going to be mine some day.”
It appeared that Jeffrey and his uncle lived alone, save for the
servants, and had cruised up the Hudson to Catskill Landing in their boat
for the trout fishing of which the old gentleman was fond. How the pair
had happened to penetrate to this isolated spot was not quite clear, but
the boys gathered that it had been a favorite haunt of Mr. Waring’s
youthful days.
“He told me he’d bring me and show me,” said Jeffrey, “and that we’d stay
here and catch fish and I could send my pigeons back to James—he’s our
chauffeur—and I’d get better so’s I could remember things better. Do you
think you get better living in the woods?”
“Surest thing you know,” said Garry.
The picture of the kindly old gentleman, bringing his none too robust
nephew to this lonely spot, which lingered in his memory perhaps as the
scene of woodland sports of his own boyhood, touched the four boys and
seemed to bring them in closer sympathy with the figure that lay prone
and motionless within the little shack.
“I can have anything I want,” Jeffrey told them again. “Spotty cost fifty
dollars, but he died. That’s because I was sick and my brain didn’t work
good. My other carrier cost thirty dollars and I sent him to James to
tell him the governor was hurt.”
The scouts told him the fate of the pigeon and of how they had received
the message.
“But we’ll never get away from here,” Jeffrey said hopelessly. “We’ll
never find our way back.”
With the first light of dawn Garry increased the dying blaze and sent the
smudge signal. Piling damp leaves on the fire he caused a straight thin
column of thick smoke to rise high into the air and by inverting the
deserted pigeon coop over this, and removing and replacing it as the
Morse code required, he imprinted against the vast gray dawn the words
COMING HAVE DOCTOR
They knew well enough that some one in the camp would keep sleepless
vigil, watching for just such a message. Three times the words were
spelled out in smoke to make sure that they would be caught and
understood.
To Jeffrey, whose only resource had been his pet pigeon and who had been
unnerved by his inability to find his way from the hill, the sending of
this message and the quiet orderly preparations for departure which
followed were the cause of gaping amazement. He clung to Garry, as the
others got his uncle onto the stretcher, and walked along at his side,
plying him with excited questions. Sometimes it was necessary for him to
take a corner while one of the scouts went ahead to open a way and then
his panic was pitiable.
It did not seem at all peculiar to the others that he should single out
Garry and cling to him, for everybody fell for Garry almost at first
sight. What they did notice was that he appeared to shun Tom, who,
indeed, was entitled to all his gratitude and was the hero of the
occasion if anyone was.
But then he was a queer boy anyway, and thoroughly shaken up by his
experience.
As for Garry, the sudden hit which he had apparently made quite amused
him.
“You should worry,” he said, laughingly to Tom.
And Tom shrugged his shoulders and smiled.