AT TWILIGHT
Tom had never explored this old trail. It was one of the things that he
had been always intending to do but had never done. He had hoped that
Audry might introduce him to its romantic neighborhood and indeed she
had piloted him as far as the first intersecting crevice, where she
balked.
On a certain evening after supper he was sitting on the little porch of
the cottage. Audry was busy with her accustomed task of helping Miranda
with the dishes and he could hear her girlish, cocksure talk in the
kitchen. Audry was always very positive about everything. She knew what
she knew.
On the campus, as they called the clearing, Whalen and Fairgreaves were
picking up bits of wood. Tom smiled as he observed the graceful,
athletic form of the amiable Fairgreaves. Each time he stooped he looked
as if he were bowing to some grand lady. His khaki trousers and cutaway
coat made him look outlandish.
Yet, thought Tom, here was a kind man. If Fairgreaves were a failure at
least he could enjoy the success of others. He was the soul of
generosity. He could not be so bad. Perhaps the world needs just such
amiable ne’er-do-wells as Fairgreaves.
Tom was just about to go over and join them in their self-imposed after
supper task when Fairgreaves sauntered with ingratiating step toward the
group on the rear porch, where the chauffeur who had been deprived of
his license was playing a harmonica.
The inventor who was waiting for the million dollar suit to be decided
in his favor was sitting on the railing smoking a pipe. Billy the sailor
sat with his feet against the rail. They all seemed to be enjoying their
ease.
Billy the sailor was telling how he had once assisted in killing a
skipper who had killed a seaman. The men all seemed to think that was a
pretty good thing to do. They were not too conventional, these men.
“What’s new, Legitt’?” one of them asked as Fairgreaves approached them.
“There is nothing new under the sun,” said Fairgreaves elegantly.
“The hell there ain’t,” said Billy the sailor.
Whalen did not join the group but sauntered off with an effect of
aimless weariness toward the edge of the clearing and disappeared in the
woods. It seemed to Tom that his stroll and its direction were wholly
unpremeditated.
Tom had lately wanted a chance to talk with Whalen alone. He had seen
his former companion come and go and had been with the others when
Whalen was present. But he wanted to see him alone. There was no
particular reason for this, except that he felt an impulse to renew, if
possible, some measure of their former intimacy.
He had long since ceased to attach (if indeed he had ever attached) any
significance to the look on Whalen’s face in the woods. That striking
resemblance to his little old friend, Caleb Dyker, had been a thing seen
in a moment of half-consciousness and amid surroundings altogether
dramatic and unusual.
Yet he had wondered if there were any particular reason why Whalen
avoided him. He had decided that there was not, that it was just his
friend’s moroseness and lonely habit. Probably Whalen looked upon him as
a kid, thought Tom. At all events here was a chance to chat with him in
the good old way he used to do....
Tom soon found that he was on the trail along the brow of the mountain.
By the time he reached the point which marked the limit of Audry’s
daring, Whalen had disappeared around a bend in the winding trail.
Tom leaped the crevice and soon found himself in the thick of the
jungle. On his left the heavy undergrowth encroached upon the almost
indistinct path as if to crowd the passerby to the very brink of the
overgrown cliff. Below, the abnormal, upturned wilderness with its
tilted trees and half-exposed roots, and its great insecurely lodged
boulders, looked dark and forbidding in the cold twilight.
In this witching hour the path seemed very lonesome. Shadows played like
living things among the trees. The great reservoir afar off looked the
color of steel in the gathering dusk.
And the initialed rocks along the trail, wrapped in the gray coverlet of
twilight, might easily have been imagined to be ghosts out of the past.
On one of these bordering rests a shadow flitted back and forth making
the initials of some unknown pilgrim to shimmer in the changing light
and hover on the verge of invisibility like some departed shade. How
interesting and romantic, thought Tom, for some former visitor who had
left his memorial in this silent haunt, to return and search it out.
He had passed around another bend of this sequestered, lofty trail, when
he saw Whalen sitting on a rock some hundred feet or so distant. His
back was toward Tom, for he had turned about and had somewhat altered
his sitting posture to gaze at the darkening panorama in the extensive
country below.
As he thus sprawled unaware of Tom’s approach, the latter’s eye was
caught by something shiny on the rock. As he approached nearer, he saw
it was an open jack-knife.
As soon as Whalen became aware of Tom he turned about, which was
natural, but it seemed to Tom that there was something unnatural in the
new attitude. He fancied a trace of agitation about Whalen, which was
quite unlike him. As he approached it seemed as if Whalen were on the
point of coming to meet him but decided suddenly to remain where he was.
“H’lo, Ned,” said Tom cheerily. “Taking a walk? Or a rest, I mean?”
Perhaps it was because Whalen did not think and act quickly enough, or
perhaps it was because it was repugnant to his nature to indulge an
impulse to concealment; or it may have been that in that short moment of
panic he found a kind of cynical abandonment the easiest course.
Whatever the cause, he made no additional effort to conceal certain
carvings on the rock.
Tom saw that the jack-knife had been used to scrape the gray mold out of
the letters comprising two names, one carved above the other.
The carving, apparently, was by no means as old as much of the idle
handiwork along the path for the figures _1907_ were cut beneath the two
names. Nor had the work that appearance of creditable care about it
which characterized some of the other specimens; the letters were
sprawling and irregular. But the names were easy enough to read and Tom
Slade, with more presence of mind than Whalen showed, read them aloud
without the least suggestion of astonishment or even interest.
“Anson Dicker or Dyker—Joe Ganley. Huh. Wonder who those fellows were,
hey? Couple of wearie willies maybe. Any objection to me sitting down
and resting, Ned? I don’t see much of you these days. Nice and quiet
along in here, hey?”