HE STOOD THERE, DRIPPING, TREMBLING.
“Yes,” I said roughly, “come in—I’m glad you’ve come. No, don’t touch me, but sit there by the fire—you’re welcome. I was to blame. I’m sorry.” It was odd, perhaps, but even in my relief at seeing him and giving him shelter, a little of my anger and resentment returned so that I was at an effort to repress it. “Dennheimer is worse than you, for he seduced you. Sit down—you needn’t be afraid.”
I seated myself in the great chair before the fire, but he remained standing with one hand upon its massive back. His sleeve was tight and clinging, like a woman’s, which gave him a grotesque look and somehow went to my heart. So standing, he spoke with a painful effort at composure as if his few words had been contemplated and rehearsed. As he spoke, I thought I saw in his eyes a kind of forced calmness as if he had at last groped his way to some peg to hang his wits on.
“That other name,” he said, “say it.”
I was surprised that after his experience he did not clutch my arm, but instead the chair and clung to it as if that were a part of his resolve. The poor, heroic effort at self-control was touching and I answered in a kinder tone.
“Other name? There isn’t any other name. I want you to sit close to the fire and take off your coat and shoes; then we’ll talk. See, I’ll put a fresh log on.”
“Say that name,” he repeated, and already I could see his will power tottering. It had been strong enough for a request but not for continued insistence.
“I think you must remember Dennheimer,” I said, “and I know of no other name. Of course, you knew Dennheimer.”
He shook his head.
“Well,” I persisted, “it is more important to get dry and warm. I wonder how you found your way here in such a night.”
“I can find my way anywhere,” he said; “I had to find my way to ask about the name.”
I was puzzled.
“You mean your own name—Tasso?” I ventured.
“Two traitors,” he said; “the other one. You said—you said—you said—I was one.”
“Indeed,” I said, “I am not burdening my mind with the names of traitors and if I named one it must have been in anger. As for you, I’ll not be your judge—so sit down. You are tired and——”
“I’ve known a night like this before,” he said, clutching the chair and gulping in the labor of his effort to be calm and rational; “I am glad on account of it—the rain—because—it—it—reminds me. You are a coward if you are afraid of a storm—you—are—scouts—the—they——” and his voice trailed away.
“Shh,” I said. “You must be quiet I will tell you the other name——”
“Yes,” he said eagerly.
“It was a young fellow who lived in my town in America and came over here and after a while he got mixed up with the Germans somehow. Slade was his name—Tom Slade; and I’m sorry I mentioned it before. He’s dead now——”
“Say his name again,” he interrupted, trembling like a leaf.
“Slade—Tom Slade.”
“Tomasso—not Tasso,” he cried; “that is what he used to call me.”
I thought his wits were wandering now, so I spoke soothingly, telling him again to sit down. But he clutched my arm and looked at me like a wild man. There was a light in his eyes, too, which I had never seen before. And if he lacked in will and had no power to speak connectedly, a certain fine abandon came to him which took me by storm. I knew, of course, that his tirade was but the reaction of his nervous strain and mental hallucinations, but some things that he said puzzled and rather startled me.
“Do you know—do you know what he—I did,” he breathed. “You think you can bury—me—but—you can’t. I—I’ll tell you what I did—I strangled him—like that (he clutched my throat). I threw him out of the car. He—he tried—to stab me with—with my own jack-knife—he tried to cut the rope—but I can go too quick—up a rope—anyway—trailing—stalking—you see how I can come here when I must have that name. That is my name—it belongs to me—me—it does. Give it to me—or—or I—it’s your town as much as mine—I kept it from getting—disgraced you’re a coward if you’re a-scared of storms—I rode a storm—I did—and I tracked you here—you are—you’re a thief—you are! Give me my name—Tom Slade—I hunt for—that. I trailed it—I am Tomasso!”
I removed his weakening fingers from my throat and, standing, stroked his shoulders soothingly. Every part of him was shaking and he was breathing like a dog. He had to toss his head back to gulp out his excitement and he kept closing one eye in a nervous manner, most distressing to see.
“You must be quiet,” I said, “and get your wet clothes off. Shh— I’ll give you your name (for I thought it best to humor him) as soon as you do that. Hold up your arm—so; so I can get your coat off. Now sit down, quietly. There. It’s because you are tired—that’s all. Don’t think about anything, just....”
But he would not sit down, only laid his head upon the back of the great chair and sobbed like a baby. I made no effort to dissuade him for I knew that was just the effect of his exhausting tirade. I assumed, of course, that he had been talking nonsense....
Copy of cable despatch which I sent to Roy Blakeley on the fourth day following the incidents related in the last chapter.
Following is my last letter to Roy Blakeley, written at the little inn of Hans Twann above St. Craix village in Switzerland:
Dear Roy:
I sent you a cable via Paris and Rouen. Tom Slade is alive and with me here in Switzerland. I waited four days before sending the cable in order that there might be no shadow of uncertainty about the facts, which seemed hardly believable. I think this will go through to you without much delay since the armistice has been signed. But you’ll probably not see us for several months.
Tom is in care of the physician in Solothurn, the nearest town of any size, and I am sure he is in good hands. He cannot leave here for several weeks, however, and when he does we shall probably be delayed in France in connection with getting his discharge or at least an extended furlough. I understand the censorship is off, so this should come to you unopened but in any case keep the whole business close until I return. I have already written a sketch of Tom’s adventures for you but if there is no objection in any quarter I would like to publish this whole extraordinary business, first and last.
I can hardly collect my own mind sufficiently to give you a straight account of this amazing climax of Tom’s career, and I will not now tell you anything contained in the several batches of story I mean to hand you. For you might as well know the whole thing. Tom himself is in no condition to talk and contradicts himself a great deal. But of the essential truth of what he tells me there can be no doubt.
He is suffering from shock incident to the terrible experience he had and this, I think, was aggravated by an injury to his head which he had previously sustained.
In the neighborhood where this final experience of his occurred it is current among the French peasants that the body of Slade fell from the clouds ten minutes after his machine crashed to earth. I mentioned this supposed superstition in the narrative which I shall give you, saying that such a thing was manifestly impossible. It is a fact, however, that the victim fell ten minutes after Tom’s machine descended. But the victim was not Tom Slade. You’ll hardly credit your senses when you read this, but the body which fell on the rocky hillside was none other than that of Toby Schmitt, son of Adolph Schmitt, the Bridgeboro grocer!
This unspeakable young scoundrel was in the German service and was the moving spirit of their spy activities along a front of a hundred miles or more. He was, in fact, the Captain Toby, or Monsieur le Capitaine, whom you shall hear of in my narrative. Tom learned of this young traitor’s presence along the front where he was on a secret mission in France and saw his photograph, which he instantly recognized. He also learned the means by which he might identify this arch villain—a double cross on the observation balloon which he often used.
As nearly as I can gather from Tom (for he has to be handled carefully still), the machine he was pursuing ascended into the clouds where, apparently, its occupant was to seek orders from the balloon which was anchored there. But of that, of course, he is not certain. He downed the enemy flier and was about to shoot at the balloon when something happened to his machine gun. You may imagine his chagrin at finding himself thus helpless, especially when he noticed two black crosses on the balloon’s car.
I think he must have been in a frenzy of rage and desperate resolution to do what he did. I am hoping that later he will be able to give a clearer account of it, and the doctor assures me that he will be. I gather that he circled about the cable of the balloon until finally in some way he was able to get hold of it. That he should have sacrificed his plane and trusted himself to this cable is an evidence of his towering resolve. The doctor thinks that even at that time his mental state was perhaps not quite normal.
In any event, he knew what he was going to do. That he raised himself, hand over hand, up that cable there seems no doubt. And he got into the car. He says that “Schmitty” which was the name he knew young Schmitt by in Bridgeboro, was frantic with fear, and so he must have been to see this redoubtable creature lifting himself up through that cloud-filled air and finally coming aboard like a pirate over the side of a ship. Yet he dared not cut the rope for that would be to release his balloon and put it at the mercy of the wind.
Before Tom was yet within the car, Schmitt, who was apparently unarmed, or at least unprepared, reached down and secured the knife which Tom carried in his pocket. Tom was powerless to prevent this since his hands were upon the rope. This is an American Boy Scout knife and I myself later found it in the wreck of the balloon.
Tom says Schmitt tried to stab him with it. Of the frightful combat which took place in that car we can only imagine the details. Tom himself goes to pieces whenever he tries to talk about it. It was a case of one or the other—there seems little doubt of that. And in the end Schmitt either fell or was thrown out of the car. He must have been clutching at Tom’s neck as he fell for he tore away the cord on which hung Tom’s Scout cross and identification disk. These things were later picked up by the Germans who removed Schmitt’s body. Schmitt had a watch bearing the initials of his name, T. S., and to this was fastened a wallet containing some of his treasonable papers. He had also been corresponding with some girl in Bridgeboro and part of one of her letters, together with a photograph, were found in the wallet.
All of these matters you shall find in the story which I hope soon to give you and the circumstances attending the discovery of these things and my own connection with them, will surprise you greatly.
I shall write no more now, for indeed I find it hard to set these things down. Tom is getting better each day, he talks of you very much, and looks forward to the day when he can be a scoutmaster. All through the days of his sorrowful weakness and distraction the war has been a thing forgotten, and it is hard to arouse in him memories of those last days of his military career. But of scouting and of you he thinks continually and never tires of talking. And I always call him Tomasso because, he says, it reminds him of you.
POSTSCRIPT—WRITTEN AFTER MY RETURN TO AMERICA
I shall not prolong this narrative with an account of our return through France, though it is quite likely that I may, at another time, detail one or two of the rather surprising adventures which we encountered on that remarkable journey. For what seemed to me good and sufficient reasons, our progress was made as surreptitiously as possible, it being my intention to keep the whole business quiet until we should report at Chalons which was where Tom had been stationed.
But, as you probably know, if you have seen any of those misleading news items, we were arrested at Langres. Here our pleasant hike through the hills, which I had counted upon to restore Tom’s mental repose, was rudely brought to an end by the preposterous charge that I was assisting a deserter. The matter was straightened out in an hour, of course, and is too ridiculous to dwell upon. Even the army medical men, who should have known better, smiled annoyingly when I stated, what was the plain truth, that it had simply been my intention to afford Tom a few days of the old woods life which he loved before presenting him to the authorities. And I have to thank his own irrational stubbornness and crying rebellion, that he was not taken from me altogether.
The incident is of no consequence, but I think you must already have discovered that Tom’s memories of scouting, even when he was at his worst, formed the one link which bound his fitful and disordered mind to former days. Indeed, it was by this means that I began the task of nursing and diverting him. The merest mention of a camp fire or casual reference to a trail found always a ready response and I have learned myself to love Nature and all her beneficent influences and soothing voices, for the knowledge of how she dwelt constantly in the poor brain which could hold naught else.
It remains only to say that the task which I began has been triumphantly completed by a keen-eyed old man who presides over Temple Camp in the Catskills—Uncle Jeb, the boys call him. And if anyone in this war-torn world could bring peace and poise to a distracted soul, Jeb Rushmore is that man.
And this brings me to my final task of gathering up the few loose threads of my tale, a thing which I could not do save for Tom’s complete recovery. Straightway upon our return to Bridgeboro, Mr. Ellsworth, that indefatigable scoutmaster, took him up to Temple Camp, where he and Uncle Jeb are now busy getting the big camp ready for the influx of scouts which begins about June.
Roy, Mr. Ellsworth and I lost no time in discussing the proposition of publishing this whole story, and there seemed but one obstacle to our doing so. This was Margie Clayton, as sweet and patriotic a girl as ever lived, and what good end could be served by proclaiming to the world that the young fellow whom she had liked and trusted was a sneak and a traitor? Evidently she had cared for young Schmitt—there is no accounting for tastes, and girls are funny things. It was Roy, bully scout that he is, who put the clincher upon this discussion by reminding us of some rule or other that a scout must be kind and chivalrous.
And it was Miss Margie herself who took the clincher off. How she learned the truth about Schmitt I have never discovered, but she made known in very unmistakable terms that the fate of the whole Schmitt family was nothing to her and that she was very sorry she had ever wasted a good photograph and a good sheet of notepaper on such a creature. As for the photograph, it was not exactly wasted for I returned it to her, and the last time I saw it was during one of my visits to Temple Camp where it hung in a birchbark frame in Tom’s cabin. I did not ask him how it got there.
So, the way being clear, we went ahead with our publishing enterprise and I will conclude with one or two scraps of information which I have lately had from Tom. One is in answer to the question of how the cable of the balloon was broken. He thinks now that he must have cut this himself in savage desperation, fearing that Toby Schmitt would return after falling from the car. If, indeed, he did such a thing he must, of course, have been stark mad, and it is awful to think of him, the prey of such maniac fury, being carried, a lone prisoner in that little car, through clouds and darkness, who shall say how high, and for how long, and finally cast like a shipwrecked mariner upon those lonely mountains.
The harrowing story of that awful night can only be imagined, and perhaps it is better so. No doubt, it is one of God’s mercies that Tom should never recall all that happened in that insane combat among the clouds, and in the frightful journey which followed. He believes that he was in the air through another day, but I think that unlikely unless, indeed, the fugitive balloon was born hither and yon upon the changing winds before landing. All he knows is that he crawled out from under that tangled wreckage in the darkness of night.
One or two trifling details he remembers more closely. I asked him how Toby Schmitt happened to wear an American uniform and he said that evidently it was the custom of that unspeakable creature to wear not only the American, but the French and British uniforms, as occasion and the work in hand suggested. It was the sight of Schmitt in Uncle Sam’s outfit which enraged Tom to the point of uncontrollable fury, but whether this was one of the causes or just a result of his nervous state I cannot say. He tells me that in Schmitt’s room in the Grigou cottage there was the uniform of an English lieutenant, and the jacket of an American Y. M. C. A. worker.
But enough of Schmitt; my pen rebels at the task of recalling his villainy. As for the tattered German coat which Tom wore, he supposes that he found it in the car. He says that his own coat was torn away by Schmitt in the struggle and no doubt this was so, since we know that the wretch also wrenched away the cord bearing his scout badge and identification disk.
There is only one more question and neither Tom nor myself could have any answer for it. It is whether the Germans really believed that they had discovered Slade, when in fact the body was that of their own man. Very likely they really thought it was Slade for, of course, Schmitt could not have been known to every subordinate in the German service, and doubtless he was disfigured beyond identification as the result of his tragic fall. Where his own mark of identification was, I have no guess, though perhaps, being a spy, he wore none.
It is a matter of rueful memory with me that I should have reverently laid a “tribute from our Bridgeboro scouts” upon the grave of that young scoundrel. But perhaps a better spirit of Christian charity should incline me to cherish no such angry regrets and I will not begrudge him the few flowers which I left there as a token of the far-off town where he was born.
Indeed, I am not of a mood for unavailing bitterness for the cruel war is over and the springtime is come and the flowers are coming forth and the birds are singing in the trees as if to lure one’s thoughts away from the horrid nightmare. And last Saturday Roy and I made the trip up to Temple Camp to see old Uncle Jeb and visit Tom in his retreat among those silent, lonely hills.
Not a soul was thereabout as we rowed across the lake to the camp shore, and the cabins and pavilion stood reflected in the black water and all the surrounding woods seemed permeated with a solemn stillness. It was at the day’s end and the frogs were sending up their harsh croakings out of the marshy places—those discordant voices which accord so fittingly with the quiet and the dusk.
“When the frogs begin croaking,” said Roy, “then you know that pretty soon the scouts will begin coming.”
We found Uncle Jeb smoking his pipe under the lean-to of the boarded-up cooking shack looking for all the world as if he were waiting for some rattling old stage-coach which he was to pilot across the scorching western plain. There was peace in his keen gray eyes and a refreshing whiff of the prairies in his brown, furrowed skin and drooping, gray moustache.
“Waiting for the boys to come, Uncle Jeb?” I asked, after the greeting.
“They’ll be comin’ purty quick naow, I reckin,” he drawled.
“Find it lonesome here?”
“’Tain’t never lonesome,” he said, “but I like to see the youngsters coming.”
“I suppose you know that Roy and I together are going to write some stories about Temple Camp,” I ventured, as a pleasantry.
He looked at Roy with a humorous twinkle in his eye.
“And we’re going to put you in, Uncle Jeb,” said Roy.
“Thar’s a youngster over yonder would fit into a story-book,” Uncle Jeb drawled, “kind of a char-ac-ter, as you might say. Lives over thar through the woods whar you see the smoke goin’.”
He told us we would probably find Tom over that way for he had gone after milk. So we took our way along the woods path, which was filled with memories for Roy, until we came to a road with open country beyond, which, being private land, he had never crossed before. Perhaps a hundred yards or so distant stood an old white farmhouse with the familiar paraphernalia of barnyard and adjacent outbuildings, making, I thought, a pleasant scene of old-fashioned farm life.
As we followed the cowpath across the fields we became aware of two figures sitting on a rail fence, and I waved my hand to Tom, who answered with a cheery greeting to us both. It was good to see him looking so hale and ruddy.
But it was in a kind of trance that I saw him lower himself from the fence to come and meet us. For a second I stood gaping, then grasped Roy’s arm in speechless amazement. For there before me, swinging his legs from the fence, was Archibald Archer!
Yes, it was none other than Archibald Archer as large as life, larger, in fact, with his freckled face lighted up so that he was just one enormous grin; Archibald Archer, home from the wars, and once more enthroned among his favorite apple trees which ere long must pay him their luscious tribute. His feet were quite bare, he wore trousers of gaudy bed tick with suspenders brazenly conspicuous, and a straw hat as big as a parachute.
“Well—I’m flabbergasted!” I managed to gasp as I took his proffered hand; “I knew your home was near Temple Camp, but I didn’t know how near.”
“I’m mustered out,” he informed me.
“I think I like you even better in your ancestral domains,” I said, shaking his hand with right good will, “and I congratulate you that you are back in your orchards once more. I might have known that it would take more than a world war to kill you. Tell me, how is the souvenir business?
“I got some mustarrd gas in a vinegarr jarr,” he said. “Want to see it?”
“Thank you,” I answered, “but I have had enough gas for one war. I think you are yourself quite enough of a souvenir for me. I shall not lose track of you again. Roy and I intend to put you where we can always have you handy.” And I winked at my young literary partner.
“I got a piece of wirre from a wirreless, too,” Archer persisted, as if his store was inexhaustible.
The doubtful nature of this last-mentioned memento gave me an uncomfortable feeling that I was being made fun of, so I retorted with severe sarcasm, “I do not care for that, but if you have a ring or two from the bell of Rheims Cathedral I might be willing to accept it.”
“If you want to see the belles,” he said, “come to the barrn dance on Saturrday night.”
It was useless trying to down him.
“And how are all your friends on the other side?” I inquired, venturing upon a new tack. “Sir Douglas Haig and Papa Clemenceau? I hope they are quite well.”
“Pretty smarrt,” he answered, “but they couldn’t come home with me on account of being busy.”
“Too bad,” said I; “and General Pershing and your old college chum, Marshal Foch—how are they?”
“Fine and dandy. They sent theirr kind regarrds to you.”
“Their kind what?” said Tom in that sober way of his.
“Regarrrrds!” repeated Archer.
“Once more,” said Tom.
But for answer Archer toppled him off the fence, where he had reseated himself, to the amusement of Roy, who sat down on the ground, drew his knees up, clasped his hands about them, and laughed so that he shook.
“Humpty Dumpty Tomasso,” he said.
And, do you know, I think that right there, with Roy Blakeley laughing his merry laugh and the famous, patent-applied-for scout smile spread all over his roguish face, is the place to end this rambling story. For in that laugh, as in the spring breeze, there is promise. And if you will but hold your hand to your ear, scout fashion, and fancy that you can hear his joyous uproar, you may take it as a reminder that the bloody warpath has, after all, brought us back to the solemn, friendly trees and the placid lake of the beloved camp once more, and that we are parting but to meet again in the scouts’ own season, which is the good old summertime.