THE FACE
All the next day that face haunted Roscoe. "If I could only know where he is," he said to himself; "if I could bring him back, I'd tell the whole business."
It occurred to him that perhaps Tom was dead and that that was why he was continually seeing that stolid face with the bloody scar. "Maybe the cut got worse and he got blood poisoning and died," he thought.
This train of thought possessed him so that he grew to believe that Tom Slade must really be dead. And that being the case, there would be no use in telling anybody anything....
At breakfast he seemed so preoccupied that after he left the room his mother said to his father,
"You don't think he's nervous or timid, do you?"
"I think he's a little nervous about making a speech in public," said Mr. Bent. "He isn't afraid of anything else," he added proudly.
During the morning Mrs. Bent wanted to take his picture. "You look so splendid and handsome in your uniform, dear!" she told him. So he stood in the big bay window where the sunlight streamed in and let her snap the camera at him. He did look splendid and handsome, there was no denying that.
Then she would have him develop the film with his own hands so that she could make some prints right away. "You may not have another leave," she said. "It's dreadful that you have to go back to camp late to-night."
"Don't you care," he laughed, in that companionable way in which he always talked with his mother.
"You can take one of the prints over to East Bridgeboro to-night," she added, as an inducement to his developing the film at once.
"Think she'd like to have one?"
"The idea! Of course she would."
So, to please his mother, Roscoe took off Uncle Sam's service coat, put on a kitchen apron, and went into his little familiar dark closet to wrestle with chemicals.
And there again, in the dim light of the red lantern, and the deathlike quiet, he saw that face—with the cut and the thick, disordered hair, and the big, tight-set mouth. "You can see yourself it wouldn't do for anybody to know," he fancied the lips saying. "If you told, it would spoil it all——"
"I won't spoil it," Roscoe mumbled, as if he were doing the shadowy presence a great favor.
Private Bent, who was going to "can the Kaiser," was glad to get out of that dark, stuffy place.
In the afternoon he went down into the cellar to grease and cover up his motorcycle in anticipation of his long absence "over there." This would be his last chance to do it, unless he got up very early in the morning. But then he would be an hour over his leave in getting back to camp late to-night on a milk train. A soldier's honor must not be sullied by a stolen hour....
And there again Roscoe Bent saw that face. It was a little more than a face this time. He could almost have sworn that he saw the figure of Tom Slade standing over in the dark corner near the coal bins; and as Roscoe, kneeling by his motorcycle, fixed his eyes upon this thing another sentence ran through his thoughts: "Those secret service fellows—do yer think I'd let them get yer? Do you think because you made fun of me...."
He tried to stare the apparition down, but it would not disappear—not until he went over to it and saw that it was just a burlap bag full of kindling wood, with James, the furnace man's, old felt hat thrown upon it.
"I—I know what it means, all right," he muttered; "it means he's dead."
After supper he parted his wavy blond hair, and his mother brushed his uniform while he stood straight as an arrow, his handsome head thrown back. Then his father proudly helped him into his big military coat and he started for East Bridgeboro, which was across the river. The new Y. M. C. A. hall was not over there, but he was going there first, just the same.
"Have you got the print?" his mother called after him.
"Sure."
"The one holding the gun? You look so soldierly and brave in that!"
He laughed as he went down the steps.
But presently he became moody and preoccupied again. "If Mr. Ellsworth hadn't dragged me into this thing," he said to himself, "it wouldn't be so bad. It gets my goat to stand up there and shoot off about honor and all that sort of thing. But I can't do anything else now. I'm not going to spoil it all. It can't make any difference to Tom now—he's out of the game. He's through with the scouts, and he's through with Bridgeboro—dead, I'm afraid. And if I just keep my mouth shut, it'll be doing just what he wanted me to do; it was his idea."
So that was settled; and in place of those troubling thoughts, Roy Blakeley bobbed up in his mind—Roy Blakeley, who believed in "standing by a fellow through thick and thin"; who was staunch and loyal to his friend.
"He's a bully kid," mused Roscoe, as he crossed the bridge whence the town derived its name, and the more he thought about Roy the more mean and contemptible he felt himself to be.
At the scouts' float hard by the bridge, the troop's cabin launch, the Good Turn, participant in many adventures, past and to come, lay moored.
Even the sophisticated Roscoe, who had never "bothered much with the kids," knew of this famous boat. There had been a photograph of it hanging in the Temple Camp office, with the face of Tom Slade peering out through the little hatchway. The sudden knocking of the hull against the float in the still night startled him, and as he looked down upon the moon-lit river with its black background of trees he fancied again that he saw the face of Tom Slade looking out from the hatchway of the boat.
"Hello, there!" he called, though of course he knew no one was there.
Once over the bridge, he took a short cut through Morrell's Grove for the River Road.
"It's best to let well enough alone," he told himself; "what's past is past. I'm not going to worry about it now. If Ellsworth hadn't hauled me into this thing, and given me that spiel, I wouldn't be bothering my head about things that happened months ago. I'm not going to worry."
He was singularly moody and dissatisfied for a person who was not going to worry.
"Wish I could get that Blakeley kid out of my head," he reflected.
But he couldn't exactly get that Blakeley kid out of his head, and he couldn't get that face out of his mind, nor Mr. Ellsworth's stinging words out of his memory. So he stumbled along through the dark grove, thinking what he should say to the boys and how he should talk to Margaret Ellison so as not to let her suspect his troubled conscience and general feeling of—not exactly meanness and dishonor, but....
"Girls are such blamed fiends for reading your thoughts," he grumbled.
About halfway through the grove he stopped suddenly in the narrow path. For there was that face again peering out of the darkness. There was a slouch hat on it this time, but the old familiar shock of hair protruded from under it and there was an ugly scar on the forehead.
"It's blamed dark in here," said Roscoe, as he pulled himself together. A lonely owl answered with a dismal shriek from a distant tree, making the night seem still more spooky.
Roscoe tried to whistle to keep up his spirits, but as he walked on along the path the face, instead of fading away, seemed to become clearer, and he could have sworn that there was the dark outline of a form below it leaning against a tree. It was only his fancy enlivened by his conscience, he knew, but it took him back to a night months before, when he had stood in a remote mountain trail and watched a figure clinging to a tree, and he remembered how he had stood speechless and listened, as a man may watch a thunderstorm. No one in all the wide world but those two had known of that meeting.
"Or ever will," thought Private Bent.
Suddenly he paused again, and he, Private Roscoe Bent, who would take delight in canning the Kaiser, who would give his young life if need be, to make the world free for democracy, trembled like a leaf.
The figure had moved—he was sure of it. For a couple of seconds he could not speak, he was breathing so heavily.
"Hello!" he finally managed to call.
"Hello!" came a dull voice. "There ain't any need to be afraid," it added. "I couldn't hurt you. I can't see very good—is—it—you—Roscoe?"
Roscoe spoke not a word but went forward and cautiously felt of the figure, laid his hand on the heavy thick shoulder and peered into the face.
"Tom Slade," he muttered.
"I didn't know you in your soldier's coat," said Tom; "it makes you look so tall and straight and—brave——"
Still the soldier did not speak, only kept his hand upon Tom's shoulder and looked into his square ugly face. And again the ghostly hoot of the owl made the little patch of woods seem more spooky and lonesome.
Then Private Roscoe Bent, Second Infantry, U. S. A., who intended to help roll the Teuton lines back and smash militarism once and for all, who would go over the top with all the fine frenzy of his impulsive nature and send the blond beast reeling, slipped his arm farther over Tom's shoulder until Tom Slade could feel the warmth from the thick sleeve of Uncle Sam's big military coat upon his own bare neck and threadbare flannel shirt. And the handsome head with its wavy blond hair which Private Roscoe Bent knew how to hold with such a fine air, hung down against that threadbare shirt in anything but martial fashion.
"Oh, Tom—Tom Slade——" he said, a feeling of great relief taking possession of him. "I know what to do now—now I can see straight—as you used to say.—You've come—to show me the right way, just as you did before."