Tom Slade at Bear Mountain

by Percy Keese Fitzhugh

I have told you of the geography of Rattlesnake Gulch; I must now tell you something of its immediate neighborhood. I never knew and I do not know now, whether the name Rattlesnake Gulch pertains to the little wild hollow where the cabin stood or to the larger gap of land in which it lay. It was, as one might say, a gulch within a gulch. Only the larger gulch is not so easy to present to the mind’s eye. I find myself writing of these places in the past tense, for they seem to me now all as part of a tale that is told. You must, somehow, be made to see this wild section clearly, if you are to understand what happened there.

If some wide railroad cut were overgrown and cluttered with rock and crazy trees and tangled brush for a couple of hundred feet or so, that would be something like the immediate neighborhood of old Buck’s cabin. Through this miniature jungle a stream had once flowed, and the old stream bed was a very chaos of rock and tangled undergrowth; a chaotic gully. On its damp bottom, underneath the rank growth, no ray of sunlight ever penetrated. A strange kind of life thrived here, slugs and little red lizards which hid under stones and scooted when such a refuge was removed by some alien hand or foot from the world above. So much you already know.

But this whole thicket where Conner’s ruin and the cabin lay was in a close valley flanked by ranges of hills running east and west. These ranges of hills were about a quarter of a mile apart, running more or less parallel. The land between them was what I have called the valley; it was long and deep, the flanking heights being in places almost precipitous. For all I know, this whole wild vale was Rattlesnake Gulch. No old inhabitant of the region ever visited our campers to tell them otherwise. I learned the appalling name from old Buck and passed it on to my young friends. It makes very little difference how much of that forbidding section the name was supposed to include. I suppose the whole region, as far as the flanking hills to either side, might properly have been called a gulch.

In hot weather the heat in this whole section was terrific, as it usually is in valleys. But it was more so, I think, than in a spacious, open valley, because, when the sun was overhead, it poured its torrid rays down into a sort of natural receptacle where the heat was confined and retained. That, I suppose, is the reason why so much of the vegetation there was dry; much of it dead or dying. One made as much noise walking over dried twigs and leaves there (even in the height of summer) as is usually made in walking on a pavement.

The whole place must have been frightful in times of storm. Dead and broken trees, sticking their crazy, dislocated branches this way and that, testified to the fury of the wind as it swept through the narrow valley. Even in calm weather, such as our campers had enjoyed, the door and little window of the cabin were always rattling at night because of the draught through the long, deep, narrow valley. I often think of the winters spent by old Buck and little June in that freezing channel between the hills: winters of lashing wind and blinding snow—they must have been terrible!

Well, a few days after recovering the treasure, Tom and Brent went fishing again. It was laughable, but they took the money with them (Tom carrying the wallet in his pocket) for fear of anything happening to it in their absence. They had done this before and faithfully replaced it in its romantic old container on returning, like a jewel replaced in its casket.

They had fished as long as daylight and hunger would permit, and were returning through the Gulch with a tempting string of trout. These they would cook and then settle down to an evening at chess, at which game Brent was something of an expert. They would lay the board on the dining table (that is, an old barrel) sitting on either side of it on a couple of old boxes. Four candles, one at each corner of the board, gave an ecclesiastical look to their silent encounters.

As they passed through the Gulch Tom observed (so he told me later) that if they hurried they could cook their fish by daylight, conserving their candles for the evening’s pastime. He pointed to an area of brightness to the west, that is, beyond the end of the valley, or where it widened out into open country. “We’ll have light for an hour yet,” he said.

A little later, as Brent emerged from the cabin to get some water, he noticed that the area of brightness, instead of being less, was of a flaming red and that there was smoke above it.

“Come and look at this,” he called.