I knew Tim Daggett, of course, and he greeted me cordially. Tot Burke, also of my home town, I knew slightly. Piker Pete, the fire-lookout near Temple Camp, was hardly more than a boy. He returned to his aerial perch in the Catskills after I had been at camp a day or two. Paul Scheffler was a smiling, tow-headed young German who had worked as a farmhand near Ausable Forks; I never knew how Tom got hold of him. There is always a kind of drift toward Tom; odd characters find him somehow. Heinie, as we called Paul, had been in the German army and I believe he had also followed the sea. His home was in his hat.
Charlie Rivers had lately drifted into camp seeking work. He was a bronzed, taciturn man with an inscrutable look. He worked hard and said little. He was well versed in woods lore. His eyes had a quiet keenness about them and seemed always fixed on the distance. When accosted he would pause, listening patiently, with his gaze afar. I never got the impression that he could not look at me, but rather that what I said was not of enough importance to warrant such acknowledgment of my presence. I liked and respected him.
The tired workers did not remain late at their card game and Tom and Brent and I were left alone in the lodge where we sat late before the cheerful blaze. The men slept in another building, only less pretentious than this main structure; there were half a dozen rooms in it, and a large room for provisions. Besides these completely furnished apartments there were, I think, as many as twenty army cots piled in the storage part; they looked to me as if they had never been used.
I understood that the leather king had planned to carry electricity into his wilderness retreat, but Brent and I were glad that he had not done so. When the men adjourned to their own quarters that first night, they carried three railroad lanterns which had lighted their game. Somehow that silent little procession emphasized the solemnity and remoteness of our camp, as it made its way among the trees to the other building. The new cabins loomed momentarily in the dim passing lights. Then we could see only a faint gleam in a distant window to tell that the men had reached their lodging. We paused in the doorway a few moments listening to a dismal wailing somewhere in the lower reaches of the mountain which cast its gloomy shadow over our camp.
“That’s a cat,” said Brent. “There must be a back fence somewhere around here.”
“It’s a lynx,” Tom said. “We hear it most every night; seems to come from over on that second slope. Charlie Rivers says it’s a jaguar, but I don’t think so. He’s thinking of the Canadian lynx; he used to hang out up there in the Canadian Rockies.”
“I say it’s a Canadian lynx,” I said.
Tom laughed at me. “What do you know about it?”
“Maybe it’s the hermit having his singing lesson,” Brent suggested.
“I kind of have a feeling that if Charlie Rivers says a thing it must be so,” I observed. “I sort of feel that he always knows what he’s talking about. I say a jaguar.”