Tom Slade in the north woods

by Percy Keese Fitzhugh

Tom threw up his hands in despair and shook his head ruefully at Tot Burke and Skipper Tim. But I had my way. The next morning they all started off in Tom’s flivver. It was a chill, bleak, rainy day. Yet I came very near to envying them as they rode away, they were so full of the spirit of their long promised excursion. Brent carried a brief-case and looked funny enough in a little worsted skull-cap which one of the others had offered him. Tom laughed at him and protested against the umbrella which Brent also carried.

“Here!” he laughed, snatching it from him. “Are you afraid of getting wet?”

“It isn’t myself I’m thinking of, it’s the fish,” said Brent.

“I guess I don’t want this either,” said Charlie Rivers, handing me the old coat which lay across his knees.

So there I stood in the drizzling rain holding Brent’s umbrella and Charlie’s coat as the merry little caravan went rattling off along the woods trail. For a few moments the sequestered camp did seem gloomy enough. The great, rugged mountain which towered above the spot looked wild and somber enough in pleasant weather, but in that chill haze it seemed to me almost unearthly in its forbidding aspect. Surely no human being had ever penetrated its black and trailless wilderness. What prowling beasts, I wondered, paced the unknown fastnesses high in its precipitous reaches? Even as I gazed at it and noted how the drenched trees near its rock-ribbed base were all merged in the heavy gloom, I heard that dismal wailing afar off, somewhere on those jungle-covered slopes. Tom said it always came from the depression beyond the second ridge. I don’t know why he thought so; it seemed to me to be the very voice of the whole wild mountain. The lodge seemed cozy indeed as I entered it and threw the coat and umbrella on the table. I went out again and dragged in a couple of good-sized logs so that they might dry in time to keep me company with their crackling blaze throughout the lonely evening.

CHAPTER XII—SIGNS ON THE MOUNTAIN

I must now tell you of an incident which shook me as nothing else in my whole life has ever shaken me, and the meaning of it was not clear to me till long afterward. I suppose that the gloom of that cheerless day affected me. I can hardly describe my feeling more than to say that throughout the long, bleak afternoon, as I sat at work in the lodge, I was harassed by a strange presentiment as of something impending.

I had looked forward to a few days of solitude, but the loneliness of the place was intolerable in the half darkness and that continuous, blowing rain. By mid-afternoon I was in such a state that I blew out the smelly little lamp which had lighted my work in the dim apartment and resigned myself to idleness. I stood at one of the windows gazing out upon the dismal scene. Through the thin, driven rain, the lake looked hazy and there was the odd effect of the water moving toward me. It was not like the surf on a seashore, ever lapping and receding, but a sort of straining of the whole body of water under the impetus of the wind. There occurred to me the whimsical fancy that if the water should succeed in its effort the bed of the lake would be laid bare and I would see, perchance, the object which had enmeshed and held for so many days the body of poor Roland McClintick. I think I never saw a more gloomy sight than Weir Lake on that dreary, haunting afternoon.

The lodge, you will understand, was between the base of the mountain and the lake. I stepped across the room and stood looking out upon the deserted scene of our recent labors. And there I beheld a strange sight which for the moment startled me. It was a trail passing between two of the new cabins. It ran behind the stone bungalow of the old camp (where the boys slept) but beyond this, in the direction of the mountain, I saw no certain trace of it. At one spot where the rugged ascent began I could just make out a faint line perhaps fifty feet in extent. It hovered between visibility and invisibility; I thought it was the trail.

The sight of this hardly tangible and broken line leading, as I thought, up the mountain, astonished me. I had always understood that there was no regular trail up Hogback. Tom is a perfect fiend on such matters; he will find a trail if there is one, but he knew of none up those dense slopes. Many times I had looked from that window, and heaven knows I had never seen the faintest sign of a trail. Nor had any of our group ever mentioned one. In talking of our projected ascent after the prowling creature whose moaning we had heard, Tom had said that he thought the best way was to hike around the base of the mountain and ascend the easier slopes of the farther side.