Tom Slade, Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer

by Percy Keese Fitzhugh

There is a strength born of desperation—a strength of will which is conjured into physical power in the last extremity. It is when the frantic, baffled spirit calls aloud to rally every failing muscle and weakening nerve. It is then that the lips tighten and the eyes become as steel, as the last reserves waiting in the entrenchments of the soul are summoned up to re-enforce the losing cause.

And there in that tree, on the brink of the heedless, rushing waters which crossed the highroad to Dieppe was going to be fought out one of the most desperate battles of the whole war. There, in the mocking light of the paling dawn, Tom Slade, his big mouth set like a vice, and with every last reserve he could command, was going to make his last cast of the dice—let go, give up—or, hold on.

Let go! Of all the inglorious forms of defeat or surrender! To let go! To be struck down, to be taken prisoner, to be——

But to let go! The bulldog, the snapping turtle, seemed like very heroes now.

"He always said I had a good muscle—he liked to feel it," he muttered. "And besides, she said she guessed I was strong."

He was thinking of Margaret Ellison, away back in America, and of Roscoe Bent, as he had known him there. When he muttered again there was a beseeching pathos in his voice which would have pierced the heart of anyone who could have seen him struggling still against fate, in this all but hopeless predicament.

But no one saw him except the sun who was raising his head above the horizon as a soldier steals a cautious look over the trench parapet.

There would be no report of this affair.

He lowered his chest to the limb, wound his legs around it and for a second lay there while he tightened and set his legs, as one will tighten a belt against some impending strain. Not another fraction of an inch could he have tightened those encircling legs.

And now the fateful second was come. It had to come quickly for his strength was ebbing. There is a pretty dependable rule that if you can just manage to lift a weight with both hands, you can just about budge it with one hand. Tom had tried this at Temple Camp with a visiting scout's baggage chest. With both hands he had been barely able to lift it by its strap. With one hand he had been able to budge it for the fraction of a second. But there had been no overmastering incentive—and no reserves called up out of the depths of his soul.