“You going to hang around, Slady?”
“I’m going to fight it out on these lines if it takes all summer,” Tom said.
Thus the two most patient, stubborn living things in all the world were left alone together—the turtle and Tom Slade.
Tom sat on a rock and the turtle sat on the ground. Tom did not budge. Neither did the turtle. The turtle was facing up toward the camp and away from the lake. Tom rested his chin in his hands, studying the initials on the turtle’s shell. If they had been A. H. instead of T. H. they would indeed have been the very initials of Master Anthony Harrington, Jr. But a miss is as good as a mile, thought Tom, and T. H. is no more like A. H. than it is like Z. Q.
This train of thought naturally recalled to his mind the letters he had seen imprinted in the mud up in the woods. But those letters were H. T. and there was therefore no connection between these three sets of letters.
Tom knew well enough the habit of the Temple Camp scouts of carving their initials everywhere. The rough bench where they waited for the mail wagon to come along was covered with initials. And among them Tom recalled a certain sprightly tenderfoot, Theodore Howell by name, who had been at camp early that same season. Doubtless this artistic triumph on the bulging back of Llewellyn was the handiwork of that same tenderfoot.
And likely enough, too, those letters up in the woods were the initials of Harry Thorne, still at camp. Tom would ask Harry about that. And at the same time he would remind some of these carvers in wood and clay not to leave any artistic memorials on the camp woodwork. It was part of Tom’s work to look after matters of that kind. About the only conclusion he reached from these two disconnected sets of initials was that he would have an eye out for specialists in carving....
But Tom’s authority was as naught when it came to Llewellyn. The turtle cared not for the young camp assistant. He sat upon the ground motionless as a rock, apparently dead to the world.
Tom had now no more interest in the turtle than a kind of sporting instinct not to be beaten. He could sit upon the rock as long as his adversary could sit upon the ground. In a moment of exasperation he had been upon the point of hurling the turtle into the lake, but had refrained, and now he was reconciled to a vigil which should last all night.
Llewellyn had met his match.