First and last old Caleb did enough odd jobs to earn his board. He was a prime favorite with Uncle Jeb Rushmore, the camp manager, and with that dread potentate before whom every scout did homage, Chocolate Drop, the colored emperor and autocrat of the cooking shack.
Hour after hour old Caleb would sit in a tilted chair outside this holy of holies whittling handiwork with a jack-knife while a continually shifting audience of scouts lolled about on the grass.
He could make boats, and linked wooden chains and even complicated wooden edifices miraculously assembled in bottles. Some of these marvels the scouts put on sale in the neighboring village of Leeds and they were bought by summer boarders and the proceeds turned over to old Caleb. Pop Dyker he came to be called and he seemed to like it, or at least not to care....
And so things might have gone on till the end of the season and old Caleb gone sturdily forth again upon his wanderings if it had not been for a shipment of provisions which had been put off the West Shore train down at Kingston instead of at Catskill, the nearest station to the camp. That was because somebody or other of the name of Templeton lived at Kingston and his home was called Templeton Lodge and in the language of freight men, Templeton Lodge sounds exactly like Temple Camp.
It fell to the young assistant to go down to Kingston and get this business straightened out and, because it concerned food, Pee-wee Harris generously volunteered to accompany him. It was remarkable how many proffers of assistance Pee-wee made in the face of continuous rejection of his services.
The scout who accompanied Tom in the camp flivver was Brent Gaylong, a tall, lanky, wise-looking young fellow, who was in fact a sort of unofficial scoutmaster to a one patrol troop. The two most conspicuous things about him were a dry sense of humor and a pair of spectacles which perched halfway down his nose, giving him a whimsically mature and studious look; they seemed to remove him quite irrevocably from the field of thrilling adventure. Tom liked “Old Doctor Gaylong” as everybody did, for he was good company and an ideal companion for a journey.
CHAPTER X
ON THE TRAIL
Brent Gaylong sat on the middle of his back as he usually did and used the edge of the windshield for a foot rest. Tom drove the car. It was a Ford touring car and on the side of it in gilt letters was printed TEMPLE CAMP, BLACK LAKE, N. Y.
“A Ford’s the only car that has any romance about it, do you know that, Tom?” Brent spoke in his funny, drawling way. “There’s the same difference between the Ford and other cars as there is between a little old tavern and a modern hotel. Suppose somebody were to tell you the Waldorf-Astoria is haunted; you’d just laugh at him.