Tom Slade on Overlook Mountain

by Percy Keese Fitzhugh

“The hell there ain’t,” said Billy the sailor.

Whalen did not join the group but sauntered off with an effect of aimless weariness toward the edge of the clearing and disappeared in the woods. It seemed to Tom that his stroll and its direction were wholly unpremeditated.

Tom had lately wanted a chance to talk with Whalen alone. He had seen his former companion come and go and had been with the others when Whalen was present. But he wanted to see him alone. There was no particular reason for this, except that he felt an impulse to renew, if possible, some measure of their former intimacy.

He had long since ceased to attach (if indeed he had ever attached) any significance to the look on Whalen’s face in the woods. That striking resemblance to his little old friend, Caleb Dyker, had been a thing seen in a moment of half-consciousness and amid surroundings altogether dramatic and unusual.

Yet he had wondered if there were any particular reason why Whalen avoided him. He had decided that there was not, that it was just his friend’s moroseness and lonely habit. Probably Whalen looked upon him as a kid, thought Tom. At all events here was a chance to chat with him in the good old way he used to do....

Tom soon found that he was on the trail along the brow of the mountain. By the time he reached the point which marked the limit of Audry’s daring, Whalen had disappeared around a bend in the winding trail.

Tom leaped the crevice and soon found himself in the thick of the jungle. On his left the heavy undergrowth encroached upon the almost indistinct path as if to crowd the passerby to the very brink of the overgrown cliff. Below, the abnormal, upturned wilderness with its tilted trees and half-exposed roots, and its great insecurely lodged boulders, looked dark and forbidding in the cold twilight.

In this witching hour the path seemed very lonesome. Shadows played like living things among the trees. The great reservoir afar off looked the color of steel in the gathering dusk.

And the initialed rocks along the trail, wrapped in the gray coverlet of twilight, might easily have been imagined to be ghosts out of the past.

On one of these bordering rests a shadow flitted back and forth making the initials of some unknown pilgrim to shimmer in the changing light and hover on the verge of invisibility like some departed shade. How interesting and romantic, thought Tom, for some former visitor who had left his memorial in this silent haunt, to return and search it out.