“How’d you know it was hickory?” Connie asked.
“Because I can tell hickory,” said Tom, bluntly, “and it’s being all worm-eaten proved it—kind of. That’s the trouble with hickory.”
They always had to make the best of Tom’s answers.
“I don’t know where he got the hickory stick,” he said, as he pushed along through the underbrush, “but he didn’t get it anywhere around here, that’s sure.”
“And he probably didn’t sit down that same day and carve things on it, either,” suggested Garry; “Tom, you’re a wonder.”
“He might have lived up here for two or three years after he fell,” said Doc reflectively. “Gee, it starts you thinking, don’t it?”
Connie shook his head. “It’s a mystery, all right,” said he.
The thought of the solitary man, disabled crippled, perhaps, living there on that lonely mountain after the terrible accident which had brought him there lent a new gruesomeness to their discoveries. And who but Tom Slade would have been able to keep an open mind and to see so clearly by the aid of trifling signs as to separate the two apparent catastrophes and see them as independent occurrences?
“Tomasso, you’re the real scout,” said Doc. “The rest of us are only imitations.”
Tom said nothing. He was used to this kind of talk and was about as proof against such praise as a battleship is against a popgun. And just now he was thinking of other things. Yet if he could have looked into the future and seen there the extraordinary explanation of his discovery and known the strange adventures it would lead to, he might have paused, even on that all but hopeless errand of rescue, and looked again at those pathetic remains. But those things were to be reserved for another summer.