Tom Slade on the River

by Percy Keese Fitzhugh

“He was never at camp,” laughed Doc.

“Hmn,” said Tom, apparently but half convinced.

A few steps brought them to a little clearing where stood a rough shack. Outside it, fastened against a tree, was a vegetable crate with bars nailed across it—the silent evidence of departed pets. Several fishing rods lay against a tree. Close by was a makeshift fireplace. On a rough bunk inside the shack lay a man, no longer young, with iron gray hair. His eyes were open and staring and one seemed larger than the other. Doc felt his pulse and found that he was living.

“He fell on the rocks and hurt his arm—I think it’s broken,” said Jeffrey. “It bled and I bandaged it.”

Doc raised the bandaged arm and it fell heavily. Removing the bandage carefully he saw that the cut itself was not dangerous, but from first-aid studies he thought the man was suffering from an apoplectic stroke or something of that nature. He wondered if the injury to the arm had not been incidental to the man’s seizure and sudden fall. People sometimes lingered in an unconscious condition for days, he knew. It was hardly a case for first-aid, but it was certainly a case for skill and resource, for whatever happened the patient, dead or living, would have to be taken away from this mountain camp.

With Garry’s help, he raised the victim into a recumbent posture, piling everything available under the head while Connie hurried back and forth to the brook, bringing wet applications for the head and neck.

There was no sign of returning consciousness and the question was how to get the patient away down to Temple Camp where medical aid might be had, and where any contingency might be best handled.

The four boys, greatly hampered in their discussion by Jeffrey, whose long vigil had brought him to the verge of collapse, decided that it would be quite useless to signal for help, since it would mean another expedition with most of the difficulties of their own, even if attempted after daybreak.

So they decided to wait for dawn, which happily would come soon, and with the first sign of it to send a smudge signal that they were coming and to have a doctor at camp. They believed that in the daylight they could carry the patient back over the same path which they had so laboriously opened and though delay was irksome this plan seemed the only feasible one to follow.

Despite their weariness none could sleep, so they kindled a little fire and sat about it chatting while they counted time, impatiently waiting for the first streak of daylight.