“Thatchy?” he queried. “Yes, it is. Just a little to the left,” he added, moving the glass for me. “Do you see two big rocks with points? One a little higher than the others?”
Our detachment had gone on along the road which flanked the hill, for, of course, there was no intention of surmounting the forbidding place, and it was important that we pass out of range of it before the enemy gain the vantage point of the summit.
For half a minute I looked upon the very spot where Slade had fallen—two big, gray rocks somewhat more than midway up that cheerless cliff and I thought of that traveller described in a poem of Scott’s, who died in some remote, forlorn spot—unfriended and alone. The two rocks formed a sort of gutter on the precipitous hill, and a quantity of descending debris had fallen against them, forming a chaotic mass there.
“I suppose he rolled down against those and caught there,” I said, still looking at the place through the glass.
“Guess so,” said the lieutenant, half interested. “They call them the Scuppers. I heard a couple of Signal Corps men saying that the Huns must have found Slade in the Scuppers—God-forsaken looking place, huh?”
I could not speak just then. Of all the lonesome places to die, that gray, cold, forsaken waste seemed the most terrible—a spot more barren and heartless than the sea, and ugly with a kind of brutal ugliness. And that, I reflected, was where Tom Slade of my own home town in far-off America fell to his heroic death. I wondered how long he had lain there and suffered beyond the help of surgeons and nurses.
“He’s buried in Pevy,” I said; “they had the decency to take him there and give him a Christian grave.”
The lieutenant had already taken his glass from me and was moving away. He was not greatly interested in Tom Slade.
“Do you think,” I said, “that if I climbed up there and looked at the place, I could manage to get the rest of the way to the summit and join the detachment before they reach Pevy? I want to be in at the finish.”
“You might do it in a newspaper or in the movies,” he said, for he would never let me forget that I was a fountain-pen warrior.