The rest was easy, yet it is characteristic of Slade that he called himself a fool for not having smelled out this covered ravine in his wanderings. It was dark and musty inside, the little brook meandering aimlessly from one side to the other, with pools here and there, and the foliage overhead emitting a pungent, rotten odor from its soaking in the recent heavy rains. Some of our own boys, you may be interested to know, recently passed through this very ravine in their advance toward Tourteron. But one look inside it was enough for me.
Slade hurried through it, parting the matted roofing now and then for a glimpse of the guiding stars, and was assured that the passage led almost due north. And somewhere along this dark, sickening way, he was siezed with hauting doubts, lest he be pursuing a phantom. What he sought was so great and the clue to if so trifling! “But I remembered how Indian scouts would follow a trail a hundred miles just because they found a hair sticking to a bramble,” he told his superiors. And so he hurried on, on, with hope sometimes mounting, sometimes falling.
After he had gone what he thought was nearly two miles there came a welcome freshness in the air which much relieved him, and he soon saw the clear sky overhead. Before him, to the south, the open country spread away and in the distance he could distinguish two or three tiny lights which he thought were within the allied lines.
The ravine opened into a spacious basin filled partly by a small lake and enclosed by dense woods. He followed the guiding stream out of the dank passage and found that it had its source in this lofty little sheet of water nestling almost at the very brink of a steep decline. In its black, placid bosom his guiding stars were reflected and a sombre tree of swamp larch cast its inverted shadow in the water.
Farther back there were others—larches and cedars. “Good old scouts, I told ’em,” Slade said afterwards; “they love the water, same as I do.” So there, Master Roy Blakeley, scout and would-be author—there is the sequel of your Temple Camp and your Black Lake and your silent, companionable trees.
Tom Slade saw the lay of the land clearly enough now. This covered ravine was in fact the lofty crevice between two hills, and from the distant allied lines its end must have taken the form of a great rough V high up where those twin hills parted. There was no suggestion of this upon close inspection, but it is a faculty of the scout to see in his mind’s eye a bird’s-eye view of the locality he is studying. Thus the scout has always two pairs of eyes.
What Tom Slade saw about him was just a lake amid woods rising on either side, east and west, and below him, southward, an expanse of open country. In the little jungle of crowded brush, which from a distance must have seemed to half fill that big V, stood a great, ugly thing swathed in canvas. It poked its big nose up slanting-ways at the stars as if to threaten those friendly monitors of the night for helping this weary young fellow who stood leaning against it, trying to realize his good fortune. All about it and over it the brush and foliage clustered, as if ashamed to own its presence in their still, obscure retreat; and in front of it, between it and the steep decline, a graceful larch tree stood in all its silent, supple dignity. From one of its lower spreading limbs a broken branch hung loose, the splintered remnant blowing to and fro in the night.
“It seemed as if it must hurt,” said Slade to Captain Whitloss, “and I felt kind of as if I ought to go and bandage it up—especially as it did me such a good turn, as you might say....”
CHAPTER XII—THE LAST ADVENTURE
And so, like Archibald Archer, that murderous old brute of the wooded hills passes out of the story. A gun crew in Santois turned their handle until they got the muzzle of their gun just exactly where they wanted it and that was straight for the big wooded V between the hills. And having fixed everything just right, they let fly—once, twice, three times—and once again for good measure. And the old giant of the mountains was never heard from again. But when those hills where Tom Slade hurried in the night finally came within the iron lines of Marshal Foch, they found the poor old monster knocked clear off his pedestal, where Tom Slade of the Flying Corps had leaned to rest that night when his scouting lore did not forsake him.