Tom Slade with the Flying Corps: A Campfire Tale

by Percy Keese Fitzhugh

To my host and his good wife I said nothing of what I had learned—much less of what I had done, but all through the evening I nursed my remorse in silence.

As luck would have it, the night blew up cold and stormy. There is a keenness to the slightest breeze in these parts and I have wondered whether it is because of the narrow valleys it passes through, causing, as one might say, a perpetual draft. The rain comes in gusts.

Well, on this memorable night there was not so much as a star to be seen—only the tiny light away up on Ollon peak, which I always thought must be a star. Some hermit monks lived there, I understood, and lonely enough it must have been for them. Down in St. Craix we could see the lights, dimmed by the misty thickness of the blown rain, disappear one after another as the good peasant people went to their beds, and as I watched them from our tap-room window, I felt that no human being should be abroad in those mountains on such a night. Once there came a tap upon our door and I thought it might be that poor distracted soul, but it was only Laff Turtman, the herdsman, for a warming draught of kirschwasser. He was on his way down to Craix with his sheep, and I could see them out in the path, making a kind of community of warmth by crowding together. The blazing fire in our tap-room was cheerful that night and we all sat about it.

At last I could stand it no longer and taking my host’s oilskin cape and hat from their peg, I announced that I was going to see if the Gray Meteor was all right, that being the name they always called him by. It pleased me to assume that he would be in his cave, and I would not entertain the thought that he was not there. But he was nowhere about the place. Outside were the two smooth sticks that he was wont to rub together with such childish confidence of getting a spark from them, and it went to my heart to see them lying there. The rain was streaming down the cliff above his cave and pouring over the opening like a waterfall.

I was thoroughly alarmed now, but what to do I did not know. I cannot say I had any sympathy for him more than any Christian would have for the lowest wretch cast adrift on such a night. I was in two minds whether to go all the way down into the village, but what could I do there? Awaken the good people out of their slumbers?

It was intolerable to do nothing, and I ended by doing the only other thing I could think of, and that was to pick my way through all that drenching rain and darkness to the wreck of his balloon. Now that he had seen it again, I suspected it would have a kind of fascination for him.

But he was not there and I was at my wits’ end. The wreck looked tragic and uncanny enough in the night, the hollow, wrinkled bag moving to and fro, and simulating the stirrings of some crouching thing among the rocks. I groped about among the wreckage of the car and found a dented, rusted spyglass, which had doubtless stolen many a secret from behind our lines, and a jack-knife, so rusted that I could not open it. This I took—I do not know why.

Suddenly through the rain I heard a sound near me and peering about I saw a goggled head bobbing close by.

“Who is it—speak,” I demanded, and I am afraid my voice was not quite steady.

But there was no answer and approaching I found it to be only an airman’s helmet hanging from a hook in the broken moulding. Even as I felt of it I started at a rustling sound beneath me, but I supposed it was only some small creature of the mountains who had made the forlorn ruin its home.