Tom Slade at Black Lake | Page 2

to worry about Tom Slade never growing up. He is just a trifle over eighteen years old and very strong and husky. Confidentially, I look upon him as nothing but a kid. I keep tabs on his age and when he has to go on crutches and is of no more interest to you, I shall be the first to know it. He is likely to have no end of adventures between eighteen and twenty.
Meanwhile, don't worry about him. He's just a big overgrown kid and the best Scout this side of Mars.
P. K. F.
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. Tom Looks at the Map 1 II. He Sends a Letter 5 III. The New Struggle 10 IV. "Lucky Luke" 16 V. About Seeing a Thing Through 24 VI. "The Woods Property" 29 VII. Just Nonsense 35 VIII. Five, Six, and Seven 45 IX. Roy's Nature 52 X. Tom Receives a Surprise 55 XI. Tom and Roy 59 XII. The Long Trail 66 XIII. Roy's Trail 73 XIV. The Really Hard Part 76 XV. A Letter From Barnard 80 XVI. The Episode in France 86 XVII. On the Long Trail 94 XVIII. Tom Lets the Cat Out of the Bag 101 XIX. The Spectre of Defeat 106 XX. The Friend in Need 110 XXI. Tom's Guest 117 XXII. An Accident 122 XXIII. Friends 132 XXIV. Tom Goes on an Errand 138 XXV. Two Letters 147 XXVI. Lucky Luke's Friend 152 XXVII. Thornton's Story 158 XXVIII. Red Thornton Learns Something About Scouts 170 XXIX. Tom Starts for Home 176 XXX. The Troop Arrives 182 XXXI. Archer 193 XXXII. Tom Loses 197
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TOM SLADE AT BLACK LAKE
CHAPTER I
TOM LOOKS AT THE MAP
Tom Slade, bending over the office table, scrutinized the big map of Temple Camp. It was the first time he had really looked at it since his return from France, and it made him homesick to see, even in its cold outlines, the familiar things and scenes which he had so loved as a scout. The hill trail was nothing but a dotted line, but Tom knew it for more than that, for it was along its winding way into the dark recesses of the mountains that he had qualified for the pathfinder's badge. Black Lake was just an irregular circle, but in his mind's eye he saw there the moonlight glinting up the water, and canoes gliding silently, and heard the merry voices of scouts diving from the springboard at its edge.
He liked this map better than maps of billets and trenches, and to him the hill trail was more suggestive of adventure than the Hindenburg Line. He had been very close to the Hindenburg Line and it had meant no more to him than the equator. He had found the war to be like a three-ringed circus--it was too big. Temple Camp was about the right size.
Tom reached for a slip of paper and laying it upon the map just where the trail went over the hilltop and off the camp territory altogether, jotted down the numbers of three cabins which were indicated by little squares.
"They're the only three together and kind of separate," he said to himself.
Then he went over to the window and gazed out upon the busy scene, which the city office of Temple Camp overlooked. He did this, not because there was anything there which he wished particularly to see, but because he contemplated doing something and was in some perplexity about it. He was going to dictate a letter to Miss Margaret Ellison, the stenographer.
Tom had seen cannons and machine guns and hand grenades and depth bombs, but the thing in all this world that he was most afraid of was the long sharply pointed pencil which Miss Margaret Ellison always held poised above her open note book, waiting to record his words. Tom had always fallen down at the last minute and told her what he wanted to say; suggesting that she say it in her own sweet way. He did not say sweet way, though he may have thought it.
So now he stood at the open window looking down upon Bridgeboro's surging thoroughfare, while the breath of Spring permeated the Temple Camp office. If he had been less susceptible of this gentle influence in the very air, he would still have known it was Spring by the things in the store windows across the way--straw hats and hammocks and tennis rackets. There were moving vans, too, with furniture bulging out behind them, which are just as certain signs of merry May as the flowers that bloom in the Spring. There was something too, in the way that the sun moved down which bespoke Spring.
But the surest sign of all was the flood of applications for cabin accommodations at Temple Camp; that was just as sure and reliable