Tom Slade at Black Lake | Page 4

even stopped to
think, she would have consulted with Tom before typing that letter,
which was the cause of such momentous consequences. As for Mr.
Burton, he knew that Tom knew the camp like A. B. C. and he simply
signed his name to the letter and let it go at that.
CHAPTER III
THE NEW STRUGGLE
Tom did as he had promised Mr. Burton he would do; he went home
and lay down and rested. It was not much of a home, but it was better
than a dugout. That is, it was cleaner though not very much larger. But
there were no lieutenants.
It was a tiny hall-room in a boarding house, and the single window
afforded a beautiful view of back fences. It was all the home that Tom
Slade knew. He had no family, no relations, nothing.
He had been born in a tenement in Barrel Alley, where his mother had
died and from which his good-for-nothing father had disappeared. For a
while he had been a waif and a hoodlum, and by strict attention to the
code of Barrel Alley's gang, he had risen to be king of the hoodlums.
No one, not even Blokey Mattenburg himself, could throw a rock into a
trolley car with the precision of Tom Slade.
Then, on an evil day, he was tempted to watch the scouts and it proved
fatal. He was drawn head over ears into scouting, and became leader of

the new Elk Patrol in the First Bridgeboro Troop. For three seasons he
was a familiar, if rather odd figure, at Temple Camp, which Mr. John
Temple of Bridgeboro had founded in the Catskills, and when he was
old enough to work it seemed natural that these kindly gentlemen who
had his welfare at heart, should put him into the city office of the camp,
which he left to go to war, and to which he had but lately returned,
suffering from shell-shock.
He was now eighteen years old, and though no longer a scout in the
ordinary sense, he retained his connection with the troop in capacity of
assistant to Mr. Ellsworth, the troop's scoutmaster.
He had been rather older than the members of this troop when he made
his spectacular leap from hoodlumism to scouting, and hence while
they were still kicking their heels in the arena he had, as one might say,
passed outside it.
But his love for the boys and their splendid scoutmaster who had given
him a lift, was founded upon a rock. The camp and the troop room had
been his home, the scouts had been his brothers, and all the simple
associations of his new life were bound up with these three patrols.
Perhaps it was for this reason that among these boys, all younger than
himself, and with whom he had always mingled on such familiar terms,
he showed but few, and those not often, of the distressing symptoms
which bespoke his shattered nerves. Among them he found refuge and
was at peace with himself.
And the boys, intent upon their own pursuits, knew nothing of the
brave struggle he was making at the office where his days were spent,
and in the poor little shabbily furnished room where he would lie down
on his iron bed and try to rest and forget the war and not hear the noises
outside.
How he longed for Friday nights when the troop met, and when he
could forget himself in those diverting games!
Since the first few days of his return from France, he had seen but little

of the troop, except upon those gala nights. The boys were in school
and he at the office, and it seemed as if their two ways had parted, after
all his hopes that his return might find them reunited and more intimate
than ever before. But after the first joyous welcome, it had not been so.
It could not be so.
Of course, if they had known how he loved to just sit and listen to them
jolly the life out of Peewee Harris, they would doubtless have arranged
to do this every night for his amusement, for it made no difference to
them how much they jollied Peewee. If they had had the slightest
inkling that it helped him just to listen to Roy Blakeley's nonsense, they
would probably have arranged with Roy for a continuous performance,
for so far as Roy was concerned, there was no danger of a shortage of
nonsense. But you see they did not think of these things.
They did much for wounded soldiers, but Tom Slade was not a
wounded soldier. And so it befell that the very thing which he most
needed was the thing he did not have, and that was just the riot