Tom Slade, Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer Part 8

"_One sure thing!_" Roscoe laughed inaudibly. "It's the same old Tommy Slade. Well, I was just going to bean this geezer when my officer told me I'd better follow him."

"I was following him, too," said Tom; "stalking is the word you ought to use."

"Captain thought he might be up to something special. So I followed--_stalked_--how's that?"

"All right."

"So I stalked him and when I saw he was following the stream I made a detour and waited for him right here. You see what he was up to? Way down in Cantigny they could turn a switch and start this blamed poison, half a dozen hogsheads of it, flowing into the stream. They waited till they lost the town before they turned the switch, and they probably thought they could poison us Americans by wholesale. Maybe they had some reason to think the blamed thing hadn't worked, and sent this fellow up.

I beaned him just as he was going to turn the stop-c.o.c.k."

"Maybe you saved a whole lot of lives, hey?" said Tom proudly.

Roscoe shrugged his shoulder in that careless way he had. "I'll be glad to meet any more that come along," he said.

It was well that Tom Slade's first sight of deliberate killing was in connection with so despicable a proceeding as the wholesale poisoning of a stream. He could feel no pity for the man who, fleeing from those who fought cleanly and like men instead of beasts, had sought to pour this potent liquid of anguish and death into the running crystal water. Such acts, it seemed to him, were quite removed from the sphere of honorable, manly fighting.

As a scout he had learned that it was wrong even to bathe in a stream whence drinking water was obtained, and at camp he had always scrupulously observed this good rule. He felt that it was cowardly to defile the waters of a brook. It was not a "mailed fist" at all which could do such things, but a fist dripping with poison.

And Tom Slade felt no qualm, as otherwise he might have felt, at hiding there waiting for new victims. He was proud and thrilled to see his friend, secreted in his perch, keen-eyed and alert, guarding alone the crystal purity of this laughing, life-giving brook, as it hurried along its pebbly bed and tumbled in little gus.h.i.+ng falls and wound cheerily around the rocks, bearing its grateful refreshment to the weary, thirsty boys who were holding the neighboring village.

"I used to think I wouldn't like to be a sniper," he said, "but now it seems different. I saw two fellers in the village and one had a bandage on his arm and the other one who was talking to him--I heard him say a long drink of water would go good--and--I--kind of--now----"

The Jersey Snipe winked at Tom and patted his rifle as a man might pat a favorite dog.

"It's good fresh water," said he.

CHAPTER TWELVE

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

In Tom's visions of the great war there had been no picture of the sniper, that single remnant of romantic and adventurous warfare, in all the roar and clangor of the horrible modern fighting apparatus.

He had seen American boys herded onto great s.h.i.+ps by thousands; and, marching and eating and drilling in thousands, they had seemed like a great machine. He knew the murderous submarine, the aeroplane with its ear-splitting whir, the big clumsy Zeppelin; and he had handled gas masks and grenades and poison gas bombs.

But in his thoughts of the war and all these diabolical agents of wholesale death there had been no visions of the quiet, stealthy figure, inconspicuous in the counterfeiting hues of tree and rock, stealing silently away with his trusty rifle and his week's rations for a lonely vigil in some sequestered spot.

There was the same attraction about this freelance warfare which there might have been about a privateer in contrast with a flotilla of modern dreadnaughts and frantic chasers, and it reminded him of Daniel Boone, and Kit Carson, and Davy Crockett, and other redoubtable scouts of old who did not depend on stenching suffocation and the poisoning of streams. It was odd that he had never known much about the sniper, that one instrumentality of the war who seems to have been able to preserve a romantic ident.i.ty in all the b.l.o.o.d.y _melee_ of the mighty conflict.

For Tom had been a scout and the arts of stealth and concealment and nature's resourceful disguises had been his. He had thought of the sniper as of one whose shooting is done peculiarly in cold blood, and he was surprised and pleased to find his friend in this romantic and n.o.ble role of holding back, single-handed, as it were, these vile agents of agonizing death.

a.r.s.enic! Tom knew from his memorized list of poison antidotes that if one drinks a.r.s.enic he will be seized with agony unspeakable and die in slow and utter torture. The more he thought about it, the more the cold, steady eye of the unseen sniper and his felling shot seemed n.o.ble and heroic.

Almost unconsciously he reached out and patted the rifle also as if it were some trusted living thing--an ally.

"Did you really mean you named it after me--honest?" he asked.

Roscoe laughed again silently. "See?" he whispered, holding it across, and Tom could distinguish the crudely engraved letters, TOMMY.

"--Because I never had anything named after me," he said in his simple, dull way. "There's a place on the lake up at Temple Camp that the fellers named after Roy Blakeley--Blakeley Isle. And there's a new pavilion up there that's named after Mr. Ellsworth, our scoutmaster. And Mr. Temple's got lots of things--orphan asylums and gymnasiums and buildings and things--named after _him_. I always thought it must be fine. I ain't that kind--sort of--that fellers name things after," he added, with a blunt simplicity that went to Roscoe's heart; and he held the rifle, as the sniper started to take it back, his eyes still fixed upon the rough scratches which formed his own name. "In Bridgeboro there was a place in Barrell Alley," he went on, apparently without feeling, "where my father fell down one night when he was--when he'd had too much to drink, and after that everybody down there called it Slade's Hole. When I got in with the scouts, I didn't like it--kind of----"

Roscoe looked straight at Tom with a look as sure and steady as his rifle. "Slade's Hole isn't known outside of Barrell Alley, Tom," he said impressively, although in the same cautious undertone, "but _Tom Slade_ is known from one end of this sector to the other."

"Thatchy's what they called me in Toul sector, 'cause my hair's always mussed up, I s'pose, and----"

"The first time I ever saw you to really know you, Tom, your hair was all mussed up--and I hope it'll always stay that way. That was when you came up there in the woods and made me promise to go back and register."

"I knew you'd go back 'cause----"

"I went back with bells on, and here I am. And here's _Tom Slade_ that's stuck by me through this war. It's named _Tom Slade_ because it makes good--see? Look here, I'll show you something else--you old hickory nut, you. See that," he added, pulling a small object from somewhere in his clothing.

Tom stared. "It's the Distinguished Service Cross," he said, his longing eyes fixed upon it.

"That's what it is. The old gent handed me that--if anybody should ask you."

Tom smiled, remembering Roscoe's familiar way of speaking of the dignified Mr. Temple, and of "Old Man" Burton, and "Pop" this and that.

"General Pers.h.i.+ng?"

"The same. You've heard of him, haven't you? Very muchly, huh?"

"Why don't you wear it?" Tom asked.

"Why? Well, I'll tell you why. When your friend, Thatchy, followed me on that crazy trip of mine he borrowed some money for railroad fare, didn't he? And he had a Gold Cross that he used to get the money, huh? So I made up my mind that this little old souvenir from Uncle Samuel wouldn't hang on my distinguished breast till I got back and paid Tom Slade what I owed him and made sure that he'd got his own Cross safely back and was wearing it again. Do you get me?"

"I got my Cross back," said Tom, "and it's home. So you can put that on.

You got to tell me how you got it, too. I always knew you'd make a success."

"It was _Tommy Slade_ helped me to it, as usual. I beaned nine Germans out in No Man's Land, and got away slightly wounded--I stubbed my toe.

Old Pop Clemenceau gave me a kiss and the old gent slipped me this for good luck," Roscoe said, pinning on the Cross to please Tom. "When Clemmy saw the name on the rifle, he asked what it meant and I told him it was named after a pal of mine back home in the U.S.A.--Tom Slade.

Little I knew you were waltzing around the war zone on that thing of yours. I almost laughed in his face when he said, 'M'soo Tommee should be proud.'"

So the Premier of France had spoken the name of Tom Slade, whose father had had a mud hole in Barrell Alley named after him.

"I _am_ proud," he stammered; "that's one sure thing. I'm proud on account of you--I am."

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE FOUNTAINS OF DESTRUCTION

As Tom had the balance of the day to himself he cherished but one thought--that of remaining with Roscoe as long as his leave would permit. If he had been in the woods up at Temple Camp, away back home in his beloved Catskills, he could hardly have felt more at home than he felt perched in this tree near the headwaters of the running stream; and to have Roscoe Bent crouching there beside him was more than his fondest dreams of doing his bit had pictured.