Part 17 (2/2)
CHAPTER XXI
COMPANY
Ordinarily Tom Slade would have stopped to think and would have kept his nerve and acted cautiously; but he had not sufficiently recovered his poise to meet this emergency wisely. He knew he could not swim away, that capture was now inevitable, and instead of pausing to collect himself he gave way to an impulse which he had never yielded to before, an impulse born of his shaken nerves and stricken hope and the sort of recklessness which comes from despair. What did it matter? Fate was against him....
With a kind of defiant abandonment he limped to the little stone doorway and stood there like an apparition, clutching the sides with trembling hands. But whatever reckless words of surrender he meant to offer froze upon his lips, and he swayed in the opening, staring like a madman.
For reclining upon a rough bunk, with knees drawn up, was Archibald Archer, busily engaged in whittling a stick, his freckled nose wrinkling up in a kind of grotesque accompaniment to each movement of his hand against the hard wood.
”I--I thought----” Tom began.
”Well,--I'll--be----” countered Archer.
For a moment they stared at each other in blank amaze. Then a smile crept over Tom's face, a smile quite as unusual with him as his sudden spirit of surrender had been; a smile of childish happiness. He almost broke out laughing from the reaction.
”Are you carvin' a souvenir?” he said foolishly.
”No, I ain't carrvin' no souveneerr,” Archer answered. ”Therre's fish among those rocks and I'm goin' to spearr 'em.”
”You ain't carvin' a _what_!” said Tom.
”I ain't carrvin' a souveneerr,” Archer said with the familiar Catskill Mountain roll to his R's.
”I just wanted to hear you say it,” said Tom, limping over to him and for the first time in his life yielding to the weakness of showing sentiment.
”All night long,” he said, sitting down on the edge of the bunk, ”I was thinkin' how you said it--and it sounds kind of good----”
”How'd you make out in the riverr?” Archer asked.
”You can't even say _river_,” said Tom, laughing foolishly in his great relief.
”It was some storrm, all right! But I got the matches safe anyway, and they'll strike, 'cause I tried one.”
”You ought to have made a whisk stick[A] to try it,” said Tom, then caught himself up suddenly. ”But I ain't going to tell you what you ought to do any more. I'm goin' to stop bossin'.”
[Footnote A: A stick the end of which is separated into fine shavings which readily catch the smallest flame, a familiar device used by scouts.]
”I got yourr spy-gla.s.s forr you,” said Archer. ”I had to dive f'rr't.
Didn't you hearr me call to you it was lost and I was goin' down f'rr't?”
”----lost----down----”
The tragic words flitted again through Tom's mind, and he reached out and took Archer's hand hesitatingly as if ashamed of the feeling it implied.
”What'd you do that for? You were a fool,” he said.
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