IN THE WOODS

“What are you doing to-night?” Tom asked, scrutinizing the old man curiously. Then without waiting for an answer he said in his hearty way, “I tell you what you do; come back to camp with me and look us over, knock around there for a day or two and rest up. Nothing but spring water, absolutely guaranteed,” he added pleasantly. “We keep open house at camp, you know, and you’ll be welcome. What d’you say? It’s only about six miles from here across fields.”

“I walked as much as twenty mile a day,” the old man said. “I walked nigh on a thousand mile in the last ten year, I reckon.”

“Well, you’re about due for a little rest,” laughed Tom. “Come on back with me and meet the bunch, they’re just a lot of kids.”

“I travelled one summer with a circus,” the old man said.

“So?” said Tom.

“I sold needles one summer,” the old man added. “I got two dollars for being in a moving picture. You didn’t happen to see that picture?”

“N—no, I didn’t,” Tom answered thoughtfully. The crisp, disinterested way in which the old man enumerated his experiences seemed to preclude the possibility of getting him to discourse upon them. He delivered himself of random items, out of his apparently miscellaneous fund of adventures, in such a choppy way as to seem both amusing and disconcerting.

Tom suspected that his memory might be good enough to recall salient things, but not details. Moreover, it is very hard to discourse familiarly with one who does not look at you. Personal intercourse is quite as much with the eyes as with the voice. Tom had an amused sense of the handicap to conversation in the little old man’s queer way of talking, as if making dogmatic announcements to the world at large.

“Well, let’s stroll down to camp,” he said, rising. “When I meet a person who’s travelled as much as you have, I feel as if I want to know him better. Come on, what do you say we start?”

It was not until this request, accompanied by physical evidence of Tom’s intention to go, that the old man arose and started to accompany him. Tom could then see how small and wizened his companion was. Yet there was an odd contradiction, something grotesque and laughable, in his spry carriage. He was evidently a hardened pedestrian. With each step he jammed his cane down on the ground with a vigor that was quite inspiring. It seemed to bespeak a strength of character out of keeping with his shrivelled little body and his shabby raiment.

As there seemed no hope of responsive conversation with his eccentric companion, Tom tried to beguile him with an account of the Goodfellow.

“Just been down to Catskill to look at a boat,” he said. “Some boat, I’ll say; regular little yacht. Belongs to a fellow named Homer that lives over the river. I’d like to own that boat. Two thousand buys it and it’s giving it away. You know these rich fellows have always got to be getting something new and poor fellows get the benefit—if they’re not too poor.”

“That’s what were offered for my boy,” said the old man. Tom had thought to get away from that topic.

“Two thousand, huh?”

“A man is worth more’n a boat,” said old Dyker.

“Oh sure,” said Tom. “But that boat’s worth a good deal more than two thousand. I’m plum crazy about that boat, it’s got everything on it you can think of. It’s named Goodfellow. Pretty good name, hey?”

“Old Merrick, he were rich,” was all the old man said. Tom construed this as an indirect reflection against young Homer, because he was in the same hated class as the late Mr. Merrick.

As they made their way along, Tom fell to wondering what were the facts about this dark business which the little old man cherished in his memory. It was impossible to get a rational and consecutive account out of him, but evidently a tragedy had occurred some years back and not the least sad effect of it, whatever it was, was that it had set this poor old creature’s wits askew and made him a wanderer.

From his own account he had tramped as far as the metropolis where he must have cut a strange figure with his shabby, rustic clothes and his crazy stick. Tom pictured him trudging down Broadway striking the sidewalk resolutely with his cane, heedless of the gaping throng. No wonder the moving picture people had used him.

Even now, as he trudged along beside him, bent and wizened and pathetic with a hundred dubious signs of lonesome poverty, there was a vigor about him which made him at once both ludicrous and picturesque. His whole being seemed so concentrated on the task of walking that Tom refrained from putting on him the added burden of conversation.

The first crimson glow of sunset was on the summit of the hills to the west and as this faded to the sombre shade of twilight, the countryside seemed suddenly to be pervaded by a stillness which by contrast emphasized every sound along the wayside. The pounding of the old man’s stick upon the stony road seemed more aggressively audible, and Tom glanced amusedly sideways now and again, smiling at his companion’s intentness.

Across the fields a laden hay wagon was lumbering homeward and its towering, disordered burden changed color in the witchery of the twilight as it moved slowly out of the dying golden area. The voices of the men seemed crisp and clear like voices heard across the water. Before the wayfarers, the road seemed clear cut and ribbon-like as it wound away into the black woods.

Here the arched and intertwined boughs made a dim tunnel in which a refreshing coolness was always felt. A shadowy calm—this stretch of a mile or so. It was always dusk in this foliage-covered way and in the twilight it was all but dark. There was the pungent odor of damp leaves and rotting wood.

The slight sound made by travelers here reechoed as if a score of spectral voices were complaining of the strangers’ intrusion into their domain. The place was called Ghost’s Trail and with reason, for one had but to pause where a death’s head was graven on a wayside stone and call aloud, when there answered a wailing chorus out of the solemn depths. It was said that two large rocks were responsible for these ghostly medleys. But some there were who found the explanation in a murder which had once been committed at this lonely spot.

Be this as it might, there was something eery about this sequestered way which afforded a short cut to Temple Camp. The playing of the shadows conjured up queer figures which often seemed like human forms lurking among the trees. Such was Tom’s first impression of a moving object ill-concealed beyond a trunk.

Soon, however, as the travelers came abreast of the tree, there emerged a gaunt figure, surprised into reluctant exposure, and trembling visibly. It was the figure of a youngish man in the last extreme of emaciation and shabbiness, but Tom could make no guess as to his age for before he could glimpse the face the stranger was already hurrying along the path in the direction from which our travelers had come. What Tom did notice with surprise was that old Caleb Dyker stood stark still, staring back at the almost fleeing form.

“You know him?” Tom asked. But his companion did not answer, only stood, as it seemed transfixed, staring at the apparition.

“You know him?” he repeated curiously.

“That you, Joey?” the old man called in the high pitched, broken voice of age. The moment seemed tense though Tom did not know why.

“Joey—that you?”

But the hurrying figure neither turned nor answered.