AT TWILIGHT

Tom had never explored this old trail. It was one of the things that he had been always intending to do but had never done. He had hoped that Audry might introduce him to its romantic neighborhood and indeed she had piloted him as far as the first intersecting crevice, where she balked.

On a certain evening after supper he was sitting on the little porch of the cottage. Audry was busy with her accustomed task of helping Miranda with the dishes and he could hear her girlish, cocksure talk in the kitchen. Audry was always very positive about everything. She knew what she knew.

On the campus, as they called the clearing, Whalen and Fairgreaves were picking up bits of wood. Tom smiled as he observed the graceful, athletic form of the amiable Fairgreaves. Each time he stooped he looked as if he were bowing to some grand lady. His khaki trousers and cutaway coat made him look outlandish.

Yet, thought Tom, here was a kind man. If Fairgreaves were a failure at least he could enjoy the success of others. He was the soul of generosity. He could not be so bad. Perhaps the world needs just such amiable ne’er-do-wells as Fairgreaves.

Tom was just about to go over and join them in their self-imposed after supper task when Fairgreaves sauntered with ingratiating step toward the group on the rear porch, where the chauffeur who had been deprived of his license was playing a harmonica.

The inventor who was waiting for the million dollar suit to be decided in his favor was sitting on the railing smoking a pipe. Billy the sailor sat with his feet against the rail. They all seemed to be enjoying their ease.

Billy the sailor was telling how he had once assisted in killing a skipper who had killed a seaman. The men all seemed to think that was a pretty good thing to do. They were not too conventional, these men.

“What’s new, Legitt’?” one of them asked as Fairgreaves approached them.

“There is nothing new under the sun,” said Fairgreaves elegantly.

“The hell there ain’t,” said Billy the sailor.

Whalen did not join the group but sauntered off with an effect of aimless weariness toward the edge of the clearing and disappeared in the woods. It seemed to Tom that his stroll and its direction were wholly unpremeditated.

Tom had lately wanted a chance to talk with Whalen alone. He had seen his former companion come and go and had been with the others when Whalen was present. But he wanted to see him alone. There was no particular reason for this, except that he felt an impulse to renew, if possible, some measure of their former intimacy.

He had long since ceased to attach (if indeed he had ever attached) any significance to the look on Whalen’s face in the woods. That striking resemblance to his little old friend, Caleb Dyker, had been a thing seen in a moment of half-consciousness and amid surroundings altogether dramatic and unusual.

Yet he had wondered if there were any particular reason why Whalen avoided him. He had decided that there was not, that it was just his friend’s moroseness and lonely habit. Probably Whalen looked upon him as a kid, thought Tom. At all events here was a chance to chat with him in the good old way he used to do....

Tom soon found that he was on the trail along the brow of the mountain. By the time he reached the point which marked the limit of Audry’s daring, Whalen had disappeared around a bend in the winding trail.

Tom leaped the crevice and soon found himself in the thick of the jungle. On his left the heavy undergrowth encroached upon the almost indistinct path as if to crowd the passerby to the very brink of the overgrown cliff. Below, the abnormal, upturned wilderness with its tilted trees and half-exposed roots, and its great insecurely lodged boulders, looked dark and forbidding in the cold twilight.

In this witching hour the path seemed very lonesome. Shadows played like living things among the trees. The great reservoir afar off looked the color of steel in the gathering dusk.

And the initialed rocks along the trail, wrapped in the gray coverlet of twilight, might easily have been imagined to be ghosts out of the past.

On one of these bordering rests a shadow flitted back and forth making the initials of some unknown pilgrim to shimmer in the changing light and hover on the verge of invisibility like some departed shade. How interesting and romantic, thought Tom, for some former visitor who had left his memorial in this silent haunt, to return and search it out.

He had passed around another bend of this sequestered, lofty trail, when he saw Whalen sitting on a rock some hundred feet or so distant. His back was toward Tom, for he had turned about and had somewhat altered his sitting posture to gaze at the darkening panorama in the extensive country below.

As he thus sprawled unaware of Tom’s approach, the latter’s eye was caught by something shiny on the rock. As he approached nearer, he saw it was an open jack-knife.

As soon as Whalen became aware of Tom he turned about, which was natural, but it seemed to Tom that there was something unnatural in the new attitude. He fancied a trace of agitation about Whalen, which was quite unlike him. As he approached it seemed as if Whalen were on the point of coming to meet him but decided suddenly to remain where he was.

“H’lo, Ned,” said Tom cheerily. “Taking a walk? Or a rest, I mean?”

Perhaps it was because Whalen did not think and act quickly enough, or perhaps it was because it was repugnant to his nature to indulge an impulse to concealment; or it may have been that in that short moment of panic he found a kind of cynical abandonment the easiest course. Whatever the cause, he made no additional effort to conceal certain carvings on the rock.

Tom saw that the jack-knife had been used to scrape the gray mold out of the letters comprising two names, one carved above the other.

The carving, apparently, was by no means as old as much of the idle handiwork along the path for the figures 1907 were cut beneath the two names. Nor had the work that appearance of creditable care about it which characterized some of the other specimens; the letters were sprawling and irregular. But the names were easy enough to read and Tom Slade, with more presence of mind than Whalen showed, read them aloud without the least suggestion of astonishment or even interest.

“Anson Dicker or Dyker—Joe Ganley. Huh. Wonder who those fellows were, hey? Couple of wearie willies maybe. Any objection to me sitting down and resting, Ned? I don’t see much of you these days. Nice and quiet along in here, hey?”