THE RESCUE

"Take off your shoes and leave them here," Tom whispered; "and follow me and don't speak. Step just where I step."

Tom's soft moccasins were better even than stocking feet and he moved down into the thicket stealthily, silently. Not a twig cracked beneath his feet. He lifted the impediments of branch and bush aside and let them spring easily back into place again without a sound. Hervey crawled close behind him, pa.s.sing through these openings while Tom held the entangled thicket apart for both to pa.s.s. He moved like a panther. Never in all his life had Hervey Willetts seen such an exhibition of scouting.

Presently Tom paused, holding open the brush. "Hervey," he said in the faintest whisper, "they say you're happy-go-lucky. Are you willing to risk your life--again?"

"I'm yours sincerely forever, Slady."

"We're going home the short way; we're going down the way the turtle did," Tom whispered. "It's the only way--look. Shh."

With heart thumping in his breast, Hervey looked down where Tom pointed and saw amid the dense thicket a glint of bright red. Even as he looked, it moved, and appeared again in another tiny opening of the thicket close by.

"What is it?" he whispered.

"A. H." Tom hardly breathed. "It's little Anthony Harrington--shh. Don't speak from now on; just follow me. See this trickle of water? There's a spring down there. They can't have their camp there, they'd roll down.

The kid is there alone. If you're not willing to tackle the descent, say so. If we go down the regular way we'll have them after us. We've got to go a way that they _can't_ go. Say the word. Are you game?"

"You heard them call me a dare-devil, didn't you?" Hervey whispered.

"They claim I don't care anything about the Eagle award. They're right.

I'd rather be a dare-devil. Go ahead and don't ask foolish questions."

For about twenty yards Tom descended, stealthily pausing every few feet or so. Hervey was behind him and could not see what Tom saw. He did not venture to speak.

Then Tom paused, holding the brush open, and peering through--thoughtfully, intently. He looked like a scout in a picture.

Hervey waited behind him, his heart in his throat. He could not have stood there if Tom had not been in front of him. It seemed interminable, this waiting. But Tom was not the one to leap without looking.

Suddenly, like a flash of lightning, he threw aside all stealth and caution and, tearing the bushes out of his path, darted forward like a hunted animal. Hervey could only follow, his heart beating, his nerves tingling with excitement. What happened, seemed all in an instant. It was over almost before it began. Tom had emerged into a little clearing where there was a spring and the next thing Hervey knew, there was his companion stuffing a handkerchief into the mouth of a little fellow in a red sweater and lifting the little form into his arms.

Hervey saw the clearing, the spring, the handkerchief stuffed into the child's mouth, the little legs dangling as Tom carried the struggling form--he saw these things as in a kind of vision. The next thing he noticed (and that was when they had descended forty or fifty yards below the spring) was that the child's sweater was frayed near the shoulder.

Down the steep declivity Tom moved, over rocks, now crawling, now letting himself down, now handing himself by one hand from tree to tree, agilely, carefully, surely. Now he relieved one arm by taking the child in the other, always using his free hand to let himself down through that precipitous jungle. Never once did he speak or pause until he had left an almost perpendicular area of half a mile or so of rock and jungle between them and the spring above.

Then, breathless, he paused in a little level s.p.a.ce above a great rock and set the child down.

"Don't be frightened, Tony," he said; "we're going to take you home. And don't scream when I take this handkerchief out because that will spoil it all."

"Is it safe to stop here?" Hervey asked.

"Sure, they'll go down the path when they want to hunt for him. They'll never get down here. The mountain is with us now."

"I didn't drop my whistle," the little fellow piped up, as if that were his chief concern.

"Good," said Tom, in an effort to interest him and put him at ease.

"That's a dandy whistle; tell us about it. Because we're your friends, you know."

"Am I going to see my mother and father?"

"You bet. Away down there is a big camp where there are lots of boys and you're going to stay there till they come and get you."

"They sent me to the spring to get water and I took my whistle so I could soak it in the water, because that makes it go good. I made it myself, that whistle."

Tom, his clothes torn, his face and hands bleeding from scratches, sat upon the edge of a big rock with the little fellow drawn tight against him.

"And when you whistled we came and got you, hey? That's the kind of fellows we are. And I bet I know how that nice sweater got frayed, too.

A little bird did that."

"I left it hanging on a tree near the spring when they sent me to get water," the boy said, "and I left it there all night." He poked his finger in the frayed place as if he were proud of it.

"And I'll show you who did it," Tom said; "because that little thief is right down there in that big camp. And I'll show you the turtle you carved your initials on too. Because he came to our camp, too. There's so much fun there. And you're going to step very carefully and hold on to me, and we're going down, down, down, till we get to that camp where there is a man that knows how to make dandy crullers. I bet you like crullers?"

A camp where even birds and turtles go, and where they know how to make crullers, was a magic place, not to be missed by any means. And little Anthony Harrington was already undecided as to whether he would rather live there than at home.

CHAPTER THE LAST

Y-EXTRA! Y-EXTRA!

The ragged little newsboys in the big city shouted themselves hoa.r.s.e.

"Y-extree! Y-extra! Anthony Harrington safe! Rescued by Boy Scouts!

Y-extree! Mister!"

And those who bought the extras learned how the kidnappers of Anthony Harrington allowed him to purchase for nine cents a turtle from a little farm boy whom he met at the station at Catskill. And of how that turtle walked off and gave the whole thing away. Llewellyn and Orestes got even more credit than Tom Slade, but he did not care, for a scout is a brother to every other scout, and it was all in the family.

And so, as I said in the beginning, if you should visit Temple Camp, you will hear the story told of how Llewellyn, scout of the first-cla.s.s, and Orestes, winner of the merit badges for architecture and music, were by their scouting skill and lore instrumental in solving a mystery and performing a great good turn.

They are still there, the two of them; one in her elm, the other in Tenderfoot Pond. And Orestes (but this is strictly confidential) has a little scout troop of her own, tenderfeet with a vengeance, for they are out of the eggs scarcely ten days.

THE END

THE TOM SLADE BOOKS

By PERCY KEESE FITZHUGH

Author of "Roy Blakeley," "Pee-wee Harris," "Westy Martin," Etc.

=Ill.u.s.trated. Individual Picture Wrappers in Colors. Every Volume Complete in Itself.=

"Let your boy grow up with Tom Slade," is a suggestion which thousands of parents have followed during the past, with the result that the TOM SLADE BOOKS are the most popular boys' books published to-day. They take Tom Slade through a series of typical boy adventures through his tenderfoot days as a scout, through his gallant days as an American doughboy in France, back to his old patrol and the old camp ground at Black Lake, and so on.