Chapter XXIX: The Wandering Minstrel

With one exception the most patient scout at Temple Camp was Westy Martin of the interesting Bridgeboro, New Jersey, Troop. He could sit huddled up in a bush for an hour studying a bird. He could sit and fish for hours without catching anything. But the turtle was too much for him.

"We ought to name that guy Llewellyn," he commented, as he strolled away; "that means _lightning_, according to some book or other. There was an old Marathon racer a couple of million years ago named Llewellyn."

"That's a good name for him," Tom admitted.

"You going to hang around, Slady?"

"I'm going to fight it out on these lines if it takes all summer," Tom said.

Thus the two most patient, stubborn living things in all the world were left alone together--the turtle and Tom Slade.

Tom sat on a rock and the turtle sat on the ground. Tom did not budge. Neither did the turtle. The turtle was facing up toward the camp and away from the lake. Tom rested his chin in his hands, studying the initials on the turtle's shell. If they had been A. H. instead of T. H. they would indeed have been the very initials of Master Anthony Harrington, Jr. But a miss is as good as a mile, thought Tom, and T. H. is no more like A. H. than it is like Z. Q.

This train of thought naturally recalled to his mind the letters he had seen imprinted in the mud up in the woods. But those letters were H. T. and there was therefore no connection between these three sets of letters.

Tom knew well enough the habit of the Temple Camp scouts of carving their initials everywhere. The rough bench where they waited for the mail wagon to come along was covered with initials. And among them Tom recalled a certain sprightly tenderfoot, Theodore Howell by name, who had been at camp early that same season. Doubtless this artistic triumph on the bulging back of Llewellyn was the handiwork of that same tenderfoot.

And likely enough, too, those letters up in the woods were the initials of Harry Thorne, still at camp. Tom would ask Harry about that. And at the same time he would remind some of these carvers in wood and clay not to leave any artistic memorials on the camp woodwork. It was part of Tom's work to look after matters of that kind. About the only conclusion he reached from these two disconnected sets of initials was that he would have an eye out for specialists in carving....

But Tom's authority was as naught when it came to Llewellyn. The turtle cared not for the young camp assistant. He sat upon the ground motionless as a rock, apparently dead to the world.

Tom had now no more interest in the turtle than a kind of sporting instinct not to be beaten. He could sit upon the rock as long as his adversary could sit upon the ground. In a moment of exasperation he had been upon the point of hurling the turtle into the lake, but had refrained, and now he was reconciled to a vigil which should last all night.

Llewellyn had met his match.

For fifty-seven minutes by his watch, Tom waited. Then the tip end of Llewellyn's nose emerged slowly, cautiously, and remained stationary.

Eleven minutes of tense silence elapsed.

Then the tip end of Llewellyn's nose emerged a trifle more, stopped, started again and lo, his whole head and neck were out, craned stiffly upward toward the camp.

Tom did not move a muscle, he hardly breathed. Soon the turtle's tail was sticking straight out and one forward claw was emerging slowly, doubtfully.

Silence.

Another claw emerged and the neck relaxed its posture of listening reconnoissance. Then, presto, Llewellyn was waddling around like a lumbering old ferry boat and heading straight for the lake. As he waddled along in a bee line something which Tom had once read came flashing into his mind, which was that no matter where a turtle is placed, be it in the middle of the Desert of Sahara, he will travel a bee line for the nearest water.

But his recollection of this was as nothing to Tom now, when he saw with mingled feelings of shame and excitement something which seemed to open a way to the most dramatic possibilities.

As the turtle entered the muddy area near the lake Tom realized, what he should have known before, that the tracks which Hervey Willetts had followed from the mountain and which Skinny had followed from the lake were the tracks of a turtle! _The tracks of a turtle coming from a locality where it did not belong, straight for the still water which was its natural element._

With a quick inspiration Tom darted forward into the mud catching the turtle just as it was waddling into the water. He did not know why he did this, it was just upon an impulse, and in making the sudden reach he all but lost his balance. As it was he had to swing both arms to keep his feet, and as he did so the turtle fell upside down in the drier mud a few feet back from shore. As Tom lifted it, there, imprinted in the mud were the letters H. T.

The initials T. H. on the creature's back had been reversed when he fell upside down. And Tom realized with a thrill that what had just happened before his eyes had happened at that log up in the woods.

Llewellyn, the Humpty-dumpty of the animal world, had slid off the log, alighting upside down.

For a moment Tom Slade paused in dismay.

So Teddy Howell and Harry Thorne had nothing to do with this. This lumbering, waddling creature had come flopping along down out of the silent lower reaches of that frowning mountain, straight to his destination. He was not the first printer to print something the wrong way around.

Who, then, was T. H.? Not Master Anthony, Jr., at all events. But some one afar off, surely. Abstractedly, Tom Slade gazed off toward that towering mountain whence this clumsy but unerring messenger had come. It looked very dark up there. Tom recalled how from those lofty crags the great eagle had swooped down and met his match before the hallowed little home of Orestes.

In a kind of reverie Tom's thoughts wandered to Orestes. Orestes would be in bed by now. Orestes had lived away up near where that turtle had come from. And the thought of Llewellyn and Orestes turned Tom's thought to Hervey Willetts. He had not seen much of Hervey the last day or two....

Tom fixed his gaze upon that old monarch where again the first crimson rays of dying sunlight glinted the pinnacles of the somber pines near its summit. How solemn, how still, it seemed up there. The nearer sounds about the camp seemed only to emphasize that brooding silence. It was like the silence of some vast cathedral--awful in its majestic solitude.

And this impassive, stolid, hard-shell pilgrim, knowing his business like the bully scout he was, had come stumbling, sliding, rolling and waddling down out of those fastnesses, because there was something right here which he wanted. And he had brought a clew. Should the human scout be found wanting where this humble little hero had triumphed?

"I never paid much attention to those stories," Tom mused; "but if there's a draft dodger living up there, I'm going to find him. If there's a hermit I'm going to see him. If there's...."

He paused suddenly in his musing, listening. It was the distant voice of a scout returning to camp. He was singing one of those crazy songs that he was famous for. Tom looked up beyond the supply cabin and saw him coming down, twirling his hat on a stick, hitching up one stocking as often as it went down--care-free, happy-go-lucky, delightfully heedless.

He looked for all the world like a ragged vagabond. The evening breeze bore the strain he was singing down to where stolid Tom stood and he smiled, then suddenly became tensely interested as he listened. Tom often wondered where Hervey got his songs and ballads. On the present occasion this is what the blithe minstrel was caroling:

Saint Anthony he was a saint,
And he was thin and bony;
His mother called him Anthonee,
But the kids they called him Tony.