Tells of my second discovery and brings me to the point of startling revelations. This thing which I had inadvertently stepped on had, I suppose, been a part of the cap, so-called, which the Germans had dropped behind the allied lines along with Slade’s identification disk and the “small badge linked with it which was supposed to signify some honor greatly prized in the ranks of the Boy Scouts of America.” It did not occur to me as strange that the newspaper had called it a cap when in point of fact it was one of those goggle masks sometimes worn by airmen.
The discovery of this broken trifle spurred me to further scrutiny of the place and I groped about in the gathering dusk but without result. There was no sign to show where the aviator had fallen and had it not been for the merest chance I should never have made the discovery which, alas, bore a darker significance than did the innocent little piece of glass which I had crushed under foot.
I was just about to continue my climb up the hill when I noticed one of those great birds which are a common and ghoulish sight in the theatre of war, circling overhead. These sinister creatures will follow a retreating army for miles, intent and undiscouraged, and apparently knowing if it is the purpose of that army to make a stand and fight I have seen them veer away and disappear when some advantageous ground for fighting has been reached and passed. Near Blanzy, where no one dreamed that the retreating foe would give battle, a big flock of them hovered all day waiting for the routed Germans to reach that place and rally on the high ground. And they did not wait in vain. No military plans or probabilities escape them.
Well, I was watching this ungainly harbinger of death as it flopped about, its thin, naked, ugly neck extended in its horrid quest, and wondering if its presence boded ill for our boys or for the foe, when my gaze was drawn to a spot among the upper branches of the tree over which the bird was circling.
This tree, the only one to hold its head up in that desert of deformities, had probably acted as a check and prop for falling material. A mass of tangled brush had sprung up about it and many rocks found a precarious lodgment among its half-exposed roots.
What I noticed in this tree appeared in the dusk to be an area of brown fungus upon the trunk some twenty feet or more from the ground. I probably would not have thought twice about it had I not noticed a loose end of it moving slightly with the breeze, which gave the whole thing an appearance of not belonging there.
Still, I dare say I should have gone my way without further investigation except that this loose end, fluttering like a beckoning signal in that dismal spot, haunted me. I started away and turned back again. The great bird had gone and not a thing was there moving overhead—nothing save this little loose, stirring object, whatever it was, its outline growing dim in the dusk.
Doubtless the mere fact that it moved would have attracted me as I stood in the deathlike gloom of that chaotic jungle, but even as I watched my imagination conjured it into a kind of beckoning finger and I experienced a strange chill, as of apprehension, as it fluttered up there among the branches.
An impulse came upon me to climb the tree and dispel my vague fancies by a closer look at this object. It was not without difficulty that I managed to “shinny” up the trunk, but the lower branches once reached, I was able to pass easily from one to another until I was on a level with the brown object.
I had but to touch it to find that it was no fungus growth at all, but the remnant of a khaki jacket wound so tightly about the trunk that even on this closer inspection it seemed a very part of the tree. It must have been wetted and dried again by much rain and sun, for it was stiff and hard and clung to the bark when I tried to remove it. The part which blew loose was one of the sleeves and as I pulled this in my effort to detach the whole, the brittle, rotted fabric tore and came away like bark. It must have been there for a long time.
At one place, as I passed my hand over it, I encountered a hubble, very hard, and upon working the jacket loose I found this to be a watch in the flap pocket.
You are to suppose that this singular find greatly excited and interested me and it was in a trembling suspense that I carefully detached and dropped the thing to the ground.
How came it there? How long had it been there? I think no relic of a human presence in that cheerless, melancholy spot could have affected me more and started such a train of thoughts as did this rag which a living person had once worn. As to who had worn it, there seemed but one answer—it was the jacket of Tom Slade.
And this supposition I was presently to confirm.
But even before I had reached the ground there appeared to my mind’s eye a picture of the last scene in the venturesome life of the young airman, here in this cheerless jungle, and I shuddered as I thought of it, and of the heroic triumph which preceded his hideous end. I made no doubt that in his frightful fall the jacket had caught upon some sharp branch of the tree and held him, who shall say for how long, suffering—more likely dead. And when the inert, mangled form had become extricated and gone down, this tattered remnant had remained blowing in the wind and rain, marking the spot where he had fallen, until the beating storms had plastered it against the trunk, save for the little moving shred which I had seen. And so the khaki jacket, like everything else which came into that crazy, derelict community, had become a part of it, seeming, as I have said, like a bit of brown fungus on that lonely tree....