"Is it good?" she asked, when he had inhaled the first deep breath.
"Is it good?" she asked, when he had inhaled the first deep breath.
"It surely does," he admitted frankly; "and so, for that matter, does 'Mr. Prime.'"
She looked up at him with a charming little grimace.
"I'll concede the 'Lucetta' if you will concede the 'Donald.'"
"It's a go," he laughed. "It is the last of the conventions, and we'll tell it good-by without a whimper." With the goodly array of foodstuff spread out upon the sand, and with his back carefully turned upon the pool of dread, he felt that he could afford to be light-hearted.
There was only a little more of the rummaging to be done. A canvas-covered roll unlashed from its place beneath a canoe-stay proved to be a square of duck large enough to make a small sleeping-tent. Inside of this roll there was an ample stock of cartridges for the two repeating rifles lying cased in their canvas covers in the bottom of the boat, and an Indian-tanned deerskin used as a wrapping for the ammunition. With the guns there was a serviceable woodsman'saxe. In the bow, where Prime had dropped the two savage-looking hunting-knives, there were a few utensils: a teapot, a camper's skillet large enough to be worth while, tin cup and plates, an empty whiskey-bottle, and a basin—the latter presumably for the dough-mixing.
After they had their findings lying on the sand the tender conscience came in play again, and nothing would do but everything must be put back just as they had found it, Prime drawing the line, however, at a portion of the tobacco and enough of the food to serve for supper and breakfast. During the remainder of the afternoon they left the canoe-load undisturbed, but when evening came Prime borrowed the basin, the cups, plates, and the larger skillet. Farther along he borrowed the canvas roll and the axe and set up the tiny sleeping-tent, placing it so that Lucetta, if she were so minded, could see the fire.
Just before she retired the young woman made a generous protest.
"You mustn't do all the borrowing for me," she insisted. "Go right down thereand get one of those blanket-rolls for yourself. I shan't sleep a wink if you don't."
The next morning there were more speculations, on the young woman's part, as to the whereabouts of the canoe-owners, with much wonderment at their protracted absence and the singular abandonment of their entire outfit, even to the weapons. Whereat Prime invented all sorts of theories to account for this curious state of affairs, all of them much more ingenious than plausible.
For himself, the mystery was scarcely less unexplainable. Why two men, evidently outfitted for a long journey, should stop by the way, build five fires that were plainly not camp-fires, and then fall to and fight each other to death over a bag of English sovereigns, were puzzles that he did not attempt to solve in his own behalf. It was enough that the facts had befallen, and that the net result for a pair of helpless castaways was a well-stocked canoe which Lucetta's acid-proof honesty was still preventing them from appropriating.
After a breakfast served with the garnishings afforded by the Heaven-sent supplies,Prime uncased the two rifles and looked them over. They were United States products of an early edition, but were apparently serviceable and in good order. In the canvas case of one of the guns there was a packet of fish-lines and hooks. At Lucetta's suggestion a few shots were fired as a signal for the lost canoe-owners. Nothing coming of this, they tried a little target practice, selecting the largest tree in sight for a mark, and both missing it with monotonous regularity. Later in the day Prime brought the talk around by degrees to the expediencies. How much of the present good weather must they waste in waiting for the hypothetical return of the absentees? Perhaps some accident had happened; perhaps the absentees would never turn up. Who could tell?
Domestic Science, with gymnasium-teaching on the side, fought the suggestion to which all this pointed. They had no manner of right to take the canoe and its belongings without the consent of the owners. What was the hurry? By waiting they would be sure to obtain the help they were needing, and another day or two must certainly end the suspense.
Prime went as far as he could without telling the shocking truth. With the dead men's pool so near at hand he was shudderingly anxious to be gone, but the young woman's logic was unanswerable and the delay was extended. A single small advance marked this second day. Along toward evening Prime unloaded the canoe, and together they made a few heroic attempts to acquire the art of paddling. It was apparently a lost art so far as they were concerned. The big birch-bark, lightened of its load, did everything but what it was expected to do, yawing and careening under the unskilful handling in a most disconcerting manner.
"If I could only rig up some way to row the thing!" Prime exclaimed, when they had contrived to drift and seesaw half a mile or more down the almost currentless first reach of the stream.
"You couldn't," asserted the more practical young woman. "The sides are as thin as paper, and they wouldn't hold rowlocks if you could make them. Besides, who ever heard of rowing a birch-bark canoe?"
"Somebody will hear of it, if I ever liveto work this vacation trip of ours into a story—No, no; paddle the other way! We want to turn around and go back!"
They got the hang of it a little better after a while, the young woman catching the knack first; and after much labor they won back to their camping-place on the small peninsula. Over the evening fire Prime unwrapped the deerskin they had found in the canvas-roll.
"We shall have to have moccasins of some sort," he announced. "That flimsy boat isn't going to stand for shoes with heels on them. Does domestic science include a semester in shoemaking? I can assure you in advance that literature doesn't."
Lucetta took the leather and sat for a time regarding it thoughtfully. "No needle, no thread, no pattern," she mused. "And if we cut it and spoil it there won't be enough left for two pairs."
"If you have an idea, try it; I'll stand the expense of the leather," chuckled Prime, with large liberality.
But now the young woman was hesitating on another score.
"This leather belongs to the owners of the canoe; I don't know that we have any right to cut it," she objected.
Prime was tempted to say things objurgatory of these phantom owners who would not down, but he didn't. Every fresh reference to the two dead men gave him an impulse to glance over his shoulder at the silent pool in the eddy, and the longer the thing went on the less able he was to control the prompting.
"You forget that we are able to pay for all damages," was what he really did say, and at that the young woman removed a shoe, placed a neatly stockinged foot on the skin and marked around it with a bit of charcoal taken from the fire, leaving a generous margin. Borrowing Prime's pocket-knife she cut to the line, made tiny buttonholes all around the piece, and threaded them with a drawing-string made of the soft leather.
"You've got it!" exclaimed the unskilled one in open-eyed admiration, after the one-piece slipper was fashioned and tried on. "You are a wonder! I shouldn't have thought of that in a month of Sundays. It's capital!"
There was enough material in the single skin to make the two pairs, with something left over, and Prime put his on at once with a sigh of relief born of the grateful chance to get rid of the civilized shoes. Past that there was more talk about the ever-thickening mysteries, and again Lucetta refused to accept the Grider explanation, while Prime clung to it simply because he could not invent any other. Yet it was borne in upon him that the mystery was edging away from the Grider hypothesis in spite of all he could do. There was nothing to connect the two canoemen, fighting over the purse of gold, with Grider, or with the abduction of a school-teacher and a writer of stories; yet there were pointings here, too, if one might read them. Why were the five fires lighted in the glade unless it were for a signal of some sort? Prime wished from the bottom of his heart that he could set the keen mentality of his companion at work on this latest phase of the mystery, but with the dead men lying stiff and still at the bottom of their pool less than a stone's throw away, his courage failed him and his lips were sealed.
Onthe fifth morning—their third at the peninsula camp—Prime registered a solemn vow to make this the last day of the entirely unnecessary delay. More and more he was tormented by the fear that the dead men might escape from their weightings and rise to become a menace to Lucetta's sanity or his own; and, though he had been given the best possible proof that his companion was above reproach in the matter of calm courage and freedom from hysteria, he meant to take no chances—for her or for himself.
At his suggestion they began the day by making another essay at the paddling, embarking in the emptied canoe shortly after breakfast. Gaining a little facility after an hour or so, they headed the birch-bark downstream past the point which they had reached the previous afternoon, and soon found themselves in a quickening current. Prime, kneeling in the bow, gave the word, and Lucetta obeyed it.
"We'll try the quick water," he flung back to her. "We'll have to have the experience, and we had better get it with the empty canoe, rather than with the load."
This seemed logical, but it led to results. In a short time the shores grew rocky and there was no safe place to land. Moreover, the little river was now running so swiftly that they were afraid to try to turn around. Rapid after rapid was passed in vain struggles to stop the triumphal progress, and if the canoe's lading had been aboard, Prime would have been entirely happy, since every rapid they shot was taking them farther away from the scene of the tragedy. But the lading was not aboard.
"We've got to do something to head off this runaway!" the bowman shouted back over his shoulder in one of the quieter raceways. "We're leaving our commissary behind."
"Anything you say," chimed in the steers-woman from the stern of the dancing runaway. "My knees are getting awfully tired, but I can stand it as long as you can."
"That is the trouble," Prime called back."We're staying with it too long. The next pool we come to, you paddle like mad, all on one side, and I'll do the same. We've simplygotto turn around!"
The manœuvre worked like a charm. A succession of the eddy-pools came rushing up from down-stream, and in the third of them they contrived to get the birch-bark reversed and pointed up-stream. Then it suddenly occurred to the young woman that they had had their trouble for nothing; that the same end might have been gained if they had merely turned themselves around and faced the other way. Her shriek of laughter made Prime stop paddling for the moment.
"I need a guardian—we both need guardians!" he snorted, when she told him what she was laughing at, and then they dug their paddles in a frantic effort to stem the swift current.
It was no go—less than no go. In spite of all they could do the birch-bark refused to be driven up-stream. What was worse, it began to drift backward, slowly at first, but presently at a pace which made them quickly turn to face the other way lest theybe smashed in a rapid. A mile or more fled to the rear before they could take breath, and two more rapids were passed, up which Prime knew they could never force the canoe with any skill they possessed or were likely to acquire.
Taking advantage of the next lull in the unmanageable flight, he shouted again.
"We'll have to go ashore! We are getting so far away now that we shall never get back. You're steering: try it in the next quiet place we come to, and I'll do all I can to help."
The "next quiet place" proved to be a full half-mile farther along, and they had a dozen hairbreadth escapes in more of the quick stretches before they reached it. Prime lived years in moments in the swifter rushes. Knowing his own helplessness in the water, he was in deadly fear of a capsize, not from any unmanly dread of death but because he had a vivid and unnerving picture of Lucetta's predicament if she should escape and be left alone and helpless in the heart of the forest wilderness. He drew his first good breath after the runaway canoe had been safely beached on the shore of an eddy and theyhad tottered carefully out of it to drag it still higher upon the shelving bank.
"My heavens!" he panted, throwing himself down to gasp at leisure. "I wouldn't go through that again for a farm in Paradise! Weren't you scared stiff?"
"I certainly was," was the frank admission. The young woman had taken her characteristic attitude, sitting down with her chin propped in her hands.
"But, just the same, you didn't forget to paddle!" Prime exulted. "You are a comrade, right, Lucetta! It's a thousand pities you aren't a man!"
"Isn't it?" she murmured, without turning her head.
"Do you know—I was simply paralyzed at the thought of what would happen if we should upset—not so much at the thought of what would be certain to happen to me, but on your account."
"The protective instinct," she remarked; "it is like a good many other things which we have outgrown—or are outgrowing—quite useless, but stubbornly persistent."
"You mean that you don't need it?"
"I haven't needed it yet, have I?"
"No," he admitted soberly. "So far, you have had the nerve, and more than your share of the physique."
"I have had better training, perhaps," she offered, as if willing to make it easier for him. "A little farther along you will begin to develop, while I shall stand still."
But Prime would not let it rest at that.
"I have always maintained that most women have a finer nerve, and finer courage, than most men; I am speaking now of the civilized average. You are proving my theory, and I owe you something. But to get back to things present; doesn't it occur to you that we have gotten ourselves into a rather awkward mess?"
"It does, indeed. We must be miles from anything to eat, and if you know of any way to take this canoe up-stream I wish you would tell me; I don't."
"It will be by main strength and awkwardness, as the Irishman played the cornet, if we do it at all," Prime decided.
"And if, in the meantime, the owners come back and find it gone——"
Prime got up stiffly. "I have a feeling that they haven't come back yet, and it is growing fast into a feeling that they are not going to come back at all. Shall we try a towing stunt?"
They tried it, though they had no towline and were reduced to the necessity of dragging the canoe along in the shallows, each with a hand on the gunwale. This did not answer very well, and after fighting for a half-hour in the first of the rapids and getting thoroughly wet and bedraggled they had to give it up and reverse the process, letting the birch-bark drift down to the safe dockage again.
While they were resting from their labors, and the hampered half of the towing squad was wringing the water from her skirts, Prime looked at his watch.
"Heavens and earth!" he exclaimed. "It is noon already! I thought I was beginning to feel that way inside. Why didn't we have sense enough to take a bite along with us when we left camp this morning?"
"Oh, if you are going into the whys, why didn't we have sense enough to know thatwe couldn't handle the canoe? How far have we come?"
Prime shook his head. "You couldn't prove it by me. A part of the time it seemed to me that we were bettering a mile a minute." He got up and hobbled back and forth on the little beach to work the canoe-cramp out of his knees. "It looks to me as if we are up against it good and hard; the canoe is here, and the dunnage is up yonder. Which do we do: carry the canoe to the dunnage, or the dunnage to the canoe? It's a heavenly choice either way around. What do you say?"
Lucetta voted at once for the canoe-carrying, if it were at all possible. So much, she said, they owed to the owners, who had every right to expect to find their property where they had left it. Again Prime was tempted to say hard things about the ghosts which so stubbornly refused to be laid, and again he denied himself.
"The canoe it is," he responded grimly, but by the time they had dragged the light but unwieldy craft out of the water and part way up the bank they were convinced that the other alternative was the only one. Ashort portage they might have made, or possibly a long one, if they had known enough to turn the birch-bark bottom-side up and carry it on their headsvoyageur-fashion. But they still had this to learn.
"It's a frost," was Prime's decision after they had tugged and stumbled a little way with the clumsy burden knocking at their legs. "The mountain won't go to Mohammed—that much is perfectly plain. Are you game for a long portage with the camp outfit? It seems to be the only thing there is left for us to do."
The young woman was game, and since they were on the wrong side of the river they put the canoe into the water again and paddled to the other side, leaving the birch-bark drawn out upon the bank of the eddy-pool. From that they went on, hunger urging them and the water-softened moccasins holding them back and making them pick their way like children in the first few days of the barefoot season. The distance proved to be about three miles and they made it in something over an hour. The embers of their morning fire were still alive, and thebelated midday meal was quickly cooked and despatched.
"Now for the hard part of it," Prime announced, as he began to pack the camp outfit. "You sit right still and rest, and I'll get things ready for the tote."
"Then you have determined to ride roughshod over the rights of the people who own the things?" the young woman asked.
Prime turned his back deliberately upon the pool of dread.
"Necessity knows no law, and we can't stay here forever waiting for something to turn up. Somebody has given us a strong-hand deal, for what reason God only knows, and we've got to fight out of it the best way we can. We'll take these things, and we are willing to pay for them if anybody should ask us to; but in any event we are going to take them, because it is a matter of life and death to us. I'll shoulder all the responsibility, moral and otherwise."
She laughed a little at this. "More of the protective instinct? I can't allow that—my conscience is my own. But I suppose you are right. There doesn't seem to beanything else to do. And you needn't fit all of those packs to your own back; I propose to carry my share."
He protested at that, and learned one more thing about Lucetta Millington: up to a certain point she was as docile and leadable as the woman of the Stone Age is supposed to have been, and beyond that she was adamant.
"You said a little while ago it was a pity I wasn't a man: it is the woman's part nowadays to ask no odds. Will you try to remember that?"
Here was a hint of a brand-new Lucetta, and Prime wondered how he had contrived to live twenty-eight years in a world of women only to be brought in contact for the first time with the real, simon-pure article in the heart of a Canadian wilderness. Nevertheless he took her at her word and made a small pack for her, with a carrying-strap cut from the remains of the deerskin. At the very best the portage promised to demand three trips, which was appalling.
It was well past the middle of the afternoon when they reached the canoe at theend of the first carry. The three-mile trudge had been made in silence, neither of the amateur carriers having breath to spare for talk. Since they had the tent and one of the blanket-rolls and sufficient food, Prime was for putting off the remaining double carry to another day, but again Lucetta was adamant.
"If we do that we shall lose all day tomorrow," was the form her protest took; "and now that we have started we had better keep on going."
"Oh, what is the frantic hurry?" Prime cut in. "You said your school didn't begin until September. Haven't we the entire, unspoiled summer ahead of us?"
"Clothes," she remarked briefly. "Yours may last all summer, but mine won't—not if we have to go on tramping through the woods every day."
Prime's laugh was a shout. "We'll be blanket Indians, both of us, before we get out of this. I feel that in my bones, too. But about the second carry; we'll make it if you say so. It will at least give us a good appetite for supper."
They made it, reaching the end of the six-mile doubling a short while before the late sunset. Prime was all in, down, and out, but he would not admit it until after the supper had been eaten and the shelter-tent set up over its bed of spruce-tips. Then he let go with both hands.
"I'm dog-tired, and I am not ashamed to admit it," he confessed. "But you—you look as fresh as a daisy. What are you made of—spring steel?"
"Not by any manner of means; but I wasn't going to be the first to say anything. I feel as if I were slowly ossifying. I wouldn't walk another mile to-night for a fortune."
Prime stretched himself lazily before the fire with his hands under his head. "Luckily, you don't have to. You had better turn in and get all the sleep that is coming to you. I'm going to hit the blankets after I smoke another pinch of this horrible tobacco."
As he sat up to roll the pinch a rising wind began to swish through the tree-tops. A little later there was a fitful play of lightning followed by a muttering of distant thunder.
"That means rain, and you are going to get wet," said the young woman, as she was preparing to creep under her canvas. An instant later a gusty blast came down the river, threatening to scatter the fire. Prime sprang up at once and began to take the necessary precautions against a conflagration. In the midst of the haste-making he heard his companion say: "We might drag the canoe up here and turn it over so that you could have it for a shelter."
With the fire safely banked they went together to the river's edge to carry out her suggestion. By this time the precursor blast of the shower was lashing the little river into foam, and the spray from the rapid just above them wet their faces. One glance, lightning assisted, at the little beach where they had drawn up the canoe was enough. The birch-bark was gone.
The young woman was the first to find speech. At another lightning-flash she cried out quickly:
"There it is! Don't you see it?—going down the river! The wind is blowing it away!"
Immediately they dashed off in pursuit, stumbling through the forest in darkness, which, between the lightning-flashes, was like a blanketing of invisibility. The race was a short one. One flash showed them the canoe dancing down the raceway of a lower rapid, and at the next it had disappeared.
Atthe disappearance of the canoe Prime called the halt which the black darkness was insisting upon, and they made their way back in the teeth of the storm to the camp-fire. In a few minutes the summer squall had blown itself out, with scarcely enough rain to make a drip from the trees. Weary as he was, Prime took the axe, searched until he found a pine stump, and from it hewed the material for a couple of torches. With these for light they set out doggedly down-stream in search of their lost hope.
Happily, since they were both fagged enough to drop in their tracks, the birch-bark was discovered stranded on their side of the river a hundred yards below the lower rapid. This time they ran no risks, and, though it cost them a half-hour of stumbling toil, they did not rest until they had carried the canoe around the rapid to place it highand dry in the little glade where they had made their camp.
The next morning found them plentifully stiff and sore from their strenuous exertions of the day before, but there was good cheer in the thought that thus far they had triumphed stoutly over difficulty and disaster.
"I feel as if I couldn't put one foot before the other, and I am sure you must be in the same condition," Prime groaned, over the second helping of fried potatoes and bacon, served in Domestic Science's best style. "Just the same, I mean to take a dose of the hair of the dog that bit me and go up after the remainder of our loot. While I am doing it you must stay here and watch the canoe, to see that it doesn't run away again. I wouldn't trust it a single minute, even on dry land."
"No," was the firm rejoinder. "You must get the sex idea out of your head once for all, Donald. It will be time enough for you to make it easy for me when I need it worse than I do now."
"Yesterday I said you were a wonder,Lucetta; to-day I rise to remark that you are two wonders, and mighty plucky ones at that."
"And to-morrow I shall be three wonders, and the next day four, and so on to infinity, I suppose," she said, laughing. "By the way, speaking of days, what day is this?"
Prime drew a notched twig from his pocket.
"Don't ever say after this that I am not the original Robinson Crusoe," he grinned. "I cut this twig the second day, just before we began the hike for the river." Then he counted up: "According to my almanac, this ought to be Monday—wash-day."
"Then yesterday was Sunday, which is why we had all our bad luck. We ought to have gone to church. Is it possible that we were both in Quebec no longer ago than last Tuesday night? It seems as if months had elapsed since then—months, I said, but I ought to have said ages."
"Are things changing for you so radically, then?" he asked.
"They are, indeed. And for you?"
"Yes; I guess so. For one thing, I havediscovered the habitat of about a million muscles that I didn't know I had; and for another——"
"Well?" she challenged, "why don't you say it?"
"I will say it. For another, I have discovered the most remarkable woman that ever lived."
She laughed joyously. "See what a few days of unavoidable propinquity will do! But you are mistaken—I'm not especially remarkable. You are only doing what Mr. Grider said you ought to do—studying the female of the species at short range."
"Grider was an ass!" was the impatient rejoinder. "If I had him here I'd duck him in the river in spite of his fifty pounds excess. But this isn't getting the remainder of the dunnage. Are you quite sure you want to go along?"
"Quite sure," she returned, and once more they took the riverside trail to the stream-head.
The third carry was lighter than the others had been, and the six-mile tramp was the best possible antidote for stiffened jointsand lamed muscles. By the time they had reassembled themselves and their belongings in the little glade between the rapids they were both in fine fettle, and ready to begin the real journey.
The loading of the canoe was a new thing, but in this they gave common sense a free rein. The camp stuff and provisions were made into packages with the blankets and the tent canvas for wrappings; and each package was securely lashed beneath the brace-bars of the birch-bark, so that in case of a capsize there would still be some chance for salvage. Prime's final precaution was worthy of a real woodsman. Drying the empty whiskey-bottle carefully with a wisp of grass, he filled it with matches, corked it tightly, and skewered it in an inside pocket of his coat.
"You are learning," Lucetta observed; and then: "Did you get that out of a story?"
"No, indeed; I dug it up whole out of my literary imagination. If I should tumble overboard you want to be sure to save the pieces, if you ever hope to see a fire again. Are we all ready?"
Five minutes later they had taken theirlives in their hands and were shooting the rapids. With the laden canoe the paddling was an entirely different proposition. Mile after mile the quick water held, with only the shortest of reaches between Scylla and Charybdis for the breath-catching. At first the keen strain of it keyed nerve and muscle to the snapping-point; but after a time the fine wine of peril had its due and exhilarating effect, and they shouted and laughed, calling to each other above the turmoil of the waters, gasping joyously when the spray from the white-fanged boulders slapped them in the face, and having the luck of the innocent or the drunken, since disaster held aloof and they escaped with nothing more serious than the spray wettings.
Though light-heartedness thus sat in the saddle—or knelt on the paddling-mat—prudence was not wholly banished. At noon, when they pulled out at the foot of a quiet reach to make a pot of tea, they found that they were at the head of a rapid too swift and tortuous to offer anything but certain catastrophe. While the tea water was heating Prime went ahead to reconnoitre.
"Too many chances," he reported on hisreturn. "And, besides, the carry is only a few hundred yards. It means more hard work, but we can't afford to run the risk."
"Oh, dear me!" sighed the young woman in mock despair; "have we got to unload that canoe piece by piece, and then carry and load it all over again?"
"We shall doubtless have to do it so many times that we shall count that day lost when we are denied the opportunity," Prime laughed. "But, Heaven helping us, we shall make no more three-mile portages, as we did yesterday."
The task did not seem quite so formidable after they had broken their fast. Moreover, in the repeated packings and unpackings, they were gaining facility. With the dunnage transported they were ready to attack the birch-bark, and Lucetta had an inspiration.
"Haven't I seen a picture somewhere of the oldvoyageurscarrying their canoes on their heads?" she asked.
"Why, of course!" said Prime. "Why didn't we think of that last night? I believe I could carry it that way alone. Now, then,over she goes and up she goes; you set the pace, and for pity's sake don't stumble."
Nobody stumbled, and in due time the canoe was launched below the rapids, was reloaded, and the paddling was resumed. This day, which ended in a snug camp at the foot of a stretch of slow water which had kept them paddling all the afternoon, was a fair sample of their days through the remainder of the week. Night after night, after they had been shooting rapids, or making long carries, or paddling steadily through stretches where the current did not go fast enough for them, Prime found Lucetta's prophecy as to his growth coming true. Day by day he was finding himself anew, advancing by leaps and bounds, as it seemed, into a stronger and fresher and simpler manhood.
And as for the young woman—there were times when the realization that in a few hours of a single mysterious night she had passed from the world of the commonplace into a world hitherto unpictured even in her wildest imaginings, was graspable, but these moments were rare. Adaptable, even under the fetterings of the conventions, LucettaMillington was finding herself fairly gifted now that the fetterings were removed. From childhood she had longed for an opportunity to explore the undiscovered regions of her own individuality, and now the opportunity had come. It pleased her prodigiously to find that Prime seemed not to be even remotely touched by their unchaperoned condition. From the first he had been merely the loyal comrade, and she tried consistently to meet him always upon his own ground—tried and succeeded.
On the Saturday night they found themselves at the head of a long portage, still in the heart of the wilderness, and having yet to see the first sign of any human predecessor along the pathway traced through the great forest by their little river.
"I can't understand it," Prime said that night over the camp-fire. "We have covered a good many miles since last Monday, and still we don't seem to be getting anywhere. Another thing I don't fancy is the way the river has changed its course. Have you noticed that for the last three days it has been flowing mainly northward?"
The young woman became interested at once. "I hadn't noticed it," she admitted, and then: "Why don't you like it?"
"Because it seems a bit ominous. It may mean that we were carted clear over to the northern side of the big watershed, though that doesn't seem possible. If we were, we are going painstakingly away from civilization instead of toward it. That would account at once for the fact that we haven't come across any timber-cuttings. The northern rivers all flow into Hudson Bay."
Lucetta's gaze became abstracted. "Besides that, we are still groping in the blind alleys of the mysteries," she put in. "Have you given up the Mr. Grider idea?"
"I can't give it up wholly and save my sanity," Prime averred. "Think a minute; if we throw that away, what have we to fall back upon? Nothing, absolutely nothing! Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does the sane mind. Don't mistake me; I haven't the slightest idea that Grider let us in for any such experience as this, meaning to. But he took a chance, as every practical joker does, and the result in our case hasspelled disaster. I am only hoping that it has spelled disaster for him, too, confound him!"
She smiled sweetly.
"Are you calling it disaster now? Only yesterday you said you were enjoying it. Have you changed your mind?"
"I have, and I haven't. From a purely selfish point of view, I'm having the finest kind of a vacation, and enjoying every blessed minute of it. More than that, the raggeder I grow the better I feel. It's perfectly barbarous, I know; but it is the truth. My compunctions are all vicarious. I shouldn't have had half so much fun if I had gone motoring through New England."
The young woman smiled again. "You needn't waste any of the vicarious compunctions on me. Honestly, Donald, I—I'm having the time of my life. It is the call of the wild, I suppose. I shall go back home, if I ever reach home, a perfect savage, no doubt, but the life of the humdrum will never be able to lay hold of me again, in the sense that it will possess me, as it used to."
Prime's grin was an expression of the purely primitive.
"It is a reversion to type," he asserted, getting up to arrange Lucetta's sleeping-tent. "It makes one wonder if all humanity isn't built that way; if it wouldn't go back at a gallop if it were given half a chance."
"I don't call it going back," was the quiet reply. "I feel as if I had merely dropped a large number of utterly useless hamperings. Life has never seemed so free and completely desirable before, and yet, when we have been running some of the most terrifying rapids, I have felt that I could give it up without a murmur if I shouldn't prove big enough to keep it in spite of the hazards. At such times I have felt that I could go out with only one big regret—the thought that I wasn't going to live long enough to find outwhyI had to be drowned in the heart of a Canadian forest."
Atthe foot of the long portage which had closed the week for them the two voyagers found the course of their river changing again to the southeastward, and were encouraged accordingly. In addition to the changing course the stream was taking on greater volume, and, while the rapids were not so numerous, they were more dangerous, or at least they looked so.
By this time they were acquiring considerable skill with the paddles, together with a fine, woodcrafty indifference to the hardships. In the quick water they were never dry, and they came presently to disregard the wettings, or rather to take them as a part of the day's work. As the comradeship ripened, their attitude toward each other grew more and more intolerant of the civilized reservations.
Over the night fires their talk dug deeply into the abstractions, losing artificiality injust proportion to the cracking and peeling of the veneers.
"I am beginning to feel as though I had never touched the real realities before," was the way Prime expressed it at the close of a day in which they had run a fresh gamut of all the perils. "Life, the life that the vast majority of people thrive upon, will always seem ridiculously trivial and commonplace to me after this. I never understood before that civilization is chiefly an overlaying of extraneous things, and that, given a chance, it would disintegrate and fall away from us even as our civilized clothes are doing right now."
The young woman looked up with a quaint little grimace. She was trying to patch the frayed hem of her skirt, sewing with a thread drawn from one of the blankets and a clumsy needle Prime had fashioned for her out of a fish-bone.
"Please don't mention clothes," she begged. "If we had more of the deerskin I'd become a squaw at once. The fringes wouldn't look so bad if they were done in leather."
"Mere accessories," Prime declared, meaning the clothes. "Civilization prescribes them, their cut, fashion, and material. The buckskin Indians have the best of us in this, as in many other things."
"The realities?" she queried.
"The simplicities," he qualified. "Life as we have lived it, and as we shall probably live it again if we ever get out of this, is much too complex. We are learning how few the real necessities are, and it is good for the soul. I wouldn't take a fortune for what I've been learning in these weeks, Lucetta."
"I have been learning, too," she admitted.
"Other things besides the use of a paddle and a camp-fire?"
"Many other things. I have forgotten the world I knew best, and it is going to require a tremendous effort to remember it again when the need arises."
"I shall never get back to where I was before," Prime asserted with cheerful dogmatism. Then, in a fresh burst of confidence: "Lucetta, I'm coming to suspect that I have always been the merest surface-skimmer. I thought I knew life a little, andwas even brash enough to attempt to write about it. I thought I could visualize humanity and its possibilities, but what I saw was only the outer skin—of people and of things. But my greatest impertinence has been in my handling of women."
"Injustice?" she inquired.
"Not intentional; just crass ignorance. I know now that I was merely imitative, choosing for models the character-drawings of men who knew even less about women than I did. Vapid sentimentality was about as far as I could get. It revolts me to think of it now."
Her laugh was as unrestrained as that of a child. "You amuse me, Donald. Most women are hopelessly sentimental. Don't you know that?"
"You are not," he retorted soberly.
"How do you know?"
"Heavens and earth! if I haven't had an opportunity to find out——"
"You haven't," she returned quietly; "not the least little morsel of an opportunity. A few days ago we were thrown together—a man and a woman who were total strangers,to live or die as the chance might fall. I defy any one to be sentimental in such circumstances. Sentiment thrives only in the artificialities; they are the very breath of its life. If men and women could know each other as they really are, there would be fewer marriages, by far."
"And the few would be far happier," Prime put in.
"Do you think so? I doubt it very much."
"Why?"
"Because, in the most admirable marriage there must be some preservation of the reticences. It is possible for people to know each other too well."
"I don't think so, if the qualities are of the kind that will stand the test."
"Who has such qualities?" she asked quickly.
"You have, for one. I didn't believe there was a human woman on earth who could go through what you have and still keep sweet. Setting aside the hardships, I fancy most other women would have gone stark, staring mad puzzling over the mystery."
"Ah, yes; the mystery. Shall we ever be able to explain it?"
"Not if we decide to throw Grider overboard, I'm afraid."
"Doesn't the Mr. Grider solution seem less and less possible to you as time goes on?" she asked. "It does to me. The motive—a mere practical joke—isn't strong enough. Whoever abducted us was trying for something larger than a laugh at our expense."
"You'd think so, wouldn't you? Big risks were incurred, and the expense must have been considerable, too. Still, as I have said before, if we leave Grider out of it we abandon the one only remotely tenable explanation. I grant you that the joke motive is weak, but aside from that there is no motive at all. Nobody in this world could have any possible object in getting rid of me, and I am sure that the assumption applies with equal force to you. You see where it leaves us."
"I know," was the ready rejoinder. "If the mystery had stopped with our discovery of the aeroplane-tracks, it would have beendifferent. But it didn't stop there. It continued with our finding of the ownerless canoe stocked for a long journey. Was the canoe left for us to find?"
Prime knew his companion well enough by this time to be willing to trust her with the grewsome truth.
"I don't know what connection the canoe may have had with our kidnapping, if any, but I am going to tell you something that I didn't care to tell you until we were far enough away from the scene of it. We reasoned that there were two owners for the canoe, arguing from the two rifles and the two hunting-knives. Do you know why they didn't turn up while we were waiting for them?"
"No."
"It was because they couldn't. They were dead."
"You knew it at the time?" she asked.
"Yes. I found them. It was in a little glade just below our camp at the river-head. They had fought a duel with knives. It was horrible, and I thought it best not to tell you—it seemed only the decent thing not to tell you."
"When did you find them?"
"It was when I went over to the river on the excuse of trying to get some berries while you were cooking supper. I had seen the canoe when I went after the can of water. Instead of looking for berries I began to hunt around for the owners, thinking that probably they were camped somewhere near by. I didn't find any traces of a camp; but in the glade there were the ashes of five fires arranged in the shape of a Greek cross: one fire in the middle and one at the end of each arm. This mystified me still more, but it was then growing so dark that it was no use to look farther. Just as I was leaving the glade I stumbled over the two men, locked in each other's arms; they had evidently been dead for some hours, or maybe days."
"How perfectly frightful!" she exclaimed. "I don't wonder that you looked ill when you came back."
"It nearly knocked me out," Prime confessed. "But I realized at once that it wasn't necessary to multiply the shock by two. After you were asleep that night I went over and buried the two men—weighted themwith stones and sunk them in the river, since I didn't have anything to dig with. Afterward, while I was searching for the other knife, I found a little buckskin bag filled with English sovereigns, lying, as I supposed, where one of them had dropped it. It seemed to indicate the motive for the desperate fight."
"But it adds just that much more to the mystery," was the young woman's comment. "Were they white men?"
"Half-breeds or Indians, I couldn't tell which."
"Somebody hired them to do something with us?" she suggested tentatively.
"That is only a guess. I have made it half a dozen times only to have it pushed aside by the incredibilities. If we are to connect these two men with our kidnapping, it presupposes an arrangement made far in advance. That in itself is incredible."
"What do you make of the five fires?"
"I could make nothing of them unless they were intended for signal-fires of some kind; but even in that case the arrangement in the form of a cross wouldn't mean anything."
The young woman had finished her mending and was putting the fish-bone needle carefully away against a time of future need.
"The arrangement might mean something if one were looking down upon it from above," she put in quietly.
Prime got up to kick the burned log-ends into the heart of the fire.
"If I didn't have such a well-trained imagination, I might have thought of that," he said, with a short laugh. "It was a signal, and it was lighted for the benefit of our aeroplane. How much farther does that get us?"
The young woman was letting down the flaps of her sleeping-tent, and her answer was entirely irrelevant.
"I am glad the protective instinct was sufficiently alive to keep you from telling me at the time," she said, with a little shudder which she did not try to conceal. "You may not believe it, Donald Prime, but I still have a few of the civilized weaknesses. Good night; and don't sit up too long with that horrid tobacco."
Thoughthe castaways had not especially intended to observe the day of rest, they did so, the Sunday dawning wet and stormy, with lowering clouds and foggy intervals between the showers to make navigation extrahazardous. When the rain settled into a steady downpour they pulled the canoe out of water, turning it bottom-side up to serve as a roof to shelter them. In the afternoon Prime took one of the guns and went afield, in the hope of finding fresh meat of some sort, though it was out of season and he was more than dubious as to his skill as either a hunter or a marksman. But the smoked meats were becoming terribly monotonous, and they had not yet had the courage to try the pemmican. Quite naturally, nothing came of the hunting expedition save a thorough and prolonged soaking of the hunter.
"The wild things have more sense than I have," he announced on his return. "They know enough to stay in out of the rain. Can you stand the cold-storage stuff a little while longer?"
Lucetta said she could, and specialized the Sunday-evening meal by concocting an appetizing pan-stew of smoked venison and potatoes to vary the deadly monotonies.
The Monday morning brought a return of the fine weather. The storm had blown itself out during the night and the skies were clearing. The day of rain had swollen the river quite perceptibly, and a short distance below their Sunday camp its volume was further augmented by the inflow of another river from the east, which fairly doubled its size.
On this day there were fewer water hazards, and the current of the enlarged river was so swift that they had little to do save to keep steerageway on the birch-bark. Nevertheless, it was not all plain sailing. By the middle of the forenoon the course of the stream had changed again to the northward, swinging around through a widehalf-circle to the west, and this course, with its Hudson Bay threatenings, was maintained throughout the remainder of the day.
Their night camp was made at the head of a series of rapids, the first of which, from the increased volume of the water, looked more perilous than any they had yet attempted. It was late when they made camp and, the darkness coming on quickly, they were prevented from reconnoitring. But they had the thunder of the flood for music at their evening meal, and it was ominous.
"I am afraid that noise is telling us that we are to have no thoroughfare to-morrow," was the young woman's comment upon the thunder music. "Let us hope it will be a short carry this time."
Prime laughed. "Isn't there a passage somewhere in the Bible about the back being fitted to its burden?" he asked. Then he went on for her encouragement: "It's all in the day's work, Lucetta-woman, and it is doing you no end of good. The next time you are able to look into a mirror you won't know yourself."
Though she had thought that she wasby this time far beyond it, the young woman blushed a little under the rich outdoor brown.
"Then I'm not growing haggard and old?" she inquired.
"Indeed, you are not!" he asserted loyally. "I'm the beauty of the two"—passing a hand over the three weeks' growth of stubble beard on his face. "You are putting on weight every day. In another week your face will be as round as a full moon. It may not sound like it, but that was meant for a compliment."
"Was I too thin?" she wanted to know.
"Er—not precisely thin, perhaps; but a little strenuous. You gave me the idea at first that Domestic Science, with gymnasium teaching on the side, had been a trifle too much for you. Had they?"
"No; I was perfectly fit. But one acquires the habit of living tensely in that other world that we have lost and can't find again. It is human to wish to make money, and then a little more money."
"What special use have you for a little more money?" Prime asked curiously.
"Travel," she said succinctly. "I should like to see the world; all of it."
"That wouldn't take so very much money. Goodness knows, the pen isn't much of a mining-pick, but with it I have contrived to dig out a year in Europe."
"You couldn't have done it teaching the daughters of retired farmers how to cook rationally," she averred. "Besides, my earning year is only nine months long."
"Then you really do want money?"
"Yes; not much money, but just enough. That is, if there is any such half-way stopping-point for the avaricious."
"There is," he asserted. "I have found it for myself. I should like to have money enough to enable me to write a book in the way a book ought to be written—in perfect leisure and without a single distracting thought of the royalty check. No man can do his best with one eye fixed firmly upon the treasurer's office."
"I had never thought of that," she mused. "I always supposed a writer worked under inspiration."
"So he does, the inspiration of the butcherand the baker and the anxious landlord. I can earn a living; I have done it for a number of years; but it is only a living for one, and there isn't anything to put aside against the writing of the leisurely book—or other things."
"Oh! then you have other ambitions, too."
"The one ambition that every normal-minded man ought to have: I want a wife and babies and a home."
"Then you certainly need money," she laughed.
"Sure I do; but not too much—always remember that—not too much."
"What would you call 'too much'?"
"Enough to spoil the children and to make it unnecessary for me ever to write another line."
This time her laugh was mocking. "Just now you said you wanted enough so that you could write without thinking of money," she reminded him.
"Oh, there is a golden mean; it doesn't have to be all honey or all vinegar. A nice tidy little income that would provide at apinch for the butcher and the baker and the other people. You know what I mean."
"Yes, I think I do; and my ambition is hardly more soaring than yours. As you remarked, it doesn't cost so frightfully much to travel and live abroad."
He looked at her dubiously. "You don't mean that you'd wish to travel all the time, do you?"
"Why not?"
"Why—er—I don't know precisely. But you'd want to settle down and have a home some time, wouldn't you?"
"And cook for a man?" she put in. "Perhaps I haven't found the man."
Prime's laugh was boyishly blatant.
"I notice you are cooking pretty assiduously for a man these days. But perhaps that is only in self-defense. If the man cooked for you you wouldn't live very long."
"I am merely doing my bit, as the English say," was the cool retort. "I haven't said that I like to do it."
"But you do like to do it," he insisted. "If you didn't, you couldn't hit it off so cheerfully. I know a thing or two, and whatI don't know I am learning. You are a perfectly normal woman, Lucetta, and normality doesn't mean continuous travel."
"You have changed your mind again. Last week you were calling me abnormal, and saying that you had never met a woman like me before."
"I hadn't; but that was my misfortune. I hope there are a good many like you; I've got to hope it for the sake of humanity and the good of the race. But this talk isn't getting us anywhere. We had better turn in; there is a hard day ahead of us tomorrow."
In the morning the prophecy seemed destined to fulfil itself in heaping measure. While Lucetta was getting breakfast Prime took to the woods and made a careful survey of some portion of the hazards ahead. He was gone for the better part of an hour, and when he came back his report was not encouraging.
"Worse and more of it," was the way he described the difficulties. "It is just one rapid after another, as far as I went; and that must have been a mile and a half ormore. Coming back, I kept to the river bank, and tried to imagine us picking the way between the rocks in the channel. I believe we can do it if you have the nerve to try."
"IfIhave the nerve?" she flung back. "Is that a revival of the sex idea?"
"I beg your pardon," he hastened to say. "It was simply a manner of speaking. Your nerve is like the rest of you—superb. We'll shoot the rapids if it takes a leg. It would ask for more than a leg to make the carry."
A little later they loaded the canoe carefully for the greater hazard, packing the dunnage securely and protecting the meal and the flour as well as they could by wrapping them tightly in the canvas roll. Past this, they cut strips from the remaining scraps of deerskin and tied everything, even to the utensils, the guns, and the axe, to the braces, taking time to make their preparations thorough.
It was well that they took the time while they had it. After the birch-bark had been headed into the first of the rapids there was no time for anything but the strenuous fightfor life. Faster and still faster the frail craft leaped on its way, down one rapid and into another before they could congratulate themselves upon the latest hairbreadth dodging of the thickly strewn boulders.
From time to time in the brief respites Prime shouted encouragement to his canoe-mate. "Keep it up—it can't last forever! We're doing nobly. Look out for this big beggar just ahead!"
So it went on, from bad to worse and then to bad again, but never with a chance for a landing or a moment's rest from the engrossing vigilance. Prime gasped and was thankful that there were days of sharp muscle-hardening behind them to fit them for this crowning test. He was sure he could measure Lucetta's fortitude by his own. So long as he could endure the strain he knew he could count upon hearing the steady dip of her paddle keeping time with his own.
But the worst of the worst was yet to come. At the foot of a series of rapids which were like a steeply descending stair, they found themselves in a sluiceway where the enlarged river ran like a torrent in flood.On the still air of the summer day a hoarse clamor was rising to warn them that there was a cataract ahead. Prime's cry of alarm was not needed. With the first backing dip of the paddle he felt the braking impulse at the stern striking in with his own.
"Hold her!" he shouted. "We've got to make the shore, if it smashes us!" But the puny strength of the two pairs of arms was as nothing when pitted against the onsweep of the mighty flood. For a brief instant the downward rush of the canoe was checked; then it was caught in a whirling eddy and spun end for end as if upon a pivot. When it straightened up for the leap over the shallow fall it was headed the wrong way, and a moment later the crash came.
The young woman was the only one of the two who knew definitely what followed. In the tipping glide over the brink they were both thrown out of the canoe and spilled into the whirlpool at the foot of the cataract. Lucetta kept her head sufficiently to remember that Prime could not swim, and when she came up from the plunge she saw him, and saw that he was not struggling.