"Hold her!" he shouted. "We've got to make the shore, if it smashes us!"
"Hold her!" he shouted. "We've got to make the shore, if it smashes us!"
Two quick strokes enabled her to get her fingers in his hair, and then began a battle in which the strength of the single free arm had to match itself against the swirling current of the whirlpool. Twice, and yet once again, the young woman and her helpless burden were swept around the circle, each time drawing a little nearer to the recurving eddy under the fall. Lucetta knew well enough that a second ingulfing under the cataract meant death for both, and at the beginning of the fourth circling she made the supreme effort, winning the desperate battle and struggling out upon the low shingly bank of the pool, to fall exhausted when she had dragged her unconscious canoe-mate out of the water.
After a dazed minute or two she was able to sit up and realize the extent of the disaster. The canoe had disappeared after its leap into the pool, and she did not know what had become of it. And Prime was lying just as the dragging rescue had left him, with his arms flung wide. His eyes were closed, and his face, under the three weeks' growth of stubble beard, was haggard and drawn.In the dive over the fall he had struck his head, and the blood was oozing slowly from a great bruise on his forehead.
Itis a trite saying that even the weakest strand in the cable never knows how much it can pull until the demanding strain comes. As a young woman with athletic leanings, Lucetta had had arduous drillings in first-aid, and had drilled others. If Prime had been merely drowned she would have known precisely what to do. But the broken head was a different matter.
Nevertheless, when her own exhaustion was a little assuaged, she essayed the first-aid. Dragging the hapless one a little farther from the water's edge, she knelt beside him to examine the wound with fingers that trembled a little as they pressed, in spite of the brave diagnostic resolution. There was no skull fracture, but she had no means of determining how serious the concussion was. Prime was breathing heavily, and the bruise was already beginning to puff up and discolor.
With hope still in abeyance, she worked swiftly. Warmth was the first necessity. Her hands were shaking when she felt in the pocket of Prime's coat for the precious bottle of matches. Happily it was unbroken, and she could have wept for joy. There was plenty of fuel at hand, and in a few minutes she had a fire blazing brightly, before which she propped the wounded man to dry out, though his wet clothing gave him a sweltering steam bath before the desiccating process began. It was heroic treatment, but there was no alternative, and by the time she had him measurably dried and warm, her own soggy discomfort was also abating.
Having done what she could, her situation was still as forlorn as it could well be; she was alone in the heart of the forest wilderness with a wounded man, who might live or die as the chance should befall—and there was no food. She set her face determinedly against the erosive impatience of despair. There was nothing to do but to wait with what fortitude she could muster.
The afternoon dragged on interminably, and to make the prospect more dispiritingthe sky clouded over and the sun disappeared. Toward evening Prime began to stir restlessly and to mutter in a sort of feeble delirium. The young woman hailed this as a hopeful symptom, and yet the mutterings of the unconscious man were inexpressibly terrifying. What if the recovery should be only of the body and not of the mind?
As the dusk began to gather, Lucetta found her strong resolution ebbing in spite of all she could do. The thunder of the near-by cataract deafened her, and the darkling shadows of the forest were thickly shot with unnerving suggestions. To add the finishing touch, her mind constantly reverted to the story of the finding and disposal of the two dead men and she could not drive the thought away. In a short time it became a frenzied obsession, and she found herself staring wildly in a sort of hypnotic trance at the waterfall, fully expecting to see one or both of the dead bodies come catapulting over it.
While it was still light enough to enable her to distinguish things dimly, something did come over the fall, a shapeless objectabout the size of a human body, shooting clear of the curving water wall, to drop with a sullen splash into the whirlpool. Lucetta covered her eyes with her hands and shrieked. It was the final straw, and she made sure her sanity was going.
She was still gasping and trembling when she heard a voice, and venturing to look she saw that Prime was sitting up and holding his head in his hands. The revulsion from mad terror to returning sanity was so sudden and overpowering that she wanted to go to him and fall on her knees and hug him merely because he was a man and alive, and hadn't died to leave her alone with the frightful horrors.
"Didn't I—didn't I hear you scream?" he mumbled, twisting his tongue to the words with the utmost difficulty. And then: "What on earth has happened to me? I feel—as if—I had been run through—a threshing-machine."
"You were pitched out of the canoe and hurt," she told him. "I—I was afraid you were going to die!"
"Was that why you screamed?" Thewords were still foolishly hard to find and still harder to set in order.
At this she cried out again, and again covered her eyes. "No—no! It is there yet—in the whirlpool—one of the—one of the dead men!"
Though Prime was still scarcely more than half conscious of his condition and cripplings, the protective instinct was clamoring to be heard, dinning in his ears to make him realize that his companion was a woman, and that her miraculous courage had for some cause reached its ultimate limit. With a brand from the fire for a torch, he crept half mechanically on hands and knees to the edge of the bowl-like whirlpool. In due time he had a glimpse of a black object circling past in the froth and spume, and he threw the firebrand at it. A moment later he was setting the comforting prop of explanation under Lucetta's toppling courage.
"It is nothing but a log—just a broken log of wood," he assured her. "Forget it, and tell me more about how I came to get this bushel-basket head of mine. It aches like sin!"
She described the plunge of the unmanageable canoe over the fall and its immediate consequences, minifying her own part in the rescue.
"You needn't try to wiggle out of it," he said soberly at the end of the brief recounting. "You saved my life. If you hadn't pulled me out, I'd be down there in that pool right now, going round and round like that bally log of wood. What do you charge for saving a man's life, Lucetta?"
"A promise from the man to be more careful in future. But we mustn't slide back into the artificial things, Donald. For all you know, my motive might have been altogether selfish—perhaps it was selfish. My first thought was a screaming horror of being left alone here in this wilderness. It made me fight,fight!"
"Is that the truth, Lucetta?" he inquired solemnly.
"Y-yes."
"All of the truth?"
"Oh, perhaps not quite all. There is such a thing as the life-saving instinct, isn't there? Even dogs have it sometimes. Ofcourse I couldn't very well swim out and leave you to drown."
"No," he put in definitively, "you couldn't—and what's more, you hadn't the first idea of doing such a thing. And that other thing you told me was only to relieve my sense of obligation. You haven't relieved it—not an ounce. And I don't care to have it relieved. Let it go for the time being, and tell me what became of the canoe."
"I haven't the faintest notion. I didn't see it again after we went over the fall. Of course it is smashed and ruined and lost, and we are perfectly helpless again."
For a long minute Prime sat with his throbbing head in his hands, trying to think connectedly. When he looked up it was to say: "We are in a pretty bad box, Lucetta, with the canoe gone and nothing to eat. It is hammering itself into what is left of my brain that we can't afford to sit still and wait for something to turn up. If we push on down river we may find the canoe or the wreck of it, and there will surely be some little salvage. I don't believe the birch-bark would sink, even if it were full of water."
"You are not able to push on," she interposed quickly. "As it is, you can hardly hold your head up."
"I can do whatever it is needful to do," he declared, unconsciously giving her a glimpse of the strong thread in the rather loosely woven fabric of his character. "I have always been able to do what I had to do. Let's start out at once."
With a couple of firebrands for torches they set out down the river bank, following the stream closely and keeping a sharp lookout for the wreck. Before they had gone very far, however, the blinding headache got in its work, and Prime began to stumble. It was at Lucetta's insistence that they made another halt and gave up the search for the night.
"It is no manner of use," she argued. "You are not able to go on; and, besides, we can't see well enough to make sure that we are not passing the thing we are looking for. We had much better stop right where we are and wait for daylight."
The halt was made in a small opening in the wood, and the young woman persuadedPrime to lie down while she gathered the material for another camp-fire. Almost as soon as it was kindled Prime dropped off into a heavy sleep. Lucetta provided fuel to last through the night, and then sat down with her back to a tree, determined to stay awake and watch with the sick man.
Thoughshe had formed her resolution with a fair degree of self-reliance, Lucetta Millington soon found that she had set herself a task calling for plenty of fortitude and endurance. Beyond the circle of firelight the shadows of the forest gloomed forbiddingly. They had seen but little of the wild life of the woods in their voyagings thus far, but now it seemed to be stirring uneasily on all sides of the lonely camp-fire.
Once some large-hoofed animal went crashing through the underbrush toward the river; and again there were other hoof-beats stopping abruptly at a little distance from the clearing. Lucetta, shading her eyes from the glow of the fire, saw two gleaming disks of light shining in the blackness of the backgrounding forest. Her reason told her that they were the eyes of the animal; that the unnerving apparition was probably a deer halted and momentarily fascinated by the sight ofthe fire. But the incident was none the less alarming to the town-bred young woman.
Later there were softly padding footfalls, and these gave her a sharper shock. She knew next to nothing about the fauna of the northern woods, nor did she have the comforting knowledge that the largest of the American cats, the panther, rarely attacks a human being unless wounded, or under the cruelest stress of winter hunger. Breathlessly she listened and watched, and presently she saw the eyes of the padding intruder glowing like balls of lambent green fire. Whereupon it was all she could do to keep from shrieking frantically and waking her companion.
After the terrifying green eyes had vanished it occurred to her to wonder why they had seen and heard so little of the night prowlers at their former camps. The reason was not far to seek. Days well filled with toil and stirring excitement had been followed by nights when sleep came quickly and was too sound to be disturbed by anything short of a cataclysm.
As midnight drew near, Prime began tomutter disconnectedly. Lucetta did not know whether he was talking in his sleep or whether he had become delirious again, but at all events this new development immeasurably increased the uncanny weirdness of the night-watch. Though many of the vaporings were mere broken sentences without rhyme or reason, enough of them were sufficiently clear to shadow forth a sketchy story of Prime's life.
Lucetta listened because she could not well help it, being awake and alert and near at hand. Part of the time Prime babbled of his boyhood on the western New York farm, and she gathered that some of the bits were curious survivals of doubtless long-forgotten talks with his grandfather. Breaking abruptly with these earlier scenes, the wandering underthought would skip to the mystery, charging it now to Watson Grider and again calling it a blessed miracle. With another abrupt change the babbler would be in Europe, living over again his trampings in the Tyrol, which, it seemed, had been taken in the company of an older man, a German, who was a Heidelberg professor.
Farther along, after an interval of silence in which Lucetta began to hope that the talkative fit had passed, Prime broke out again—this time waxing eloquent over his struggles in New York as a beginner in the writing trade. Here there were revelations to make her sorry that she was obliged to listen; for years, it seemed, the fight had gone discouragingly hard with him; there had been times when he had had to choose between giving up in defeat or going hungry.
Lucetta pieced together a pitiful little story of this starving time. Some one—once Prime called the some one Grider, and later gave him another name—had tempted the struggler with an offer of a comfortable income, the single condition precedent being an abandonment of the literary fight. Prime's mutterings made the outcome plain for the listener on the opposite side of the camp-fire: "No, I couldn't sell soap; it's honest enough, no doubt—and decent enough—everybody ought to use soap. But I've set my hand to the plough—no, that isn't it.... Oh, dammit, Peter, you know what I mean; I can't turn back; that is the one thing I'venever learned how to do. No, and I can't take your money as a loan; that would be only another way of confessing defeat. No, by George, I won't go out to dinner with you, either!"
Lucetta wept a little in sheer sympathy. Her own experience had not been too easy. Left an orphan while she was still too young to teach, she knew what it meant to set the heart upon a definite end and to strive through thick and thin to reach it. She was relieved when Prime began to talk less coherently of other incidents in his life in the great metropolis. There were more references to Grider, and at last something that figured as Prime's part in a talk with the barbarian. "Yes, by Jove, Watson, the scoundrels tried to pull my leg; actually advertised for me in theHerald. No, of course, I didn't fall for it. I know perfectly well what it was ... same old gag about the English estate with no resident heirs in sight. No, the ad. didn't say so, but I know. What's that?—I'm a liar? Like Zeke I am!"
There were more of the vaporings, but neither these nor the young woman's anxietyabout the wounded man's condition were disturbing enough at the last to keep her eyelids from drooping and her senses from fluttering over the brink of the sleep abyss. Once she bestirred herself to put more fuel on the fire, but after that the breeze blew the mosquitoes away, the warmth from the upleaping blaze added its touch, and she fell asleep.
When she awoke the sun had risen and Prime was up and mending the fire.
"Better," he said cheerfully, in answer to her instant question. "Much better; though my head reminds me of the day when I got the check for my first story—pretty badly swelled, you know. But after I've had a good cup of hot tea"—he stopped in mid-career with a wry laugh. "Bless my fool heart! If I hadn't totally forgotten that we haven't any tea or anything else! And here I've been up a quarter of an hour and more, trying to get a good cooking-fire started! Where were we when we left off last night?"
"We had set out to search for the wreck of the canoe," she explained, rising to standbefore the fire. "We came this far, and concluded it was no use trying to go on in the dark. You were pretty badly off, too."
"It's coming back to me, a little at a time and often, as the cat remarked when it ate the grindstone," he went on, determined to make her smile if it were within the bounds of possibility. He knew she must have had a bad night of it, and the brightness of the gray eyes told him that even now she was not very far from tears. "Don't cry," he added abruptly; "it's all over now."
Her laugh was the sort that harbors next door to pathos.
"I'm hungry!" she said plaintively. "We had no dinner yesterday, and no supper last night, and there doesn't seem to be any very brilliant prospect for breakfast this morning."
Prime put his hand to his bruised head as if to satisfy himself that it was all there.
"Haven't you ever gone without a meal before for the raw reason that you couldn't get it?" he asked.
"Not since I can remember."
"I have; and it's bad medicine—mightybad medicine. We'll put the fire out and move on. While there's life there's hope; and our hope this morning is that we are going to find the wreck of that canoe. Let's hike."
They set out courageously, keeping close to the bank of the river and scanning every eddy and backwater as they moved along. For this cause their progress was slow, and it was nearly or quite noon when they came to a quiet reach in the river, a placid pond with great trees overhanging its margins and wide stretches of reeds and bulrushes growing in the shallows. And on the opposite side of the pond-like expanse and apparently grounded among the bulrushes they saw their canoe. It was bottom side up with care, and on the wrong side of the river; also they knew that its lading, if any of this had survived the runaway flight, must be soaked and sodden. But the triumphant fact remained—the canoe was found.
Fora moment neither of them spoke. Then Prime broke out in a sardonic laugh.
"That is a heavenly prospect for dinner, supper, breakfast, and dinner all rolled into one, isn't it, now? If there is anything left in the canoe, it's soaked to a pulp—to say nothing of the fact that we can't get to it. How are we going to raft ourselves over there without the axe?"
Lucetta went down to the margin of the pond-like reach and tested its depth with a tossed stone.
"It is deep," she said, "swimming-deep. The shallows must be all on the other side."
"I'll go down-stream a piece and see if there isn't some place where I can wade," Prime offered. But at this she shook her head.
"We passed out of all the wading depths days and days ago. If you will make a fire, I'll swim over and get the canoe."
Prime had a world of objections to offer to this, and he flung them into the breach one after another. It was no woman's job. The water was cold, and it would be a long swim—for a guess, not less than a hundred yards; she had gone without food so long that she was not fit for it; if she should try it and fail, he would have to go in after her, and that would mean suicide for both of them.
She heard him through with a quaint little lip-curl of amusement at his fertility in obstacle raising, and at the end calmly fished the remains of his handkerchief out of his pocket and bound it about her head.
"Another attack of the undying protective instinct," she retorted light-heartedly. "You go on and make the fire and I'll save the wreck, or what there is left of it." Whereupon she walked away up-stream, losing herself shortly for Prime in a thicket beyond the first bend of the river above.
Prime fell to work gathering fuel, feeling less like a man than at any time since the voyage had begun. It stabbed hisamour-propreto the heart to be compelled to lether take the man's part while he did the squaw's. But there seemed to be no help for it.
While he was kindling the fire he heard a plunge, and a little later saw the coifed head making diagonally across from the upper bend toward the canoe. She was swimming easily with the side stroke, and he could see the rhythmical flash and swing of a white arm as she made the overhand reach. Then he dutifully turned his back and gave his entire attention to the firemaking.
When he looked again she had righted the canoe and was coming across with it, swimming and pushing it ahead of her. At a little distance from the shore she called to him: "Take it; it's all yours"—giving the birch-bark a final shove. "I'll be with you in a few minutes." And with that she turned off and swam away up-stream to her dressing-thicket.
Prime gave her time to disappear and then went to draw the canoe out on the bank and to begin an inventory of the losses. Thanks to the care they had taken in tyingeverything in, nothing was missing save the paddles. Such food as was still in the original tin was undamaged, but the meat was soaked and the flour and meal were soggy masses of paste. Prime was dismayed. The small stock of potatoes would not last forever, and neither would the canned vegetables. They were not yet backwoodsmen enough to live upon meat alone; and another and crowning misfortune was the loss of the salt.
Prime was lamenting over the wet salt-sack and trying to save some little portion of the precious condiment when Lucetta came on the scene, looking as bright and fresh as the proverbial field-flower after her plunge and swim, and took over the culinary problem. Fortunately, they still had the salt pork, and the prettycuisinièreissued her orders promptly.
"Find some nice clean pieces of birch bark and spread this flour and meal out so that it will dry before the fire," she directed; and while he was doing that and hanging the blankets and tent canvas up to drip and dry, she opened a tin of baked beans and made another of the triumphant stews ofjerked deer meat and potatoes seasoned with a bit of the salt pork. Upon these two dishes they presently feasted royally, making up for the three lost meals, and missing the bread only because they didn't have it.
"I have settled one thing in my own mind," Prime declared, while he was assiduously drying a leaf of the soaked tobacco for the after-dinner smoke. "If I am ever cast away again, I'm going to make dead sure that I have a Domestic Science expert for a fellow sufferer. Lucetta, you are simply great when it comes to making something out of nothing. What are we going to do with this flour-and-meal pudding?"
"We are going to dry it carefully and then grind it up again on a flat stone and go on as before," was the cheerful reply. "That is my part of it, and yours will be a good bit harder; you will have to make some new paddles and contrive some way to patch that big hole in the canoe."
Prime laughed hilariously. His head was still aching, but the disaster had fallen so far short of the ultimate fatalities that the small discomforts were as nothing.
"I can imagine both the paddles and the patch," he boasted. "It remains to be seen whether or not I can turn them into serviceable realities."
While the dunnage was drying and Lucetta was regrinding her flour and meal Indian-fashion on a smooth stone, Prime hacked manfully at a small spruce and finally got it down. It took him the better part of the afternoon to split the tree with wooden wedges and to get out two pieces to be hewn roughly with the axe into the paddle shape. Over the evening fire he whittled laboriously with the sharper of the two hunting-knives, and when the knife grew dull he learned by patient trial to whet it on a bit of stone. To keep him company, Lucetta had recourse to the fish-bone needle. Her clothes had not come scathless out of the cataract disaster and its aftermath.
"You have one of the best of the good qualities, Donald," she said, marking the patience with which the whittling went on. "You are not afraid to buckle down to the necessity and keep on trying."
"'Patient continuance in well-doing,'" hequoted, grinning. "I learned that, up one side and down the other, in the writing trade. It is about the only thing that gets you anywhere."
"You had a hard time making your start in the writing, didn't you?" she offered.
"When did I ever tell you that?"
"You told me something about it the first day we were together, and a good bit more last night."
"Huh! Talking in my sleep, was I? What did I say?"
"A lot of things; I can't remember them all. You talked about Mr. Grider, and the mystery, and the dead men, and I don't know what all."
"I didn't say anything about the girl, did I?"
"Not a word," she returned.
"For the best possible reason on earth, Lucetta: there hasn't been any girl. You don't believe that, I suppose. You wouldn't believe it of any man of my age, and—and temperament?"
"Yet you said night before last that you wanted a wife and children and a home. Doesn't that presuppose a girl?"
"In my case it presupposes a handsomely imaginary girl; I'm great on the imaginary things."
"What does she look like—this imaginary girl of yours?"
He glanced up from the paddle-whittling. "Some day, when we get back into the world again, I'll show you what she looks like. Can you wait until then?"
"You don't leave me any choice."
"We ran off the track," he went on, after a little interval of silence. "You were telling me what I talked about last night."
"Oh, yes; I have forgotten most of it, as I said; but along at the last there were a good many disjointed things about your fight for recognition. Once, I remember, you were talking to somebody about soap."
Prime's laugh was a guffaw.
"I can laugh at it now," he chuckled; "but it was mighty binding at the time—that soap incident. I was down in a hole, in the very bottom of the hole. I had written a book and couldn't get it published; couldn't get anybody to touch it with a ten-foot pole. I had friends who were willing to lend memoney to go on with, and one who offered me a job writing advertisements for his soap factory. It was horribly tempting, but when I was built, the ability to let go, even of a failure, was left out. So I didn't become an ad. writer. What else did I say?"
"Oh, a lot of things that didn't make sense; one of them was about an advertisement you said you had seen in theNew York Herald. I couldn't make out what it was; something about an English estate."
Prime looked up quickly.
"Isn't it odd how these perfectly inconsequent things bury themselves somewhere in the human brain, to rise up and sneak out some time when the bars happen to be left down," he speculated. "There was such an ad., and I saw it; but I don't believe I have given it a second thought from that time to this."
"When you spoke of it last night, you seemed to be telling Mr. Grider about it. Was it addressed to you?"
"It was addressed to the heirs of Roger Prime, of Batavia, and Roger Prime was my father. If I remember correctly, theadvertisers gave a Canadian address—Ottawa, I think—and the 'personal' was worded in the usual fashion: 'If the heirs of Roger Prime will apply'—and so on; you know how they go. It was the old leg-pull."
"I don't quite understand," she demurred. "What do you mean by 'leg-pull'?"
"The swindle is so venerable that it ought to have whiskers by this time. Every once in a while a rumor leaks out that some great estate has been left in England, or somewhere else across the water, with no native heirs. You or I, if we happen to have a family name that fits in, are invited to contribute to a sum which is being made up to pay the cost of establishing the rights of the American descendants, and there you are. I suppose hundreds of thousands of dollars have been buncoed out of credulous Americans in that way, first and last."
"I wish you could remember the Canadian address which you say you think was Ottawa," rejoined the young woman reflectively.
"Why?"
"Because I saw in a Cleveland newspaperan advertisement of the same nature, addressed to the heirs of the body of Clarissa Millington, born Bradford. Clarissa Millington was my mother. There was no name signed, but a business address was given, and it was in Ottawa."
"You have forgotten the address?" said Prime.
"I didn't try to remember it. I wrote it down, and I have it in my luggage in Quebec."
The paddle-maker looked up with an accusing laugh.
"You were planning to return from Quebec by way of Ottawa; you were going to give those sharks some of your hard-earned teaching money. Don't deny it."
"I can't," she confessed. "I meant to do that very thing. And I thought I had plenty of time. There was a date limit set in the advertisement, and it was July thirty-first. Do you think it was a swindle?"
"There isn't the least doubt of it. Your kidnapping has saved you some money. The date limit was merely to make you hustle. I have seen the game worked before,and it is very plausible. And since it is usually worked from Canada, a citizen of the United States has no recourse in law. You had a narrow escape."
"We may call it that, anyway," was the young woman's reply. "The thirty-first of July will probably be nothing more than a memory by the time we find our way back to the world."
A busy silence followed the dismissal of the subject, and then Lucetta began to tell about the various alarms she had had during the previous night. "All of which goes to prove that I am still the normal woman," she concluded.
"You are a heroine, and one of these days I mean to put you in a book," Prime threatened. "You saved my life yesterday and my self-respect to-day; and that is more than a man ought to expect from the most normal woman in the world."
"Your self-respect?"
"Yes; you heard me babbling all night, and you have been good-hearted enough not to report anything that a man need be ashamed of."
"You didn't say anything to be ashamed of," she returned quickly. "Most of the talk was about the old farm near Batavia; that and your grandfather."
"Grandfather Bankhead," he mused; "they don't make any finer characters nowadays than he was—or as fine."
"Bankhead?" she asked suddenly; "was that your grandfather's name?"
"It was: Abner Greenlow Bankhead. It is not such a very usual name. Have you ever heard it before?"
"Heard it? Why—why, it was my mother's mother's maiden name! She was a Bankhead, and she married Josiah Greenlow Bradford!"
Prime dropped both paddle and knife.
"Well—wouldn't that jar you!" he exclaimed. "Can it be possible that—hold on a minute; my grandfather had a Bankhead cousin who grew up in the family, and she married and moved to Ohio, away along back in the other century. What was your grandmother's Christian name?"
"It was an old-fashioned one—Lorinda. I can remember her indistinctly as a littleold lady with white hair and the brightest possible blue eyes."
Prime was wagging his head as one in a daze. "It is too wonderful to be true, Lucetta! But it must be true. My grandfather's cousin's name was Lorinda, and I can remember seeing an oil portrait of her, a horrible thing done by some local artist, hanging in the old farmhouse at Batavia. I can't figure it out, but the way it is working around, we ought to be cousins of some sort. Can you believe it?"
The young woman put her mending aside to trace the relationship thoughtfully, counting the generations on her finger-tips. When she had finally determined to her own satisfaction that they really had a common ancestor four generations back, she laughed.
"It is wonderful," she said; "almost too wonderful to be true. But the wonder of it is completely overshadowed by the unbelievable coincidence which dropped us two, cousins and descendants of that far-away Bankhead, down together on the beach of a forest lake in the wilds of the Canadian backwoods—a lake that neither of us eversaw or heard of before. Will the mysteries never end?"
"Wait a minute; let's get it straight," Prime interposed. "We are really cousins, aren't we? Don't you figure it out that way?"
"Third cousins; yes."
"You'll have to show me," he invited. "Genealogy is like Sanskrit to me."
She proceeded to show him, and from that the talk drifted rather excitedly into family reminiscences. After the manner of people who really have ancestors, neither of them was able to remember many of the traditions. Prime's recollections, indeed, stopped short with his grandfather, but Lucetta knew a little more about the older generations, and she dug the individuals out one by one, offering them to Prime as spurs to further rememberings.
"No, I don't remember anything about Jabez," he said. "And Elvira and Elmina and John I never heard mentioned. Grandfather Bankhead had no near relations that I know of except his brother Jasper and his cousin Lorinda, who grew up with him."
"I seem to remember something about grandmother's cousin Jasper," Lucetta put in. "Didn't something happen to him—something out of the usual?"
"Yes," was the prompt reply. "He disappeared—went to the Far West when he was a young man and was never heard of afterward. Grandfather often wondered what had become of him, and in his later years spoke of him quite frequently."
Lucetta went on with her mending, the fish-bone needle making her progress primitively slow. Prime got up and strolled down to the river-bank. When he returned he went around to her side of the fire to say:
"I'm mighty glad we have found out that we are cousins, Lucetta; twice glad, for your sake. It makes things a bit easier for you, doesn't it?"
She did not look up.
"Why should it?" she asked quietly.
"Oh, I don't know; we have both been throwing tin cans and brickbats at the conventions; but I haven't any idea that we have killed them off permanently. And they die harder in a woman than in a man.We have jollied things along pretty well, so far, but that isn't saying that I haven't known how hard it must have been for you. As matters stand now, I am your natural protector."
She looked up with the quaint little smile that he had learned to know, to interpret, and to love.
"What difference does the relationship make, Donald, so long as you are what you are? And what difference would it make if you happened to be the other kind of man?"
He stood smiling down upon her with his hands in his pockets.
"Your trust is the most wonderful thing in this world, Lucetta—and the most beautiful. I should have to be a much worse man than I have ever dared to be to do anything to spoil it," he said slowly, and with that he went to set up her sleeping-tent.
Primewhittled through the better part of the succeeding forenoon on the paddles, and for the midday bread Lucetta tried her domestic-science hand upon the dried and reground flour. Not to draw too fine a comparison, the paddles were the better success, though the bread was eatable. In the afternoon the man of all work, with Lucetta for consulting engineer, tackled the broken canoe.
There was no lack of materials with which to make the repairs if they had only known how to use them. Attempts to sew a patch of birch bark over the hole with threads drawn from the blanket were dismal failures. At each of the thread punctures the patch would split and curl up most perversely; and when night came they had succeeded only in making a bad matter slightly worse.
After supper they put their heads together to become, if the oracles should prove auspicious,inventors in this hitherto untried field.
"If we only had a few drops of Indian blood in us!" Prime complained. "What do you suppose they daub this bark thing with to make it water-tight? It must be something they find in the woods."
Lucetta went over to the canoe, chipped a bit of the daubing from one of the seams, and tasted it appraisingly.
"It tastes like spruce-gum," she offered; "do you suppose it can be?"
Prime ate a little in his turn and confirmed the guess. "That is about what it is," he decided. "The next thing is to find out how they contrive to get enough of it. I wonder if they tap the trees as we do sugar-maples?"
"If we could find a tree that has been broken," Lucetta suggested. And then: "How have we managed to live so long without learning some of these perfectly simple things, Cousin Donald?"
"Too much education and too little instinct," he scoffed. "To-morrow morning I'll climb trees and become a gum-gatherer. It seems inexpressibly humbling to thinkthat a small hole in a piece of birch bark is all that prevents us from going on our way rejoicing. Never mind, there is another day coming, and if there isn't, success or failure won't make any considerable difference to either of us."
Bright and early the next morning they tried the spruce-gum experiment. Prime found that he could have plenty of it for the gathering, and when they had a sufficient quantity they melted it in one of the empty vegetable tins and used it as a glue with which to make the patch adhere. The result was not entirely satisfactory. The melted gum hardened quickly, but it became so brittle that a touch would loosen it.
"This is where we set up a laboratory for original research," Lucetta said, laughing. "I wonder if some more cooking would do it any good."
"'The ruling passion strong in death,'" Prime quoted with good-natured sarcasm. "You are a born cook. Let's try it."
They tried it and merely succeeded in making the product still more brittle. They then tried adding a little grease from thefat pork to make it more flexible, and that ruined it completely.
"Two civilized brains, college-trained to a piano-polish finish, and not a single workable idea between them," Prime derided. "It's humiliating—disgusting!"
"The brains are still available," asserted the undaunted one. "Go and find some pine pitch and we'll mix it with the spruce."
This experiment promised better success. A gluey mixture resulted that stuck, not only to the canoe body and the patch, but to their fingers and to everything it touched. Inventing still further, they contrived a rude clamp to hold the patch in place while it was drying, if by good hap the glue would consent to dry at all; and with the new paddles whittled and scraped into shape, there was nothing to do but to wait upon the drying process.
Prime spent the afternoon fishing, with the tackle found in one of the gun-cases, and was lucky enough to accumulate a noble string of trout. Lucetta would not say what she was going to do, merely hinting that Prime's absence until supper-time would bea boon. Only the buzzard swinging in slow circles overhead could have told tales of the doing after the young woman had obtained her meed of solitude in the little glade, and possibly the buzzard had seen a sufficient number of blanketed women washing clothes at a river brink not to be unduly stirred at the sight.
Later, Prime came in to exhibit his string of fish with true sportsman's pride, and again they feasted royally, forgetting their late tribulations, and looking forward half-regretfully to a resumption of their journey on the morrow.
"It is astonishing how rapidly one can revert to the cave-man type," was Prime's phrasing of the regret. "I have been a person of pavements and cement walks all my life, as I suppose you have—of the paved streets and all that they stand for. Yet I shall go back to them with something like reluctance. Shan't you?"
She did not reply to the direct question.
"You speak as if you had some assurance that we are approaching the pavements. Have you?"
"A bare hint. I fished along the river for about a mile down-stream, spying out the land—or the water—as I went, for future reference. We can't claim this region by the right of discovery. Somebody has been here before us."
"You didn't find a house?" she ventured.
"Oh, no; nothing like that. But I did find the stump of a tree, and the tree had been felled with an axe. It wasn't recently; the stump was old and moss-grown. But it was axe work just the same."
She laughed softly.
"I don't know whether to be glad or sorry, Donald; for myself, I mean. Of course, you want to get back to your work."
"Do I?" he inquired. "I suppose I ought to want to. I left a book half finished in my New York attic."
"How could you do that? I should think such work would be ruined by having a vacation come along and cut it in two."
"I was sick of it," he confessed frankly. "It was another pen picture of the artificialities, and I shall never finish it now. I'll write a better one."
"Staging it in a Canadian forest?"
"Staging it among the realities, at least. And there shall be a real woman this time."
In his new character of cousin-in-authority, Prime sent Lucetta early to bed to catch up on her arrears of sleep. After she had disappeared behind the curtains of the small shelter-tent, he sat for a long time before the fire smoking the rank tobacco and letting his thoughts rove at will through the mazes of the strange adventure which had befallen him and this distant cousin, of whose very existence he had been ignorant.
More and more the mazes perplexed him, and the coincidences, if they were coincidences, began to verge upon the fantastic or the miraculous. Was it by accident or design that they had both chanced to be in Quebec at the same time? If the plot were of Grider's concocting, did the barbarian know of the cousinship beforehand? Prime was charitable enough to hope that he did. It made the brutal joke—if it were a joke—a little less criminal to suppose that Grider knew of the relationship.
Still, it was all vastly incredible on anyjoking hypothesis. Taking the most lenient view of it—that Grider had pre-arranged the assault upon their liberty and had hired the two half-breeds to pick them up and convoy them out of the wilderness—it was unbelievable that the barbarous one, with all of his known disregard for the common humanities where his Homeric sense of humor was involved, would have turned them over to the tender mercies of two semi-savages whose character had been sufficiently demonstrated by the manner of their death.
"It simplycan'thave been Watson Grider," Prime mused over his sixth cigarette—he was rolling them now in the label paper of the vegetable tins, frugally soaked off and saved. "If it had been his joke, he wouldn't have left it up in the air; he would have followed along to get the good of it. But if it isn't Grider, who is it, and what is it all about?"
The riddle always worked around thus to the same tormenting question, with no hint of an answer; and, as many times before, Prime was obliged to leave it hanging, like Mohammed's coffin, between heavenand earth. But when he renewed the fire and rolled himself in his blankets for the night, he was still casting about for some means of bringing it to earth.
Figuring it out afterward, he was certain that he could not have been asleep for more than an hour or two before he was awakened, with the echo of a noise like volley-firing of some sort still ringing in his ears. His first impulse was to spring up, but the second, which was the one he obeyed, was more in keeping with the new character development. Deftly freeing himself from the blanket wrappings, he reached over to make sure that one of the guns could be caught up quickly, and lay quiet.
For some little time nothing happened, and the night silence of the forest was undisturbed. Just as he was beginning to think that it had been the mosquitoes, and not a noise, which had awakened him, and was about to get up and renew the smudge which he had made to windward before turning in, he heard cautious footsteps as of some one approaching from the direction of the river.
The measured tread assured him that the footfalls were human, and his hold tightened mechanically upon the grip of the gun-stock. By this time he was thinking quite clearly, and he told himself that the militant precaution was doubtless unnecessary; that there was little chance that the approaching intruder—any intruder who would be attracted by the light of the camp-fire—would be unfriendly. Yet it was the part of prudence to be prepared.
After a moment or two he was able to note that the approaching footsteps were growing more cautious. At this he rolled over by imperceptible inchings to face toward the river, drawing the gun with him. It was useless to try to penetrate the black shadows of the background. The fire had died down to a mass of glowing embers, its bedtime replenishing of dried wood blazing up fitfully only now and then to illumine a slightly wider circle. Prime saw nothing, and, for a time after the footfalls ceased, heard nothing. But the next manifestation was startling enough. At a moment when he was beginning to wonder if his imagination had been playing tricks on him, he hearda curious ripping sound coming, this time, from behind the inverted canoe.
Silently he rose to his knees with the rifle held low. For shelter, in case of a shower, the provisions had been placed under the inverted birch-bark, and he decided instantly that the intruder was trying to steal them. Not wishing to alarm Lucetta, he got upon his feet and walked toward the canoe, meaning to put the man behind it between himself and the firelight.
The manœuvre was never completed. Before he had taken half a dozen steps a blinding flashlight was turned upon him from behind the canoe, and it stopped him as suddenly as if the dazzling radiance had been a volley from a machine-gun. But the stopping shock was only momentary. Dashing forward around the end of the canoe, he had a glimpse of a big-bodied man in a golf cap and sweater crashing his way through the undergrowth toward the river, and promptly gave chase.
"Grider!—Watson!" he called, but there was no reply. The intruder, as he ran, had the benefit of his flashlight; Prime could see the momentary gleams as the runnertook a diagonal course which would bring him out a hundred yards down-stream from a point directly opposite the camp-fire.
Prime collided with a tree, stumbled and fell, and sprang up to call again. The retreating footfalls were no longer audible, but now there was another cacophony of noise—the sputtering exhausts of a motor-boat—and Prime reached the river-bank in time to see the dark shape of the power-driven craft losing itself in the starlight in its swift rush down the river.
In the first flush of his rage at what figured as a second heartless desertion, Prime was strongly tempted to open fire on the retreating motor-boat and its occupant. This was purely a cave-man prompting, and before it could translate itself into action the opportunity was gone. When the motor-boat had disappeared, losing itself to sight and sound, the breathless pursuer went back to his blankets, swearing gloomily at the spiteful chance which had opened the door of misfortune by making him a college classmate of one Watson Grider.
Thenext morning Prime waited until after breakfast before telling Lucetta about the visit of the intruder, the postponement basing itself upon a very natural disinclination to re-align himself, even constructively, with such a brutal humorist as Watson Grider. Indeed, when he told the story, he omitted to mention the barbarian's name; would never have mentioned it if Lucetta had not pushed him into a corner.
"You say you saw the man; was it a stranger, or some one you knew?" she questioned.
"I couldn't be sure," Prime evaded. "The fire wasn't burning very brightly, and he had just blinded me with his flashlight."
The gray eyes were regarding him calmly.
"It is to be hoped, Cousin Donald, that you will never have to fib yourself out of a real difficulty. You prevaricate so clumsily, you know."
"I wasn't lying," he protested; "really, you know, I couldn't be sure."
"But you thought you recognized him."
"Yes, I did," he admitted doggedly. "I didn't mean to tell you, but I fancy it doesn't make any great difference now. It was Grider, of course."
"You are sure?"
"I have just said that I wasn't sure. I didn't see his face. But I saw a golf cap and a sweater, and Grider wears both upon any and all occasions; he has even been accused of sleeping in them."
"But why should he come here like that and then run away again?"
"He wanted to find out how his execrable joke was getting along, of course! I had a mind to fire at him after he got into the boat, and I wish now that I had. You didn't hear any of the noise?"
"Not a sound." They had taken the cooking utensils down to the river edge to wash them, and Lucetta scoured for a silent half minute on the skillet before she picked the one comforting grain of assurance out of the midnight adventure. "We ought tobe obliged to this outrageous friend of yours for one thing, anyway," she commented. "He has told us that there are no more rapids to be shot. If he could come up the river in a motor-boat, we can go down it safely in a canoe."
"That is so," said Prime; "I hadn't thought of that. I wonder if our patch is sticking all right. Suppose we go and see."
They went to look, and what they saw struck them both dumb. The clamped patch was still in place, but a glance at the upturned canoe bottom showed them what the midnight marauder had done and explained for Prime the cause of the ripping noise he had heard. For a distance fully one-third of its length the thin sheathing of the canoe had been cut as if with the slashing blow of a sharp knife.
Prime was the first to find speech, and what he said would have kindled a fire under wet wood. Then he remembered and made gritting amends. "I beg your pardon; I couldn't help it, Lucetta. I'm not taken that way very often, but I should have blown up like a rotten boiler if I couldn't have relievedthe pressure. Did you ever hear of such an infernally idiotic scoundrel in all your life? I wish to gracious I'd had the courage of my convictions and turned loose on him with the gun! He deserves to be shot!"
Lucetta was examining the damaged canoe bottom more closely. "But why?" she protested. "Why should he follow us up so vindictively, Donald? Surely it has passed all the limits of any kind of a joke by this time."
"Of a joke?—yes; I should say so! I hate to think it of him, Lucetta—I do for a fact. If I hadn't seen him I wouldn't believe it was Watson; but seeing is believing."
"Not always," was the reflective dissent. And then: "This is the work of a spiteful enemy, Donald; not that of any friend, however harebrained. It is the work of some one who has a particular object in keeping us from getting back to civilization."
"We have been over all that ground until it is worn out," Prime broke in impatiently."It is Grider; it can't be anybody else; and I wish I had potted him while I had the chance. But that is a back number now. The mischief is done and we must repair it if we can. Get your glue-pot ready and I'll go and hunt for some more of the sticky stuff."
Lucetta was laughing silently.
"We are so humanly inconsistent—both of us!" she commented. "Yesterday we were almost willing to be sorry because our woods idyll couldn't last forever; and now we are ready to draw and quarter Mr. Grider—or whoever did this—because it makes the idyll last a few days longer."
It took them the better part of the day to patch the knife-gash, and, though the other patch seemed to be holding satisfactorily, they were doubtful of the results in the more serious hurt. It was impossible to devise any clamp for the greater rent, but they did their best, overlaying the fresh patches with clean sheets of the bark and weighting the whole down with flat stones carried laboriously from the river brink.
That night Prime slept with one eye openand with both guns where he could lay his hands upon them quickly. Somewhile past midnight he got up and built a small fire beyond the canoe as another measure of safety, locking the stable carefully after the horse had been stolen. When he went back to his blankets he found Lucetta up and sitting under the turned-up flap of the shelter-tent.
"Did you hear anything?" she inquired.
He shook his head. "No; I thought I'd light up a little more so that we couldn't be stalked again as we were last night."
"You are losing too much sleep. Let me have one of the guns and I'll keep watch for a while."
"What could you do with a gun?" he demanded gloomily.
"I can at least make a noise and waken you if needful."
There was no sleep for either of them for a long time; but after a while Prime lost himself, and when he awoke it was daylight and Lucetta was cooking breakfast.
On this day they were fairly out of an occupation. With the stone weightings removed,the canoe patches seemed to be sticking bravely, but they still required to be daubed with another coating of the pitch, which must dry thoroughly before they could venture upon a relaunching. The small job done, they took turns sleeping through the forenoon, and after the midday meal Prime went fishing, taking care, however, not to go beyond calling distance from the glade.
When night came they carried the precious canoe to the exact centre of the clear space and built a circle of small fires all around it, at the imminent risk of burning it up or at least of melting the pitch from its seams. The afternoon had been cloudy and there were indications of a storm. Prime made the fastenings of the shelter-tent secure and stowed the provisions under the overturned birch-bark, leaving a space where he could crawl under himself if the storm should break. For a long time after supper they sat together beside the cooking-fire. The mosquitoes were worse than usual, and Prime had provided some rotting wood for a smudge, in the reek of which they wept in sympathetic companionship.
"Speaking of smoked meat," Prime grumbled, after they had exhausted all other topics, "that jerked stuff under the canoe hasn't any the best of us." Then, with a teasing switch to their rapidly disintegrating clothes: "How would you like to walk into your classroom in the girls' school just as you are?"
"Just about as well as you'd like to walk down Fifth Avenue under the same conditions," was the choking reply. "My! but that smoke is dreadful!"
"It is like the saw-off between any two evils: when you are enduring the one you think you'd rather endure the other. Let us hope and pray that this is the last night for us in this particular sheol, at least. I've heard and read a good bit about the insect pests of the northern woods, and I have always taken it with a grain of salt. That is another mistake I shall never make again."
"They were not bad on the St. Lawrence nor in Quebec," observed the other martyr.
The mention of Quebec started a new subject or, rather, revived an old one, and they fell to talking of their short experiencein the historic city. One thing leading to another, Prime went more specifically into his evening excursion with the athletic young fellow who had seemed so anxious to increase the dividends of the motion-picture houses and the cafés.
"He was a handsome fellow, and he didn't begin to have the face of a villain," he commented. "A good talker too. He had travelled—been everywhere. One of the pictures we saw was a 'Western,' and that brought on more talk. I remember he told me a lot about his own experience in the British Columbia mines. It was great stuff. He had been manager and general factotum for some rich old money-bags—if he wasn't lying to me and making it all up out of whole cloth."
"He didn't do anything to make you suspect that he might have designs upon you?"
"Not a thing in the world. He was as frank and open-hearted as a boy. There wasn't anything peculiar about him except his habit of looking at his watch every few minutes. I asked him once if I was keeping him from an appointment, and he laughedand said he wished that I were; wished that he were well enough acquainted in the city to be able to make appointments."
"Did he tell you his name?" queried the weeping listener.
"He did, and ever since we woke up and found ourselves back yonder on the lake shore I have been trying to recall it. It is gone completely. 'Bender' is the nearest I can come to it, and that isn't it."
"Would you know it if you should hear it?"
"I am sure I should. It was a queer name, and I remember thinking at the time that I would jot it down and use it for the name of a character in a story—simply because it was so delightfully odd."
"Tell me," she broke in quickly; "was this young man of yours fair, with blue eyes, and hair that reminded you a little of a hayfield?"
"That is the man!"
"How would 'Bandish' do for the name?" she asked.
"You've got it! That's what it was. How in the name of all that is wonderful did you know?"
"I was merely putting one and one together to make two," was the quiet rejoinder. "The young woman I was with that same night was Mrs. Bandish. She was the one whose careless sleeve-pin scratched my arm and put me to sleep."
"Then you knew them both?" Prime demanded.
"Only slightly. They claimed to be teachers from some little town in Indiana. I don't know where they joined our party, but I think it was before we took the St. Lawrence River boat. Anyway, it was somewhere in Canada. They were easy to get acquainted with. At first I didn't like the young woman any too well; there was something about her that gave me the idea that she was—well, that she was somehow too sophisticated. But that wore off. She was quick-witted and jolly, and both she and her husband were the life of the party coming down the big river."
"Do you suppose Grider bribed them to join the party and thus get you in tow?" Prime asked.
"No, I don't suppose anything of thekind. You are forgetting that Mr. Grider didn't even know of my existence at that time—if he does now," she added, after a moment's hesitation.
"Grider knew, and he knew that we were cousins," Prime insisted. "That is a guess, but you will see that it will turn out to be the right one. But even that doesn't explain why he should come up here in the woods and cut a hole in our canoe, confound him!"
"It doesn't explain a good many things which are much more mysterious than they were before," said Lucetta; and shortly after that she smoked her tent blue with a bit of smudge wood and disappeared for the night, leaving Prime to pull reflectively at a clumsy pipe which he had contrived to whittle out of a bit of birch wood during the day of waiting, to smoke and to hope that the threatening rain-storm would materialize and drown a few millions of the tormenting mosquitoes.