Mr. Langham was at the float to welcome the two Carolinians.
"You have," he complimented Colonel Meredith, "once more proved the ability to land on your feet in a soft spot. You will be more comfortable here, better fed, better laundered than anywhere else in the world."
As they strolled from the float to the office, Mr. Jonstone looked about him a little uneasily. Not one of the beautiful girls who had looked into his eyes from the page ofThe Four Seasonswas in sight, or, indeed, any girl, woman, or female of any sort whatever. He had led himself to expect a resort crowded with rustling and starchy boarders. He found himself, instead, in a primeval pine forest in which were sheltered many low, austere buildings of logs, above whose great chimneys stood vertical columns of pale smoke. It was not yet dusk, but the air among the long shadows had an icy quality and was heavily charged with the odor of balsam. It was difficult to believe the season summer, and Mr. Jonstonewas reminded of December evenings in the Carolinas.
"This is the office," said Mr. Langham, and he ushered them into the presence of a bright birch fire and Maud Darling. Each of the Carolinians drew a quick breath and bowed as if before royalty. Mr. Langham presented them to Miss Darling. She begged them to write their names in the guest book and to warm themselves at the fire.
"And then," said Sam Langham, "I'll shake them up a cocktail and show them their house."
"Are we to have a whole house to ourselves?" asked Colonel Meredith. He had not yet taken his eyes from Maud Darling's face.
"It's only two rooms: bath, parlor, and piazza," she explained.
"That last?" asked Mr. Jonstone.
"It's the same thing as a 'poach,'" explained Mr. Langham with a sly twinkle in his eyes.
"It's to sit on and enjoy the view from," added Maud.
"But I don't want to admire the view," complained Colonel Meredith. "I want to lounge about the office. It's the prerogative of every American citizen to lounge about the office of his hotel."
Colonel Meredith had yet to take his eyes from Maud Darling's face. And it was with protest written all over it that he at length followed his cousin and Mr. Langham into the open air.
The three were presently sampling a cocktail of the latter's shaking in the latter's snug little house, and speech was loosened in their mouths.
"Darling,père," explained Sam Langham, "went broke. He used to run this place as it is run now, with this difference: that in the old days he put up the money, while now it is the guests who pay. Two years ago the Miss Darling you just met was one of the greatest heiresses in America; now she keeps books and makes out bills."
"And are there truly five others equally lovely?" asked Colonel Meredith.
"Some people think that the oldest of the six is also the loveliest," said Sam Langham, loyal to the choice of his own heart. "But they are all very lovely."
To the Carolinians, warmed by Langham's cocktail, it seemed pitiful that six beautiful girls who had had so much should now have so little. And with a little encouragement they would have been moved to the expression of exaggeratedsentiments. It was Maud, however, and not the others, who had aroused these feelings in their breasts. The desire to benefit her by some secret action—and then to be found out—was very strong in them both.
Langham left them after a time and they began to dress for dinner. Usually they had a great deal to say to each other; often they disputed and were gorgeously insolent to each other about the most trifling things, but on the present occasion their one desire was to dress as rapidly as possible and to visit the office upon some pretext or other.
When Colonel Meredith from the engulfment of a starched shirt announced that he had several letters to write and wondered where one could buy postage-stamps, it afforded Bob Jonstone malicious satisfaction to inform him that the "little drawer in their writing-table contained not only plenty of twos but fives and a strip of special deliveries."
"All I have to think about," said he, "is my laundry. I suppose they can tell me at the office."
"They?" exclaimed Colonel Meredith.
As he spoke the collar button sprang like a slippery cherry-stone from between his thumband forefinger, fell in the exact middle of the room in a perfectly bare place, and disappeared. Up to this moment the cousins had remained on even terms in the race to be dressed first. But now Mr. Jonstone gained and, before the collar button was found, had given a parting "slick" to his hair and gone out.
It was now dark, and the woodland streets of The Camp were lighted by lanterns. Windows were bright-yellow rectangles. A wind had risen and the lake could be heard slapping against the rocky shore.
Maud Darling had left the office long enough to change from tailor-made tweeds to the simplest white muslin. She was adding up a column in a fat book. She looked golden in the firelight and the lamplight, and resembled some heavenly being but for the fact that, for the moment, she was puzzled to discover the sum of seven and five and was biting the end of her pencil. The divine muse of Inspiration lives in the "other" ends of pens and pencils. The world owes many of its masterpieces of literature and invention to reflective nibbling at these instruments, and if I were a teacher I should think twice before I told my pupils to take their pencils out of their mouths.
Mr. Jonstone knocked on the open door of the office.
"This is the office," said Miss Maud Darling; "you don't have to knock. Is anything not right?"
"Everything is absolutely perfect," bowed Mr. Jonstone. "But you are busy. I could come again. I only wanted to ask about sending some things to a laundry."
"You're not supposed to think about that," said Maud. "There is a clothes-bag in the big closet in your bedroom and my sister Eve does the rest."
"Oh, but I couldn't allow——"
"Not with her own hands, of course; she merely oversees the laundry and keeps it up to the mark. But if you like your things to be done in any special way you must see her and explain."
"In my home," said Jonstone, "my old mammy does all the washing and most everything else, and I wouldn't dare to find fault. She would follow me up-stairs and down scolding all the time if I did. You see, though she isn't a slave any more, she's never had any wages, and so she takes it out in privileges and prerogatives."
"No wages ever since the Civil War!" exclaimed Maud.
"We had to have servants," he explained, "and until the other day there was never any money to pay them with. We had nothing but the plantation and the family silver."
"And of course you couldn't part with that. In the North when we get hard up we sell anything we've got. But in the South you don't, and I've always admired that trait in you beyond measure."
"In that case," said Mr. Jonstone, turning a little pale, "it is my duty to tell you that the other day I parted with my silver in exchange for a large sum of money. I made up my mind that I had only one life to live and that I was sick of being poor."
Maud smiled.
"If you want to keep your ill-gotten gains," she said, "you ought never to have come to this place. Wasn't there some kind friend to tell you that our prices are absolutely prohibitive? We haven't gone into business for fun but with the intention of making money hand over fist. It's only fair to warn you."
She imagined that, at the outside, he might have received a couple of thousand dollars for his family silver, and it seemed wicked that he should be allowed to part with this little capital for food, lodging, and a little trout-fishing.
"My silver," he said, "turned out to be worth a lot of money, and I have put it all in trust for myself, so that my wife and children shall never want."
A flicker of disappointment appeared in Maud Darling's eyes.
"But I didn't know you were married," she said lamely.
"Oh, I'm not—yet!" he exclaimed joyfully. "But I mean to be."
"Engaged?" she asked.
"Hope to be—mean to be," he confessed.
And at this moment Colonel Melville Meredith came in out of the night. Having bowed very low to Miss Darling, he turned to his cousin.
"Did Langham find you?" he asked.
"No."
"Well, he's a-waiting at our house. I said I thought you'd be right back."
"Then we—" began Jonstone.
"Not we—you," said his cousin, malice in his eyes. "I want to ask Miss Darling some questions about telegrams and special messages by telephone."
Bob Jonstone withdrew himself with the utmost reluctance.
"We have a telephone that connects us withthe telegraph office at Carrytown," Maud began, but Colonel Meredith interrupted almost rudely.
"We engaged our rooms for ten days only," he said, "but I want to keep them for the rest of the summer. Please don't tell me that they are promised to some one else."
"But they are," said she; "I'm very sorry."
"Can't you possibly keep us?"
She shook her fine head less in negation than reflection.
"I don't see how," she said finally, "unless some one gives out at the last minute. There are just so many rooms and just so many applicants."
"How long," he asked, "would it take to build a little house for my cousin and me?"
"If we got all the carpenters from Carrytown," said Maud, "it could be done very quickly. But——"
"Now you are going to make some other objection!"
"I was only going to say that if you wanted to go camping for a few weeks, we could supply you with everything needful. We have first-rate tents for just that sort of thing."
"But we don't want to go camping. We want to stay here."
"Exactly. There is no reason why youshouldn't pitch your tent in the main street of this camp and live in it."
"That's just what we'll do," said Colonel Meredith, "and to-morrow we'll pick out the site for the tent—if you'll help us."
Early the next morning Colonel Meredith and his cousin Bob Jonstone presented themselves at the office dressed for walking. Butter would not have melted in their mouths.
"Can you come now and help us pick out a site for the tent?" asked the youthful colonel.
Maud was rather busy that morning, but she closed her ledger, selected a walking-stick, and smiled her willingness to aid them.
"It will seem more like real camping-out," said Mr. Jonstone, "if we don't pitch our tent right in the midst of things. Suppose we take a boat and row along the shores of the lake, keeping our eyes peeled."
Maud was not averse to going for a row with two handsome and agreeable young men. They selected a guide boat and insisted on helping her in and cautioning her about sitting in the middle. Maud had almost literally been brought up in a guide boat, but she only smiled discreetly. The cousins matched for places. As Maud sat in thestern with a paddle for steering, Colonel Meredith, who won the toss, elected to row stroke. Bob Jonstone climbed with gingerness and melancholy into the bow. Not only was he a long way from that beautiful girl, but Meredith's head and shoulders almost completely blanketed his view of her.
"We ought to row English style," he said.
"What is English style, and why ought we to row that way?"
"In the American shells," explained Jonstone, "the men sit in the middle. In the English shells each man sits as far from his rowlock as possible."
"Why?" asked Meredith, who understood his cousin's predicament perfectly.
"So's to get more leverage," explained Jonstone darkly.
"It's for Miss Darling to say," said Meredith. "Which style do you prefer, Miss Darling, English or American?"
"I think the American will be more comfortable for you both and safer for us all," said she.
"There!" exclaimed the man of war, "what did I tell you?"
"But—" continued Maud.
"I could have told you there would be a 'but,'" interrupted Jonstone triumphantly.
"But," repeated Maud, "I'm coxswain, and I want to see what every man in my boat is doing."
So they rowed English style.
"It's like a dinner-party," explained Maud to Colonel Meredith, who appeared slightly discomforted. "Don't you know how annoying it is when there's a tall centrepiece and you can't see who's across the table from you?"
"Even if you don't want to look at him when you have found out who he is," agreed Meredith. "Exactly."
They came to a bold headland of granite crowned with a half-dozen old pines that leaned waterward.
"That's rather a wonderful site, I think," said Maud.
"Where?" said the gentlemen, turning to look over their shoulders. Then, "It looks well enough from the water," said Jonstone, "but we ought not to choose wildly."
"Let us land," said Colonel Meredith, "and explore."
They landed and began at once to find reasons for pitching the tent on the promontory and reasons for not pitching it.
"The site is open and airy," said Jonstone.
"It is," said Colonel Meredith. "But, in case ofa southwest gale, our tent would be blown inside out."
A moment later, "How about drinking-water?" asked the experienced military man.
"I regret to say that I have just stepped into a likely spring," said Jonstone.
"We must sit down and wait till it clears."
When the spring once more bubbled clean and undefiled Mr. Jonstone scooped up two palmfuls of water and drank.
"Delicious!" he cried.
Colonel Meredith then sampled the spring and shook his head darkly.
"This spring has a main attribute of drinking-water," he said; "it is wet. Otherwise——"
"What's the matter with my spring?" demanded his cousin.
"Silica, my dear fellow—silica. And you know very well that silica to a man of your inherited tendencies spells gout."
Jonstone nodded gravely.
"I'm afraid that settles it." And he turned to Maud Darling. "I can keep clear of gout," he explained, "only just as long as I keep my system free from silica."
"Do you usually manage to?" asked Maud, very much puzzled.
"So far," he said, "I havealwaysmanaged to."
"Then you have never suffered from gout?"
"Never. But now, having drunk at this spring, I have reason to fear the worst. It will take at least a week to get that one drink out of my system."
And so they passed from the promontory with the pine-trees to a little cove with a sandy beach, from this to a wooded island not much bigger than a tennis-court. In every suggested site Jonstone found multitudinous charms and advantages, while Colonel Meredith, from the depths of his military experience, produced objections of the first water. For to be as long as possible in the company of that beautiful girl was the end which both sought.
Maud had gone upon the expedition in good faith, but when its true object dawned upon her she was not in the least displeased. The very obvious worship which the Carolinians had for her beauty was not so personal as to make her uncomfortable. It was rather the worship of two artists for art itself than for a particular masterpiece. Of the six beautiful Darlings Maud had had the least experience of young men. She was given to fits of shyness which passed with some as reserve, with others as a kind of common-senseand matter-of-fact way of looking at life. The triplets, young as they were, surpassed the other three in conquests and experience. And this was not because they were more lovely and more charming but because they had been a little spoiled by their father and brought into the limelight before their time. Furthermore, with the exception of Phyllis, perhaps, they were maidens of action to whom there was no recourse in books or reflection. Such accomplishments as drawing and music had not been forced upon them. They could not have made a living teaching school. But Lee and Gay certainly could have taught the young idea how to shoot, how to throw a fly, and how to come in out of the wet when no house was handy. As for Phyllis, she would have been as like them as one pea is like two others but for the fact that at the age of two she had succeeded in letting off a 45-90 rifle which some fool had left about loaded and had thereby frightened her early sporting promises to death. But it was only of weapons, squirming fish, boats, and thunder storms that she was shy. Young gentlemen had no terrors for her, and she preferred the stupidest of these to the cleverest of books.
Mary, Maud, and Eve had wasted a great part of their young lives upon education. They couldplay the piano pretty well (you couldn't tell which was playing); they sang charmingly; they knew French and German; they could spell English, and even speak it correctly, a power which they had sometimes found occasion to exercise when in the company of foreign diplomatists. The change in their case from girlhood to young womanhood had been sudden and prearranged: in each case a tremendous ball upon a given date. The triplets had never "come out."
If Lee or Gay had been the victim of the present conspiracy, the gentlemen from Carolina would have found their hands full and overflowing. They would have been teased and misconstrued within an inch of their lives; but Maud Darling was genuinely moved by the candor and chivalry of their combined attentions. There was a genuine joyousness in her heart, and she did not care whether they got her home in time for lunch or not. And it was only a strong sense of duty which caused her to point out the high position attained by the sun in the heavens.
With reluctance the trio gave up the hopeless search for a camp site and started for home upon a long diagonal across the lake. It was just then, as if a signal had been given, that the whole surface of the lake became ruffled as when a piece ofblue velvet is rubbed the wrong way, and a strong wind began to blow in Maud's face and upon the backs of the rowers.
Several hours of steady rowing had had its effect upon unaccustomed hands. It was now necessary to pull strongly, and blisters grew swiftly from small beginnings and burst in the palms of the Carolinians. Maud came to their rescue with her steering paddle, but the wind, bent upon having sport with them, sounded a higher note, and the guide boat no longer seemed quick to the least propulsion and light on the water, but as if blunt forward, high to the winds, and half full of stones. She did not run between strokes but came to dead stops, and sometimes, during strong gusts, actually appeared to lose ground.
The surface of the lake didn't as yet testify truly to the full strength of the wind. But soon the little waves grew taller, the intervals between them wider, and their crests began to be blown from them in white spray. The heavens darkened more and more, and to the northeast the sky-line was gradually blotted out as if by soft gray smoke.
"We're going to have rain," said Maud, "and we're going to have fog. So we'd better hurry a little."
"Hurry?" thought the Carolinians sadly. And they redoubled their efforts, with the result that they began to catch crabs.
"Some one ought to see us and send a launch," said Maud.
At that moment, as the wind flattens a field of wheat to the ground, the waves bent and lay down before a veritable blast of black rain. It would have taken more than human strength to hold the guide boat to her course. Maud paddled desperately for a quarter of a minute and gave up. The boat swung sharply on her keel, rocked dangerously, and, once more light and sentient, a creature of life, made off bounding before the gale.
"We are very sorry," said the Carolinians, "but the skin is all off our hands, and at the best we are indifferent boatmen."
"The point is this," said Maud: "Can you swim?"
"I can," said Colonel Meredith, "but I am extremely sorry to confess that my cousin's aquatic education has been neglected. Where he lives every pool contains crocodiles, leeches, snapping-turtles, and water-moccasins, and the incentive to bathing for pleasure is slight."
"Don't worry about me," said Mr. Jonstone. "I can cling to the boat until the millennium."
"We shan't upset—probably," said Maud. "It will be better if you two sit in the bottom of the boat. I'll try to steer and hold her steady. This isn't the first time I've been blown off shore and then on shore. I suppose I ought to apologize for the weather, but it really isn't my fault. Who would have thought this morning that we were in for a storm?"
"If only you don't mind," said Colonel Meredith. "It's allourfault. You probably didn't want to come. You just came to be friendly and kind, and now you are hungry and wet to the skin——"
"But," interrupted Bob Jonstone, "if only you will forget all that and think what pleasure we are having."
"I can't hear what you say," called Maud.
"I beg your pardon," shouted Mr. Jonstone. "I didn't quite catch that. What did Miss Darling say, Mel?"
"She said she wanted to talk to me and for you to shut up."
Mr. Jonstone made a playful but powerful swing at his cousin, and the guide boat, as if suddenly tired of her passengers, calmly upset and spilled them out.
A moment later the true gallantry of Mr. BobJonstone showed forth in glorious colors. Having risen to the surface and made good his hold upon the overturned boat, he proposed very humbly, as amends for causing the accident, to let go and drown.
"If you do," said Maud, excitement overcoming her sense of the ridiculous, "I'll never speak to you again."
Colonel Meredith opened his mouth to laugh and closed it a little hastily on about a pint of water.
The water was so rough, the weather so thick, and their point of view so very low down in the world that Maud and the Carolinians could neither see the shore from which they had departed nor that toward which they were slowly drifting. The surface water was warm, however, owing to a week of sunshine, and it was not necessary to drop one's legs into the icy stratum beneath.
It is curious that what the three complained of the most was the incessant, leaden rain. Their faces were colder than their bodies. They admitted that they had never been so wet in all their lives. Maud and Colonel Meredith, not content with the slow drifting, kicked vigorously; but Bob Jonstone had all he could do to cling to the guide boat and keep his head above water. His legs had a way of suddenly rising toward the surface and wrapping themselves half around the submerged boat. An effort was made to right the boat and bale her out. But Maud's water-soakedskirt and a sudden case of rattles on the part of Jonstone prevented the success of the manœuvre.
Half an hour passed.
"Personally," said Jonstone, "I've had about enough of this."
His clinging hands looked white and thin; the knuckles were beginning to turn blue. He had a drawn expression about the mouth, but his eyes were bright and resolute.
"I've always understood," said Colonel Meredith, "that girls suffer less than men from total submersion in cold water. I sincerely hope, Miss Darling, that this is so."
"Oh, I'm not suffering," said she; "not yet. My father used to let us go in sometimes when there was a skin of ice along shore. So please don't worry about me."
Mr. Jonstone's teeth began to chatter very steadily and loudly. And just then Maud raised herself a little, craned her neck, and had a glimpse of the shore—a long, half-submerged point, almost but not quite obliterated by the fog and the splashing rain.
"Land ho!" said she joyfully. "All's well. There's a big shallow off here; we'll be able to wade in a minute."
And, indeed, in less than a minute Bob Jonstone'sfeet found the hard sand bottom. And in a very short time three shipwrecked mariners had waded ashore and dragged the guide boat into a clump of bushes.
"And now what?" asked Colonel Meredith.
"And now," said Maud, "the luck has changed. Half a mile from here is a cave where we used to have picnics. There's an axe there, matches, and probably a tin of cigarettes, and possibly things to eat. It's all up-hill from here, and if you two follow me and keep up, you'll be warm before we get there."
Her wet clothes clung to her, and she went before them like some swift woodland goddess. Their spirits rose, and with them their voices, so that the deer and other animals of the neighboring woods were disturbed and annoyed in the shelters which they had chosen from the rain. Sometimes Maud ran; sometimes she merely moved swiftly; but now and then while the way was still among the dense waterside alders, she broke her way through with fine strength, reckless of scratches.
The following Carolinians began to worship the ground she trod and to stumble heavily upon it. They were not used to walking. It had always been their custom to go from place to place uponhorses. They panted aloud. They began to suspect themselves of heart trouble, and they had one heavy fall apiece.
Suddenly Maud came to a dead stop.
"I smell smoke," she said. "Some one is here before us. That's good luck, too."
She felt her way along the face of a great bowlder and was seen to enter the narrow mouth of a cave.
"Who's here?" she called cheerfully.
The passageway into the cave twisted like the letter S so that you came suddenly upon the main cavity. This—a space as large as a ball-room—had a smooth floor of sand, broken by one or two ridges of granite. At the farther end burned a bright fire, most of whose smoke after slow, aimless drifting was strongly sucked upward through a hole in the roof. Closely gathered about this fire were four men, who looked like rather dissolute specimens of the Adirondack guide, and a young woman with an old face. Maud's quick eyes noted two rusty Winchester rifles, a leather mail-bag, and the depressing fact that the men had not shaved for many days.
It is always awkward to enter your own private cave and find it occupied by strangers.
"You mustn't mind," said Maud, smiling uponthem, "if we share the fire. It's really our cave and our fire-wood."
"Sorry, miss," said one of the men gruffly, "but when it comes on to rain like this a man makes bold of any shelter that offers."
"Of course," said Maud. "I'm glad you did. We'll just dry ourselves and go."
She seated herself with a Carolinian on either side, and their clothes began to send up clouds of steam.
The young woman with the old face, having devoured Maud with hungry, sad eyes, spoke in a shy, colorless voice.
"It would be better, miss, if you was to let the boys go outside. I could lend you my blanket while your clothes dried."
"That's very good of you," said Maud, "but I'm very warm and comfortable and drying out nicely."
One of the men rose, grinned awkwardly, and said:
"I'll just have a look at the weather." With affected carelessness he caught up one of the Winchesters and passed from sight toward the entrance of the cave. This manœuvre seemed to have a cheering effect upon the other three.
"What do you find to shoot at this time ofyear?" asked Maud, and she smiled with great innocence.
"The game-laws," said the man who had spoken first, "weren't written for poor men."
"Don't tell me," exclaimed Maud, "that you've got a couple of partridges or even venison just waiting to be cooked and eaten!"
"No such luck," said the man.
Neither of the Carolinians had spoken. They steamed pleasantly and appeared to be looking for pictures in the hot embers. Their eyes seemed to have sunk deeper into their skulls. Men who were familiar with them would have known that they were very angry about something and as dangerous as a couple of rattlesnakes. After a long while they exchanged a few words in low voices and a strange tongue. It was the dialect of the Sea Island negroes—the purest African grafted on English so pure that nobody speaks it nowadays.
"What say?" asked one of the strangers roughly.
Colonel Meredith turned his eyes slowly upon the speaker.
"I remarked to my cousin," said he icily, "that in our part of the world even the lowest convict knows enough to rise to his feet when alady enters the room and to apologize for being alive."
"In the North Woods," said the man sulkily, "no one stands on ceremony. If you don't like our manners, Mr. Baltimore Oriole, you can lump 'em, see?"
"I see," said Colonel Meredith quietly, "that that leather mail-bag over there belongs to the United States Government. And I have a strong suspicion, my man, that you and your allies were concerned in the late hold-up perpetrated on the Montreal express. And I shall certainly make it my business to report you as suspicious characters to the proper authorities."
"That'll be too easy," said the man. "And suppose we was what you think, what would we be doing in the meantime? I ask youwhat?"
Mr. Jonstone interrupted in a soft voice.
"Oh, quit blustering and threatening," he said.
"Say," said a man who had not yet spoken, "do you two sprigs of jasmine ever patronize the 'movies'? And, if so, did you ever look your fill on a film called 'Held for Ransom'? You folks has a look of being kind o' well to do, and it looks to me as if you'd have to pay for it."
"Why quarrel with them?" said Maud, with gravity and displeasure in her voice, but no fear."Things are bad enough as they are. I saw that the minute we came in. Just one minute too late, it seems."
"That's horse-sense," admitted one of the men. "And when this rain holds up, one of us will take a message to your folks saying as how you are stopping at an expensive hotel and haven't got money enough to pay your bill."
"And that," said Colonel Meredith, "will only leave three of you to guard us. Once," he turned to Maud, "I spent six hours in a Turkish prison."
"What happened?" she asked.
"I didn't like it," he said, "and left."
"This ain't Turkey, young feller, and we ain't Turks. If you don't like the cave you can lump it, but you can't leave."
"We don't intend to leave till it stops raining," put in Mr. Jonstone sweetly.
"Miss Darling," said Colonel Meredith, "you don't feel chilled, do you? You mustn't take this adventure seriously. These people are desperate characters, but they haven't the mental force to be dangerous. It will be the greatest pleasure in the world both to my cousin and myself to see that no harm befalls you." He turned once more to the unshaven men about the fire.
"Have you got anything worth while in thatmail-bag?" he asked. "I read that the safe in the Montreal express only contained a few hundred dollars. Hardly worth risking prison for—was it?"
"We'll have enough to risk prison for before we get through with you."
"You might if you managed well, because I am a rich man. But you are sure to bungle."
He turned to the woman and asked with great kindness:
"Is it their first crime?"
"Yes, sir," she said. "Mr.——"
"Shut up!" growled one of her companions.
"A gentleman from New York turned us out of the woods so's he could have them all to himself and after we'd spent all our money on lawyers. So my husband and the boys allowed they had about enough of the law. And so they held up the express, but it was more because they were mad clear through than because they are bad, and now it's too late, and—and——"
Here she began to cry.
"It's never too late to mend," said Maud.
"Have you spent any of the money they took?" asked Colonel Meredith.
"No, sir; we haven't had a chance. We've got every dime of it."
"Did you own the land you were driven off?"
"No, sir, but we'd always lived on it, and it did seem as if we ought to be left in peace——"
"To shoot out of season, to burn other people's wood, trap their fish, and show your teeth at them when they came to take what belonged to them? I congratulate you. You are American to the backbone. And now you propose to take my money away from me."
Colonel Meredith turned to his cousin, after excusing himself to Maud, and they conversed for some time in their strange Sea Island dialect.
"Can that gibberish," said one of the train robbers suddenly. "I'm sick of it."
"We shan't trouble you with it again, as we've already decided what to do."
The robber laughed mockingly.
"In view of your extreme youth," said Colonel Meredith sweetly, "in view of the fact that you are also young in crime and that one member of your party is a woman, we have decided to help you along the road to reform. In my State there is considerable lawlessness; from this has evolved the useful custom of going heeled."
He spoke, and a blue automatic flashed cruelly in his white hand. His action was as sudden and unexpected as the striking of a rattlesnake.
"All hands up," he commanded.
There was a long silence.
"You've got us," said the youngest of the robbers sheepishly. "How about the man on guard with a Winchester?"
"My cousin Mr. Jonstone will bring him in to join the conference. And, meanwhile, I shall have to ask the ladies to look the other way while my cousin changes clothes with one of you gentlemen."
Of the three villains, Jonstone selected the youngest and the tidiest, and with mutual reluctance, suspicion, and startled glances toward where the ladies sat with averted faces, they changed clothes.
A broad felt hat, several sizes too big for him, added the touch of completion to the Carolinian's transformation. He took the spare Winchester and, without a word, walked quietly toward the mouth of the cave and was lost to sight.
Maud did not breathe freely until he had returned, unhurt, carrying both Winchesters and driving an exceedingly sheepish backwoodsman before him.
He expressed the wish to resume his own clothes. This done, he and his cousin broke into good-natured, boyish laughter.
The oldest and most sheepish of the backwoods-men kept repeating, "Who would 'a' thought he'd have a pistol on him!" and seemed to find a world of comfort in the thought.
"What are you going to do with them?" Maud asked almost in a whisper. "I think I feel a little sorry for them."
"Bob!" exclaimed Colonel Meredith.
"What?"
"Shefeels a little sorry for them. Don't you?"
"Yes,sir!" replied Mr. Jonstone fervently.
Colonel Meredith addressed himself to the young woman with the old face.
"Do you believe in fairies?" he asked.
She only looked pathetic and confused.
"Miss Darling, here," he went on, "is a fairy. She left her wand at home, but if she wants to she can make people's wishes come true. Now suppose you and your friends talk things over and decide upon some sensible wishes to have granted. Of course, it's no use wishing you hadn't robbed a train; but you could wish that the money would be returned, and that the police could be induced to stop looking for you, and that some one could come along and offer you an honest way of making a living. So you talk it over a while and then tell us what you'd like."
"Aren't you going to give us up?" asked one of the men.
"Not if you've any sense at all."
"Then I guess there's no use us talking things over. And if the young lady is a fairy, we'd be obliged if she'd get busy along the lines you've just laid down."
All eyes were turned on Maud. And she looked appealingly from Colonel Meredith to Mr. Jonstone and back again.
"What ought I to say? What ought I to promise?Canthe money be returned? Can the police be called off? And if I only had some work to give them, but over at The Camp——"
"Every good fairy," said Colonel Meredith, "has two helpers to whom all things are possible."
"Truly?"
The Carolinians sprang to their feet, clicked their heels together into the first position of dancing, laid their right hands over their hearts, and bowed very low.
"Then," said Maud laughing, "I should like the money to be returned."
"I will attend to that," said Colonel Meredith.
"And the police to be called off."
Again the soldier assumed responsibility.
"But who," she asked, "will find work for them?"
"I will," said Mr. Jonstone. "They shall build the house for my cousin and me to live in. You can build a house, can't you? A log house?"
"But where will you build it?" asked Maud. "You found fault with all the best sites on the lake."
"The very first site we visited suited us to perfection."
"But you said the spring contained cyanide or something."
"We were talking through our hats."
"But why——"
The Carolinians gazed at her with a kind of beseeching ardor, until she understood that they had only found fault with one promising building site after another in order that they might pass the longest time possible in her company.
And she returned their glance with one in which there was some feeling stronger than mere amusement.
Concerning information, Mark Twain wrote that it appeared to stew out of him naturally, like the precious ottar of roses out of the otter. With the narrator of this episodical history, however, things are very different. And just how the good fairy, Maud Darling, was enabled to keep her promises to the outlaws seems to him of no great moment. But the moneywasreturned to the express company; the policewerecalled off; and the four robbers, with the woman to cook for them, went to work at building a log house on the point of pines to be occupied in the near future by the Carolinians.
They were not sorry to have been turned from a life of sin. It is only when a life of sin is gilded, padded, and pleasant that people hate to turn from it. When virtue entails being rained on, starved, and hunted, it isn't a very pleasant way of life, either.
The face of the young female bandit lost its look of premature old age. She went about her work singing, and the humming of the kettle washer accompaniment. The four men looked the other men of the camp in the face and showed how to lay trees by the heels in record time. To their well-swung and even better-sharpened axes even the stems of oaks were as wax candles. It became quite "the thing" for guests at The Camp to go out to the point and admire the axe-work and all the processes of frontier house-building.
When people speak of "love in a cottage," there rises nearly always, in my mind, the memory of a log house that a friend of mine and I came across by the headwaters of a great river in Canada.
It stood—the axe marks crisp, white, and blistered with pitch—upon the brink of a swirling brown pool full of grilse. The logs of which it was built had been dragged from a distance, so that in the immediate neighborhood of the cabin was no desolation of dead tree-tops and dying stumps. Everything was wonderfully neat, new, and in order. About the pool and the cabin the maples had turned yellow and vermilion. And above was the peaceful pale blue of an Indian-summer sky.
We opened the door, held by a simple latch, and found ourselves in the pleasantest of rooms, just twenty feet by fifteen. The walls and the floor had been much whitened and smoothed bythe axe. The place smelt vaguely of pitch and strongly of balsam. There was a fireplace—the fire all laid, a bunk to lie on, a chair to sit on, a table to write on, a broom to sweep with. And neatly set upon clean shelves were various jams in glass, and meats, biscuits, and soups in tins. There was also a writing (on birch bark) over the shelves, which read: "Help yourself."
We took down the shutters from the windows and let in floods of autumn sun. Then we lighted the fire, and ate crackers and jam.
It hurt a little to learn at the mouth of our guide that the cabin belonged to a somewhat notorious and decidedly crotchety New York financier who controlled the salmon-fishing in those waters. I had pictured it as built for a pair of eminently sensible and supernaturally romantic honeymooners or for a poet. And I wanted to carry away that impression. For in such a place love or inspiration must have lasted just as long as the crackers and jam. And there is no more to be said of a palace.
One day Mary Darling and Sam Langham visited the new cabin. And Sam said: "If one of the happy pair happened to know something of cooking, what a place for a honeymoon!"
Shortly afterward, Phyllis and Herring camethat way, and Herring said: "If I was in love, and knew how to use an axe, I'd build just such a house for the girl I love and make her live in it. I believe I will, anyway."
"Believe what?" asked Phyllis demurely. "Believe you will make her live in it?"
"Yes," he said darkly—"no matter who she is and no matter how afraid of the mice and spiders with which such places ultimately become infested."
Lee and Renier visited the cabin, also. They remarked only that it had a wonderfully smooth floor, and proceeded at once thereon, Lee whistling exquisitely and with much spirit, to dance a maxixe, which was greatly admired by the ex-outlaws.
Maud came often with the Carolinians, and as for Eve, she came once or twice all by herself.
Jealousy is a horrid passion. It had never occurred to Eve Darling that she was or ever could be jealous of anybody. And she wasn't—exactly. But seeing her sisters always cavaliered by attractive men and slipping casually into thrilling and even dangerous adventures with them disturbed the depths of her equanimity. It was delightful, of course, to be made much of by Arthur and to go upon excursions with himas of old. But something was wanting. Arthur's idea of a pleasant day in the woods was to sit for hours by a pool and attempt to classify the croaks of frogs, or to lie upon his back in the sun and think about the girl in far-off China whom he loved so hopelessly.
Thanks to her excellent subordinate, and to her own administrative ability, Laundry House made fewer and fewer encroachments upon Eve's leisure. And often she found that time was hanging upon her hands with great heaviness. Memory reminded her that things had not always been thus; for there are men in this world who think that she was the most beautiful of all the Darlings.
It was curious that of all the men who had come to The Camp, Mr. Bob Jonstone had the most attraction for her. They had not spoken half a dozen times, and it was quite obvious that his mind, if not his heart, was wholly occupied with Maud. Wherever you saw Maud, you could be pretty sure that the Carolinians, hunting in a couple, were not far off. Of the two, Colonel Meredith was the more brilliant, the more showy, and the better-looking. Added to his good breeding and lazy, pleasant voice were certain Yankee qualities—a total lack of gullibility, acertain trace of mockery, even upon serious subjects. Mr. Jonstone, on the other hand, was a perfect lamb of earnestness and sincerity. If he heard of an injustice his eyes flamed, or if he listened to the recital of some pathetic happening they misted over. Once beyond the direct influence of his cousin there was neither mischief in him nor devilment. It was for this reason, and in this knowledge, that he had put his newly acquired moneys in trust for himself.
In the little house by the lake where the cousins still slept, conversation seldom flagged before one or two o'clock in the morning. Having said good-night to each other at about eleven, one or the other was pretty sure to let out some new discovery about the Darlings in general and Maud Darling in particular, and then all desire for sleep vanished and their real cousinly confidences began.
But these confidences had their limits, for neither confessed to being sentimentally interested in the young lady, whereas, within limits, they both were. And each enjoyed the satisfaction of believing (quite erroneously) that he deceived the other. I do not wish to convey the impression that they were actually in love with her.
When you are really in love, you are also inlove before breakfast. That is the final test. And when love begins to die, that is the time when its weakening pulse is first to be concerned. What honest man has not been mad about some pretty girl (in a crescendo of madness) from tea time till sleep time and waked in the morning with no thought but for toast and coffee the soonest possible? and gone about the business of the morning and early afternoon almost heart-whole and fancy-free, and relapsed once more into madness with the lengthening of the shadows? A man who proposes marriage to a girl until he has been in love with her for twenty-four consecutive hours is a light fellow who ought to be kicked out of the house by her papa. As for the girl, let her be sure that he is bread and meat to her, comfort and rest, demigod and man, wholly necessary and not to be duplicated in this world, before she even says that she will think about it.
In the early morning there would arise in the house of the Carolinians the sounds of whistling, of singing, laughter, scuffling, and running water. So that a girl who really wanted either of them must, in listening, have despaired.
As for Maud Darling, she was disgusted with herself—theoretically. But practically she was having the time of her life. In theory, she feltthat no self-respecting girl ought to be unable to decide which of the two young men she liked the better. In practice, she found a constant pondering of this delicate question to be delightful. It was very comfortable to know that the moment she was free to play there were two pleasant companions ready and waiting.
Sentiment and gayety attended their goings and comings. The Carolinians, fortified by each other's presence, were veritable Raleighs of extravagant devotion. In engineering, for instance, so that Maud should not have to step in a damp place, there were displayed enough gallantry and efficiency to have saved her from an onslaught of tigers. If the trio climbed a mountain, Maud gave herself up to the heart-warming delight of being helped when help was not in the least necessary. In short, she behaved as any natural young woman would, and should. She flirted outrageously. But in the depths of her heart a genuine friendship for the Carolinians was conceived and grew in breadth and strength. What if they did out-gallant gallantry?
One Sunday, Eve, from her window—she was rather a lazy girl that Sunday—witnessed the following departures from the camp. Sam Langham and Mary in a guide boat, with fishing-tackle and an immense hamper which looked like lunch. Herring and Phyllis could be seen hoisting the sails on the knockabout. Herring had never sailed a boat and was prepared to master that simple art at once. Lee and Renier were girt for the mountain. Renier appeared to have a Flobert rifle in semihiding under his coat, and it was to be feared that if he saw a partridge, he would open fire on it, close season though it was. He and Lee would justify this illegal act by cooking the bird for their lunch. Gay commandeered theStreakand departed at high speed toward Carrytown. She had in one hand a sheet of blue-striped paper, folded. It resembled a cablegram. And Eve thought that it must be of a very private nature, or else Gay would have telephoned it to the Western Union office, instead of carrying it by hand. The next to depart from the campwas Arthur. He moved dreamily in a northwesterly direction, accompanied by Uncas, the chipmunk, and Wow, the dog. Other guests made departures.
All of which Eve, half dressed and looking lazily from her window, lazily noted, remarking that for her Sunday was a day of rest and that she thanked Heaven for it. And she did not feel any differently until Maud and the Carolinians walked out on the float and began to pack a guide boat for the day.
Then her lazy, complacent feelings departed, and were succeeded by a sudden, wide-awake surge of self-pity. She felt like Cinderella. Nobody had asked her to go anywhere or do anything, and nobody had even thought of doing so. When she was dead they would gather round her coffin and remember that they hadn't asked her to go anywhere or do anything, and they would be very sorry and ashamed and they would say what a nice girl she had been, and how she had always tried to give everybody a good time.
Between laughter and tears and mortification, Eve finished dressing, set her lovely jaw, and went out into the delicious, cool calm of the mountain morning. She could still hear the voices of many of the departing ones; and therattling and creaking of the knockabout's blocks and rigging. She heard Herring say to Phyllis: "I think it would be better if I could make the boom go out on this side, but I can't." Phyllis's answer was a cool, contented laugh. It was as if she said: "Hang the boom!We'rehere!"
Have you ever had the feeling that you would like to board a swift boat, head for the open sea, and never come back? Or that you could plunge into some boundless, trackless forest and keep straight on until you were lost, and died (beautifully and painlessly), and were covered with beautiful leaves by little birds?
Eve enjoyed (and suffered from) a hint of this latter feeling. She ate a light breakfast (it would be better not to begin starving till she was actually lost in the boundless, trackless forest), selected a light, spiked climbing-stick with a crooked handle, headed for one of the northeasterly mountains, and was soon deep in the shade of the pines and hemlocks.
After a few miles, the trail that she followed split and scattered in many directions, like the end of an unravelled rope. She followed an old lumber road for a long way, turned into another that crossed it at an angle of forty-five degrees, took no account of the sun's position in the heavensor of the marked sides of trees. If she came to a high place from which there was a view, she did not look at it. She just kept going—this way and that, up and down. In short, she made a conscious, anxious effort to lose herself. The easterly mountain toward which she had first headed kept bobbing up straight ahead. And always there was the knowledge in the back of her head of the exact location of The Camp, and of all the other landmarks, familiar to her since early youth.
"Drag it!" she said, at length, her eyes on the mountain. "I'll climb the old thing, put melancholy aside, and call this a good, if unaccompanied, Sunday."
The morning coolness had departed. It was one of those hot, breathless, mountain forenoons that kill the appetite and are usually followed, toward the late afternoon, by violent electrical disturbances.
Eve was not as fit as she had supposed, or as she thought. As a matter of fact, she was setting too fast a pace, considering the weather and the angle of the mountain slope; and she was as wet as if she had played several hard sets of tennis with a partner who stood in one corner of the court and let her do all the running.
As she climbed, reproaching her wind for being so short, she remembered that the hollow tip of this particular northeastern mountain was filled with a deep pool of water. Nobody had ever called it a lake. The map called it a pond; but it wasn't even that—it was a pool. Springs fed it just fast enough to make up for the evaporation. It had no outlet. It was shaped like a fat letter O. At one end was a little beach of white sand. Indeed, the bottom of the pool was all firm, smooth, and clean, and the whole charming little body of water was surrounded by thick groves of dwarf mountain trees and bushes. Not content with being a perfect replica, in miniature, of a full-grown Adirondack lake, this pool had in its midst an island, a dozen feet in diameter, densely shrubbed and shaded by one diminutive Japanesque pine.
When Eve came to the pool, hot, tired, and rather bothered at the thought of the long walk back to camp, she had but the vaguest idea of just why the Lord had placed such a pool on top of a mountain, impelled her to climb that mountain, and made the day so piping hot.
Eve stood a little on the sand beach. She felt hotter and hotter, and the pool looked cooler and cooler. Presently, a heavenly smile of solution brightened her flushed, warm face, and she withdrewinto a shady clump of bushes. From this there came first the exclamation "Drag it!" then a sound of some sort of a string being sharply broken in two, and then there came from the clump of bushes Eve herself, looking for all the world like a slice of the silver moon.
And as you may have seen the silver moon slip slowly into the sea, so Eve vanished slowly into the pool—all but her shapely little round head, with its crisp bright-brown hair and its lovely face, happy now, exhilarated, and eager as are the faces of adventurers.
And Eve thought if one didn't have to eat, if one didn't end by being cold, if one could make time stand still—she would choose to be always and forever a slice of the silver moon, lolling in a mountain pool.
She had the kind of hair that wets to perfection. But it was not the sort of permanent wave which lasts six months or so, costs twenty-five dollars, and is inculcated by hours of alternate baking and shampooing. Eve had always had a permanent wave. She feared neither fog nor rain, nor water in any form of application. And so it was that, now and then, as she lolled about the pool, she disappeared from one fortunate square yard of surface and reappeared in another.
Half an hour had passed, when suddenly the mountain stillness was broken by men's voices.
Eve was at the opposite side of the pool from where she had left her clothes. Between her and the approaching voices was the little island. She landed hastily upon this and hid herself among the bushes.
Three gross, fat men and one long, lean man, with a face like leather and an Adam's apple that bobbed like a fisherman's float, came down to the beach, sweating terribly, and cast thereon knapsacks, picnic baskets, hatchets, fishing-tackle, and all the complicated paraphernalia of amateurs about to cook their own lunch in the woods.
All but one had loud, coarse, carrying voices, and they all appeared to belong to the ruling class. They appeared, in short, to have neither education nor refinement nor charm nor anything to commend them as leaders or examples. Eve wondered how it was possible for them to find pleasure even in each other's company. They quarrelled, wrangled, found fault, abused each other, or suddenly forgot their differences, gathering about the fattest of the fat men and listening, almost reverently, while he told a story. When he had finished, they would throw their heads far backand scream with laughter. He must have told wonderfully funny stories; but his voice was no more than a husky whisper, so that Eve could not make head or tail of them.
After a while the whispering fat man produced from one of the baskets four little glasses and a fat dark bottle. And shortly after there was less wrangling and more laughter.
The thin man with the leathery face and the bobbing Adam's apple put a fishing-rod together, tied a couple of gaudy flies to his leader, and began to cast most unskilfully from the shores of the pool, moving along slowly from time to time.
The fat men, occasionally calling to ask if he had caught anything, busied themselves with preparations for lunch. One of them made tremendous chopping sounds in the wood and furnished from time to time incommensurate supplies of fire-wood. Smoke arose and a kettle was slung.
Meanwhile Eve, cowering among the bushes, for all the world like her famous ancestress when the angel came to the garden, did not quite know what to do. She had only to lift her voice and explain, and the men would go away for a time. She felt sure of that. She had been brought upto believe in the exquisite chivalry of the plain American man.
But there was something about the four which repelled her, which stuck in her throat. She did not wish to be under any sort of obligation to any of them. And so she kept mousy-quiet, and turned over in her mind an immense number of worthless stratagems and expedients.
Have you ever tried to lie on the lawn under a tree and read for an hour or two—incased in all your buffer of clothes? Try it some time—without the buffers. Try it in the buff. And then imagine how comfortable Eve was on the island. Imagine how soft it felt to her elbows, for instance. And imagine to yourself, too, that it was not an uninhabited island—but one upon which an immense gray spider had made a home and raised a family.
From time to time the inept caster of flies returned to the camp-fire, always in answer to a boisterous summons from his friends. And after each visit, his leathery face became redder and his casting more absurd.
Finally his flies caught in a tree, his rod broke, and he abandoned the gentle art of angling for that time and place. Meanwhile steam ran from the kettle and mingled with the smoke of thefire. The sound of voices was incessant. Ten minutes later the gentlemen were served.
Midway of the meal, some of which was burnt black and some of which was quite raw, there was produced a thermos bottle as big as the leg of a rubber boot. And a moment later, icy-cold champagne was frothing and bubbling in tumblers.
In that high air, upon a thick foundation of raw whiskey, the brilliant wine of France had soon built a triumphant edifice, so that Eve, cold now, miserable, and frightened, felt that the time for an appeal to chivalry was long since past.
Far from their wives and constituents, the four politicians were obviously not going to stop short of complete drunkenness. Indeed, it was an opportunity hardly to be missed. For where else in the woods could nature be more exquisite, dignified, and inspiring?
It got so that Eve could no longer bear to watch them or to listen to them. Pink with shame, fury, hatred, and fear, she stuffed her fingers in her ears and hid her face.
Thus lying, there came to her after quite a long interval, dimly, a shout and a howl of laughter with an entirely new intonation. She looked up then and saw the thin man, waist-deep in thebushes, just where she had left her clothes, making faces of beastly mystery at his companions, beckoning to them and urging them to come look. They went to him, presently, staggering and evil.
And then they scattered and began to hunt for her.