Out of the Primitive Part 2

Though puzzled and a trifle discomposed, Lord James quietly seated himself beside the girl, and signing the men to give way, took the tiller.

"My dear Miss Leslie," he murmured, "if you but knew my delight over having found both you and Tom safe and well!"

"Then you really know him?" she replied. "Yes, to be sure; he called you by your first name. Wait! I remember now. One day soon after we were cast ash.o.r.e--the second day, when we were thinking how to get fire, to drive away the leopard--"

"Leopard? I say! So that's where you got this odd gown?"

"No--the mother leopard and the cubs. I was going to say, Tom remarked that James Scarbridge had been his chum."

"Had been? He meant _is!_"

"Then it's true! Oh, isn't it strange and--and splendid? You know, I did not connect the remark with you, Lord James. He had told me to try to think how we were to find food for the next meal. His reference to you was made quite casually in his talk with Winthrope."

"Winthrope!" exclaimed Lord James. "Then he, too, reached sh.o.r.e? Yet if so--"

The girl put her hand before her eyes, as if to shut out some terrible sight. Her voice sank to a whisper: "He--he was killed in the second cyclone--a few days ago."

"Ah!" muttered the young earl. After a pause, he asked in a tone of profound sympathy, "And the others--Lady Bayrose?"

"Don't ask! don't ask!" she cried, shuddering and trembling.

But quickly she regained her composure and looked up at him with a calm unwavering gaze that told him how much she had undergone and the strength of character she had gained during the fearful weeks that she had been marooned on this savage and desolate coast.

"How foolish of me to give way!" she reproached herself. "It is what you might have expected of me before--before I had been through all this, with his example to uplift me out of my helplessness and inefficiency. Believe me, Lord Avondale, I am a very different young woman from the shallow, frivolous girl you knew during those days on the Mediterranean."

"Shallow! frivolous!" he protested. "Anything but that, Miss Genevieve!

You must have known how vastly different were my--er--impressions. If Lady Bayrose hadn't so suddenly shunted you off at Aden to the Cape boat--Took me quite by surprise, I a.s.sure you. Had you kept on to India, I had hoped to--er--"

She gave him a glance that checked his fast-mounting ardor.

"I--I beg pardon!" he apologized. "This of course is hardly the time--About the others, if I may ask--that is, if it's not too painful for you. I infer that Lady Bayrose--that she did not--reach the sh.o.r.e."

The girl's thorn-scarred, sun-blistered hands clasped together almost convulsively. But she met his look of concern with unflinching braveness.

"Poor dear Lady Bayrose!" she murmured. "They had put her and the maids into one of the boats--there at the first, when the ship crashed on the reef. They ran back to fetch me, but before they could rush me across, a wave more terrible than all the others swept the ship. It tore loose the boat and whirled them away, over and over!"

"Gad!" he exclaimed.

"It also carried away the captain and most of the crew. Between the breakers, Winthrope and Tom and I were flung into the one remaining boat. Winthrope cut the rope before the sailors could follow, and then--then the steamer slipped back off the reef and went down."

"I say! Only the three of you left! The boat brought you safe ash.o.r.e?"

"No, we were overturned in the breakers, but were washed up--flung up--how, I cannot tell. The wind was frightful. It must have blown us out of the surf and along with the water that was being driven up and over into the lagoon. The first I knew, I was behind a little knoll with Winthrope. Tom was near--in a pool. He--he crawled out. It was nearly dark. We were all so beaten and exhausted that we slept until morning. When we awoke, there was no sign of--of any one else, or of the boat--nothing; only the top of the highest mast sticking up above the water, out beside the reef. Tom swam out to it; but he couldn't get anything--even he couldn't."

"Swam out, you say? These waters swarm with sharks. They're keen to nip a swimmer!"

The girl's eyes flashed. "Do you believe he'd fear them?--that he'd fear anything?"

"Not he! I fancy I ought to know, if any one. Knocked about with him, half 'round the world. I dare say he's told you."

"Would it be like him to claim the credit of your friendship? No!

Before, on the steamer, we had mistaken him to be--to be what he appears to strangers--rough, almost uncouth. Yet even that frightful morning--it was among the swamps, ten miles or more up the coast. He carried us safe out of them, me nearly all the way--out of the bog and water, safe to the palms; and he as much tortured with thirst as were we!"

"Fancy! No joke about that--thirst!"

"Yet it was only the beginning of what he did for us. Starvation and wild beasts and snakes and the fever--he saved us from all. Yet he had nothing to begin with--no tools or weapons, only his burning gla.s.s. Can you wonder that I--that I--"

She stopped and looked down, the color mounting swiftly under the dark coat of tan that covered the exquisite complexion he remembered so pleasantly.

"My word!" he remonstrated, amazed and disquieted. "Surely not that!

It's--it's impossible! It can't be possible!"

"Do you think so?" she whispered. "If you but knew the half--the tenth--of what he has done!"

The rusty side of the tramp loomed up above them. The boat crew flung up their oars, and Lord James steered in alongside, under the sling that was being lowered for the rescued lady. She pointed up at it, and met the reproachful, half-dazed glance of her companion with a look of compa.s.sionate regret for his disappointment. Yet she made no effort to conceal the love for his friend and rival that shone with tender radiance from her candid eyes.

"You should know him--his true, his real self!" she said. "Hasten back.

Do not delay to come aboard with me. Hasten ash.o.r.e and to the cleft.

See for yourself."

She caught the descending sling with a dexterity that astonished him, and seated herself in it before he could rise to a.s.sist her.

"Haul away," she called in a clear voice that held no note of timidity.

Those above at the tackle hastened to obey. As she was swung upwards, she looked down at the earl and waved him to put off.

"Hasten!" she urged. "Do not wait. I am all right now. Even if he is returning, go to the cleft and see."

He shook his head, and waited until she had been hauled up the ship's side. But as her little moccasined feet cleared the bulwarks and Meggs himself leaned out to draw her inboard, he signed the oarsmen to thrust off again.

Knowing the course, they made direct for the end of the sunken ledge.

Blake had not returned, nor was he anywhere in sight. They skirted in along the rocky slope of the cliff foot to where it curved away into the sand beach of the plain. Lord James sprang ash.o.r.e alone and hastened inland along the base of the cliffs.

A brisk walk of ten minutes over the sandy plain brought him to the grove at the foot of the cleft. In the midst of the trees was a pool, half choked with the dried mud and rubbish of a recent flood from the ravine. The wash had obliterated all tracks below; but there were traces of a trail leading up the ravine over a four-foot ledge. He took the rock at a bound, and hastened on upwards between the lofty walled sides of the cleft.

At the first turn he was brought to an abrupt halt. From side to side, between two outjutting corners of rock, the ravine had been barricaded with a twelve-foot _boma_ of thorn scrub. It was a fence high enough and strong enough to stop even a hungry lion. In the centre was a low opening, partly masked by the dry spiky fronds of a small date palm.

"Gad!" murmured the Englishman. "Some of Tom's engineering! And she said he started without weapons or tools--on this coast! . . . Yet for him to have won her--No, no, it's impossible! impossible! American or not, she's a lady--thoroughbred! He's a true stone, but in the rough--uncut, unpolished! A girl of her breeding--He's worth it, 'pon my word, he is; though I never would have fancied that she, of all girls--She's so different. No! it's impossible! it can't be! Must be pure fancy on her part--grat.i.tude. It can't be anything more!"

A heavy step sounded on the far side of the barrier, and a deep voice called out to him: "h.e.l.lo, there! That you, Jimmy? Thought it about time you were due. What you doing?--telling yourself how to climb over?

Abase yeh n.o.ble knee to the dust and crawl through, me lud."

Without pausing to reply, Lord James stooped and crept through the narrow pa.s.sage under the th.o.r.n.y wall. As he straightened up on the inner side, Blake caught and gripped his hand in a big calloused palm.

"Jimmy!" he exclaimed, his pale blue eyes glistening with the soft light of deep friendship. "Jimmy boy! to think you beat 'em to it! I figured ten to one odds that it was a tramp chartered by Papa Leslie--And then to see you pop up in the sternsheets, spic and span as a laundry ad! When you sang out--Lord!"

"Ring off, bo! Those're my fingers you're mashing!" objected the victim.

As Blake released him, he stepped aside and ran his eye up and down the sinewy rag-and-skin-clad form of the engineer. He nodded approvingly.