Stranded in Arcady Part 11

"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. Of course 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 pa.s.sing 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 persuaded Prime 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.

XI

"A CRACKLING OF THORNS"

THOUGH she 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 fort.i.tude 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 of the 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 b.a.l.l.s 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 to mutter 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 pa.s.sed, 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've never 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 the _Herald_. 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 anxiety about 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 stand before 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--mighty bad 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.

XII

IN SEARCH OF AN ANCESTOR

FOR a 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.