Stranded in Arcady Part 13

"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 advertis.e.m.e.nt, 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 little old 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 ever saw 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.

XIII

AT CAMP COUSIN

PRIME whittled 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. .h.i.therto 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 think that 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."