Stranded in Arcady Part 15

"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 a.s.surance out of the midnight adventure. "We ought to be 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 relieved the 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 pa.s.sed 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 open and 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce 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 cla.s.sroom 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 experience in 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 cafes.

"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 laughed and 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 sh.o.r.e 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.