Stranded in Arcady Part 22

"I'll fight it out with you in any court you like, you stubborn blockhead!" Prime heard the big man bellow at Macdougal, and then the canoe was pa.s.sed swiftly aft, somebody reached over the side and lifted him bodily into the c.o.c.kpit of the motorboat, and a moment later he found Lucetta beside him, staring wildly and clinging to him as if he were her only hope.

"Wha-what are they doing to us now?" she quavered, and as she spoke the grumbling machinery in the depths below roared a louder note, and the big motor-craft cut a careening half-circle in midstream, leaving the birch-bark to dance and wabble in the converging area of the furrowing bow wave. By this time Prime had shaken himself fully awake. The two deck-hands who had pulled him and Lucetta aboard had disappeared, and the big man who had been bullying Macdougal was at the wheel. There was a single electric bulb in the centre of the c.o.c.kpit awning, and by its light Prime had his first good look at the big steersman.

"_Grider!_" he exploded, taking a step toward the man at the wheel; and at that Miss Lucetta Millington drew herself up icily and turned her back.

XX

WATSON GRIDER

PRIME had often made his fictional heroes "see red" in exceptionally vigorous crises, and he was now able to verify the colorful figure of speech in his own proper person. Like a submerging wave the recollection of all that the heartless joke might have meant to a pair of helpless victims--of all that it had actually entailed in hardships and peril and sickness--rushed over him as he faced the handsome young giant at the wheel of the motor-cruiser.

"So it _was_ you, after all!" he gritted. Then: "There are some few things that won't keep, Grider. Put this boat ash.o.r.e where we can have a little more room. The account between us is too long to wait for daylight!"

The barbarian's answer to this was a shout of derisive laughter, and he made a show of putting the small steering-wheel between himself and his belligerent pa.s.senger.

"Give me time, Don--just a little time to take it all in!" he gurgled.

"Oh, my sainted grandmother! what a perfectly ripping fling you must have had, to make you turn loose all holds like this! And the lady--won't you--won't you introduce me?"

Lucetta faced about, and, if a look could have crippled, the motor-cruiser would have lost its steersman.

"Cousin Donald has tried to tell me about you, but the reality is worse than he or anybody could put into words!" she broke out in indignant scorn. "Of all the inhuman, dastardly things that have ever been done in the name of a practical joke, yours is certainly the climax, Mr.

Grider!"

The young man at the wheel pursed his lips as if he were going to whistle; then he appeared to comprehend suddenly and went off in another gust of Hudibrastic mirth.

"I've been figuring it all out as I came along up river," he choked; "how you had tried to account for yourselves to each other--how you had been wrestling with the lack of all the little civilized knickknacks and notions--how you'd look when you came out. Excuse me, but your--your clothes, you know; you're a pair to make a wooden idol hold his sides and chortle himself to death!"

This seemed to be adding insult to injury, and by this time Prime was speechless, Berserk-mad, as he himself would have written it. Nothing but Lucetta's restraining hand upon his arm kept him from hurling himself, reckless of consequences, upon the heartless jester. When he could control his symptoms sufficiently to find a few coherent words, he contrived to ease the soul-nausea--in some small measure.

"There is another day coming, Grider; don't you lose sight of that for a single minute!" he raged. "I'm not saying anything about myself; perhaps I have given you cause to a.s.sume that you can pull off your brutal initiation stunts on me whenever you feel like it. That's all right, but you've overdone the thing this time. Miss Millington's quarrel is my quarrel. If I can't get you in any other way, I'll post you in every club you belong to as the man who plays horse-laugh jokes on women!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "The account between us is too long to wait for daylight!"]

At this outburst Grider only laughed again, appearing to be entirely and quite joyously impervious to either scorn or red rage.

"Perhaps I do owe you both an apology--not for the joke--that is too ripping good to be spoiled--but for breaking your night's rest in that peppery Scotchman's birch-bark," he offered. "If you'll duck under the raised deck, you'll find two dog-kennel staterooms. The port-side kennel is yours, Don, and the other is Miss Millington's. Suppose you turn in and get your nap out. To-morrow morning, if you still feel in the humor for it, you can get together and give me what you seem to think is coming to me. _Shoo!_ I can't steer this boat and play skittles with you at the same time. Run along to bed--both of you!"

With such a case-hardened barbarian for a host, there seemed to be nothing else to be done, and Prime took Lucetta's arm and helped her down into the tiny cabin. It was lighted, and the doors of the two box-like staterooms were open. Prime felt for the b.u.t.ton on the jamb of the right-hand door and Lucetta's sleeping-niche sprang alight. She looked in and gave a little cry of astonishment.

"My suitcases!" she exclaimed; "the ones I left in the Quebec hotel!"

Prime snapped the opposite switch and looked on his own side. "My auto trunk, too," he conceded sourly. "We didn't need any more evidence, but this is conclusive. Grider has had his horse-laugh, and the least he could do in the wind-up was to bring us our belongings. I suppose we are compelled to be indebted to him for getting us out of the sc.r.a.pe with Macdougal, much as it goes against the grain; but to-morrow we'll settle with him."

Lucetta braced herself in her doorway against the surge and swing of the racing cruiser.

"He doesn't look like a man who could be so wholly lost to all sense of--of the fitness of things, Donald," she ventured, as one who would not be immitigably vindictive.

"He looks, and acts, like a wild a.s.s of the desert!" Prime stormed, in a fresh access of resentment. And then: "You'd best go to bed and get what sleep you can. Heaven only knows what new piece of buffoonery will be sprung upon us to-morrow morning."

She looked up with the adorable little grimace, a copy of which he had long since resolved to wish upon his next and most bewitching heroine.

"I believe you are angry yet," she chided, half in mockery. "I like you best when you don't scowl so ferociously, Cousin Donald. You forget that we have agreed that it wasn't all bad. Good night." And she closed her door.

Turning out of his box-berth the next morning, Prime found the sun shining broadly in at the stateroom port-light. The motorboat was at rest and the machinery was stopped. A bath, a shave, and a complete change to fresh haberdashery made him feel somewhat less pugnacious, and stumbling up the companion to the c.o.c.kpit he saw that the cruiser was tied up at a wharf on the river fringe of a considerable city; saw, also, that Lucetta, likewise renewed as to her outward appearance, was awaiting him.

"Where is Grider?" he demanded shortly.

"He has gone somewhere to get an auto to take us to a hotel."

"What city is this?"

"It is Ottawa. Don't you see the government buildings up there on the hill?"

Prime was silent for a moment. Then he said: "He needn't think he is going to smooth it all over by showing us a few little neighborly attentions. We are back in the good old civilized world once more, and we are not asking any favors of Watson Grider."

"Oh, I shouldn't feel that way, if I were you," she qualified. "He seems very humble and penitent this morning, though he is still twinkly-eyed, and I couldn't make him talk much. He said we'd want to be having our breakfast, and----"

"We don't breakfast with him," was the crabbed rejoinder.

"Why, Donald!" she protested, in a laughing mockery of deprecatory concern. "I believe you are still angry. You really mustn't hold spite, that way. It isn't nice--or Bankhead-y."

He looked her fairly in the eyes. "Don't begin by throwing the old minister ancestor up at me, Lucetta. I can't help the grouch, and I don't know as I want to help it. Every time I think of you lying there under the big spruces, sick and discouraged, suffering for the commonest necessities and with no possible chance of getting them, I want to go out and swear like a pirate and murder somebody. Why doesn't he bring that auto, if he is going to?"

As if the impatient demand had evoked him, Grider appeared on the wharf and beckoned to them. Prime helped his companion up to the string-piece, and had only a scowl for their late host as Grider led the way to the street and a waiting auto. The barbarian stood aside while Prime was putting Lucetta into the car and clambering in after her. Then he took the seat beside the driver, and no word was said until the car was stopped before the entrance of an up-town hotel, where Grider got down to open the tonneau door for the pair on the rear seat.

"You'll want to have your first civilized breakfast by yourselves and I shan't b.u.t.t in," he offered good-naturedly. "Later on, say about ten o'clock, I'll be glad to see you both in the ladies' parlor--if you can forgive me that far."

Prime made no reply, but after they were seated in the comfortable breakfast-room and were revelling in their surroundings and in the efficient service he broke out again.

"Grider still has his bra.s.s-bound nerve with him; to ask us to meet him!

I'd see him in kingdom come first, if I wasn't spoiling to tell him a few things."

"Perhaps he wishes to try to explain," came from the less vindictive side of the table-for-two. "Think a moment, Cousin Donald: you two have been friends and college chums, and--and Mr. Grider has been brotherly good to you in times past, hasn't he? And I don't want you to quarrel with him."

"Why don't you?"

"Because you have said enough to make me understand that you are doing it for my sake. That won't answer at all, you know."

"I don't see why it won't," Prime objected with sudden obtuseness.

"For the best possible reason; there is another woman to be considered.

Sooner or later she will hear that you have broken with your best friend on account of a--a person she has never even heard of, and there will be consequences."

"Oh, if that is all"--and then he laughed. "You are either the most childlike bit of femininity the world has ever seen--or the most wilfully blind, Lucetta."