Stranded in Arcady Part 4

The waiting proved to be a terrific strain; the more so since the conditions were strictly compelling. The chance to secure the ownerless and well-stocked canoe was by no means to be lost, but Prime saw difficulties ahead. His companion would wish to know a lot of things that she must not be told, and he was well a.s.sured that she would have to be convinced of their right to take the canoe before she would consent to be an accomplice in the taking. This meant delay, which in its turn rigidly imposed the complete effacement of all traces of the tragedy. He was waiting to begin the effacement.

By the time his tobacco was gone he was quivering with a nervous impatience to be up and at it and have it over with. After the crackling fire died down the forest silence was unbroken. The young woman was asleep; he could hear her regular breathing. But the time was not yet ripe. The moon had risen, but it was not yet high enough to pour its rays into the tree-sheltered glade, and without its light to aid him the horrible thing he had to do would be still more horrible.

It was nearly midnight when he got up from his place beside the whitening embers of the camp-fire and pulled himself together for the grewsome task. Half-way to the glade a fit of trembling seized him and he had to sit down until it pa.s.sed. It was immensely humiliating, and he lamented the carefully civilized pre-existence which had left him so helplessly unable to cope with the primitive and the unusual.

When he reached the glade and the big spruce the moon was shining full upon the two dead men. One of them had a crooking arm locked around the neck of the other. Prime's gorge rose when he found that he had to strain and tug to break the arm-grip, and he had a creeping shock of horror when he discovered that the gripped throat had a gaping wound through which the man's life had fled. In the body of the other man he found a retaliatory knife, buried to the haft, and it took all his strength to withdraw it.

With these unnerving preliminaries fairly over, he went on doggedly, dragging the bodies one at a time to the river-brink. Selecting the quietest of the eddies, and making sure of its sufficient depth by sounding with a broken tree limb, he began a search for weighting-stones. There were none on the river-bank, and he had to go back to the lake sh.o.r.e for them, carrying them an armful at a time.

The weighting process kept even pace with the other ghastly details.

The men both wore the belted coats of the northern guides, and he first tried filling the pockets with stones. When this seemed entirely inadequate he trudged back to the abandoned canoe and secured a pair of blankets from its lading. Of these he made a winding-sheet for each of the dead men, wrapping the stones in with the bodies, and making all fast as well as he could with strings fashioned from strips of the blanketing.

All this took time, and before it was finished, with the two stiffened bodies settling to the bottom of the deep pool, Prime was sick and shaken. What remained to be done was less distressing. Going back to the glade he searched until he found the other hunting-knife. Also, in groping under the murder tree he found a small buckskin sack filled with coins. A lighted match showed him the contents--a handful of bright English sovereigns. The inference was plain; the two men had fought for the possession of the gold, and both had lost.

Prime went back to the river and, kneeling at the water's edge, scoured the two knives with sand to remove the blood-stains. That done, and the knives well hidden in the bow of the canoe, he made another journey to the glade and carefully scattered the ashes of the five fires.

Owing to the civilized pre-existence, he was f.a.gged and weary to the point of collapse when he finally returned to the campfire on the lake beach and flung himself down beside it to sleep. But for long hours sleep would not come, and when it did come it was little better than a succession of hideous nightmares in which two dark-faced men were reproachfully throttling him and dragging him down into the bottomless depths of the outlet river.

V

A SECRET FOR ONE

PRIME awoke unrefreshed at the moment when the morning sun was beginning to gild the tops of the highest trees, to find his campmate up and busying herself housewifely over the breakfast fire.

"You looked so utterly tired and worn out I thought I'd let you sleep as long as you could," she offered. "Are you feeling any better this morning?"

"I'm not sick," he protested, wincing a little in spite of himself in deference to the stiffened thews and sinews.

"You mustn't be," she argued cheerfully. "To-day is the day when we must go back a few thousand years and become Stone-Age people."

"Meaning that the provisions will be gone?"

"Yes."

"There are rabbits," he a.s.serted. "I saw two of them yesterday. Does the domestic-science course include the cooking of rabbits _au voyageur_?"

"It is going to include the cooking of anything we can find to cook.

Does the literary course include the catching of rabbits with one's bare hands?"

"It includes an imagination which is better than the possession of many traps and weapons," he jested. "I feel it in my bones that we are not going to starve."

"Let us be thankful to your bones," she returned gayly, and at this Prime felt the grisly night and its horrors withdrawing a little way.

There was more of the cheerful badinage to enliven the scanty breakfast, but there was pathos in the air when Prime felt for his cigarette-papers and mechanically opened his empty tobacco-pouch.

"You poor man!" she cooed, pitying him. "What will you do now?"

Prime had a thought which was only partly regretful. He might have searched in the pockets of the dead men for more tobacco, but it had not occurred to him at the time. He dismissed the thought and came back to the playing of his part in the secret for one.

"The lack of tobacco is a small consideration, when there is so much else at stake," he maintained. "If the Grider guess is the right one, it is evident that something has turned up to tangle it. Unscrupulous as he is in the matter of idiotic jokes, I know him well enough to be sure that he wouldn't leave us here to famish. He is only an amateur aviator, and it is quite within the possibilities that he has wrecked himself somewhere. It seems to me that we ought to take this river for a guide and push on for ourselves. Doesn't it appear that way to you?"

"If we only had a boat of some kind," she sighed. "But even then we couldn't push very far without something to eat."

It was time to usher in the glad surprise, and Prime began to gather up the breakfast leavings. "We'll go over and have a look at the river, anyway," he suggested, and a few minutes later he had led the way across the point of land, and had heard the young woman's cry of delight and relief when she discovered the stranded canoe.

"You knew about this all the time," was her reproachful accusation. "You were over here last night. That is why you had the prophetic bones a little while ago. Why didn't you tell me before?"

He grinned. "At the moment you seemed cheerful enough without the addition of the good news. Do you know what is in that canoe?"

"No."

"Things to eat," he avouched solemnly; "lots of them! More than we could eat in a month."

"But they are not ours," she objected.

"No matter; we are going to eat them just the same."

"You mean that we can hire the owners to take us out of this wilderness?

Have you any money?"

"Plenty of it," he boasted, c.h.i.n.king the buckskin bag in his pocket, the finding of which he had, up to this moment, entirely forgotten.

"But where are the owners? I don't see any camp."

"That is one reason why I didn't tell you last night. I found the canoe, but I didn't find anything that looked--er--like a camp."

"Then we shall have to sit down patiently and wait until they come back.

They wouldn't go very far away and leave a loaded canoe alone like this, would they?"

Prime gave a furtive side glance at the shadowy pool in the eddy. Truly the canoe-owners had not gone very far, but it was quite far enough. If he could have framed any reasonable excuse for it, he would have urged the immediate borrowing of the canoe, and an equally immediate departure from the spot of grisly a.s.sociations. Indeed, he did go so far as to suggest it, and was brought up standing, as he more than half expected to be, against Miss Millington's conscience.

"Why, certainly we couldn't do anything like that!" she protested. "It would be highway robbery! We must wait until they return. Surely they won't be gone very long."

There was no help for it except in telling her the shocking truth, and Prime was not equal to that. So he reconciled himself as best he could to the enforced delay, hoping that the tender conscience would not demand too much time.

Almost at once the owner of the conscience suggested that they make a round through the adjoining forest in an attempt to discover the camp of the missing men. Prime acceded cheerfully enough, though he was impatient to examine the canoe-load, in which he was hoping there might prove to be a supply of tobacco. For the better part of the forenoon they quartered the forest around and about between the river and the lake in widening circles, missing nothing but the glade of horrors, which Prime took good care to avoid. At noon they came back to the canoe-landing and made a frugal meal on the remains of their own store of food.

"We are too punctiliously foolish," Prime declared when the second meal without its tobacco aftermath had been endured. "You say we are obliged to wait, and in that case we shall have to borrow, sooner or later. I don't see any reason why we shouldn't begin it now. We can explain everything, you know; and, besides, I have money with which to pay for what we take."

"But your money isn't Canadian money," was the ready objection voiced by the tender conscience.

Prime's laugh did not ring quite true. "That is where you are mistaken,"

he retorted. "It is good English gold, in sovereigns."