Kitabı oku: «Stranded in Arcady», sayfa 2

III
SENSIBLE SHOES

The dawn of the second morning was much like that of the first, cool and crystal clear, and with the sun beating out a pathway of molten gold across the mirror-like surface of the solitary lake.

Prime bestirred himself early, meaning to get the breakfast under way single-handed while Miss Millington slept. But the young woman who had described herself as being "fit" had stolen a march upon him. He was frying the bacon when she came skimming up the beach with her hair flying.

"I got up early and didn't want to disturb you," she told him. "There is a splendid swimming place just around that point; I don't know when I've enjoyed a dip more. Wouldn't you like to try it while I dry my hair and make some more of the homicidal bread?"

Prime went obediently and took the required bath, finding the water bracingly cold and scarcely shallow enough to be reassuring to a non-swimmer. Over the breakfast which followed, the picnic spirit still presided, though by now it was beginning to lose a little of the lilt. For one thing, the bacon and the pan-bread, though they were ameliorated somewhat by the tinned things, were growing a trifle monotonous; for another, the limitless expanse of lake and sky and forest gave forth no sign of the hoped-for rescue.

After breakfast they made a careful calculation to determine how long their provisions would last. This, too, was unhopeful. With reasonable economy they might eat through another day. Beyond that lay a chance of famine.

"Surely Grider will come back for us to-day," Prime asserted when Domestic Science had done its best in apportioning the supplies. But at this the young woman shook her head doubtfully.

"I have had time to think," she announced. "It is all a guess, you know – this about Mr. Grider – and the more I think of it the more incredible it seems. Consider a moment. To make the kidnapping possible we must both have been drugged. That is a serious matter – too serious to have a part in the programme of the most reckless practical joker."

Prime looked up quickly. "I might have been drugged very easily. But you?"

The young woman bared a rounded arm to show a minute red dot half-way between wrist and elbow. "I told you about the young woman who stumbled and turned her ankle: when I took hold of her to help her, something pricked my arm. She said it was a pin in the sleeve of her coat and apologized for having been so careless as to leave it there."

Prime looked closely at the red dot.

"A hypodermic needle?" he suggested.

She nodded. "That is why I became so sleepy. And your potion was put in the wine, which you say tasted so bad."

Prime admitted the deduction without prejudice to his belief that Grider was the arch-plotter, saying: "Grider is quite capable of anything, if the notion appealed to him. And, of course, he must have had hired confederates; he couldn't manage it all alone."

"Still," she urged, "it seems to me that we ought to be trying to help ourselves in some way. It doesn't seem defensible just to sit here and wait, on the chance that your guess is going to prove true."

Prime laughed. "You are always and most eminently logical. Where shall we begin?"

"At the geography end of it," she replied calmly. "How far could an aeroplane fly in a single night?"

Prime took time to think about it. He had never had occasion to use a long aeroplane flight in any of his stories; hence the special information was lacking. But common sense and a few figures helped out – so many hours, so many miles an hour, total distance so much.

"Two hundred miles, let us say, as an extreme limit," he estimated, and at this the young woman gave a faint little shriek.

"Two hundred miles! Why, that is as far as from Cincinnati to Lake Erie! Surely we can't be that far from Quebec!"

"I merely mentioned that distance as the limit. We are evidently somewhere deep in the northern woods. I don't know much about the geography of this region – never having had to stage a story in it – but a lake of this size, with miles of marketable timber on its shores, argues one of two things: it is too far from civilization to have yet tempted the lumbermen, or else it has no outlet large enough to admit of logging operations. You may take your choice."

"But two hundred miles!" she gasped. "If some one doesn't come after us, we shall never get out alive!"

"That is why I think we ought to wait," said Prime quietly.

So they did wait throughout the entire forenoon, sitting for the most part under the shade of the shore trees, killing time and talking light-heartedly against the grim conclusion that each passing hour was forcing upon them. They contrived to keep it up to and through the noonday séance with the cooking fire; but after that the barriers, on the young woman's part, went out with a rush.

"I simply can't stand it any longer," she protested. "We must do something, Mr. Prime. We can at least walk somewhere and carry the bits of provisions along with us. Why should we stay right in this one spot until we starve?"

"I am still clinging to the Grider supposition," Prime admitted. "If we move away from here he might not be able to find us."

"It is only a supposition," she countered quickly. "You accept it, but, while I haven't anything better to offer, I cannot make it seem real."

"If you throw Grider out of it, it becomes an absolutely impossible riddle."

"I know; but everything is impossible. We are awake and alive and lost, and these are the only facts we can be sure of." Then she added: "It will be so much easier to bear if we are only doing something!"

Prime had an uncomfortable feeling that a move would be a definite abandonment of the only reasonable hope; but he had no further argument to adduce, and the preparations for the move were quickly made. Though the young woman was the disbeliever in the Grider hypothesis, it was at her suggestion that Prime wrote a note on the back of a pocket-worn letter and left it sticking in a cleft stake by the waterside; the note advertising the direction they were about to take. They had no plan other than to try to find the lake's outlet, and to this end they laid their course southward along the shore, dividing the small "tote-load" of dunnage at the young woman's insistence.

So long as they had the sandy lake margin for a path, the going was easy, but in a little time the beach disappeared in a rocky shore, with the forest crowding closely upon the water, and they were forced to make a long circuit inland. Still having the protective instinct, Prime "broke trail" handsomely for his companion, but, since he was something less than an athlete, the long afternoon of it told upon him severely; so severely, indeed, that he was glad to throw himself down upon the sands to rest when they finally came back to the lake on the shore of a narrow bay.

"I didn't know before how much I lacked of being a real man," he admitted, stretching himself luxuriously upon his back to stare up into the sunset sky. Then, as if it had just occurred to him: "Say – it must have been something fierce for you."

"I am all right," was the cheerful reply. "But I shall never get over being thankful that I put on a pair of sensible shoes, night before last, to walk to the Heights of Abraham."

After he had rested and was beginning to grow stiff, Prime sat up.

"We can't go much farther before dark; shall we camp here?" he asked.

The young woman shook her head. "We can't see anything from here; it is so shut in. Can't we go on a little farther?"

"Sure," Prime assented, scrambling up and stooping to rub the stiffness out of his calves, and at this the aimless march was renewed, to end definitely a few minutes later at the intake of a stream flowing silently out of the lake to the southeastward; a stream narrow and not too swift, but sufficiently deep to bar their way.

Twilight was stealing softly through the shadowy aisles of the forest when they prepared to camp at the lake-shore edge of the wood. Prime made the camp-fire, and, since the lake water was a little roiled at the outlet mouth, he took one of the empty fruit-tins and crossed the neck of land to the river. Working his way around a thicket of undergrowth, he came upon the stream at a point where the little river, as if gathering itself for its long journey to the sea, spread away in a quiet and almost currentless reach.

Climbing down the bank to fill the tin, he found a startling surprise lying in wait for him. Just below the overhanging bank a large birch-bark canoe, well filled with dunnage, was drawn out upon a tiny beach. His first impulse was to rush back to his companion with the good news that their rescue was at hand; the next was possibly a hand-down from some far-away Indian-dodging ancestor: perhaps it would be well first to find out into whose hands they were going to fall.

The canoe itself told him nothing, and neither did the lading, which included a good store of eatables. There was an air of isolation about the birch-bark which gave him the feeling that it had been beached for some time, and the dry paddles lying inside confirmed the impression. He listened, momently expecting to hear sounds betraying the presence of the owners, but the silence of the sombre forest was unbroken save by the lapping of the little wavelets on the near-by lake shore.

Realizing that Miss Millington would be waiting for her bread-mixing water, Prime filled the tin and recrossed the small peninsula.

"I was beginning to wonder if you were lost," said the bread-maker. "Did you have to go far?"

"No, not very far." Then, snatching at the first excuse that offered: "I saw some berries on the river-bank. Let me have the tin again and I'll see if I can't gather a few before it grows too dark."

Having thus given a plausible reason for a longer absence, he went back to the canoe to look in the fading light for tracks in the sand. Now that he made a business of searching for them, he found plenty of them; heelless tracks as if the feet that had made them had been shod with moccasins. A little farther down the stream-side there were broken bushes and a small earth-slide to show where somebody had scrambled up to the forest level. Following the trail he soon found himself in a natural clearing, grass-grown and running back from the river a hundred yards or more. In the centre of this clearing he came upon the ashes of five separate fires, disposed in the form of a rude cross.

Still there was no sign of the canoe-owners themselves, and the discovery of the curiously arranged ash-heaps merely added more mystery to mystery. The fires had been dead for some time. Of this Prime assured himself by thrusting his hand into the ashes. Clearly the camp, if it were a camp, had been abandoned for some hours at least. The gathering dusk warned him that it would be useless to try to track the fire-makers, and he turned to make his way back to the lake shore and supper.

It was in the edge of the glade, under the gloomy shadow of a giant spruce, that he stumbled blindly over some reluctantly yielding obstacle and fell headlong. Regaining his feet quickly with a nameless fear unnerving him, he stooped and groped under the shadowing tree, drawing back horror-stricken when his hand came in contact with the stiffened arm of a corpse.

He had matches in his pocket, and he found one and lighted it. His hand shook so that the match went out and he had to light another. By the brief flare of the second match he saw a double horror. Lying in a little depression between two spreading roots of the spruce were the bodies of two men locked in a death-grip. Another match visualized the tragedy in all its ghastly details. The men were apparently Indians, or half-breeds, and it had been a duel to the death, fought with knives.

IV
IN THE NIGHT

Prime made his way to the camp-fire at the lake edge, a prey to many disturbing emotions. Having lived a life practically void of adventure, the sudden collision with bloody tragedy shocked him prodigiously. Out of the welter of emotions he dug a single fixed and unalterable decision. Come what might, his companion must be kept from all knowledge of the duel and its ghastly outcome.

"Dear me! You look as if you had seen a ghost," was the way the battle of concealment was opened when he came within the circle of firelight. "Did you find any berries?"

Prime shook his head. "No, it was too dark," he said; "and, anyway, I'm not sure there were any."

"Never mind," was the cheerful rejoinder. "We have enough without them, and, really, I am beginning to get the knack of the pan-bread. If you don't say it is better this evening – " She broke off suddenly. He had sat down by the fire and was nursing his knees to keep them from knocking together. "Why, what is the matter with you? You are as pale as a sheet."

"I – I stumbled over something and fell down," he explained hesitantly. "It wasn't much of a fall, but it seemed to shake me up a good bit. I'll be all right in a minute or two."

"You are simply tired to death," she put in sympathetically. "The long tramp this afternoon was too much for you."

Prime resented the sympathy. He was not willing to admit that he could not endure as much as she could – as much as any mere woman could.

"I'm not especially tired," he denied; and to prove it he began to eat as if he were hungry, and to talk, and to make his companion talk, of things as far as possible removed from the sombre heart of a Canadian forest.

Immediately after supper he began to build another sleeping-shelter, though the young woman insisted that it was ridiculous for him to feel that he was obliged to do this at every fresh stopping-place. None the less, he persevered, partly because the work relieved him of the necessity of trying to keep up appearances. Fortunately, Miss Millington confessed herself weary enough to go to bed early, and after she left him Prime sat before the fire, smoking the dust out of his tobacco-pouch and formulating his plan for the keeping of the horrid secret.

The plan was simple enough, asking only for time and a sufficient quantity – and quality – of nerve. When he could be sure that his camp-mate was safely asleep he would go back to the glade and dispose of the two dead men in some way so that she would never know of their existence alive or dead.

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 assured 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 passed. 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 shore 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 fagged 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 asserted. "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, chinking 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 associations. 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."

If the young woman were surprised to learn that a man who had expected to motor out of Canada in a day or two at the most had supplied himself with a stock of English sovereigns, she did not question the fact. But for fear she might, Prime went on hastily:

"I always like to be prepared for all kinds of emergencies when I leave home, and this time I wasn't sure just where I was going to bring up, you know – after Grider had changed his mind as to our starting-point."

The evasion served its purpose, and the young woman assented to an immediate examination of the canoe-load. Prime helped her down the steep bank, and they began to rummage, spreading their findings out on the little beach. As Prime had intimated, there was a liberal stock of provisions – jerked deer-meat, smoke-cured bacon, flour, meal, salt, baking-powder, tea, and sugar, but no coffee, a few tins of vegetables, a small sack of potatoes, and, last but not least, a canvas-covered mass of something which they decided was pemmican.

Rummaging further, the precious tobacco came to light – two huge twists of it hidden in the centre of one of the two remaining blanket-rolls. Prime stopped right where he was, crumbled a bit of the dried leaf in his hands, and made a cigarette, his companion looking on with a little lip-curl which might have been of derision or merely of amusement.

"Is it good?" she asked, when he had inhaled the first deep breath.

"It's vile!" he returned. "At the same time, it is so much better than nothing that I could do a Highland fling for pure joy. Take my advice, Miss Millington, and never become a slave to the tobacco habit."

"'Miss Millington,'" she repeated, half musingly. "Doesn't that strike you as being a trifle absurd at this distance from a drawing-room?"

"It surely does," he admitted frankly; "and so, for that matter, does 'Mr. Prime.'"

She looked up at him with a charming little grimace.

"I'll concede the 'Lucetta' if you will concede the 'Donald.'"

"It's a go," he laughed. "It is the last of the conventions, and we'll tell it good-by without a whimper." With the goodly array of foodstuff spread out upon the sand, and with his back carefully turned upon the pool of dread, he felt that he could afford to be light-hearted.

There was only a little more of the rummaging to be done. A canvas-covered roll unlashed from its place beneath a canoe-stay proved to be a square of duck large enough to make a small sleeping-tent. Inside of this roll there was an ample stock of cartridges for the two repeating rifles lying cased in their canvas covers in the bottom of the boat, and an Indian-tanned deerskin used as a wrapping for the ammunition. With the guns there was a serviceable woodsman's axe. In the bow, where Prime had dropped the two savage-looking hunting-knives, there were a few utensils: a teapot, a camper's skillet large enough to be worth while, tin cup and plates, an empty whiskey-bottle, and a basin – the latter presumably for the dough-mixing.

After they had their findings lying on the sand the tender conscience came in play again, and nothing would do but everything must be put back just as they had found it, Prime drawing the line, however, at a portion of the tobacco and enough of the food to serve for supper and breakfast. During the remainder of the afternoon they left the canoe-load undisturbed, but when evening came Prime borrowed the basin, the cups, plates, and the larger skillet. Farther along he borrowed the canvas roll and the axe and set up the tiny sleeping-tent, placing it so that Lucetta, if she were so minded, could see the fire.

Just before she retired the young woman made a generous protest.

"You mustn't do all the borrowing for me," she insisted. "Go right down there and get one of those blanket-rolls for yourself. I shan't sleep a wink if you don't."

The next morning there were more speculations, on the young woman's part, as to the whereabouts of the canoe-owners, with much wonderment at their protracted absence and the singular abandonment of their entire outfit, even to the weapons. Whereat Prime invented all sorts of theories to account for this curious state of affairs, all of them much more ingenious than plausible.

For himself, the mystery was scarcely less unexplainable. Why two men, evidently outfitted for a long journey, should stop by the way, build five fires that were plainly not camp-fires, and then fall to and fight each other to death over a bag of English sovereigns, were puzzles that he did not attempt to solve in his own behalf. It was enough that the facts had befallen, and that the net result for a pair of helpless castaways was a well-stocked canoe which Lucetta's acid-proof honesty was still preventing them from appropriating.

After a breakfast served with the garnishings afforded by the Heaven-sent supplies, Prime uncased the two rifles and looked them over. They were United States products of an early edition, but were apparently serviceable and in good order. In the canvas case of one of the guns there was a packet of fish-lines and hooks. At Lucetta's suggestion a few shots were fired as a signal for the lost canoe-owners. Nothing coming of this, they tried a little target practice, selecting the largest tree in sight for a mark, and both missing it with monotonous regularity. Later in the day Prime brought the talk around by degrees to the expediencies. How much of the present good weather must they waste in waiting for the hypothetical return of the absentees? Perhaps some accident had happened; perhaps the absentees would never turn up. Who could tell?