Kitabı oku: «Stranded in Arcady», sayfa 5

X
HORRORS

It is a trite saying that even the weakest strand in the cable never knows how much it can pull until the demanding strain comes. As a young woman with athletic leanings, Lucetta had had arduous drillings in first-aid, and had drilled others. If Prime had been merely drowned she would have known precisely what to do. But the broken head was a different matter.

Nevertheless, when her own exhaustion was a little assuaged, she essayed the first-aid. Dragging the hapless one a little farther from the water's edge, she knelt beside him to examine the wound with fingers that trembled a little as they pressed, in spite of the brave diagnostic resolution. There was no skull fracture, but she had no means of determining how serious the concussion was. Prime was breathing heavily, and the bruise was already beginning to puff up and discolor.

With hope still in abeyance, she worked swiftly. Warmth was the first necessity. Her hands were shaking when she felt in the pocket of Prime's coat for the precious bottle of matches. Happily it was unbroken, and she could have wept for joy. There was plenty of fuel at hand, and in a few minutes she had a fire blazing brightly, before which she propped the wounded man to dry out, though his wet clothing gave him a sweltering steam bath before the desiccating process began. It was heroic treatment, but there was no alternative, and by the time she had him measurably dried and warm, her own soggy discomfort was also abating.

Having done what she could, her situation was still as forlorn as it could well be; she was alone in the heart of the forest wilderness with a wounded man, who might live or die as the chance should befall – and there was no food. She set her face determinedly against the erosive impatience of despair. There was nothing to do but to wait with what fortitude she could muster.

The afternoon dragged on interminably, and to make the prospect more dispiriting the sky clouded over and the sun disappeared. Toward evening Prime began to stir restlessly and to mutter in a sort of feeble delirium. The young woman hailed this as a hopeful symptom, and yet the mutterings of the unconscious man were inexpressibly terrifying. What if the recovery should be only of the body and not of the mind?

As the dusk began to gather, Lucetta found her strong resolution ebbing in spite of all she could do. The thunder of the near-by cataract deafened her, and the darkling shadows of the forest were thickly shot with unnerving suggestions. To add the finishing touch, her mind constantly reverted to the story of the finding and disposal of the two dead men and she could not drive the thought away. In a short time it became a frenzied obsession, and she found herself staring wildly in a sort of hypnotic trance at the waterfall, fully expecting to see one or both of the dead bodies come catapulting over it.

While it was still light enough to enable her to distinguish things dimly, something did come over the fall, a shapeless object about the size of a human body, shooting clear of the curving water wall, to drop with a sullen splash into the whirlpool. Lucetta covered her eyes with her hands and shrieked. It was the final straw, and she made sure her sanity was going.

She was still gasping and trembling when she heard a voice, and venturing to look she saw that Prime was sitting up and holding his head in his hands. The revulsion from mad terror to returning sanity was so sudden and overpowering that she wanted to go to him and fall on her knees and hug him merely because he was a man and alive, and hadn't died to leave her alone with the frightful horrors.

"Didn't I – didn't I hear you scream?" he mumbled, twisting his tongue to the words with the utmost difficulty. And then: "What on earth has happened to me? I feel – as if – I had been run through – a threshing-machine."

"You were pitched out of the canoe and hurt," she told him. "I – I was afraid you were going to die!"

"Was that why you screamed?" The words were still foolishly hard to find and still harder to set in order.

At this she cried out again, and again covered her eyes. "No – no! It is there yet – in the whirlpool – one of the – one of the dead men!"

Though Prime was still scarcely more than half conscious of his condition and cripplings, the protective instinct was clamoring to be heard, dinning in his ears to make him realize that his companion was a woman, and that her miraculous courage had for some cause reached its ultimate limit. With a brand from the fire for a torch, he crept half mechanically on hands and knees to the edge of the bowl-like whirlpool. In due time he had a glimpse of a black object circling past in the froth and spume, and he threw the firebrand at it. A moment later he was setting the comforting prop of explanation under Lucetta's toppling courage.

"It is nothing but a log – just a broken log of wood," he assured her. "Forget it, and tell me more about how I came to get this bushel-basket head of mine. It aches like sin!"

She described the plunge of the unmanageable canoe over the fall and its immediate consequences, minifying her own part in the rescue.

"You needn't try to wiggle out of it," he said soberly at the end of the brief recounting. "You saved my life. If you hadn't pulled me out, I'd be down there in that pool right now, going round and round like that bally log of wood. What do you charge for saving a man's life, Lucetta?"

"A promise from the man to be more careful in future. But we mustn't slide back into the artificial things, Donald. For all you know, my motive might have been altogether selfish – perhaps it was selfish. My first thought was a screaming horror of being left alone here in this wilderness. It made me fight, fight!"

"Is that the truth, Lucetta?" he inquired solemnly.

"Y-yes."

"All of the truth?"

"Oh, perhaps not quite all. There is such a thing as the life-saving instinct, isn't there? Even dogs have it sometimes. Of course I couldn't very well swim out and leave you to drown."

"No," he put in definitively, "you couldn't – and what's more, you hadn't the first idea of doing such a thing. And that other thing you told me was only to relieve my sense of obligation. You haven't relieved it – not an ounce. And I don't care to have it relieved. Let it go for the time being, and tell me what became of the canoe."

"I haven't the faintest notion. I didn't see it again after we went over the fall. Of course it is smashed and ruined and lost, and we are perfectly helpless again."

For a long minute Prime sat with his throbbing head in his hands, trying to think connectedly. When he looked up it was to say: "We are in a pretty bad box, Lucetta, with the canoe gone and nothing to eat. It is hammering itself into what is left of my brain that we can't afford to sit still and wait for something to turn up. If we push on down river we may find the canoe or the wreck of it, and there will surely be some little salvage. I don't believe the birch-bark would sink, even if it were full of water."

"You are not able to push on," she interposed quickly. "As it is, you can hardly hold your head up."

"I can do whatever it is needful to do," he declared, unconsciously giving her a glimpse of the strong thread in the rather loosely woven fabric of his character. "I have always been able to do what I had to do. Let's start out at once."

With a couple of firebrands for torches they set out down the river bank, following the stream closely and keeping a sharp lookout for the wreck. Before they had gone very far, however, the blinding headache got in its work, and Prime began to stumble. It was at Lucetta's insistence that they made another halt and gave up the search for the night.

"It is no manner of use," she argued. "You are not able to go on; and, besides, we can't see well enough to make sure that we are not passing the thing we are looking for. We had much better stop right where we are and wait for daylight."

The halt was made in a small opening in the wood, and the young woman persuaded Prime to lie down while she gathered the material for another camp-fire. Almost as soon as it was kindled Prime dropped off into a heavy sleep. Lucetta provided fuel to last through the night, and then sat down with her back to a tree, determined to stay awake and watch with the sick man.

XI
"A CRACKLING OF THORNS"

Though she had formed her resolution with a fair degree of self-reliance, Lucetta Millington soon found that she had set herself a task calling for plenty of fortitude and endurance. Beyond the circle of firelight the shadows of the forest gloomed forbiddingly. They had seen but little of the wild life of the woods in their voyagings thus far, but now it seemed to be stirring uneasily on all sides of the lonely camp-fire.

Once some large-hoofed animal went crashing through the underbrush toward the river; and again there were other hoof-beats stopping abruptly at a little distance from the clearing. Lucetta, shading her eyes from the glow of the fire, saw two gleaming disks of light shining in the blackness of the backgrounding forest. Her reason told her that they were the eyes of the animal; that the unnerving apparition was probably a deer halted and momentarily fascinated by the sight of the fire. But the incident was none the less alarming to the town-bred young woman.

Later there were softly padding footfalls, and these gave her a sharper shock. She knew next to nothing about the fauna of the northern woods, nor did she have the comforting knowledge that the largest of the American cats, the panther, rarely attacks a human being unless wounded, or under the cruelest stress of winter hunger. Breathlessly she listened and watched, and presently she saw the eyes of the padding intruder glowing like balls of lambent green fire. Whereupon it was all she could do to keep from shrieking frantically and waking her companion.

After the terrifying green eyes had vanished it occurred to her to wonder why they had seen and heard so little of the night prowlers at their former camps. The reason was not far to seek. Days well filled with toil and stirring excitement had been followed by nights when sleep came quickly and was too sound to be disturbed by anything short of a cataclysm.

As midnight drew near, Prime began to mutter disconnectedly. Lucetta did not know whether he was talking in his sleep or whether he had become delirious again, but at all events this new development immeasurably increased the uncanny weirdness of the night-watch. Though many of the vaporings were mere broken sentences without rhyme or reason, enough of them were sufficiently clear to shadow forth a sketchy story of Prime's life.

Lucetta listened because she could not well help it, being awake and alert and near at hand. Part of the time Prime babbled of his boyhood on the western New York farm, and she gathered that some of the bits were curious survivals of doubtless long-forgotten talks with his grandfather. Breaking abruptly with these earlier scenes, the wandering underthought would skip to the mystery, charging it now to Watson Grider and again calling it a blessed miracle. With another abrupt change the babbler would be in Europe, living over again his trampings in the Tyrol, which, it seemed, had been taken in the company of an older man, a German, who was a Heidelberg professor.

Farther along, after an interval of silence in which Lucetta began to hope that the talkative fit had passed, Prime broke out again – this time waxing eloquent over his struggles in New York as a beginner in the writing trade. Here there were revelations to make her sorry that she was obliged to listen; for years, it seemed, the fight had gone discouragingly hard with him; there had been times when he had had to choose between giving up in defeat or going hungry.

Lucetta pieced together a pitiful little story of this starving time. Some one – once Prime called the some one Grider, and later gave him another name – had tempted the struggler with an offer of a comfortable income, the single condition precedent being an abandonment of the literary fight. Prime's mutterings made the outcome plain for the listener on the opposite side of the camp-fire: "No, I couldn't sell soap; it's honest enough, no doubt – and decent enough – everybody ought to use soap. But I've set my hand to the plough – no, that isn't it… Oh, dammit, Peter, you know what I mean; I can't turn back; that is the one thing I've never learned how to do. No, and I can't take your money as a loan; that would be only another way of confessing defeat. No, by George, I won't go out to dinner with you, either!"

Lucetta wept a little in sheer sympathy. Her own experience had not been too easy. Left an orphan while she was still too young to teach, she knew what it meant to set the heart upon a definite end and to strive through thick and thin to reach it. She was relieved when Prime began to talk less coherently of other incidents in his life in the great metropolis. There were more references to Grider, and at last something that figured as Prime's part in a talk with the barbarian. "Yes, by Jove, Watson, the scoundrels tried to pull my leg; actually advertised for me in the Herald. No, of course, I didn't fall for it. I know perfectly well what it was … same old gag about the English estate with no resident heirs in sight. No, the ad. didn't say so, but I know. What's that? – I'm a liar? Like Zeke I am!"

There were more of the vaporings, but neither these nor the young woman's anxiety about the wounded man's condition were disturbing enough at the last to keep her eyelids from drooping and her senses from fluttering over the brink of the sleep abyss. Once she bestirred herself to put more fuel on the fire, but after that the breeze blew the mosquitoes away, the warmth from the upleaping blaze added its touch, and she fell asleep.

When she awoke the sun had risen and Prime was up and mending the fire.

"Better," he said cheerfully, in answer to her instant question. "Much better; though my head reminds me of the day when I got the check for my first story – pretty badly swelled, you know. But after I've had a good cup of hot tea" – he stopped in mid-career with a wry laugh. "Bless my fool heart! If I hadn't totally forgotten that we haven't any tea or anything else! And here I've been up a quarter of an hour and more, trying to get a good cooking-fire started! Where were we when we left off last night?"

"We had set out to search for the wreck of the canoe," she explained, rising to stand before the fire. "We came this far, and concluded it was no use trying to go on in the dark. You were pretty badly off, too."

"It's coming back to me, a little at a time and often, as the cat remarked when it ate the grindstone," he went on, determined to make her smile if it were within the bounds of possibility. He knew she must have had a bad night of it, and the brightness of the gray eyes told him that even now she was not very far from tears. "Don't cry," he added abruptly; "it's all over now."

Her laugh was the sort that harbors next door to pathos.

"I'm hungry!" she said plaintively. "We had no dinner yesterday, and no supper last night, and there doesn't seem to be any very brilliant prospect for breakfast this morning."

Prime put his hand to his bruised head as if to satisfy himself that it was all there.

"Haven't you ever gone without a meal before for the raw reason that you couldn't get it?" he asked.

"Not since I can remember."

"I have; and it's bad medicine – mighty bad medicine. We'll put the fire out and move on. While there's life there's hope; and our hope this morning is that we are going to find the wreck of that canoe. Let's hike."

They set out courageously, keeping close to the bank of the river and scanning every eddy and backwater as they moved along. For this cause their progress was slow, and it was nearly or quite noon when they came to a quiet reach in the river, a placid pond with great trees overhanging its margins and wide stretches of reeds and bulrushes growing in the shallows. And on the opposite side of the pond-like expanse and apparently grounded among the bulrushes they saw their canoe. It was bottom side up with care, and on the wrong side of the river; also they knew that its lading, if any of this had survived the runaway flight, must be soaked and sodden. But the triumphant fact remained – the canoe was found.

XII
IN SEARCH OF AN ANCESTOR

For a moment neither of them spoke. Then Prime broke out in a sardonic laugh.

"That is a heavenly prospect for dinner, supper, breakfast, and dinner all rolled into one, isn't it, now? If there is anything left in the canoe, it's soaked to a pulp – to say nothing of the fact that we can't get to it. How are we going to raft ourselves over there without the axe?"

Lucetta went down to the margin of the pond-like reach and tested its depth with a tossed stone.

"It is deep," she said, "swimming-deep. The shallows must be all on the other side."

"I'll go down-stream a piece and see if there isn't some place where I can wade," Prime offered. But at this she shook her head.

"We passed out of all the wading depths days and days ago. If you will make a fire, I'll swim over and get the canoe."

Prime had a world of objections to offer to this, and he flung them into the breach one after another. It was no woman's job. The water was cold, and it would be a long swim – for a guess, not less than a hundred yards; she had gone without food so long that she was not fit for it; if she should try it and fail, he would have to go in after her, and that would mean suicide for both of them.

She heard him through with a quaint little lip-curl of amusement at his fertility in obstacle raising, and at the end calmly fished the remains of his handkerchief out of his pocket and bound it about her head.

"Another attack of the undying protective instinct," she retorted light-heartedly. "You go on and make the fire and I'll save the wreck, or what there is left of it." Whereupon she walked away up-stream, losing herself shortly for Prime in a thicket beyond the first bend of the river above.

Prime fell to work gathering fuel, feeling less like a man than at any time since the voyage had begun. It stabbed his amour-propre to the heart to be compelled to let her take the man's part while he did the squaw's. But there seemed to be no help for it.

While he was kindling the fire he heard a plunge, and a little later saw the coifed head making diagonally across from the upper bend toward the canoe. She was swimming easily with the side stroke, and he could see the rhythmical flash and swing of a white arm as she made the overhand reach. Then he dutifully turned his back and gave his entire attention to the firemaking.

When he looked again she had righted the canoe and was coming across with it, swimming and pushing it ahead of her. At a little distance from the shore she called to him: "Take it; it's all yours" – giving the birch-bark a final shove. "I'll be with you in a few minutes." And with that she turned off and swam away up-stream to her dressing-thicket.

Prime gave her time to disappear and then went to draw the canoe out on the bank and to begin an inventory of the losses. Thanks to the care they had taken in tying everything in, nothing was missing save the paddles. Such food as was still in the original tin was undamaged, but the meat was soaked and the flour and meal were soggy masses of paste. Prime was dismayed. The small stock of potatoes would not last forever, and neither would the canned vegetables. They were not yet backwoodsmen enough to live upon meat alone; and another and crowning misfortune was the loss of the salt.

Prime was lamenting over the wet salt-sack and trying to save some little portion of the precious condiment when Lucetta came on the scene, looking as bright and fresh as the proverbial field-flower after her plunge and swim, and took over the culinary problem. Fortunately, they still had the salt pork, and the pretty cuisinière issued her orders promptly.

"Find some nice clean pieces of birch bark and spread this flour and meal out so that it will dry before the fire," she directed; and while he was doing that and hanging the blankets and tent canvas up to drip and dry, she opened a tin of baked beans and made another of the triumphant stews of jerked deer meat and potatoes seasoned with a bit of the salt pork. Upon these two dishes they presently feasted royally, making up for the three lost meals, and missing the bread only because they didn't have it.

"I have settled one thing in my own mind," Prime declared, while he was assiduously drying a leaf of the soaked tobacco for the after-dinner smoke. "If I am ever cast away again, I'm going to make dead sure that I have a Domestic Science expert for a fellow sufferer. Lucetta, you are simply great when it comes to making something out of nothing. What are we going to do with this flour-and-meal pudding?"

"We are going to dry it carefully and then grind it up again on a flat stone and go on as before," was the cheerful reply. "That is my part of it, and yours will be a good bit harder; you will have to make some new paddles and contrive some way to patch that big hole in the canoe."

Prime laughed hilariously. His head was still aching, but the disaster had fallen so far short of the ultimate fatalities that the small discomforts were as nothing.

"I can imagine both the paddles and the patch," he boasted. "It remains to be seen whether or not I can turn them into serviceable realities."

While the dunnage was drying and Lucetta was regrinding her flour and meal Indian-fashion on a smooth stone, Prime hacked manfully at a small spruce and finally got it down. It took him the better part of the afternoon to split the tree with wooden wedges and to get out two pieces to be hewn roughly with the axe into the paddle shape. Over the evening fire he whittled laboriously with the sharper of the two hunting-knives, and when the knife grew dull he learned by patient trial to whet it on a bit of stone. To keep him company, Lucetta had recourse to the fish-bone needle. Her clothes had not come scathless out of the cataract disaster and its aftermath.

"You have one of the best of the good qualities, Donald," she said, marking the patience with which the whittling went on. "You are not afraid to buckle down to the necessity and keep on trying."

"'Patient continuance in well-doing,'" he quoted, grinning. "I learned that, up one side and down the other, in the writing trade. It is about the only thing that gets you anywhere."

"You had a hard time making your start in the writing, didn't you?" she offered.

"When did I ever tell you that?"

"You told me something about it the first day we were together, and a good bit more last night."

"Huh! Talking in my sleep, was I? What did I say?"

"A lot of things; I can't remember them all. You talked about Mr. Grider, and the mystery, and the dead men, and I don't know what all."

"I didn't say anything about the girl, did I?"

"Not a word," she returned.

"For the best possible reason on earth, Lucetta: there hasn't been any girl. You don't believe that, I suppose. You wouldn't believe it of any man of my age, and – and temperament?"

"Yet you said night before last that you wanted a wife and children and a home. Doesn't that presuppose a girl?"

"In my case it presupposes a handsomely imaginary girl; I'm great on the imaginary things."

"What does she look like – this imaginary girl of yours?"

He glanced up from the paddle-whittling. "Some day, when we get back into the world again, I'll show you what she looks like. Can you wait until then?"

"You don't leave me any choice."

"We ran off the track," he went on, after a little interval of silence. "You were telling me what I talked about last night."

"Oh, yes; I have forgotten most of it, as I said; but along at the last there were a good many disjointed things about your fight for recognition. Once, I remember, you were talking to somebody about soap."

Prime's laugh was a guffaw.

"I can laugh at it now," he chuckled; "but it was mighty binding at the time – that soap incident. I was down in a hole, in the very bottom of the hole. I had written a book and couldn't get it published; couldn't get anybody to touch it with a ten-foot pole. I had friends who were willing to lend me money to go on with, and one who offered me a job writing advertisements for his soap factory. It was horribly tempting, but when I was built, the ability to let go, even of a failure, was left out. So I didn't become an ad. writer. What else did I say?"

"Oh, a lot of things that didn't make sense; one of them was about an advertisement you said you had seen in the New York Herald. I couldn't make out what it was; something about an English estate."

Prime looked up quickly.

"Isn't it odd how these perfectly inconsequent things bury themselves somewhere in the human brain, to rise up and sneak out some time when the bars happen to be left down," he speculated. "There was such an ad., and I saw it; but I don't believe I have given it a second thought from that time to this."

"When you spoke of it last night, you seemed to be telling Mr. Grider about it. Was it addressed to you?"

"It was addressed to the heirs of Roger Prime, of Batavia, and Roger Prime was my father. If I remember correctly, the advertisers gave a Canadian address – Ottawa, I think – and the 'personal' was worded in the usual fashion: 'If the heirs of Roger Prime will apply' – and so on; you know how they go. It was the old leg-pull."

"I don't quite understand," she demurred. "What do you mean by 'leg-pull'?"

"The swindle is so venerable that it ought to have whiskers by this time. Every once in a while a rumor leaks out that some great estate has been left in England, or somewhere else across the water, with no native heirs. You or I, if we happen to have a family name that fits in, are invited to contribute to a sum which is being made up to pay the cost of establishing the rights of the American descendants, and there you are. I suppose hundreds of thousands of dollars have been buncoed out of credulous Americans in that way, first and last."

"I wish you could remember the Canadian address which you say you think was Ottawa," rejoined the young woman reflectively.

"Why?"

"Because I saw in a Cleveland newspaper an advertisement of the same nature, addressed to the heirs of the body of Clarissa Millington, born Bradford. Clarissa Millington was my mother. There was no name signed, but a business address was given, and it was in Ottawa."

"You have forgotten the address?" said Prime.

"I didn't try to remember it. I wrote it down, and I have it in my luggage in Quebec."

The paddle-maker looked up with an accusing laugh.

"You were planning to return from Quebec by way of Ottawa; you were going to give those sharks some of your hard-earned teaching money. Don't deny it."

"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 advertisement, 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.