ADRIFT ON LOST RIVER
HERE sat Charmian abreast the pounding waters, sobbing at times as
if her heart would break, while up at the cave lolled the drivelling
thing that once had been a man, young and handsome and pulsing with the
thrill of life. The little water ouzel bowed and bobbed to her, perched
on a stone in the frothy pool below. He was like a boy stripped for
the first spring plunge into his favourite swimming hole, but jouncing
on the spring-board, shivering in anticipation of the chilling dive,
and thinking up excuses to postpone it. Yet always he dived, broke
the surface of the water again, and perched himself once more on his
aquatic throne. Here he bobbed his head to the girl and danced about,
then lifted a voice attuned to the song of the dashing waters, but
merging trills of gladness with their funeral dirge. He was always
there; he never failed her. He feared her not at all, neither did he
court her. The only jarring element in their companionship was his
complete indifference to her presence. But she forgave him this when
he sent forth his fluty notes in defiance of ice and snow and driving
spray. Here she sat and wept, ofttimes trembling from the cold, and
prayed for relief from this hideous thing that had come upon her.
Her brief dream of love had faded. At first she had striven bravely to
keep the fires burning, devoting herself to sacrifices for him, trying
to remember him as he had been only a few short days before. At times
she hated herself for what she considered her inconstancy and lack
of character. But her dream of love had gone--and now she realized
that love never had existed. He had swept her off her feet, this once
handsome, careless boy, and her youth had responded to his. Now she had
time to think, and she knew that she had dreamed.
She remembered now how she had tried to draw him into serious
discussion of various topics that interested her, and should have
interested him, and how persistently he had evaded them. He had been
a student of the law, but even upon that topic she had been unable to
draw a thoughtful word from him. Light-hearted, boyish, shallow-minded,
care-free he had always been, with never a thought for the morrow, his
distant future, or hers. How bitterly she recalled all this now! How
blind she had been! Never could they have been happy together. She had
not loved Andy Jerome--the female in her had succumbed to the male
attraction that his vigorous manhood offered; she had surrendered to
that alone.
Dr. Shonto had been right. Dr. Shonto was always right. Andy Jerome
was not for her. Now she saw that, with this dreadful thing constantly
threatening him, his family had not urged him to mental performances
which would strengthen his mind and character. Out of love for him they
had let him go his way, well supplied with money, and with nothing
to bother him. His schooling, she imagined, had been a mere pretence,
designed to delude him and his friends into believing he was normal.
In the end he would have turned out a failure, perhaps, but he would
not have been the first failure in a rich man’s family. Nothing would
have come of it, and he would have lived his life in blissful ignorance
of the real cause of his failure. Dr. Inman Shonto, she believed, had
counselled them to do this.
She was thinking of Inman Shonto hourly these days--of his grave,
kindly smile, his tolerance of human shortcomings, his knowledge,
success, liberal ideas, and lofty idealism. She never once thought of
his ugliness of face. In her picture of him she saw only the magnetic
smile and the power of that face.
It had occurred to her once--just once--that Shonto might have
prolonged his return so that Andy would run out of his medicine, when
he would be revealed to her in all his monstrousness. But she had put
the ungenerous thought behind her instantly. Dr. Shonto never would
stoop to such a thing as that.
No, something serious had detained him. He would come to her soon, if
it was possible for an aeroplane to cope successfully with the mountain
blizzards that raged over the Valley of Arcana. He would return to her.
She heard it in the unceasing song of the little water ouzel.
She had lost track of the days. Andy now was helpless, insensible to
cold and pain. At night she helped him to his blankets, made him lie
down, and wrapped him up. She slept in the outer chamber of the cave
now--slept fitfully, for she must needs be up every other hour to
replenish the fire, lest her charge throw off his covering and freeze
to death. Also her own covering was insufficient, for it was growing
colder, and but for the cave and the leaping fire she surely would have
suffered from the steadily lowering temperature.
She rose one morning about nine o’clock. The sky was leaden, as usual,
and the wind moaned over the Valley of Arcana. It was cold and dreary
in the cave, for she had slept for the past three hours and the fire
had died down to a bed of coals. She glanced once at the huddled form
under the blankets, then with the wooden shovel moved the drifted snow
from the entrance and rebuilt the signal fire outside. Then she made
acorn bread--how she hated it!--soaked and stewed jerked rabbit, and
laid out on the stone table an array of dried grapes and huckleberries.
When the unappetizing meal was ready she tried to drag the inert man
from his blankets, but he muttered and refused to move. So she ate, and
afterward made an effort to feed him, but without avail.
She wondered if he was dying. She wondered, too, at her indifference.
Surely he would be better dead. Her existence had become a primitive
one, and primitive people are wont to look at such things as life and
death in a most pragmatic light. But she hated herself again for not
worrying over his fate. If he refused to eat, however, what could she
do? Dr. Shonto had told her that she would know what to do if the
tablets should run out before his return. She knew now what he had
meant. She could feed Andy and keep him from freezing--and nothing more!
She left him wrapped in his blankets, breathing huskily, a motionless
heap of animal matter. She waded through the snow that had drifted
into the trail, which the previous day she had cleared, and sought the
waterfall and her friend of the driving spray.
He was there before her, perched upon his stone, bowing and scraping,
and bobbing about like a hard working auctioneer. This morning,
however, his song failed to cheer her. She wondered if she were going
mad. Strange thoughts had been in her mind since she had arisen. She
somehow seemed indifferent to what might lie before her. She was dull
and apathetic, and it seemed that she almost was as insensible to grief
and fear as that vegetated man lying like a dying fish in the Cave of
Hypocritical Frogs. She could not cry this morning. With dull eyes she
gazed at the antics of the water ouzel, and her thoughts were taken
up with a vague wonder of everything--life particularly. She wondered
who she was, why she was, what she was--wondered if her past were all
a dream--wondered if she had not lived in this deserted valley always,
and only dreamed of civilization and a girl called Charmian Reemy.
She must fight this off. She was growing afraid--afraid of herself! She
twisted her fingers together in a sudden agony of realization of her
plight, as when an unannounced wave of understanding sweeps across the
befuddled mind of a drunken man and he knows that he is drunk, and for
a moment suffers deep remorse. She rose to her feet to walk about for
warmth--
And then the water ouzel bobbed to the surface and flew to his perch;
and near the place where he had risen she saw a shining object tossing
about in the writhing current.
It was such an unfamiliar object that she stood and looked at it
uncomprehendingly. It was about a foot in length, seemed cylindrical,
and was unaccountably bright. This brightness had attracted her. It was
so out of place in that dull-coloured land.
It was a length of tree limb, she told herself. Some piece of driftwood
twelve inches long by three inches in diameter, with the bark slipped
off. But what had made the under bark so bright? Was it river slime?
Certainly--it could be nothing else.
She turned away, stopped--turned back again.
There it was eddying about in the swirling water. It was bright!
Bright! Bright like metal! And metal did not float--
Except!
With a new strange thought she clambered rapidly down over the stones
and reached the level of the ouzel’s throne. She found a long stick,
but it was far too short to reach the queer object tossing upon the
boiling water. She watched it tremblingly. It _was_ metal. No inner
bark could assume that brightness, no slime of the water could cause a
piece of limb to deceive the eye so easily.
All eagerness, fearful of disillusionment, she tested the water’s
depth, but had known before she did so that she dared not venture in.
The riotous current, twisting this way and that without stability of
direction, had swept the bright object to the middle of the pool once
more. And now it struck the main channel and went racing downstream,
past the water ouzel’s perch, and into the straight stretch of river
below.
And Charmian knew that it was of metal and meant for her.
The lost river! Down Lost River, through the mysterious underground
passages, Dr. Inman Shonto had sent a message to her, incased in a
metal cylinder!
Feverish with anxiety, she clambered over the stones and reached
the level land above the pool. Now, running with all her might, she
followed the river’s course through the heavy snow. The metal cylinder
was being swept downstream at a rapid rate. Her only hope lay in
reaching the canoe ahead of it, and paddling out to await its coming.
Trees and boulders shut off her view of the river. Hence she had
no notion of the speed of the drifting cylinder, and in greatest
excitement and dread of loss she waded on through the drifts, streaming
perspiration. Almost the last rational act of Andy Jerome before he
succumbed to the hideous malady had been to paddle the canoe upstream
as near as possible to the cave. He had been obliged to beach it below
a second waterfall, past which the two of them had been unable to carry
it.
At last, staggering on, she heard abreast of her the roar of the lower
waterfall. She left the open and ploughed into the trees. She reached
the river, staggering from the fierce strain. And now a dread thought
came to her: Had she the strength to shove the heavy, awkward craft
into the water? She remembered that it had required the combined
efforts of her and Andy to launch it before, to which they had found it
necessary to add no little ingenuity.
But a feeble cry came from her lips as she neared the spot where they
had left it. The river had risen. The canoe had launched itself and was
riding easily at the end of the tough grass rope that they had braided
for a painter and tied to a sapling on the river bank.
She had never paddled this canoe, nor any other canoe. She knew,
though, from what Andy had told her, that she must be cautious and not
unbalance the clumsy craft. In her excitement she had stepped into it,
taken up the paddle, and propelled it to the limit allowed by the grass
rope before she realized that it was still made fast to the sapling.
She pulled inshore again and stepped out, when, as she fumblingly
untied the rope, she realized that it would be folly for her to paddle
to the middle of the stream until the cylinder came in sight. She would
wait inshore in the canoe, with paddle in readiness, until she saw the
bright object coming down on the swift current.
She carefully entered once more, and knelt on the rough bottom with
her crude paddle. And now the terrible idea seized her that perhaps she
had been too slow and that the cylinder had long since drifted by.
She waited, torn by doubt and indecision, and was on the point of
leaving the canoe and plunging on downstream when a bright something
came toward her bobbing on the waves in the middle of the river.
With an inarticulate cry she shoved off and paddled awkwardly ahead of
it. Then the main current caught her, whirled her completely around,
and started her downstream at the same rate that the cylinder was
travelling.
She paddled upstream, but seemed unable to gain a foot. She dipped more
vigorously, her eyes on the drifting object of her hopes. The canoe was
swept into a rapids, struck a snag--and next instant she was in the icy
water, with the canoe capsized and hurrying on.
She could swim, and her bellows breeches did not impede the movements
of her legs as a skirt would have done. But she wore her heavy hiking
shoes; the current was swift and dangerous; the river was deep; in a
deplorably short time the ice-cold water would chill her blood and
benumb her muscles.
She struck out bravely; but, already half exhausted from her race
through the snowdrifts, she made little headway toward the snag that
had capsized the canoe. The water boiled over her, swept her about
unmercifully, and blinded her. Terror seized her as she realized that
she was not equal to the struggle against it. She went completely under
three times, twisted down by the undertow or whirlpools. She was
losing! She could not make the snag.
And then, coming up for the fourth time, gasping for air, her outflung
hand touched something hard and smooth, and her fingers closed over a
cylinder of brass.
Five minutes later, stunned, almost unable to move a limb from the
deadly coldness of the water, she half swam, half floated to a
projecting rock far downstream from the point where she had grasped the
cylinder. She clutched it with a hand, rested a minute or more, then
dragged herself upon it and lay gasping for breath, with the cylinder
pressed to her heaving breast.