Produced by Ernest Schaal, Suzanne Shell and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
BOOKS BY FRANCIS LYNDE
Published by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
* * * * *
STRANDED IN ARCADY. Illustrated.
12mo _net_ $1.35
AFTER THE MANNER OF MEN.
Illustrated. 12mo _net_ $1.35
THE REAL MAN. Illustrated.
12mo _net_ $1.35
THE CITY OF NUMBERED DAYS.
Illustrated. 12mo _net_ $1.35
THE HONORABLE SENATOR SAGEBRUSH.
12mo _net_ $1.35
SCIENTIFIC SPRAGUE. Illustrated.
12mo _net_ $1.35
THE PRICE. 12mo _net_ $1.35
THE TAMING OF RED BUTTE WESTERN
Illustrated. 12mo _net_ $1.35
THE KING OF ARCADIA. Illustrated.
12mo _net_ $1.35
A ROMANCE IN TRANSIT. 16mo _net_ .75
STRANDED IN ARCADY
[Illustration: "No," said Prime soberly, "it was--er--it looks as if it
might have been an aeroplane."]
[_Page 13._]
STRANDED
IN ARCADY
BY
FRANCIS LYNDE
_ILLUSTRATED BY_
ARTHUR E. BECHER
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK :::::::::: 1917
Copyright, 1917, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Published May, 1917
[Illustration]
To
L. A. H. L.
WHOSE ACCOMPLISHMENTS IN SIMILAR FIELDS
ARE MUCH MORE VERSATILE THAN
_LUCETTA'S_
THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY
INSCRIBED BY
"P-D."
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE 1
II. AMATEUR CASTAWAYS 14
III. SENSIBLE SHOES 26
IV. IN THE NIGHT 38
V. A SECRET FOR ONE 45
VI. CANOEDLINGS 61
VII. _ROULANT MA BOULE_ 76
VIII. CRACKING VENEERS 88
IX. SHIPWRECK 98
X. HORRORS 111
XI. "A CRACKLING OF THORNS" 120
XII. IN SEARCH OF AN ANCESTOR 128
XIII. AT CAMP COUSIN 145
XIV. OF THE NAME OF BANDISH 157
XV. JEAN BA'TISTE 169
XVI. _MARCHONS!_ 180
XVII. ROOTS AND HERBS 191
XVIII. HEIGHTS AND DEPTHS 203
XIX. IN DURANCE VILE 214
XX. WATSON GRIDER 226
XXI. THE FAIRY FORTUNE 237
ILLUSTRATIONS
"No," said Prime soberly; "it was--er--it looks as if
it might have been an aeroplane" _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
"Is it good?" she asked, when he had inhaled the first
deep breath 52
"Hold her!" he shouted. "We've got to make the
shore, if it smashes us!" 108
"_Vraiment!_ she's one good gon," he commented . . .
"W'ere you get 'um?" 172
"None o' that, now! Ye'll be puttin' yer hands up
ower yer heids--the baith o' ye--or it'll be the
waur f'r ye!" 212
"The account between us is too long to wait for daylight!" 228
STRANDED IN ARCADY
I
THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE
AT the half-conscious moment of awakening Prime had a confused
impression that he must have gone to bed leaving the electric lights
turned on full-blast. Succeeding impressions were even more
disconcerting. It seemed that he had also gone to bed with his clothes
on; that the bed was unaccountably hard; that the pillow had borrowed
the characteristics of a pillory.
Sitting up to give these chaotic conclusions a chance to clarify
themselves, he was still more bewildered. That which had figured as the
blaze of the neglected electrics resolved itself into the morning sun
reflecting dazzlement from the dimpled surface of a woodland lake. The
hard bed proved to be a sandy beach; the pillory pillow a gnarled and
twisted tree root which had given him a crick in his neck.
When he put his hand to the cramped neck muscle and moved to escape the
bedazzling sun reflection, the changed point of view gave him a shock.
Sitting with her back to a tree at a little distance was a strange young
woman--strange in the sense that he was sure he had never seen her
before. Like himself, she had evidently just awakened, and she was
staring at him out of wide-open, slate-gray eyes. In the eyes he saw a
vast bewilderment comparable to his own, something of alarm, and a trace
of subconscious embarrassment as she put her hands to her hair, which
was sadly tumbled.
Prime scrambled to his feet and said, "Good morning"--merely because the
conventions, in whatever surroundings, die hard. At this the young woman
got up, too, patting and pinning the rebellious hair into subjection.
"Good morning," she returned, quite calmly; and then: "If you--if you
live here, perhaps you will be good enough to tell me where I am."
Prime checked a smile. "You beat me to it," he countered affably. "I was
about to ask you if you could tell me where _I_ am."
"Don't you know where you are?" she demanded.
"Only relatively; this charming sylvan environment is doubtless
somewhere in America, but, as to the precise spot, I assure you I have
no more idea than the man in the moon."
"It's a dream--it must be!" the young woman protested gropingly. "Last
night I was in a city--in Quebec."
"So was I," was the prompt rejoinder. Then he felt for his watch,
saying: "Wait a moment, let's see if it really was last night."
She waited; and then--"Was it?" she inquired eagerly.
"Yes, it must have been; my watch is still running."
She put her hand to her head. "I can't seem to think very clearly. If we
were in Quebec last night, we can't be so very far from Quebec this
morning. Can't you--don't you recognize this place at all?"
Prime took his first comprehensive survey of the surroundings. So far as
could be seen there was nothing but the lake, with its farther shore
dimly visible, and the primeval forest of pine, spruce, fir, and ghostly
birch--a forest all-enveloping, shadowy, and rather forbidding, even
with the summer morning sunlight playing upon it.
"It looks as if we might be a long way from Quebec," he ventured. "I am
not very familiar with the Provinces, but these woods----"
She interrupted him anxiously. "A long way? How could it be--in a single
night?" Then: "You are giving me to understand that you are not--that
you don't know how we come to be here?"
"You must believe that, if you can't believe anything else," he hastened
to say. "I don't know where we are, or how we got here, or why we should
be here. In other words, I am not the kidnapper; I'm the kidnapped--or
at least half of them."
"It seems as if it _must_ be a bad dream," she returned, with the frown
of perplexity growing between the pretty eyes. "Things like this don't
really happen, you know."
"I know they don't, as a rule. I've tried to make them happen, now and
then, on paper, but they always seem to lack a good bit in the way of
verisimilitude."
The young woman turned away to walk down to the lake edge, where she
knelt and washed her face and hands, drying them afterward on her
handkerchief.
"Well," she asked, coming back to him, "have you thought of anything
yet?"
He shook his head. "Honestly, I haven't anything left to think with.
That part of my mind has basely escaped. But I have found something,"
and he pointed to a little heap of provisions and utensils piled at the
upper edge of the sand belt: a flitch of bacon, sewn in canvas, a tiny
sack of flour, a few cans of tinned things, matches, a camper's
frying-pan, and a small coffee-pot. "Whoever brought us here didn't mean
that we should starve for a day or two, at least. Shall we breakfast
first and investigate afterward?"
"'We?'" she said. "Can you cook?"
"Not so that any one would notice it," he laughed. "Can you?"
She matched the laugh, and it relieved him mightily. It was her
undoubted right as a woman to cry out, or faint, or be foolishly
hysterical if she chose; the circumstances certainly warranted
anything. But she was apparently waiving her privilege.
"Yes, I ought to be able to cook. When I am at home I teach domestic
science in a girls' school. Will you make a fire?"
Prime bestirred himself like a seasoned camper--which was as far as
possible from being the fact. There was plenty of dry wood at hand, and
a bit of stripped birch bark answered for kindling. The young woman
removed her coat and pulled up her sleeves. Prime cut the bacon with his
pocket-knife, and, much to the detriment of the same implement, opened a
can of peaches. For the bread, Domestic Science wrestled heroically with
a lack of appliances; the batter had to be stirred in the tiny skillet
with water taken from the lake.
The cooking was also difficult. Being strictly city-bred, neither of
them knew enough to let the fire burn down to coals, and they tried to
bake the pan-bread over the flames. The result was rather smoky and
saddening, and the young woman felt called upon to apologize. But the
peaches, fished out of the tin with a sharpened birch twig for a fork,
were good, and so was the bacon; and for sauce there was a fair degree
of outdoor hunger. Over the breakfast they plunged once more into the
mystery.
"Let us try it by the process of elimination," Prime suggested. "First,
let me see if I can cancel myself. When I am at home in New York my name
is Donald Prime, and I am a perfectly harmless writer of stories. The
editors are the only people who really hate me, and you could hardly
charge this"--with an arm-wave to include the surrounding
wilderness--"to the vindictiveness of an editor, could you?"
He wished to make her laugh again, and he succeeded--in spite of the sad
pan-bread.
"Perhaps you have been muck-raking somebody in your stories," she
remarked. "But that wouldn't include me. I am even more harmless than
you are. My worst enemies are frivolous girls from well-to-do families
who think it beneath them to learn to cook scientifically."
"It's a joke," Prime offered soberly; "it can't be anything else." Then:
"If we only knew what is expected of us, so that we could play up to
our part. What is the last thing you remember--in Quebec?"
"The most commonplace thing in the world. I am, or I was, a member of a
vacation excursion party of school-teachers. Last evening at the hotel
somebody proposed that we go to the Heights of Abraham and see the old
battle-field by moonlight."
"And you did it?"
"Yes. After we had tramped all over the place, one of the young women
asked me if I wouldn't like to go with her to the head of the cove where
General Wolfe and his men climbed up from the river. We went together,
and while we were there the young woman stumbled and fell and turned her
ankle--or at least she said she did. I took her arm to help her back to
the others, and in a little while I began to feel so tired and sleepy
that I simply couldn't drag myself another step. That is the last that I
remember."
"I can't tell quite such a straight story," said Prime, taking his turn,
"but at any rate I shan't begin by telling you a lie. I'm afraid I
was--er--drunk, you know."
"Tell me," she commanded, as one who would know the worst.
"I, too, was on my vacation," he went on. "I was to meet a friend of
mine in Boston, and we were to motor together through New England. At
the last moment I had a telegram from this friend changing the plan and
asking me to meet him in Quebec. I arrived a day or so ahead of him, I
suppose; at least, he wasn't at the hotel where he said he'd be."
"Go on," she encouraged.
"I had been there a day and a night, waiting, and, since I didn't know
any one in Quebec, it was becoming rather tiresome. Last evening at
dinner I happened to sit in with a big, two-fisted young fellow who
confessed that he was in the same boat--waiting for somebody to turn up.
After dinner we went out together and made a round of the movies, with
three or four cafes sandwiched in between. I drank a little, just to be
friendly with the chap, and the next thing I knew I was trying to go to
sleep over one of the cafe tables. I seem to remember that my chance
acquaintance got me up and headed me for the hotel; but after that it's
all a blank."
"Didn't you know any better than to drink with a total stranger?" the
young woman asked crisply.
"Apparently I didn't. But the three or four thimblefuls of cheap wine
oughtn't to have knocked me out. It was awful stuff; worse than the _vin
ordinaire_ they feed you in the Paris wine-shops."
"It seems rather suspicious, doesn't it?" she mused; "your sudden
sleepiness? Are you--are you used to drinking?"
"Tea," he laughed; "I'm a perfect inebriate with a teapot."
"There must be an explanation of some sort," she insisted. Then: "Can
you climb a tree?"
He got up and dusted the sand from his clothes.
"I haven't done it since I used to pick apples in my grandfather's
orchard at Batavia, but I'll try," and he left her to go in search of a
tree tall enough to serve for an outlook.
The young woman had the two kitchen utensils washed and sand-scoured by
the time he came back.
"Well?" she inquired.
"A wild and woolly wilderness," he reported; "just a trifle more of it
than you can see from here. The lake is five or six miles wide and
perhaps twice as long. There are low hills to the north and woods
everywhere."
"And no houses or anything?"
"Nothing; for all I could see, we might be the only two human beings on
the face of the earth."
"You seem to be quite cheerful about it," she retorted.
He grinned good-naturedly. "That is a matter of temperament. I'd be
grouchy enough if it would do any good. I shall lose my motor trip
through New England."
"Think--think hard!" the young woman pleaded. "Since there is no sign of
a road, we must have come in a boat; in that case we can't be very far
from Quebec. Surely there must be some one living on the shore of a lake
as big as this. We must walk until we find a house."
"We'll do anything you say," Prime agreed; and they set out together,
following the lake shore to the left, chiefly because the beach
broadened in that direction and so afforded easy walking.
A tramp of a mile northward scarcely served to change the point of view.
There was no break in the encircling forest, and at the end of the mile
they came to a deeply indented bay, where the continuing shore was in
plain view for a doubling of another mile. The search for inhabitants
seeming to promise nothing in this direction, they turned and retraced
their steps to the breakfast camp, still puzzling over the tangle of
mysteries.
"Can't you think of _any_ way of accounting for it?" the young woman
urged for the twentieth time in the puzzlings.
"I can think of a million ways--all of them blankly impossible," said
Prime. "It's simply a chaotic joke!"
The young woman shook her head. "I have lost my sense of humor," she
confessed, adding: "I shall go stark, staring mad if we can't find out
something!"
More to keep things from going from bad to worse than for any other
reason, Prime suggested a walk in the opposite direction--southward from
the breakfast camp. While they were still within sight of the ashes of
the breakfast fire they made a discovery. The loose beach sand was
tracked back and forth, and in one place there were scorings as if some
heavy body had been dragged. Just beyond the footprints there were wheel
tracks, beginning abruptly and ending in the same manner a hundred yards
farther along. The wheel tracks were parallel but widely separated,
ill-defined in the loose sand but easily traceable.
"A wagon?" questioned the young woman.
"No," said Prime soberly; "it was--er--it looks as if it might have been
an aeroplane."
II
AMATEUR CASTAWAYS
LUCETTA MILLINGTON--she had told Prime her name on the tramp to the
northward--sat down in the sand, elbows on knees and her chin propped in
her hands.
"You say 'aeroplane' as if it suggested something familiar to you, Mr.
Prime," she prompted.
Truly it did suggest something to Prime, and for a moment his mouth went
dry. Grider, the man he was to have met in Quebec, was a college
classmate, a harebrained young barbarian, rich, an outdoor fanatic, an
owner of fast yachts, a driver of fast cars, and latterly a dabbler in
aviatics. Idle enough to be full of extravagant fads and fancies, and
wealthy enough to indulge them, this young barbarian made friends of his
enemies and enemies of his friends with equal facility--the latter
chiefly through the medium of conscienceless practical jokes evolved
from a Homeric sense of humor too ruthless to be appreciated by mere
twentieth-century weaklings.
Prime had more than once been the good-natured victim of these jokes,
and his heart sank within him. It was plain now that they had both been
conveyed to this outlandish wilderness in an aircraft of some sort, and
there was little doubt in his mind that Grider had been at the controls.
"It's a--it's a joke, just as I have been trying to tell you," he
faltered at length. "We have been kidnapped, and I'm awfully afraid I
know the man who did it," and thereupon he gave her a rapid-fire sketch
of Grider and Grider's wholly barbarous and irresponsible proclivities.
Miss Millington heard him through without comment, still with her chin
in her hands.
"You are standing there and telling me calmly that he did this--this
unspeakable thing?" she exclaimed when the tale was told. Then, after a
momentary pause: "I am trying to imagine the kind of man who could be so
ferociously inhuman. Frankly, I can't, Mr. Prime."
"No, I fancy you can't; I couldn't imagine him myself, and I earn my
living by imagining people--and things. Grider is in a class by himself.
I have always told him that he was born about two thousand years too
late. Back in the time of Julius Caesar, now, they might have appreciated
his classic sense of humor."
He stole a glance at the impassive face framed between the supporting
palms. It was evident that Miss Millington was freezing silently in a
heroic effort to restrain herself from bursting into flames of angry
resentment.
"You may enjoy having such a man for your friend," she suggested with
chilling emphasis, "but I think there are not very many people who would
care to share him with you. Perhaps you have done something to earn the
consequences of this wretched joke, but I am sure _I_ haven't. Why
should he include me?"
Prime suspected that he knew this, too, and he had to summon all his
reserves of fortitude before he could bring himself to the point of
telling her. Yet it was her due.
"I don't know what you will think of me, Miss Millington, but I guess
the truth ought to be told. Grider has always ragged me about my
women--er--that is, the women in my stories, I mean. He says they are
all alike, and all sticks; merely wooden manikins--womanikins, he calls
them--upon which to hang an evening gown. I shouldn't wonder if it were
partly true; I don't know women very well."
"Go on," she commanded.
"The last time I was with Grider--it was about two weeks ago--he was
particularly obnoxious about the girl in my last bit of stuff--the story
that was printed in the _New Era_ last month. He said--er--he said I
ought to be marooned on some desert island with a woman; that after an
experience of that kind I might be able to draw something that wouldn't
be a mere caricature of the sex."
At this, as was most natural, Miss Millington's ice melted in a sudden
and uncontrollable blaze of indignation.
"Are you trying to tell me that this atrocious friend of yours has taken
_me_, a total stranger, to complete his cast of characters in this
wretched burlesque?" she flashed out.
"I don't wish to believe it," he protested. "It doesn't seem possible
for any human being to do such a thing. But I know Grider so well----"
"It is the smallest possible credit to you, Mr. Prime," she snapped.
"You ought to be ashamed to have such a man for a friend!"
"I am," he acceded, humbly enough. "Grider weighs about fifty pounds
more than I do, and he took three initials in athletics in the
university. But I pledge you my word I shall beat him to a frazzle for
this when I get the chance."
"A lot of good that does us now!" scoffed the poor victim. And then she
got up and walked away, leaving him to stand gazing abstractedly at the
wheel tracks of the kidnapping air-machine.
Having lived the unexciting life of a would-be man of letters, Prime had
had none of the strenuous experiences which might have served to preface
a situation such as this in which he found himself struggling like a
fly in a web. It was absurdly, ridiculously impossible, and yet it
existed as a situation to be met and dealt with. Watching the indignant
young woman furtively, he saw that she went back to sit down beside the
ashes of the breakfast fire, again with her chin in her hands. Meaning
to be cautiously prudent, he rolled and smoked a cigarette before
venturing to rejoin her, hoping that the lapse of time might clear the
air a little.
She was staring aimlessly at the dimpled surface of the lake when he
came up and took his place on the opposite side of the ashes. The little
heap of provisions gave him an idea and an opening, but she struck in
ahead of him.
"Let me know when you expect me to pose for you," she said without
turning her head.
"I was an idiot to tell you that!" he exploded. "Can't you understand
that that fool suggestion about the desert island and a--er--a woman was
Grider's and not mine? How could I know that he would ever be criminal
enough to turn it into a fact?"
"Oh, if you can call it criminal, and really mean it--" she threw out.
"I'll call it anything in the vocabulary if only you won't quarrel with
me. Goodness knows, things are bad enough without that!"
She let him see a little more of her face. The frown had disappeared,
and there were signs that the storm of indignation was passing.
"I suppose it isn't a particle of use to quarrel," she admitted. "What
is done is done and can't be helped, however much we may agree to
despise your barbarous friend, Mr. Grider. How is it all going to end?"
At this Prime aired his small idea. "Our provisions won't last more than
a day or two; they were evidently not intended to. If that means
anything, it means that Grider will come back for us before long. He
certainly can't do less."
"To-day?"
"Let us hope so. Have you ever camped out in the woods before?"
"Never."
"Neither have I. What I don't know about woodcraft would make a much
larger book than any I ever hope to write. You probably guessed that
when you saw me make the fire."
The corners of the pretty mouth were twitching. "And you probably
guessed my part of it when you saw me try to make that dreadful
pan-bread. I _can_ cook; really I can, Mr. Prime; but when one has been
used to having everything imaginable to do it with----"
Prime thought he might venture to laugh once more. "Your revenge is in
your own hands; all you have to do is to continue to make the bread.
It'll get me in time. My digestion isn't particularly good, you know."
"Do you really think we shall be rescued soon?"
"For the sake of my own sanity, I'm obliged to think it."
"And in the meantime we must sit here and wait?"
"We needn't make the waiting any harder than we are obliged to. Suppose
we call it a--er--a sort of surprise-party picnic. I imagine it is no
use for us to try to escape. Grider probably picked the lonesomest
place he knew of."
She fell in with the idea rather more readily than he could have hoped,
and it gave him a freshening interest in her. The women he knew best
were not so entirely sensible. During what remained of the forenoon they
rambled together in the forest, care-free for the moment and postponing
the evil day. In such circumstances their acquaintance grew by leaps and
bounds, and when they came back to make a renewed attack upon the
provisions, the picnic spirit was still in the saddle.
The afternoon was spent in much the same manner; and in the absence of
the conventional restraints, a good many harmless confidences were
exchanged. Before the day was ended the young woman had heard the moving
story of Prime's struggle for a foothold in the field of letters, a
struggle which, he was modest enough to say, was still in the making;
and in return she had given her own story, which was commonplace
enough--so many years of school, so many in a Middle Western
coeducational college, two more of them as a teacher in the girls'
school.
"Humdrum, isn't it?" she said. They had made the evening fire, and she
was trying to cook two vegetables and the inevitable pan-bread in the
one small skillet. "This is my first real adventure. I wish I might know
whether I dare enjoy it as much as I'd like to."
"Why not?" he asked.
"Oh, the conventions, I suppose. We can't run fast enough or far enough
to get away from them. I am wondering what the senior faculty would say
if it could see me just now."
Prime grinned appreciatively. "It would probably shriek and expire."
"Happily it can't see; and to-morrow--surely Mr. Grider will come back
for us to-morrow, won't he?"
"We are going to sleep soundly in that comforting belief, anyway. Which
reminds me: you will have to have some sort of a place to sleep in. Why
didn't I think of that before dark?"
Immediately after supper, and before he would permit himself to roll a
cigarette from the diminishing supply of precious tobacco, Prime fell
upon his problem, immensely willing but prodigiously inexperienced. At
first he thought he would build a shack, but the lack of an axe put that
out of the question. Round by round, ambition descended the ladder of
necessity, and the result was nothing better than a camper's bed of
broken pine twigs sheltered and housed in by a sort of bower built from
such tree branches as he could break off by main strength.
The young woman did not withhold her meed of praise, especially after
she had seen his blistered hands, which were also well daubed with pitch
from the pines.
"It's a shame!" she said. "I ought not to have let you work so hard. If
it should happen to rain, you'd need the shelter much more than I
should."
"Why do you say that?"
"You don't look so very fit," was the calm reply; "and I _am_ fit. Do
you know, my one ambition, as a little girl, was to grow up and be an
acrobat in a circus?"
"And yet you landed in the laboratory of a girls' school," he laughed.
"Not exclusively," she countered quickly. "Last year I was also an
assistant in the gymnasium. Swimming was my specialty, but I taught
other things as well."
Prime laughed again. "And I can't swim a single stroke," he confessed.
"Isn't that a humiliating admission on the part of a man who has lived
the greater part of his life in sight of the ocean?"
Miss Millington said she thought it was, and in such gladsome fashion
the evening wore away. When it came time to sleep, the lately risen moon
lighted the young woman to her bower; and Prime, replenishing the fire,
made his bed in the sand, the unwonted exertions of the day and evening
putting him to sleep before he had fairly fitted himself to the
inequalities of his burrow below the tree roots.
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 _seance_ 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?"