rest, they did so, the Sunday dawning wet and stormy, with lowering
clouds and foggy intervals between the showers to make navigation
extrahazardous. When the rain settled into a steady downpour they pulled
the canoe out of water, turning it bottom-side up to serve as a roof to
shelter them. In the afternoon Prime took one of the guns and went
afield, in the hope of finding fresh meat of some sort, though it was
out of season and he was more than dubious as to his skill as either a
hunter or a marksman. But the smoked meats were becoming terribly
monotonous, and they had not yet had the courage to try the pemmican.
Quite naturally, nothing came of the hunting expedition save a thorough
and prolonged soaking of the hunter.
"The wild things have more sense than I have," he announced on his
return. "They know enough to stay in out of the rain. Can you stand the
cold-storage stuff a little while longer?"
Lucetta said she could, and specialized the Sunday-evening meal by
concocting an appetizing pan-stew of smoked venison and potatoes to vary
the deadly monotonies.
The Monday morning brought a return of the fine weather. The storm had
blown itself out during the night and the skies were clearing. The day
of rain had swollen the river quite perceptibly, and a short distance
below their Sunday camp its volume was further augmented by the inflow
of another river from the east, which fairly doubled its size.
On this day there were fewer water hazards, and the current of the
enlarged river was so swift that they had little to do save to keep
steerageway on the birch-bark. Nevertheless, it was not all plain
sailing. By the middle of the forenoon the course of the stream had
changed again to the northward, swinging around through a wide
half-circle to the west, and this course, with its Hudson Bay
threatenings, was maintained throughout the remainder of the day.
Their night camp was made at the head of a series of rapids, the first
of which, from the increased volume of the water, looked more perilous
than any they had yet attempted. It was late when they made camp and,
the darkness coming on quickly, they were prevented from reconnoitring.
But they had the thunder of the flood for music at their evening meal,
and it was ominous.
"I am afraid that noise is telling us that we are to have no
thoroughfare to-morrow," was the young woman's comment upon the thunder
music. "Let us hope it will be a short carry this time."
Prime laughed. "Isn't there a passage somewhere in the Bible about the
back being fitted to its burden?" he asked. Then he went on for her
encouragement: "It's all in the day's work, Lucetta-woman, and it is
doing you no end of good. The next time you are able to look into a
mirror you won't know yourself."
Though she had thought that she was by this time far beyond it, the
young woman blushed a little under the rich outdoor brown.
"Then I'm not growing haggard and old?" she inquired.
"Indeed, you are not!" he asserted loyally. "I'm the beauty of the
two"--passing a hand over the three weeks' growth of stubble beard on
his face. "You are putting on weight every day. In another week your
face will be as round as a full moon. It may not sound like it, but that
was meant for a compliment."
"Was I too thin?" she wanted to know.
"Er--not precisely thin, perhaps; but a little strenuous. You gave me
the idea at first that Domestic Science, with gymnasium teaching on the
side, had been a trifle too much for you. Had they?"
"No; I was perfectly fit. But one acquires the habit of living tensely
in that other world that we have lost and can't find again. It is human
to wish to make money, and then a little more money."
"What special use have you for a little more money?" Prime asked
curiously.
"Travel," she said succinctly. "I should like to see the world; all of
it."
"That wouldn't take so very much money. Goodness knows, the pen isn't
much of a mining-pick, but with it I have contrived to dig out a year in
Europe."
"You couldn't have done it teaching the daughters of retired farmers how
to cook rationally," she averred. "Besides, my earning year is only nine
months long."
"Then you really do want money?"
"Yes; not much money, but just enough. That is, if there is any such
half-way stopping-point for the avaricious."
"There is," he asserted. "I have found it for myself. I should like to
have money enough to enable me to write a book in the way a book ought
to be written--in perfect leisure and without a single distracting
thought of the royalty check. No man can do his best with one eye fixed
firmly upon the treasurer's office."
"I had never thought of that," she mused. "I always supposed a writer
worked under inspiration."
"So he does, the inspiration of the butcher and the baker and the
anxious landlord. I can earn a living; I have done it for a number of
years; but it is only a living for one, and there isn't anything to put
aside against the writing of the leisurely book--or other things."
"Oh! then you have other ambitions, too."
"The one ambition that every normal-minded man ought to have: I want a
wife and babies and a home."
"Then you certainly need money," she laughed.
"Sure I do; but not too much--always remember that--not too much."
"What would you call 'too much'?"
"Enough to spoil the children and to make it unnecessary for me ever to
write another line."
This time her laugh was mocking. "Just now you said you wanted enough so
that you could write without thinking of money," she reminded him.
"Oh, there is a golden mean; it doesn't have to be all honey or all
vinegar. A nice tidy little income that would provide at a pinch for
the butcher and the baker and the other people. You know what I mean."
"Yes, I think I do; and my ambition is hardly more soaring than yours.
As you remarked, it doesn't cost so frightfully much to travel and live
abroad."
He looked at her dubiously. "You don't mean that you'd wish to travel
all the time, do you?"
"Why not?"
"Why--er--I don't know precisely. But you'd want to settle down and have
a home some time, wouldn't you?"
"And cook for a man?" she put in. "Perhaps I haven't found the man."
Prime's laugh was boyishly blatant.
"I notice you are cooking pretty assiduously for a man these days. But
perhaps that is only in self-defense. If the man cooked for you you
wouldn't live very long."
"I am merely doing my bit, as the English say," was the cool retort. "I
haven't said that I like to do it."
"But you do like to do it," he insisted. "If you didn't, you couldn't
hit it off so cheerfully. I know a thing or two, and what I don't know
I am learning. You are a perfectly normal woman, Lucetta, and normality
doesn't mean continuous travel."
"You have changed your mind again. Last week you were calling me
abnormal, and saying that you had never met a woman like me before."
"I hadn't; but that was my misfortune. I hope there are a good many like
you; I've got to hope it for the sake of humanity and the good of the
race. But this talk isn't getting us anywhere. We had better turn in;
there is a hard day ahead of us tomorrow."
In the morning the prophecy seemed destined to fulfil itself in heaping
measure. While Lucetta was getting breakfast Prime took to the woods and
made a careful survey of some portion of the hazards ahead. He was gone
for the better part of an hour, and when he came back his report was not
encouraging.
"Worse and more of it," was the way he described the difficulties. "It
is just one rapid after another, as far as I went; and that must have
been a mile and a half or more. Coming back, I kept to the river bank,
and tried to imagine us picking the way between the rocks in the
channel. I believe we can do it if you have the nerve to try."
"If _I_ have the nerve?" she flung back. "Is that a revival of the sex
idea?"
"I beg your pardon," he hastened to say. "It was simply a manner of
speaking. Your nerve is like the rest of you--superb. We'll shoot the
rapids if it takes a leg. It would ask for more than a leg to make the
carry."
A little later they loaded the canoe carefully for the greater hazard,
packing the dunnage securely and protecting the meal and the flour as
well as they could by wrapping them tightly in the canvas roll. Past
this, they cut strips from the remaining scraps of deerskin and tied
everything, even to the utensils, the guns, and the axe, to the braces,
taking time to make their preparations thorough.
It was well that they took the time while they had it. After the
birch-bark had been headed into the first of the rapids there was no
time for anything but the strenuous fight for life. Faster and still
faster the frail craft leaped on its way, down one rapid and into
another before they could congratulate themselves upon the latest
hairbreadth dodging of the thickly strewn boulders.
From time to time in the brief respites Prime shouted encouragement to
his canoe-mate. "Keep it up--it can't last forever! We're doing nobly.
Look out for this big beggar just ahead!"
So it went on, from bad to worse and then to bad again, but never with a
chance for a landing or a moment's rest from the engrossing vigilance.
Prime gasped and was thankful that there were days of sharp
muscle-hardening behind them to fit them for this crowning test. He was
sure he could measure Lucetta's fortitude by his own. So long as he
could endure the strain he knew he could count upon hearing the steady
dip of her paddle keeping time with his own.
But the worst of the worst was yet to come. At the foot of a series of
rapids which were like a steeply descending stair, they found themselves
in a sluiceway where the enlarged river ran like a torrent in flood. On
the still air of the summer day a hoarse clamor was rising to warn them
that there was a cataract ahead. Prime's cry of alarm was not needed.
With the first backing dip of the paddle he felt the braking impulse at
the stern striking in with his own.
"Hold her!" he shouted. "We've got to make the shore, if it smashes us!"
But the puny strength of the two pairs of arms was as nothing when
pitted against the onsweep of the mighty flood. For a brief instant the
downward rush of the canoe was checked; then it was caught in a whirling
eddy and spun end for end as if upon a pivot. When it straightened up
for the leap over the shallow fall it was headed the wrong way, and a
moment later the crash came.
The young woman was the only one of the two who knew definitely what
followed. In the tipping glide over the brink they were both thrown out
of the canoe and spilled into the whirlpool at the foot of the cataract.
Lucetta kept her head sufficiently to remember that Prime could not
swim, and when she came up from the plunge she saw him, and saw that he
was not struggling.
[Illustration: "Hold her!" he shouted. "We've got to make the shore, if
it smashes us!"]
Two quick strokes enabled her to get her fingers in his hair, and then
began a battle in which the strength of the single free arm had to match
itself against the swirling current of the whirlpool. Twice, and yet
once again, the young woman and her helpless burden were swept around
the circle, each time drawing a little nearer to the recurving eddy
under the fall. Lucetta knew well enough that a second ingulfing under
the cataract meant death for both, and at the beginning of the fourth
circling she made the supreme effort, winning the desperate battle and
struggling out upon the low shingly bank of the pool, to fall exhausted
when she had dragged her unconscious canoe-mate out of the water.
After a dazed minute or two she was able to sit up and realize the
extent of the disaster. The canoe had disappeared after its leap into
the pool, and she did not know what had become of it. And Prime was
lying just as the dragging rescue had left him, with his arms flung
wide. His eyes were closed, and his face, under the three weeks' growth
of stubble beard, was haggard and drawn. In the dive over the fall he
had struck his head, and the blood was oozing slowly from a great bruise
on his forehead.
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!"