come all the way down the river."
With this the restless-eyed querist appeared to be satisfied. At all
events he did not press the questioning any further, and was content to
take another pipe-filling from Prime's tobacco twist and to tell a
little more about himself. He was "one ver' great trapper," in his own
phrase, and was also a "timber looker" for a lumber company. Lucetta had
withdrawn to the privacy of her tent, and Prime could not divest himself
of the idea that the small man whose tongue had been so suddenly
loosened was merely sparring for time, time in which to accomplish some
end of his own. In due course the battery was unmasked.
"You say you begin _voyageur_ on ze big lake. W'ere you leave Jules
Beaujeau an' Pierre Cambon, eh, w'at?"
"I don't know them," said Prime, telling the simple truth.
"Dis Pierre Cambon's gon," said the little man, suddenly tapping the
weapon he had been inspecting. "She 'ave hees name on ze stock. An' ze
birch-bark down yonder; she's belong' to Jules Beaujeau. You buy 'um?"
Prime scarcely knew what to say; whether to tell the truth, which would
not be believed, or to make up a lie, which might be believed. As a
compromise he chose a middle course, which is always the most dangerous.
"I don't know these two you speak of, by name; but the two men who owned
the canoe and the guns are both dead."
The supper guest sprang up as if a bomb had been exploded under him and
quickly put a safe distance between himself and the camp-fire.
"You--you kill 'um?" he demanded.
"No; come back here and sit down. They had a fight and killed each
other."
The man returned hesitantly and squatted beside the fire to press
another live coal into the bowl of his pipe. Prime switched the talk
abruptly.
"You'd better change your mind about the offer I made you and pilot us
to the nearest town. We will pay you well for it."
"You got money?" was the short question.
"Plenty of it."
At this the "ver' great trapper" assumed to take the proposal under
consideration, smoking other pipes, chaffering and bargaining and
prolonging his stay deep into the night. When he finally took his leave,
saying that he must go on to his camp, which was a few miles up one of
the smaller tributaries of the main stream, it was with a half promise
to come back in the morning for the piloting.
Prime took counsel of prudence and did not settle himself for the night
immediately after the sharp-eyed one had gone. Laying his pipe aside, he
crept cautiously out to the river-bank and assured himself that his late
visitor was doing what he had said he would do, namely, heading off up
the river with clean, quick strokes of the paddle, which soon sent his
light craft out of sight. Prime climbed down the bank, satisfied
himself that the patched canoe and its partial lading had not been
disturbed, and then went back to the fire to roll himself in his
blankets. The incident, with its inquisitorial pryings, had been rather
disturbing, in a way, but it was apparently an incident closed.
Turning in so late after a laborious day on the river, Prime overslept
the next morning, and when he awoke he found Lucetta already up and
frying the bacon.
"Your man didn't stay all night?" she questioned, after Prime had
scolded her for not making him get up and do his part.
"No; he sat here until between ten and eleven o'clock and gave me two or
three bad minutes. He recognized our canoe and one of the guns, told me
the names of the dead men, and wanted to know what had become of them."
"You didn't tell him?" she gasped.
"In the cold light of the morning after, I am afraid I told him too much
or too little. I told him the men who owned the canoe and its outfit
were dead; that they'd had a fight and killed each other. Candidly, I
don't think he believed it. It scared him until I thought he was going
to have a fit. I had to jolly him up a bit before he would come back to
the fire and talk some more."
"What does he believe?" she inquired anxiously.
"He wouldn't tell me, and I couldn't decide by merely looking at him. I
hope I've hired him to pilot us to the nearest town. When he went away
he intimated that he might be back this morning."
"Shall we wait for him?"
"No; if he isn't here by the time we are ready to start, we'll go on and
take our chance of 'gettin' los',' as he put it. I think that was a
bluff, anyway."
They breakfasted leisurely, and Prime even took time to smoke a pipe
before beginning to break camp. But his first trip to the river-bank
with a load of the dunnage brought him back on a run.
"Our canoe's gone!" he announced breathlessly. "That little wretch came
back and stole it while we were asleep!"
Lucetta sat down and propped her chin in her hands.
"This is the beginning of the end, Donald," she said quite calmly and
with a touch of resignation in her voice. "Do you know why he took the
canoe?"
"Because he's an infernal thief!" Prime raged hotly.
"No," she contradicted. "It is because he thinks we have murdered the
two owners of the canoe, and he wanted to make sure that we wouldn't run
away while he went after help to arrest us."
XVI
_MARCHONS!_
PRIME leaned against a tree and took a full minute for a grasping of the
new situation.
"I more than half believe you are right," he admitted at length. Then,
with a crabbed laugh: "If there is any bigger dunce on earth than I am I
should like to meet him--just as a matter of curiosity. I'll never brag
on my imagination after this. I could see plainly enough that the fellow
was fairly eaten up with suspicion, and it would have been so easy to
have invented a plausible lie to satisfy him."
"Don't be sorry for that," the young woman put in quickly. "If they
arrest us we shall have to tell the truth."
Prime was frowning thoughtfully. "That is where the shoe pinches. Do you
realize that the story we have to tell is one that no sane magistrate or
jury could ever believe, Lucetta? These two men, Beaujeau and Cambon,
must have started from some known somewhere, alive and well. They
disappear, and after a while we turn up in possession of their
belongings and try to account for ourselves by telling a fantastic
fairy-tale. It's simply hopeless!"
"You are killing the only suggestion I had in mind," was the dispirited
rejoinder. "I was going to say that we might wait here until they came
for us, but that won't do at all. We must hurry and disappear before
they come back and find us!"
"I think it will be best," Prime decided promptly. "If we had a
reasonable story to tell it would be different. But we haven't, and the
chances are that we should get into all sorts of trouble trying to
explain for other people a thing that we can't explain for ourselves. It
is up to us to hit the trail. Are you fit for it?"
"Why shouldn't I be?" she asked, but there was no longer the old-time
buoyancy in her tone.
"I have had a notion the last day or two that you were not feeling quite
up to the mark," Prime explained soberly. "It is something about your
eyes; they look heavy, as if you hadn't had sleep enough."
"I can do my part of anything that we have to do," she returned, rising;
and together they made a judicious division of the dunnage, deciding
what they could take and what they must leave behind.
The uncertainties made the decision hard to arrive at. If the tramp
should last no more than three or four days they could carry the
necessary food without much difficulty. But they could scarcely afford
to give up the blankets and the shelter-tent, and Prime insisted that
they must take at least one of the guns and the axe. These extras, with
the provisions and the cooking-utensils, made one light load and one
rather heavy one, and under this considerable handicap the day's march
was begun.
The slow progress was difficult from the very outset. Since the river
was their only guide, they did not dare to leave it to seek an easier
path. By noon Prime saw that his companion was keeping up by sheer force
of will, and he tried to get her to consent to a halt for the
afternoon. But she would not give up.
"No," she insisted. "We must go on. I am tired; I'll admit it; but I
should be something worse than tired if we should have to stop and be
overtaken."
From the beginning of the day's march they seemed to have left behind
all of the former hopeful signs, and were once more making their way
through a primeval forest, untouched, so far as they could see, by the
woodsman's axe. Their night camp was made among the solemn spruces by
the side of a little brook winding its way to the nearby river. Prime
made a couch of the spruce-tips, the folded tent cloth, and the
blankets, and persuaded Lucetta to lie down while he prepared the
supper.
When the meal was ready the substitute cook was the only one who could
eat. Lucetta said she didn't care for anything but a cup of tea, and
when Prime took it to her he saw that the slate-gray eyes were
unnaturally bright and her face was flushed. Whereat a great fear seized
upon him.
"You are sick!" he exclaimed, grappling helplessly with the unnerving
fear. "Why didn't you tell me before? I thought--I hoped you were just
tired out with the long tramp."
"I shall be better in the morning," she answered bravely. "It has been
coming on for a day or two, I think. Why did we camp here in this close
place, where it is so hot?"
Prime gripped his fleeting courage and held it hard. It was not hot
under the spruces; on the contrary, the evening was almost chilly.
Bestirring himself quickly to do what little he was able to do, he moved
the sick one gently and set up the tent to shelter her, dipped the
remaining bit of the soft deerskin into the brook and made a cold
compress for the aching head, and then sat down with a birch-bark fan to
keep the mosquitoes away.
As the night wore on he realized more and more his utter helplessness.
He had had no experience with sickness or with the care of the sick, and
if the remedies had been at hand he would not have known how to use
them. Time and again, after Lucetta had fallen into a troubled sleep, he
made his way to the riverbank to stare anxiously in the darkness up and
down the stream in the faint hope that help might appear. But for all
his longings the silent river gave back neither sight nor sound.
In the morning Lucetta's fever had abated, but it had left her weak and
exhausted; much too weak to continue the march, though she was willing
and anxious to make the trial. Prime vetoed that at once and tried his
best to concoct something out of their diminished store of provisions
that would prove appetizing to the invalid. She ate a little of the
broth prepared from the smoked deer meat merely to please him, and drank
thirstily of the tea; but still Prime was not encouraged.
During the afternoon Lucetta's temperature rose again, and, harassed and
anxious as he was, Prime was thankful that the fever did not make her
delirious. That, he told himself, would be the final straw. So far from
wandering, she was able to talk to him; to talk and to thank him
gratefully for his earnest but skilless attempts to make her more
comfortable.
"It is simply maddening to think that there isn't anything really
helpful that I can do," he protested, at one of these pathetic little
outbreaks of gratitude. "What do they do for people who have fevers?"
"Quinine," she said, with a twitching of the lips which was meant to be
a smile. "Why don't you give me a good big dose of quinine, Donald?"
"Yes, why don't I?" he lamented. "Why do I have to sit here like a bump
on a log and do nothing!"
"You mustn't worry," she interposed gently. "You are not responsible for
me and my aches and pains. You must try to remember that only a little
more than three weeks ago we were total strangers to each other."
"Three weeks ago and now are two vastly different things, Lucetta. You
have proved yourself to be the bravest, pluckiest little comrade that a
man ever had! And I--I, whose life you have saved, can do nothing for
you in your time of need. It's heartbreaking!"
The night, which came on all too slowly for the man who could do
nothing, was even less hopeful than the previous one had been. Though he
had no means of measuring it, Prime was sure that the fever rose higher.
For himself he caught only cat-naps now and then during the long hours,
and between two of these he went to the river-bank and built a
signal-fire on the remote chance of summoning help in that way.
Between two and three o'clock in the morning the fever began to subside
again, and the poor patient awoke. She was perfectly reasonable but
greatly depressed, not so much over her own condition as on Prime's
account. Again she sought to make him take the purely extraneous view,
and when that failed she talked quite calmly about the possibilities.
"I have had so little sickness that I hardly know whether this is really
serious or not," she said. "But if I shouldn't--if anything should
happen to me, I hope you won't--you won't have to bury me in the river."
"For Heaven's sake, don't talk that way!" he burst out. "You're not
going to die! You _mustn't_ die!"
"I am sure I don't want to," she returned. "Especially just now, when I
was beginning to learn how to live. May I have a drink of water?"
He went to the brook and got it for her, raging inwardly at the thought
that he could not even offer her a drink out of a vessel that wouldn't
taste tinny. When her thirst was quenched she went on half musingly.
"I am glad there isn't any one to be so very sorry, Donald. I know it
must be fine to have a family and to be surrounded by all kinds of love
and affection; but those things carry terrible penalties. Did you ever
think of that?"
"I hadn't," he confessed. "I've been a sort of lonesome one, myself."
"The penalties work both ways," she went on. "It breaks your heart to
have to leave the loved ones, and it breaks theirs to have you go. I
suppose the girls in the school will be sorry; they all seem to like me
pretty well, even if I am a 'cross old maid,' as one of them once called
me to my face."
"I can't imagine you cross; and as to your being old, why you're nothing
but a kid, Lucetta--just a poor little sick kiddy. And, goodness knows,
you've had enough to knock you out and to make you think all sorts of
grubby thoughts. You mustn't; you are going to get well again, and we'll
march along together the same as ever. Or perhaps the sheriff will find
us, after all. I've kindled a big fire down on the river-bank so that he
won't have any excuse for overlooking us. Day before yesterday I would
have tramped twenty miles to dodge him, but to-night I'd welcome him
with open arms."
"We were foolish to try to run away," she said. "And that was my fault,
too. The--the next time you are kidnapped, you must be careful not to
let yourself be tied to a petticoat, Cousin Donald. They are always in
the way."
"If I hadn't been tied to a petticoat that could swim, I shouldn't be
here to-night fanning the mosquitoes away from you," he retorted, with a
laugh that was meant to be cheering. And then he reverted to his one
overwhelming and blankly insoluble problem: "If I only knew what to do
for you!"
"When I was a little girl we lived in the country, and my mother
doctored the entire neighborhood with roots and herbs. It is a pity I
haven't inherited a little of her skill, isn't it?"
"There are lashings of pitiful things in this world, Lucetta, and we are
getting acquainted with a few of them right now. But I mustn't let you
talk too much. Try to go to sleep, if you can, and get a little rest
before the fever comes on again."
She closed her eyes obediently, and after a time he knew by her regular
breathing that she was asleep. For a patient hour he kept the birch-bark
fan in motion and with the first streakings of dawn got up stiffly to
make his way to the river-bank, dragging with him a half-rotted log to
turn the pillar-of-fire signal into a pillar of smoke.
XVII
ROOTS AND HERBS
THE dawning of the second day in the camp under the great spruces found
Prime still struggling desperately with the problem of what to do.
Lucetta's condition seemed to be rather worse than better. There was the
usual morning abatement of the fever, but she was evidently growing
weaker. Prime's too vivid imagination pictured an impending catastrophe,
and the canoe thief, no less than Watson Grider, came in for wordless
and despairing maledictions. If the canoe had not been stolen they might
by now be within reach of help.
It was when matters were at this most distressing pass that the
writing-man's invention, pricked alive by what Lucetta had said
concerning her mother's skill with simples, opened a temerarious door of
hope. Making his charge as comfortable as he could, and leaving a cup of
water where she could reach it, he told her he was going for a walk.
Taking the brook for a pathfinder, he traced its course until it led him
into a region of opener spaces where there was a better chance for
ground growth. In the first weed patch he came to he began to pluck and
taste. Unhappily, his knowledge of botany was perilously near a minus
quantity; there were few of the weeds that he knew even by name. At the
imminent risk of poisoning himself, he went on, chewing a leaf here and
there, not knowing in the least what he was looking for, but having an
inchoate idea that a febrifuge ought to be something bitter.
The tasting process gave him a variety of new experiences. The leaves of
one weed burned his mouth like fire, and he had to stop and plunge his
face into the brook to extinguish the conflagration. Those of another
made him deathly sick. Finally he came to a tall plant with bluish-white
flowers which looked familiar, in a way, though he could not recall its
name. A chewed leaf convinced him at once that he need seek no farther.
There was the bitterness of hopeless sorrow in its horrible acridity; it
clung to him tenaciously while he was gathering an armful of the plant,
and went with him on his return to the camp--this, in spite of the fact
that he stopped frequently to wash his mouth with brook water.
"What have you there?" was Lucetta's query when he came in with his
burden.
"I don't know, but I am hoping you can tell me," he said, giving her a
spray of the weed to look at. "Have you ever seen it before?"
"Hundreds of times," she returned. "It is a common weed in Ohio. But I
haven't the slightest idea what it is."
Prime groaned. "More of the town-bred education," he deprecated. "But
never mind; they can't call us nature-fakirs, whatever other foolish
name we may be earning for ourselves."
"What are you going to do with it?" she asked.
"Wait and you'll see."
With the bread-mixing tin for a stew-pan Prime made a rich decoction of
the leaves. When the mess began to simmer and steam the poor patient
raised herself on one elbow to look at it.
"You are not going to make me drink all that, are you, Donald?" she
protested weakly.
"Oh, no; not all of it. Wait until it's properly cooked and I'll show
you what I am going to do with it."
The cooking took some time, but the culinary effort offered a mild
diversion and was at least a change from the deadly routine of doing
nothing. The steam rising from the stewing leaves gave off a peculiarly
afflicting odor, and Lucetta sniffed it apprehensively.
"It smells very horrible," she ventured. "Is it going to taste as bad as
it smells?"
"That, my dear girl, is on the knees of the gods," he returned
oracularly.
"How did you find it?" she wanted to know.
"By the simple process of cut and try. And I can assure you that,
however bad it may smell or taste, it hasn't anything on some of the
leaves I've been chewing this morning."
When the dose was sufficiently cooked Prime fished the leaves out of the
liquor with a forked twig, and carried the stew-pan to the brook to
take the scalding edge off of the ill-smelling decoction.
"Are you ready to be poisoned?" he asked when he came back.
"You're--you're sure it _isn't_ poison, aren't you?" she quavered.
"No, but I am going to be," and with that he shut his eyes, held his
breath, and took a long drink from the stew-pan of fate, disregarding
easily, in the frightful bitterness of the draft, Lucetta's little cry
of dismay.
"Merely trying it on the dog," he gasped when he put the pan down and
turned away so that she should not see the face contortions--grimaces
forthshowing the resentment of an outraged palate. Then he went to sit
on his blanket-roll to await results. "If--if it doesn't kill me, then
you can try it; but--but we'll wait a few minutes and see what it's
going to do to me."
When the results proved to be merely embittering and not immediately
deadly, he became a nurse again.
"I have left it as hot as you can drink it," he said, offering the
basin. "It seems as if it ought to do more good that way. Take a good
long swig, if you can stand it."
Lucetta put her lips to the mixture and made a face of disgust.
"Ou-e-e-e!--_boneset!_" she shuddered. "I'd know it if I should meet it
in another world--it takes me right back to my childhood and mother's
roots and herbs! I can't, Donald; I simply _can't_ drink all of that!"
"Drink as much as you can. It's good for little sick people," he urged,
trying to twist the wryness of his own aftermath into a smile. "If the
horrible taste counts for anything, it ought to make you well in five
minutes."
Lucetta did her duty bravely, and when the worst was over Prime tucked
her up in the blankets, adding his own for good measure. Then he made up
a roasting fire, having some vague notion brought over from his boyhood
that fever patients ought to sweat. Past this, he made a sad cake of
pan-bread for his own midday meal, and when it was eaten he found that
Lucetta had fallen asleep, and was further encouraged when he saw that
fine little beads of perspiration had broken out on her forehead.
It was late in the afternoon before she awoke and called him.
"Are you feeling any better?" he asked.
"Much better; only I'm so warm I feel as if I should melt and run away.
Can't you take at least one of the blankets off?"
"Not yet. You like to cook things, and I am giving you some of your own
medicine. This is Domestic Science as applied to the human organization.
Just imagine you are a missionary on one of the South Sea Islands, and
that you are going to be served up presently _a la_ Fiji. Shall I try to
fix you up something to eat?"
"Not yet. But I feel as if I could drink the brook dry."
"No cold water," he decided authoritatively. "The doctor forbids it. But
you may have another drink of hot boneset tea."
"Oh, please, not again!" she pleaded; and at that he made her a cup of
the other kind of tea, which she drank gratefully.
"Taste good?" he inquired.
"It tastes like the boneset--everything is going to taste like boneset
for the next six weeks."
"Don't I know?" he chuckled. "Hasn't it already spoiled my dinner for
me? I could taste it in everything." Then he told her about his
experiment in pan-bread, adding: "I have saved a piece of it so that if
you wish to commit suicide after you get well, the means will be at
hand."
"Do you think I am going to get well, Donald?"
"Sure you are! You'll have to do it in self-defense. Just think of the
oceans of bitterness you'll have to swallow if you don't. What is
puzzling me now is to know what I am going to feed you. Do you suppose
you could tell me how to make some pap or gruel, or something of that
sort?"
She smiled at this, as he hoped she would, and said there was no need of
crossing that bridge until they should come to it. Shortly after this
she fell asleep again, and by nightfall Prime was overjoyed to find that
her breathing was more natural, and that the fever was not rising. With
the coming of the darkness a fine breeze blew up from the river, and he
was overjoyed again when it proved strong enough to drive the tormenting
mosquitoes back into the forest.
That night he was able to make up some of the lost sleep of the two
preceding nights, and when daybreak came another burden was lifted.
Lucetta had slept all night, and she declared she was feeling much
better; that the fever seemed to be entirely gone. This brought the
question of nourishment to the fore again, and Prime attacked it
bravely, opening their last tin of peas and making a broth of the liquor
thickened with a little of the reground flour. Lucetta ate it to oblige
him, though it was as flat and tasteless as any unsalted mixture must
be.
"Are you always as good as this to every strange woman you meet, Cousin
Donald?" she said, meaning to make the query some expression of her own
gratitude.