grumbling machinery in the depths below roared a louder note, and the
big motor-craft cut a careening half-circle in midstream, leaving the
birch-bark to dance and wabble in the converging area of the furrowing
bow wave. By this time Prime had shaken himself fully awake. The two
deck-hands who had pulled him and Lucetta aboard had disappeared, and
the big man who had been bullying Macdougal was at the wheel. There was
a single electric bulb in the centre of the cockpit awning, and by its
light Prime had his first good look at the big steersman.
"_Grider!_" he exploded, taking a step toward the man at the wheel; and
at that Miss Lucetta Millington drew herself up icily and turned her
back.
XX
WATSON GRIDER
PRIME had often made his fictional heroes "see red" in exceptionally
vigorous crises, and he was now able to verify the colorful figure of
speech in his own proper person. Like a submerging wave the recollection
of all that the heartless joke might have meant to a pair of helpless
victims--of all that it had actually entailed in hardships and peril and
sickness--rushed over him as he faced the handsome young giant at the
wheel of the motor-cruiser.
"So it _was_ you, after all!" he gritted. Then: "There are some few
things that won't keep, Grider. Put this boat ashore where we can have a
little more room. The account between us is too long to wait for
daylight!"
The barbarian's answer to this was a shout of derisive laughter, and he
made a show of putting the small steering-wheel between himself and his
belligerent passenger.
"Give me time, Don--just a little time to take it all in!" he gurgled.
"Oh, my sainted grandmother! what a perfectly ripping fling you must
have had, to make you turn loose all holds like this! And the
lady--won't you--won't you introduce me?"
Lucetta faced about, and, if a look could have crippled, the
motor-cruiser would have lost its steersman.
"Cousin Donald has tried to tell me about you, but the reality is worse
than he or anybody could put into words!" she broke out in indignant
scorn. "Of all the inhuman, dastardly things that have ever been done in
the name of a practical joke, yours is certainly the climax, Mr.
Grider!"
The young man at the wheel pursed his lips as if he were going to
whistle; then he appeared to comprehend suddenly and went off in another
gust of Hudibrastic mirth.
"I've been figuring it all out as I came along up river," he choked;
"how you had tried to account for yourselves to each other--how you had
been wrestling with the lack of all the little civilized knickknacks and
notions--how you'd look when you came out. Excuse me, but your--your
clothes, you know; you're a pair to make a wooden idol hold his sides
and chortle himself to death!"
This seemed to be adding insult to injury, and by this time Prime was
speechless, Berserk-mad, as he himself would have written it. Nothing
but Lucetta's restraining hand upon his arm kept him from hurling
himself, reckless of consequences, upon the heartless jester. When he
could control his symptoms sufficiently to find a few coherent words, he
contrived to ease the soul-nausea--in some small measure.
"There is another day coming, Grider; don't you lose sight of that for a
single minute!" he raged. "I'm not saying anything about myself; perhaps
I have given you cause to assume that you can pull off your brutal
initiation stunts on me whenever you feel like it. That's all right, but
you've overdone the thing this time. Miss Millington's quarrel is my
quarrel. If I can't get you in any other way, I'll post you in every
club you belong to as the man who plays horse-laugh jokes on women!"
[Illustration: "The account between us is too long to wait for
daylight!"]
At this outburst Grider only laughed again, appearing to be entirely and
quite joyously impervious to either scorn or red rage.
"Perhaps I do owe you both an apology--not for the joke--that is too
ripping good to be spoiled--but for breaking your night's rest in that
peppery Scotchman's birch-bark," he offered. "If you'll duck under the
raised deck, you'll find two dog-kennel staterooms. The port-side kennel
is yours, Don, and the other is Miss Millington's. Suppose you turn in
and get your nap out. To-morrow morning, if you still feel in the humor
for it, you can get together and give me what you seem to think is
coming to me. _Shoo!_ I can't steer this boat and play skittles with you
at the same time. Run along to bed--both of you!"
With such a case-hardened barbarian for a host, there seemed to be
nothing else to be done, and Prime took Lucetta's arm and helped her
down into the tiny cabin. It was lighted, and the doors of the two
box-like staterooms were open. Prime felt for the button on the jamb of
the right-hand door and Lucetta's sleeping-niche sprang alight. She
looked in and gave a little cry of astonishment.
"My suitcases!" she exclaimed; "the ones I left in the Quebec hotel!"
Prime snapped the opposite switch and looked on his own side. "My auto
trunk, too," he conceded sourly. "We didn't need any more evidence, but
this is conclusive. Grider has had his horse-laugh, and the least he
could do in the wind-up was to bring us our belongings. I suppose we are
compelled to be indebted to him for getting us out of the scrape with
Macdougal, much as it goes against the grain; but to-morrow we'll settle
with him."
Lucetta braced herself in her doorway against the surge and swing of the
racing cruiser.
"He doesn't look like a man who could be so wholly lost to all sense
of--of the fitness of things, Donald," she ventured, as one who would
not be immitigably vindictive.
"He looks, and acts, like a wild ass of the desert!" Prime stormed, in a
fresh access of resentment. And then: "You'd best go to bed and get
what sleep you can. Heaven only knows what new piece of buffoonery will
be sprung upon us to-morrow morning."
She looked up with the adorable little grimace, a copy of which he had
long since resolved to wish upon his next and most bewitching heroine.
"I believe you are angry yet," she chided, half in mockery. "I like you
best when you don't scowl so ferociously, Cousin Donald. You forget that
we have agreed that it wasn't all bad. Good night." And she closed her
door.
Turning out of his box-berth the next morning, Prime found the sun
shining broadly in at the stateroom port-light. The motorboat was at
rest and the machinery was stopped. A bath, a shave, and a complete
change to fresh haberdashery made him feel somewhat less pugnacious, and
stumbling up the companion to the cockpit he saw that the cruiser was
tied up at a wharf on the river fringe of a considerable city; saw,
also, that Lucetta, likewise renewed as to her outward appearance, was
awaiting him.
"Where is Grider?" he demanded shortly.
"He has gone somewhere to get an auto to take us to a hotel."
"What city is this?"
"It is Ottawa. Don't you see the government buildings up there on the
hill?"
Prime was silent for a moment. Then he said: "He needn't think he is
going to smooth it all over by showing us a few little neighborly
attentions. We are back in the good old civilized world once more, and
we are not asking any favors of Watson Grider."
"Oh, I shouldn't feel that way, if I were you," she qualified. "He seems
very humble and penitent this morning, though he is still twinkly-eyed,
and I couldn't make him talk much. He said we'd want to be having our
breakfast, and----"
"We don't breakfast with him," was the crabbed rejoinder.
"Why, Donald!" she protested, in a laughing mockery of deprecatory
concern. "I believe you are still angry. You really mustn't hold spite,
that way. It isn't nice--or Bankhead-y."
He looked her fairly in the eyes. "Don't begin by throwing the old
minister ancestor up at me, Lucetta. I can't help the grouch, and I
don't know as I want to help it. Every time I think of you lying there
under the big spruces, sick and discouraged, suffering for the commonest
necessities and with no possible chance of getting them, I want to go
out and swear like a pirate and murder somebody. Why doesn't he bring
that auto, if he is going to?"
As if the impatient demand had evoked him, Grider appeared on the wharf
and beckoned to them. Prime helped his companion up to the string-piece,
and had only a scowl for their late host as Grider led the way to the
street and a waiting auto. The barbarian stood aside while Prime was
putting Lucetta into the car and clambering in after her. Then he took
the seat beside the driver, and no word was said until the car was
stopped before the entrance of an up-town hotel, where Grider got down
to open the tonneau door for the pair on the rear seat.
"You'll want to have your first civilized breakfast by yourselves and I
shan't butt in," he offered good-naturedly. "Later on, say about ten
o'clock, I'll be glad to see you both in the ladies' parlor--if you can
forgive me that far."
Prime made no reply, but after they were seated in the comfortable
breakfast-room and were revelling in their surroundings and in the
efficient service he broke out again.
"Grider still has his brass-bound nerve with him; to ask us to meet him!
I'd see him in kingdom come first, if I wasn't spoiling to tell him a
few things."
"Perhaps he wishes to try to explain," came from the less vindictive
side of the table-for-two. "Think a moment, Cousin Donald: you two have
been friends and college chums, and--and Mr. Grider has been brotherly
good to you in times past, hasn't he? And I don't want you to quarrel
with him."
"Why don't you?"
"Because you have said enough to make me understand that you are doing
it for my sake. That won't answer at all, you know."
"I don't see why it won't," Prime objected with sudden obtuseness.
"For the best possible reason; there is another woman to be considered.
Sooner or later she will hear that you have broken with your best friend
on account of a--a person she has never even heard of, and there will be
consequences."
"Oh, if that is all"--and then he laughed. "You are either the most
childlike bit of femininity the world has ever seen--or the most
wilfully blind, Lucetta."
"'Cousin Lucetta,'" she corrected. "We are back among the conventions,
now."
He took the implied readjustment of their relations rather hard.
"That wasn't worthy of you," he protested warmly. "We have been too much
to each other in the past month to go back of the returns in that way,
don't you think?"
"I can tell better what I think after I have climbed down into my little
groove in the girls' school," she returned half-absently, and beyond
this the talk concerned itself with their plans for the immediate
future, Prime still insisting that he meant to see his table companion
safely home and setting the difficulties and objections aside as one who
had a perfect right to do so.
When the leisurely meal was finished Prime pushed his chair back and
glanced at his watch.
"It is nearly ten o'clock," he announced. "Shall we go and meet Grider?
Or shall we give him the cold shoulder he so richly deserves and go hunt
up the railroad timetables? It is for you to say."
She decided instantly.
"I think we ought to go and hear what Mr. Grider has to say for himself.
We owe him that much for rescuing us from that terrible old Scotch
under-sheriff."
And together they sought the hotel parlors.
XXI
THE FAIRY FORTUNE
MR. WATSON GRIDER was not alone when they found him. He was sharing a
sofa in the public parlor with an elderly little gentleman whose
winter-apple face was decorated with mutton-chop whiskers and wreathed
in smiles--the smiles of a listener who has just heard a story worth
retailing at the dinner-table.
The two stood up when Prime led his companion into the room, and Grider
did the honors.
"Miss Millington, let me introduce Mr. Shellaby, an old friend of my
father's and the senior member of the firm of Shellaby, Grice, and
Shellaby, solicitors. Mr. Shellaby--Miss Millington and Mr. Donald
Prime."
The little gentleman adjusted his eyeglasses and looked the pair over
carefully. Then the twinkling smile hovered again at the corners of the
near-sighted eyes.
"Are you--ah--are you aware of your relationship to this young lady,
Mr. Prime?" he asked.
Prime made a sign of assent. "We figured it out one evening over our
camp-fire. We are third cousins, I believe."
"Exactly," said Mr. Shellaby, matching his slender fingers and making a
little bow. "Now another question, if you please: Mr. Grider tells me
that you have just returned from a most singular and adventurous
experience in the wilds of the northern woods. This experience, I
understand, was entirely involuntary on your part. Have
you--ah--formulated any theory to account for your--ah--abduction?"
Prime glanced at Grider and frowned.
"We know all we need to know about that part of it," he rejoined curtly.
"Mr. Grider is probably still calling it a practical joke; but we call
it an outrage."
The little man smiled again. "Exactly," he agreed; and then: "Do you
happen to know what day of the month this is?"
Prime shook his head.
"We have lost count of the days. I kept a notched stick for a while, but
I lost it along toward the last."
Mr. Shellaby waved them to chairs, saying: "Be seated, if you please; we
may as well be comfortable as we talk. This is the last day of July.
Does that mean anything in particular to either of you?"
Lucetta gave a little cry of surprise.
"It does to me," she said quickly. "Did you--did you put an
advertisement in a Cleveland newspaper addressed to me, Mr. Shellaby?"
"We did; and we also advertised for the heirs of Roger Prime, of
Batavia, New York. We believed at the time that it was a mere matter of
form; in fact, when we drew his will our client informed us that there
would most probably be no results. He was of the opinion that neither
Roger Prime nor Clarissa Millington had left any living children."
"Your client?" Prime interrupted. "May we ask who he is?"
"_Was_," corrected the small man gravely. "Mr. Jasper Bankhead died last
January. You didn't know him, I'm sure; quite possibly you have never
heard of him until this moment."
"We both know of him," Prime amended. "He was my great-uncle, and a
cousin of Miss Millington's grandmother. He was scarcely more than a
family tradition to either of us, however. We had both been told that he
went west as a young man and was never heard of afterward."
Mr. Shellaby nodded soberly.
"Mr. Bankhead was a rather peculiar character in some respects; quite
eccentric, in fact. He accumulated a great deal of property in British
Columbia--in mining enterprises--and it was only in his latter years
that he came here to live. We drew his will, as I have said. He was
without family, and he left the bulk of his estate--something over two
millions--to various charities and hospitals. There were other legacies,
to be sure, and among them one which was to be divided equally between,
or among, the direct heirs, if any could be discovered, of Clarissa
Millington and Roger Prime."
"And if no such heirs could be found?" Prime inquired.
"Our client was quite sure that they wouldn't be found. It seems that he
had previously had some inquiries made on his own account. For that
reason he placed a comparatively short time limit upon our efforts and
prescribed their form. We were to advertise in certain newspapers, and
if there should be no answer within six months of the date of his death
the legacy in question was to revert to his private secretary, a young
man who had served him in many capacities, and who was, by the by,
already generously provided for in a separate bequest."
Lucetta's gray eyes lighted suddenly and she spoke with a little
catching of her breath.
"The name of that young man, Mr. Shellaby, is Horace Bandish, isn't it?"
she suggested.
"Quite so," nodded the little man; and then, with the amused twinkle
returning to point the bit of dry humor: "I am sorry to have to spoil
your estimate of Mr. Grider's capabilities as a practical joker; yes,
very sorry, indeed; but I'm afraid I must. Bandish was your kidnapper,
you know, and it is owing entirely to Mr. Grider's energetic efforts
that the fellow is at present safely lodged in the Ottawa jail awaiting
indictment and trial. In order that he might be certain of adding your
legacy to his own, he meant to deprive you both of any possible
opportunity of communicating with us before July thirty-first. The young
woman who calls herself his wife was his accomplice, but she has
disappeared. Mr. Grider can give you the details of the plot better than
I can."
"Then Grider didn't--then the legacy is ours?" Prime stammered,
clutching manfully for handholds in the grapple with this entirely new
array of things incredible.
"Precisely, Mr. Prime; yours and Miss Millington's. There will be some
legal formalities, to be sure, but Mr. Grider assures us that you can
comply with them. Compared with Mr. Bankhead's undivided total, the
amount of the legacy is not great; some two hundred thousand dollars,
less the costs of administration, to be divided equally between you if
you prove to be the only surviving heirs direct of the two persons named
in the will."
Prime turned slowly upon his companion castaway.
"You said you wanted enough, but not too much," he reminded her
solemnly. "I hope you're not disappointed, either way. At all events,
you'll never have to cook for a man again unless you really wish to, and
you can have your wish about the world travel, too."
"And you can have yours about the writing of the leisurely book," she
flashed back; "about that, and--and----"
Prime's laugh ignored the presence of Grider and the lawyer.
"And the imaginary girl, you were going to say? Yes; I shall certainly
marry her, if she'll have me."
Mr. Shellaby was on his feet and bowing again.
"I think I have said all that needs to be said here and now," he
concluded mildly. "If you will excuse me, I'll go. We are a rather busy
office. Later, Mr. Grider may bring you to us and we can set the legal
machinery in motion. I congratulate you both very heartily, I'm sure,"
and he shook hands all around and backed away.
When they were left alone with the barbarian, Prime wheeled short upon
him.
"Watson, will you raise your right hand and swear that this isn't
another twist in your infernal joke?" he demanded. "Because, if it
is----"
Grider fell back into the nearest chair and chuckled like a fat boy at a
play.
"If it only were!" he gloated. "Wouldn't it be rich? Oh, Great Peter!
why didn't I think of it in time and run a sham lawyer in on you? It
would have been as easy as rolling off a log. Unhappily, Don, it's all
too true. I didn't invent it--more's the pity!"
Prime stood over the joker, menacing him with a clenched fist. "If you
want to go on living and spending your swollen fortune, you'll tell us
all the ins and outs of it," he rasped, in well-assumed ferocity.
"I was only waiting for an invitation," was the laughing rejoinder.
"When you didn't turn up in Boston to go motoring with me I ran over to
New York and broke into your rooms. On your desk I found a telegram
purporting to have come from me at Quebec. Since I hadn't wired you from
Quebec, or anywhere else, I began to ask questions. Your janitor
answered the first one: you had already gone to Canada. I couldn't
imagine what was going on, but it seemed to be worth following up, so I
took the next train for Quebec."
"And you didn't wire ahead?" said Prime.
"No; it didn't occur to me, but it wouldn't have done any good. Your
disappearance was two days old when I reached Quebec. You weren't missed
much, but Miss Millington was; the school-teachers were milling around
and raising all sorts of a row. But in another day it quieted down flat.
Somebody started the story that you two had run off together to get
married; that it had been all cut and dried between you beforehand."
"That was probably a part of the plot--to account for us in that way,"
Lucetta put in.
"No doubt it was," Grider went on. "But the elopement story didn't
satisfy me. I knew there wasn't any reason in the wide world why Don
shouldn't get married openly, if he could find any girl foolish enough
to say 'yes,' so I simply discounted the gossip and wired for
detectives. A very little sleuth work developed the fact that each of
you had been seen last in company with one of the Bandishes. That gave
us a sort of a clew, and we began to trail Mr. Horace Bandish and dig up
his record."
"And while you were doing all this for us, we ... honestly, Mr. Grider,
I am ashamed to tell you what we were saying of you," said the young
woman in penitent self-abasement.
"Oh, that was all right. In times past I had given Don plenty of
material of that sort to work on; only I wish I had known how you were
looking at it--that you were charging it all up to me. It would have
lightened the gloom immensely. But to get on: we trailed Bandish, as I
say, and found that he had had an aeroplane shipped to him at Quebec a
few days before your arrival there. That looked a bit suspicious, and a
little more digging made it look more so. The 'plane had been unloaded
and carted away, and a few days later had been brought back and shipped
to Ottawa. That left a pretty plain trail, but still there was no
evidence of criminality."
"Of course, you didn't know anything about the legacy, at that stage of
it?" Prime threw in.
"Not a thing in the world. More than that, Bandish's record was decently
good. We found that he had been a sort of general factotum for a rich
old man, and had been left comfortably well off when his employer died.
There was absolutely no motive in sight; no reason on earth why he
should drug a couple of total strangers and blot them out. Just the
same, I was confident that he had done it, and that I should eventually
find you by keeping cases on him. So I dropped the detectives, who were
beginning to give me the laugh for being so pig-headed about an ordinary
elopement, gathered up your belongings on the chance that you'd need 'em
if I should make good in the search for you, and came here to Ottawa to
keep in touch with Bandish."
Prime's smile was grim. "You were taking a lot of trouble for two people
who were just about that time calling you all the hard names in the
category," he interposed.
"Wasn't I?" said the barbarian with a grin. "But never mind about that.
I came here, as I said, and settled down to keep an eye on Horace. For
quite some time I didn't learn anything new. I found that Bandish was a
club man, well known and rather popular; also that he was an amateur
aviator and had made a number of exhibition flights. Everybody knew him
and everybody seemed to like him. In the course of time we met at one of
the clubs, and I watched him carefully when we were introduced. If he
had sent the forged telegram it was proof that he knew me by name, at
least. But he never made a sign.
"It was about a week later than this when I stumbled upon Mr. Shellaby
and got my first real clew in the story of the legacy muddle. Of course,
that opened all the doors, and after that I laid for Horace like a cat
watching a mouse. Before long I could see that he was growing mighty
nervous about something, and the next thing I knew he turned up missing.
Right there I lost my head and wasted two whole days trying to find out
which railroad he had taken out of town. Late in the evening of the
second day I learned, by the merest bit of bull-headed luck, that he
had gone up the Riviere du Lievres in a motor-launch. I had a quick
hunch that that motor-launch was pointing in your direction and that it
was up to me to chase him and find you and get you back here before the
thirty-first. Three hours later I had borrowed the _Sprite_ and was
after him."
"He found us," said Prime, rather grittingly. "We had stopped to patch
our canoe, and he came up in the night and cut another hole in it. I
mistook him for you--which was the chief reason why I didn't take a
pot-shot at him as he was running away."