Stranded in Arcady

VII

ROULANT MA BOULE

At the disappearance of the canoe Prime called the halt which the black darkness was insisting upon, and they made their way back in the teeth of the storm to the camp-fire. In a few minutes the summer squall had blown itself out, with scarcely enough rain to make a drip from the trees. Weary as he was, Prime took the axe, searched until he found a pine stump, and from it hewed the material for a couple of torches. With these for light they set out doggedly down-stream in search of their lost hope.

Happily, since they were both fagged enough to drop in their tracks, the birch-bark was discovered stranded on their side of the river a hundred yards below the lower rapid. This time they ran no risks, and, though it cost them a half-hour of stumbling toil, they did not rest until they had carried the canoe around the rapid to place it high and dry in the little glade where they had made their camp.

The next morning found them plentifully stiff and sore from their strenuous exertions of the day before, but there was good cheer in the thought that thus far they had triumphed stoutly over difficulty and disaster.

"I feel as if I couldn't put one foot before the other, and I am sure you must be in the same condition," Prime groaned, over the second helping of fried potatoes and bacon, served in Domestic Science's best style. "Just the same, I mean to take a dose of the hair of the dog that bit me and go up after the remainder of our loot. While I am doing it you must stay here and watch the canoe, to see that it doesn't run away again. I wouldn't trust it a single minute, even on dry land."

"No," was the firm rejoinder. "You must get the sex idea out of your head once for all, Donald. It will be time enough for you to make it easy for me when I need it worse than I do now."

"Yesterday I said you were a wonder, Lucetta; to-day I rise to remark that you are two wonders, and mighty plucky ones at that."

"And to-morrow I shall be three wonders, and the next day four, and so on to infinity, I suppose," she said, laughing. "By the way, speaking of days, what day is this?"

Prime drew a notched twig from his pocket.

"Don't ever say after this that I am not the original Robinson Crusoe," he grinned. "I cut this twig the second day, just before we began the hike for the river." Then he counted up: "According to my almanac, this ought to be Monday – wash-day."

"Then yesterday was Sunday, which is why we had all our bad luck. We ought to have gone to church. Is it possible that we were both in Quebec no longer ago than last Tuesday night? It seems as if months had elapsed since then – months, I said, but I ought to have said ages."

"Are things changing for you so radically, then?" he asked.

"They are, indeed. And for you?"

"Yes; I guess so. For one thing, I have discovered the habitat of about a million muscles that I didn't know I had; and for another – "

"Well?" she challenged, "why don't you say it?"

"I will say it. For another, I have discovered the most remarkable woman that ever lived."

She laughed joyously. "See what a few days of unavoidable propinquity will do! But you are mistaken – I'm not especially remarkable. You are only doing what Mr. Grider said you ought to do – studying the female of the species at short range."

"Grider was an ass!" was the impatient rejoinder. "If I had him here I'd duck him in the river in spite of his fifty pounds excess. But this isn't getting the remainder of the dunnage. Are you quite sure you want to go along?"

"Quite sure," she returned, and once more they took the riverside trail to the stream-head.

The third carry was lighter than the others had been, and the six-mile tramp was the best possible antidote for stiffened joints and lamed muscles. By the time they had reassembled themselves and their belongings in the little glade between the rapids they were both in fine fettle, and ready to begin the real journey.

The loading of the canoe was a new thing, but in this they gave common sense a free rein. The camp stuff and provisions were made into packages with the blankets and the tent canvas for wrappings; and each package was securely lashed beneath the brace-bars of the birch-bark, so that in case of a capsize there would still be some chance for salvage. Prime's final precaution was worthy of a real woodsman. Drying the empty whiskey-bottle carefully with a wisp of grass, he filled it with matches, corked it tightly, and skewered it in an inside pocket of his coat.

"You are learning," Lucetta observed; and then: "Did you get that out of a story?"

"No, indeed; I dug it up whole out of my literary imagination. If I should tumble overboard you want to be sure to save the pieces, if you ever hope to see a fire again. Are we all ready?"

Five minutes later they had taken their lives in their hands and were shooting the rapids. With the laden canoe the paddling was an entirely different proposition. Mile after mile the quick water held, with only the shortest of reaches between Scylla and Charybdis for the breath-catching. At first the keen strain of it keyed nerve and muscle to the snapping-point; but after a time the fine wine of peril had its due and exhilarating effect, and they shouted and laughed, calling to each other above the turmoil of the waters, gasping joyously when the spray from the white-fanged boulders slapped them in the face, and having the luck of the innocent or the drunken, since disaster held aloof and they escaped with nothing more serious than the spray wettings.

Though light-heartedness thus sat in the saddle – or knelt on the paddling-mat – prudence was not wholly banished. At noon, when they pulled out at the foot of a quiet reach to make a pot of tea, they found that they were at the head of a rapid too swift and tortuous to offer anything but certain catastrophe. While the tea water was heating Prime went ahead to reconnoitre.

"Too many chances," he reported on his return. "And, besides, the carry is only a few hundred yards. It means more hard work, but we can't afford to run the risk."

"Oh, dear me!" sighed the young woman in mock despair; "have we got to unload that canoe piece by piece, and then carry and load it all over again?"

"We shall doubtless have to do it so many times that we shall count that day lost when we are denied the opportunity," Prime laughed. "But, Heaven helping us, we shall make no more three-mile portages, as we did yesterday."

The task did not seem quite so formidable after they had broken their fast. Moreover, in the repeated packings and unpackings, they were gaining facility. With the dunnage transported they were ready to attack the birch-bark, and Lucetta had an inspiration.

"Haven't I seen a picture somewhere of the old voyageurs carrying their canoes on their heads?" she asked.

"Why, of course!" said Prime. "Why didn't we think of that last night? I believe I could carry it that way alone. Now, then, over she goes and up she goes; you set the pace, and for pity's sake don't stumble."

Nobody stumbled, and in due time the canoe was launched below the rapids, was reloaded, and the paddling was resumed. This day, which ended in a snug camp at the foot of a stretch of slow water which had kept them paddling all the afternoon, was a fair sample of their days through the remainder of the week. Night after night, after they had been shooting rapids, or making long carries, or paddling steadily through stretches where the current did not go fast enough for them, Prime found Lucetta's prophecy as to his growth coming true. Day by day he was finding himself anew, advancing by leaps and bounds, as it seemed, into a stronger and fresher and simpler manhood.

And as for the young woman – there were times when the realization that in a few hours of a single mysterious night she had passed from the world of the commonplace into a world hitherto unpictured even in her wildest imaginings, was graspable, but these moments were rare. Adaptable, even under the fetterings of the conventions, Lucetta Millington was finding herself fairly gifted now that the fetterings were removed. From childhood she had longed for an opportunity to explore the undiscovered regions of her own individuality, and now the opportunity had come. It pleased her prodigiously to find that Prime seemed not to be even remotely touched by their unchaperoned condition. From the first he had been merely the loyal comrade, and she tried consistently to meet him always upon his own ground – tried and succeeded.

On the Saturday night they found themselves at the head of a long portage, still in the heart of the wilderness, and having yet to see the first sign of any human predecessor along the pathway traced through the great forest by their little river.

"I can't understand it," Prime said that night over the camp-fire. "We have covered a good many miles since last Monday, and still we don't seem to be getting anywhere. Another thing I don't fancy is the way the river has changed its course. Have you noticed that for the last three days it has been flowing mainly northward?"

The young woman became interested at once. "I hadn't noticed it," she admitted, and then: "Why don't you like it?"

"Because it seems a bit ominous. It may mean that we were carted clear over to the northern side of the big watershed, though that doesn't seem possible. If we were, we are going painstakingly away from civilization instead of toward it. That would account at once for the fact that we haven't come across any timber-cuttings. The northern rivers all flow into Hudson Bay."

Lucetta's gaze became abstracted. "Besides that, we are still groping in the blind alleys of the mysteries," she put in. "Have you given up the Mr. Grider idea?"

"I can't give it up wholly and save my sanity," Prime averred. "Think a minute; if we throw that away, what have we to fall back upon? Nothing, absolutely nothing! Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does the sane mind. Don't mistake me; I haven't the slightest idea that Grider let us in for any such experience as this, meaning to. But he took a chance, as every practical joker does, and the result in our case has spelled disaster. I am only hoping that it has spelled disaster for him, too, confound him!"

She smiled sweetly.

"Are you calling it disaster now? Only yesterday you said you were enjoying it. Have you changed your mind?"

"I have, and I haven't. From a purely selfish point of view, I'm having the finest kind of a vacation, and enjoying every blessed minute of it. More than that, the raggeder I grow the better I feel. It's perfectly barbarous, I know; but it is the truth. My compunctions are all vicarious. I shouldn't have had half so much fun if I had gone motoring through New England."

The young woman smiled again. "You needn't waste any of the vicarious compunctions on me. Honestly, Donald, I – I'm having the time of my life. It is the call of the wild, I suppose. I shall go back home, if I ever reach home, a perfect savage, no doubt, but the life of the humdrum will never be able to lay hold of me again, in the sense that it will possess me, as it used to."

Prime's grin was an expression of the purely primitive.

"It is a reversion to type," he asserted, getting up to arrange Lucetta's sleeping-tent. "It makes one wonder if all humanity isn't built that way; if it wouldn't go back at a gallop if it were given half a chance."

"I don't call it going back," was the quiet reply. "I feel as if I had merely dropped a large number of utterly useless hamperings. Life has never seemed so free and completely desirable before, and yet, when we have been running some of the most terrifying rapids, I have felt that I could give it up without a murmur if I shouldn't prove big enough to keep it in spite of the hazards. At such times I have felt that I could go out with only one big regret – the thought that I wasn't going to live long enough to find out why I had to be drowned in the heart of a Canadian forest."

VIII

CRACKING VENEERS

At the foot of the long portage which had closed the week for them the two voyagers found the course of their river changing again to the southeastward, and were encouraged accordingly. In addition to the changing course the stream was taking on greater volume, and, while the rapids were not so numerous, they were more dangerous, or at least they looked so.

By this time they were acquiring considerable skill with the paddles, together with a fine, woodcrafty indifference to the hardships. In the quick water they were never dry, and they came presently to disregard the wettings, or rather to take them as a part of the day's work. As the comradeship ripened, their attitude toward each other grew more and more intolerant of the civilized reservations.

Over the night fires their talk dug deeply into the abstractions, losing artificiality in just proportion to the cracking and peeling of the veneers.

"I am beginning to feel as though I had never touched the real realities before," was the way Prime expressed it at the close of a day in which they had run a fresh gamut of all the perils. "Life, the life that the vast majority of people thrive upon, will always seem ridiculously trivial and commonplace to me after this. I never understood before that civilization is chiefly an overlaying of extraneous things, and that, given a chance, it would disintegrate and fall away from us even as our civilized clothes are doing right now."

The young woman looked up with a quaint little grimace. She was trying to patch the frayed hem of her skirt, sewing with a thread drawn from one of the blankets and a clumsy needle Prime had fashioned for her out of a fish-bone.

"Please don't mention clothes," she begged. "If we had more of the deerskin I'd become a squaw at once. The fringes wouldn't look so bad if they were done in leather."

"Mere accessories," Prime declared, meaning the clothes. "Civilization prescribes them, their cut, fashion, and material. The buckskin Indians have the best of us in this, as in many other things."

"The realities?" she queried.

"The simplicities," he qualified. "Life as we have lived it, and as we shall probably live it again if we ever get out of this, is much too complex. We are learning how few the real necessities are, and it is good for the soul. I wouldn't take a fortune for what I've been learning in these weeks, Lucetta."

"I have been learning, too," she admitted.

"Other things besides the use of a paddle and a camp-fire?"

"Many other things. I have forgotten the world I knew best, and it is going to require a tremendous effort to remember it again when the need arises."

"I shall never get back to where I was before," Prime asserted with cheerful dogmatism. Then, in a fresh burst of confidence: "Lucetta, I'm coming to suspect that I have always been the merest surface-skimmer. I thought I knew life a little, and was even brash enough to attempt to write about it. I thought I could visualize humanity and its possibilities, but what I saw was only the outer skin – of people and of things. But my greatest impertinence has been in my handling of women."

"Injustice?" she inquired.

"Not intentional; just crass ignorance. I know now that I was merely imitative, choosing for models the character-drawings of men who knew even less about women than I did. Vapid sentimentality was about as far as I could get. It revolts me to think of it now."

Her laugh was as unrestrained as that of a child. "You amuse me, Donald. Most women are hopelessly sentimental. Don't you know that?"

"You are not," he retorted soberly.

"How do you know?"

"Heavens and earth! if I haven't had an opportunity to find out – "

"You haven't," she returned quietly; "not the least little morsel of an opportunity. A few days ago we were thrown together – a man and a woman who were total strangers, to live or die as the chance might fall. I defy any one to be sentimental in such circumstances. Sentiment thrives only in the artificialities; they are the very breath of its life. If men and women could know each other as they really are, there would be fewer marriages, by far."

"And the few would be far happier," Prime put in.

"Do you think so? I doubt it very much."

"Why?"

"Because, in the most admirable marriage there must be some preservation of the reticences. It is possible for people to know each other too well."

"I don't think so, if the qualities are of the kind that will stand the test."

"Who has such qualities?" she asked quickly.

"You have, for one. I didn't believe there was a human woman on earth who could go through what you have and still keep sweet. Setting aside the hardships, I fancy most other women would have gone stark, staring mad puzzling over the mystery."

"Ah, yes; the mystery. Shall we ever be able to explain it?"

"Not if we decide to throw Grider overboard, I'm afraid."

"Doesn't the Mr. Grider solution seem less and less possible to you as time goes on?" she asked. "It does to me. The motive – a mere practical joke – isn't strong enough. Whoever abducted us was trying for something larger than a laugh at our expense."

"You'd think so, wouldn't you? Big risks were incurred, and the expense must have been considerable, too. Still, as I have said before, if we leave Grider out of it we abandon the one only remotely tenable explanation. I grant you that the joke motive is weak, but aside from that there is no motive at all. Nobody in this world could have any possible object in getting rid of me, and I am sure that the assumption applies with equal force to you. You see where it leaves us."

"I know," was the ready rejoinder. "If the mystery had stopped with our discovery of the aeroplane-tracks, it would have been different. But it didn't stop there. It continued with our finding of the ownerless canoe stocked for a long journey. Was the canoe left for us to find?"

Prime knew his companion well enough by this time to be willing to trust her with the grewsome truth.

"I don't know what connection the canoe may have had with our kidnapping, if any, but I am going to tell you something that I didn't care to tell you until we were far enough away from the scene of it. We reasoned that there were two owners for the canoe, arguing from the two rifles and the two hunting-knives. Do you know why they didn't turn up while we were waiting for them?"

"No."

"It was because they couldn't. They were dead."

"You knew it at the time?" she asked.

"Yes. I found them. It was in a little glade just below our camp at the river-head. They had fought a duel with knives. It was horrible, and I thought it best not to tell you – it seemed only the decent thing not to tell you."

"When did you find them?"

"It was when I went over to the river on the excuse of trying to get some berries while you were cooking supper. I had seen the canoe when I went after the can of water. Instead of looking for berries I began to hunt around for the owners, thinking that probably they were camped somewhere near by. I didn't find any traces of a camp; but in the glade there were the ashes of five fires arranged in the shape of a Greek cross: one fire in the middle and one at the end of each arm. This mystified me still more, but it was then growing so dark that it was no use to look farther. Just as I was leaving the glade I stumbled over the two men, locked in each other's arms; they had evidently been dead for some hours, or maybe days."

"How perfectly frightful!" she exclaimed. "I don't wonder that you looked ill when you came back."

"It nearly knocked me out," Prime confessed. "But I realized at once that it wasn't necessary to multiply the shock by two. After you were asleep that night I went over and buried the two men – weighted them with stones and sunk them in the river, since I didn't have anything to dig with. Afterward, while I was searching for the other knife, I found a little buckskin bag filled with English sovereigns, lying, as I supposed, where one of them had dropped it. It seemed to indicate the motive for the desperate fight."

"But it adds just that much more to the mystery," was the young woman's comment. "Were they white men?"

"Half-breeds or Indians, I couldn't tell which."

"Somebody hired them to do something with us?" she suggested tentatively.

"That is only a guess. I have made it half a dozen times only to have it pushed aside by the incredibilities. If we are to connect these two men with our kidnapping, it presupposes an arrangement made far in advance. That in itself is incredible."

"What do you make of the five fires?"

"I could make nothing of them unless they were intended for signal-fires of some kind; but even in that case the arrangement in the form of a cross wouldn't mean anything."

The young woman had finished her mending and was putting the fish-bone needle carefully away against a time of future need.

"The arrangement might mean something if one were looking down upon it from above," she put in quietly.

Prime got up to kick the burned log-ends into the heart of the fire.

"If I didn't have such a well-trained imagination, I might have thought of that," he said, with a short laugh. "It was a signal, and it was lighted for the benefit of our aeroplane. How much farther does that get us?"

The young woman was letting down the flaps of her sleeping-tent, and her answer was entirely irrelevant.

"I am glad the protective instinct was sufficiently alive to keep you from telling me at the time," she said, with a little shudder which she did not try to conceal. "You may not believe it, Donald Prime, but I still have a few of the civilized weaknesses. Good night; and don't sit up too long with that horrid tobacco."

IX

SHIPWRECK

Though the castaways had not especially intended to observe the day of 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."