Читать книгу Stranded in Arcady - Lynde Francis - Страница 6

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Lucetta Millington —she had told Prime her name on the tramp to the northward—sat down in the sand, elbows on knees and her chin propped in her hands.

"You say 'aeroplane' as if it suggested something familiar to you, Mr. Prime," she prompted.

Truly it did suggest something to Prime, and for a moment his mouth went dry. Grider, the man he was to have met in Quebec, was a college classmate, a harebrained young barbarian, rich, an outdoor fanatic, an owner of fast yachts, a driver of fast cars, and latterly a dabbler in aviatics. Idle enough to be full of extravagant fads and fancies, and wealthy enough to indulge them, this young barbarian made friends of his enemies and enemies of his friends with equal facility—the latter chiefly through the medium of conscienceless practical jokes evolved from a Homeric sense of humor too ruthless to be appreciated by mere twentieth-century weaklings.

Prime had more than once been the good-natured victim of these jokes, and his heart sank within him. It was plain now that they had both been conveyed to this outlandish wilderness in an aircraft of some sort, and there was little doubt in his mind that Grider had been at the controls.

"It's a—it's a joke, just as I have been trying to tell you," he faltered at length. "We have been kidnapped, and I'm awfully afraid I know the man who did it," and thereupon he gave her a rapid-fire sketch of Grider and Grider's wholly barbarous and irresponsible proclivities.

Miss Millington heard him through without comment, still with her chin in her hands.

"You are standing there and telling me calmly that he did this—this unspeakable thing?" she exclaimed when the tale was told. Then, after a momentary pause: "I am trying to imagine the kind of man who could be so ferociously inhuman. Frankly, I can't, Mr. Prime."

"No, I fancy you can't; I couldn't imagine him myself, and I earn my living by imagining people—and things. Grider is in a class by himself. I have always told him that he was born about two thousand years too late. Back in the time of Julius Cæsar, now, they might have appreciated his classic sense of humor."

He stole a glance at the impassive face framed between the supporting palms. It was evident that Miss Millington was freezing silently in a heroic effort to restrain herself from bursting into flames of angry resentment.

"You may enjoy having such a man for your friend," she suggested with chilling emphasis, "but I think there are not very many people who would care to share him with you. Perhaps you have done something to earn the consequences of this wretched joke, but I am sure I haven't. Why should he include me?"

Prime suspected that he knew this, too, and he had to summon all his reserves of fortitude before he could bring himself to the point of telling her. Yet it was her due.

"I don't know what you will think of me, Miss Millington, but I guess the truth ought to be told. Grider has always ragged me about my women—er—that is, the women in my stories, I mean. He says they are all alike, and all sticks; merely wooden manikins—womanikins, he calls them—upon which to hang an evening gown. I shouldn't wonder if it were partly true; I don't know women very well."

"Go on," she commanded.

"The last time I was with Grider—it was about two weeks ago—he was particularly obnoxious about the girl in my last bit of stuff—the story that was printed in the New Era last month. He said—er—he said I ought to be marooned on some desert island with a woman; that after an experience of that kind I might be able to draw something that wouldn't be a mere caricature of the sex."

At this, as was most natural, Miss Millington's ice melted in a sudden and uncontrollable blaze of indignation.

"Are you trying to tell me that this atrocious friend of yours has taken me, a total stranger, to complete his cast of characters in this wretched burlesque?" she flashed out.

"I don't wish to believe it," he protested. "It doesn't seem possible for any human being to do such a thing. But I know Grider so well——"

"It is the smallest possible credit to you, Mr. Prime," she snapped. "You ought to be ashamed to have such a man for a friend!"

"I am," he acceded, humbly enough. "Grider weighs about fifty pounds more than I do, and he took three initials in athletics in the university. But I pledge you my word I shall beat him to a frazzle for this when I get the chance."

"A lot of good that does us now!" scoffed the poor victim. And then she got up and walked away, leaving him to stand gazing abstractedly at the wheel tracks of the kidnapping air-machine.

Having lived the unexciting life of a would-be man of letters, Prime had had none of the strenuous experiences which might have served to preface a situation such as this in which he found himself struggling like a fly in a web. It was absurdly, ridiculously impossible, and yet it existed as a situation to be met and dealt with. Watching the indignant young woman furtively, he saw that she went back to sit down beside the ashes of the breakfast fire, again with her chin in her hands. Meaning to be cautiously prudent, he rolled and smoked a cigarette before venturing to rejoin her, hoping that the lapse of time might clear the air a little.

She was staring aimlessly at the dimpled surface of the lake when he came up and took his place on the opposite side of the ashes. The little heap of provisions gave him an idea and an opening, but she struck in ahead of him.

"Let me know when you expect me to pose for you," she said without turning her head.

"I was an idiot to tell you that!" he exploded. "Can't you understand that that fool suggestion about the desert island and a—er—a woman was Grider's and not mine? How could I know that he would ever be criminal enough to turn it into a fact?"

"Oh, if you can call it criminal, and really mean it—" she threw out.

"I'll call it anything in the vocabulary if only you won't quarrel with me. Goodness knows, things are bad enough without that!"

She let him see a little more of her face. The frown had disappeared, and there were signs that the storm of indignation was passing.

"I suppose it isn't a particle of use to quarrel," she admitted. "What is done is done and can't be helped, however much we may agree to despise your barbarous friend, Mr. Grider. How is it all going to end?"

At this Prime aired his small idea. "Our provisions won't last more than a day or two; they were evidently not intended to. If that means anything, it means that Grider will come back for us before long. He certainly can't do less."

"To-day?"

"Let us hope so. Have you ever camped out in the woods before?"

"Never."

"Neither have I. What I don't know about woodcraft would make a much larger book than any I ever hope to write. You probably guessed that when you saw me make the fire."

The corners of the pretty mouth were twitching. "And you probably guessed my part of it when you saw me try to make that dreadful pan-bread. I can cook; really I can, Mr. Prime; but when one has been used to having everything imaginable to do it with——"

Prime thought he might venture to laugh once more. "Your revenge is in your own hands; all you have to do is to continue to make the bread. It'll get me in time. My digestion isn't particularly good, you know."

"Do you really think we shall be rescued soon?"

"For the sake of my own sanity, I'm obliged to think it."

"And in the meantime we must sit here and wait?"

"We needn't make the waiting any harder than we are obliged to. Suppose we call it a—er—a sort of surprise-party picnic. I imagine it is no use for us to try to escape. Grider probably picked the lonesomest place he knew of."

She fell in with the idea rather more readily than he could have hoped, and it gave him a freshening interest in her. The women he knew best were not so entirely sensible. During what remained of the forenoon they rambled together in the forest, care-free for the moment and postponing the evil day. In such circumstances their acquaintance grew by leaps and bounds, and when they came back to make a renewed attack upon the provisions, the picnic spirit was still in the saddle.

The afternoon was spent in much the same manner; and in the absence of the conventional restraints, a good many harmless confidences were exchanged. Before the day was ended the young woman had heard the moving story of Prime's struggle for a foothold in the field of letters, a struggle which, he was modest enough to say, was still in the making; and in return she had given her own story, which was commonplace enough—so many years of school, so many in a Middle Western coeducational college, two more of them as a teacher in the girls' school.

"Humdrum, isn't it?" she said. They had made the evening fire, and she was trying to cook two vegetables and the inevitable pan-bread in the one small skillet. "This is my first real adventure. I wish I might know whether I dare enjoy it as much as I'd like to."

"Why not?" he asked.

"Oh, the conventions, I suppose. We can't run fast enough or far enough to get away from them. I am wondering what the senior faculty would say if it could see me just now."

Prime grinned appreciatively. "It would probably shriek and expire."

"Happily it can't see; and to-morrow—surely Mr. Grider will come back for us to-morrow, won't he?"

"We are going to sleep soundly in that comforting belief, anyway. Which reminds me: you will have to have some sort of a place to sleep in. Why didn't I think of that before dark?"

Immediately after supper, and before he would permit himself to roll a cigarette from the diminishing supply of precious tobacco, Prime fell upon his problem, immensely willing but prodigiously inexperienced. At first he thought he would build a shack, but the lack of an axe put that out of the question. Round by round, ambition descended the ladder of necessity, and the result was nothing better than a camper's bed of broken pine twigs sheltered and housed in by a sort of bower built from such tree branches as he could break off by main strength.

The young woman did not withhold her meed of praise, especially after she had seen his blistered hands, which were also well daubed with pitch from the pines.

"It's a shame!" she said. "I ought not to have let you work so hard. If it should happen to rain, you'd need the shelter much more than I should."

"Why do you say that?"

"You don't look so very fit," was the calm reply; "and I am fit. Do you know, my one ambition, as a little girl, was to grow up and be an acrobat in a circus?"

"And yet you landed in the laboratory of a girls' school," he laughed.

"Not exclusively," she countered quickly. "Last year I was also an assistant in the gymnasium. Swimming was my specialty, but I taught other things as well."

Prime laughed again. "And I can't swim a single stroke," he confessed. "Isn't that a humiliating admission on the part of a man who has lived the greater part of his life in sight of the ocean?"

Miss Millington said she thought it was, and in such gladsome fashion the evening wore away. When it came time to sleep, the lately risen moon lighted the young woman to her bower; and Prime, replenishing the fire, made his bed in the sand, the unwonted exertions of the day and evening putting him to sleep before he had fairly fitted himself to the inequalities of his burrow below the tree roots.