Читать книгу Stranded in Arcady - Lynde Francis - Страница 5

Prime awoke unrefreshed at the moment when the morning sun was beginning to gild the tops of the highest trees, to find his campmate up and busying herself housewifely over the breakfast fire.

"You looked so utterly tired and worn out I thought I'd let you sleep as long as you could," she offered. "Are you feeling any better this morning?"

"I'm not sick," he protested, wincing a little in spite of himself in deference to the stiffened thews and sinews.

"You mustn't be," she argued cheerfully. "To-day is the day when we must go back a few thousand years and become Stone-Age people."

"Meaning that the provisions will be gone?"

"Yes."

"There are rabbits," he asserted. "I saw two of them yesterday. Does the domestic-science course include the cooking of rabbits au voyageur?"

"It is going to include the cooking of anything we can find to cook. Does the literary course include the catching of rabbits with one's bare hands?"

"It includes an imagination which is better than the possession of many traps and weapons," he jested. "I feel it in my bones that we are not going to starve."

"Let us be thankful to your bones," she returned gayly, and at this Prime felt the grisly night and its horrors withdrawing a little way.

There was more of the cheerful badinage to enliven the scanty breakfast, but there was pathos in the air when Prime felt for his cigarette-papers and mechanically opened his empty tobacco-pouch.

"You poor man!" she cooed, pitying him. "What will you do now?"

Prime had a thought which was only partly regretful. He might have searched in the pockets of the dead men for more tobacco, but it had not occurred to him at the time. He dismissed the thought and came back to the playing of his part in the secret for one.

"The lack of tobacco is a small consideration, when there is so much else at stake," he maintained. "If the Grider guess is the right one, it is evident that something has turned up to tangle it. Unscrupulous as he is in the matter of idiotic jokes, I know him well enough to be sure that he wouldn't leave us here to famish. He is only an amateur aviator, and it is quite within the possibilities that he has wrecked himself somewhere. It seems to me that we ought to take this river for a guide and push on for ourselves. Doesn't it appear that way to you?"

"If we only had a boat of some kind," she sighed. "But even then we couldn't push very far without something to eat."

It was time to usher in the glad surprise, and Prime began to gather up the breakfast leavings. "We'll go over and have a look at the river, anyway," he suggested, and a few minutes later he had led the way across the point of land, and had heard the young woman's cry of delight and relief when she discovered the stranded canoe.

"You knew about this all the time," was her reproachful accusation. "You were over here last night. That is why you had the prophetic bones a little while ago. Why didn't you tell me before?"

He grinned. "At the moment you seemed cheerful enough without the addition of the good news. Do you know what is in that canoe?"

"No."

"Things to eat," he avouched solemnly; "lots of them! More than we could eat in a month."

"But they are not ours," she objected.

"No matter; we are going to eat them just the same."

"You mean that we can hire the owners to take us out of this wilderness? Have you any money?"

"Plenty of it," he boasted, chinking the buckskin bag in his pocket, the finding of which he had, up to this moment, entirely forgotten.

"But where are the owners? I don't see any camp."

"That is one reason why I didn't tell you last night. I found the canoe, but I didn't find anything that looked – er – like a camp."

"Then we shall have to sit down patiently and wait until they come back. They wouldn't go very far away and leave a loaded canoe alone like this, would they?"

Prime gave a furtive side glance at the shadowy pool in the eddy. Truly the canoe-owners had not gone very far, but it was quite far enough. If he could have framed any reasonable excuse for it, he would have urged the immediate borrowing of the canoe, and an equally immediate departure from the spot of grisly associations. Indeed, he did go so far as to suggest it, and was brought up standing, as he more than half expected to be, against Miss Millington's conscience.

"Why, certainly we couldn't do anything like that!" she protested. "It would be highway robbery! We must wait until they return. Surely they won't be gone very long."

There was no help for it except in telling her the shocking truth, and Prime was not equal to that. So he reconciled himself as best he could to the enforced delay, hoping that the tender conscience would not demand too much time.

Almost at once the owner of the conscience suggested that they make a round through the adjoining forest in an attempt to discover the camp of the missing men. Prime acceded cheerfully enough, though he was impatient to examine the canoe-load, in which he was hoping there might prove to be a supply of tobacco. For the better part of the forenoon they quartered the forest around and about between the river and the lake in widening circles, missing nothing but the glade of horrors, which Prime took good care to avoid. At noon they came back to the canoe-landing and made a frugal meal on the remains of their own store of food.

"We are too punctiliously foolish," Prime declared when the second meal without its tobacco aftermath had been endured. "You say we are obliged to wait, and in that case we shall have to borrow, sooner or later. I don't see any reason why we shouldn't begin it now. We can explain everything, you know; and, besides, I have money with which to pay for what we take."

"But your money isn't Canadian money," was the ready objection voiced by the tender conscience.

Prime's laugh did not ring quite true. "That is where you are mistaken," he retorted. "It is good English gold, in sovereigns."

If the young woman were surprised to learn that a man who had expected to motor out of Canada in a day or two at the most had supplied himself with a stock of English sovereigns, she did not question the fact. But for fear she might, Prime went on hastily:

"I always like to be prepared for all kinds of emergencies when I leave home, and this time I wasn't sure just where I was going to bring up, you know – after Grider had changed his mind as to our starting-point."

The evasion served its purpose, and the young woman assented to an immediate examination of the canoe-load. Prime helped her down the steep bank, and they began to rummage, spreading their findings out on the little beach. As Prime had intimated, there was a liberal stock of provisions – jerked deer-meat, smoke-cured bacon, flour, meal, salt, baking-powder, tea, and sugar, but no coffee, a few tins of vegetables, a small sack of potatoes, and, last but not least, a canvas-covered mass of something which they decided was pemmican.

Rummaging further, the precious tobacco came to light – two huge twists of it hidden in the centre of one of the two remaining blanket-rolls. Prime stopped right where he was, crumbled a bit of the dried leaf in his hands, and made a cigarette, his companion looking on with a little lip-curl which might have been of derision or merely of amusement.

"Is it good?" she asked, when he had inhaled the first deep breath.

"It's vile!" he returned. "At the same time, it is so much better than nothing that I could do a Highland fling for pure joy. Take my advice, Miss Millington, and never become a slave to the tobacco habit."

"'Miss Millington,'" she repeated, half musingly. "Doesn't that strike you as being a trifle absurd at this distance from a drawing-room?"

"It surely does," he admitted frankly; "and so, for that matter, does 'Mr. Prime.'"

She looked up at him with a charming little grimace.

"I'll concede the 'Lucetta' if you will concede the 'Donald.'"

"It's a go," he laughed. "It is the last of the conventions, and we'll tell it good-by without a whimper." With the goodly array of foodstuff spread out upon the sand, and with his back carefully turned upon the pool of dread, he felt that he could afford to be light-hearted.

There was only a little more of the rummaging to be done. A canvas-covered roll unlashed from its place beneath a canoe-stay proved to be a square of duck large enough to make a small sleeping-tent. Inside of this roll there was an ample stock of cartridges for the two repeating rifles lying cased in their canvas covers in the bottom of the boat, and an Indian-tanned deerskin used as a wrapping for the ammunition. With the guns there was a serviceable woodsman's axe. In the bow, where Prime had dropped the two savage-looking hunting-knives, there were a few utensils: a teapot, a camper's skillet large enough to be worth while, tin cup and plates, an empty whiskey-bottle, and a basin – the latter presumably for the dough-mixing.

After they had their findings lying on the sand the tender conscience came in play again, and nothing would do but everything must be put back just as they had found it, Prime drawing the line, however, at a portion of the tobacco and enough of the food to serve for supper and breakfast. During the remainder of the afternoon they left the canoe-load undisturbed, but when evening came Prime borrowed the basin, the cups, plates, and the larger skillet. Farther along he borrowed the canvas roll and the axe and set up the tiny sleeping-tent, placing it so that Lucetta, if she were so minded, could see the fire.

Just before she retired the young woman made a generous protest.

"You mustn't do all the borrowing for me," she insisted. "Go right down there and get one of those blanket-rolls for yourself. I shan't sleep a wink if you don't."

The next morning there were more speculations, on the young woman's part, as to the whereabouts of the canoe-owners, with much wonderment at their protracted absence and the singular abandonment of their entire outfit, even to the weapons. Whereat Prime invented all sorts of theories to account for this curious state of affairs, all of them much more ingenious than plausible.

For himself, the mystery was scarcely less unexplainable. Why two men, evidently outfitted for a long journey, should stop by the way, build five fires that were plainly not camp-fires, and then fall to and fight each other to death over a bag of English sovereigns, were puzzles that he did not attempt to solve in his own behalf. It was enough that the facts had befallen, and that the net result for a pair of helpless castaways was a well-stocked canoe which Lucetta's acid-proof honesty was still preventing them from appropriating.

After a breakfast served with the garnishings afforded by the Heaven-sent supplies, Prime uncased the two rifles and looked them over. They were United States products of an early edition, but were apparently serviceable and in good order. In the canvas case of one of the guns there was a packet of fish-lines and hooks. At Lucetta's suggestion a few shots were fired as a signal for the lost canoe-owners. Nothing coming of this, they tried a little target practice, selecting the largest tree in sight for a mark, and both missing it with monotonous regularity. Later in the day Prime brought the talk around by degrees to the expediencies. How much of the present good weather must they waste in waiting for the hypothetical return of the absentees? Perhaps some accident had happened; perhaps the absentees would never turn up. Who could tell?

Domestic Science, with gymnasium-teaching on the side, fought the suggestion to which all this pointed. They had no manner of right to take the canoe and its belongings without the consent of the owners. What was the hurry? By waiting they would be sure to obtain the help they were needing, and another day or two must certainly end the suspense.

Prime went as far as he could without telling the shocking truth. With the dead men's pool so near at hand he was shudderingly anxious to be gone, but the young woman's logic was unanswerable and the delay was extended. A single small advance marked this second day. Along toward evening Prime unloaded the canoe, and together they made a few heroic attempts to acquire the art of paddling. It was apparently a lost art so far as they were concerned. The big birch-bark, lightened of its load, did everything but what it was expected to do, yawing and careening under the unskilful handling in a most disconcerting manner.

"If I could only rig up some way to row the thing!" Prime exclaimed, when they had contrived to drift and seesaw half a mile or more down the almost currentless first reach of the stream.

"You couldn't," asserted the more practical young woman. "The sides are as thin as paper, and they wouldn't hold rowlocks if you could make them. Besides, who ever heard of rowing a birch-bark canoe?"

"Somebody will hear of it, if I ever live to work this vacation trip of ours into a story – No, no; paddle the other way! We want to turn around and go back!"

They got the hang of it a little better after a while, the young woman catching the knack first; and after much labor they won back to their camping-place on the small peninsula. Over the evening fire Prime unwrapped the deerskin they had found in the canvas-roll.

"We shall have to have moccasins of some sort," he announced. "That flimsy boat isn't going to stand for shoes with heels on them. Does domestic science include a semester in shoemaking? I can assure you in advance that literature doesn't."

Lucetta took the leather and sat for a time regarding it thoughtfully. "No needle, no thread, no pattern," she mused. "And if we cut it and spoil it there won't be enough left for two pairs."

"If you have an idea, try it; I'll stand the expense of the leather," chuckled Prime, with large liberality.

But now the young woman was hesitating on another score.

"This leather belongs to the owners of the canoe; I don't know that we have any right to cut it," she objected.

Prime was tempted to say things objurgatory of these phantom owners who would not down, but he didn't. Every fresh reference to the two dead men gave him an impulse to glance over his shoulder at the silent pool in the eddy, and the longer the thing went on the less able he was to control the prompting.

"You forget that we are able to pay for all damages," was what he really did say, and at that the young woman removed a shoe, placed a neatly stockinged foot on the skin and marked around it with a bit of charcoal taken from the fire, leaving a generous margin. Borrowing Prime's pocket-knife she cut to the line, made tiny buttonholes all around the piece, and threaded them with a drawing-string made of the soft leather.

"You've got it!" exclaimed the unskilled one in open-eyed admiration, after the one-piece slipper was fashioned and tried on. "You are a wonder! I shouldn't have thought of that in a month of Sundays. It's capital!"

There was enough material in the single skin to make the two pairs, with something left over, and Prime put his on at once with a sigh of relief born of the grateful chance to get rid of the civilized shoes. Past that there was more talk about the ever-thickening mysteries, and again Lucetta refused to accept the Grider explanation, while Prime clung to it simply because he could not invent any other. Yet it was borne in upon him that the mystery was edging away from the Grider hypothesis in spite of all he could do. There was nothing to connect the two canoemen, fighting over the purse of gold, with Grider, or with the abduction of a school-teacher and a writer of stories; yet there were pointings here, too, if one might read them. Why were the five fires lighted in the glade unless it were for a signal of some sort? Prime wished from the bottom of his heart that he could set the keen mentality of his companion at work on this latest phase of the mystery, but with the dead men lying stiff and still at the bottom of their pool less than a stone's throw away, his courage failed him and his lips were sealed.