Читать книгу Empty Hands - Stringer Arthur - Страница 9

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It was early the next morning that Claire Endicott took her silver-plated casting-rod, appropriated one of the canoes at the landing, and paddled out into Barrier Lake. She fished desultorily along the open water, using a small brown trout-fly on the thinnest of gut. She had no luck, however, until she drifted closer to the Grande Décharge, where a three-pound black bass gave her a fight which taxed her over-fragile rod and left her little thought for other things. She noticed, once she had her fish safely aboard, that she was drifting disagreeably close to the entrance of Malign Canyon. So she promptly dropped her rod and caught up her paddle, remembering what Shomer Grimshaw had told her as to the perils of that neighborhood.

She swung her canoe leisurely about, in the smooth and oily water, deciding to head for the western side of the lake. It disturbed her a little, as her eye followed the rocky shore on her right, to discover that she was not making the headway she had expected. She noticed that this same rocky shore seemed to be expanding, towering closer and closer over her even as she paddled in an opposing direction. This worried her. And her worry became acute as she caught sight of the clear-cut rock-cleft of the Portal. She knew then that she was on the fringe of the Malign Canyon current and she knew that she must bend every effort to get out of it. So she swung sharply about, deciding to strike back eastward. She paddled with all her strength, with her small jaw set and her eyes on the rocky silhouette above her. But she seemed to make no headway. She paused for a moment to confirm this alarming suspicion, and then bent once more to her work. But still she did not advance. She was in the clutch of a current stronger than her rounded small arms. She was being sucked, inevitably, ineluctably, into the narrowing maw of the canyon.

She called out, just once, as the truth of this flashed over her. But she continued to wield the paddle with all her strength, her strokes growing quicker and shorter as the struggle continued. She kept on fighting that smooth and silky current, even when she saw that to do so was useless. She was still threshing the lake-water, amber-tinted in the slanting morning sunlight, when she heard an answering call and looked up to discover a pointed york-boat bearing down on her. In that boat, she saw, was Grimshaw, rowing recklessly toward the jaws from which she was striving to tear herself free.

For Grimshaw, emerging from his tent with a bath-towel over his arm and a tooth-brush in his hand, had paused for a moment, on his way to the Back Cove for his morning dip, to study that distant canoe which was skirting so closely the margin of safety. His face clouded as he watched the movements of the frail craft and made out the bare-armed brown figure in its constringing bathing-suit of knitted wool. He stood in a momentary stupor as he watched the struggle of that bare-armed figure against the current which was proving too strong for it. Then he flung away his brush and towel and ran, clad only in his pajamas, straight to a small york-boat lying beside the landing. He leaped into it and caught up the oars, shouting over his shoulder as he rowed.

He hoped, to the last, that he might overtake the girl. He even nursed a ragged tatter of faith that the two of them, once paddling together in the lighter canoe, might fight their way out of the current. When that hope was no longer reasonable, he prayed that since they were to be flung down the tumult of the canyon, they might at least be flung there together, side by side, with his stronger arm to help the other when help would be needed.

But even this, he soon saw, was not to be granted him. For as he swung toward the portal he noticed that the girl was already in the head waters of that narrowing chasm. And she herself must have realized it, for he saw her turn her frail birchbark craft sharply about, so as to face the racing tideway that awaited her. He tried to shout to her still again, but the roar of the cataract must have been already in her ears. So he stood up in his boat, catching at one of the oars, for a steering sweep, as he saw the dark and ominously boiling water take possession of him.

He knew that the run had begun. He saw himself swept in between overhanging rocks, with a sudden roaring in his ears and a thin drift of spray against his face. He felt himself being flung forward, down a narrow raceway of seething white stippled with dark-green boulders. His first duty in life, he knew, was to veer off from those dark-green shadows with the tell-tale crown of spume, to avoid them as he flashed past them. The canoe, he could see, was still afloat, and the girl with the paddle was still cool-headed enough to make an effort to keep her craft to the center of that raging torrent, which she rode as one rides a runaway horse with a broken rein. To Grimshaw it seemed as though he were careening along on the very back of that river, for the racing waters, toward the center, piled up into an ever-churning ridge several feet higher than the water-line along the broken shore. And their only salvation lay in keeping to that central ridge which swept them along like corks. He even nursed the forlorn hope that they might in some way make it, that with luck they might keep afloat through all that boiling and seething hell.

This hope grew stronger as the narrow gorge widened into a brief fan of gravel-shallows threshing from bank to bank into white foam. But the fan closed in again, and again he found himself being hurled along a boiling cataract between dark green walls. He could see the canoe dance down ahead of him, like a brown feather on a flat-blowing wind. He saw it shoot down the incline and take the great swell of "the cellar" below, where the over-driven water reared on itself like a horse falling back on its rider, take it in a cloud of spray and smother of foam that for a moment completely shut it away from him. The girl still had the paddle in her hand, when he caught sight of her again as the racing white horses once more snatched her up and dashed her along. She impressed him as a tragically passive unit in the midst of that power. For she, like himself, sat immersed in forces which dwarfed the puny strength of a puny human body. She seemed incredibly small under the great green rock-shoulders that shadowed her. Yet she still used her paddle, now on one side, now on another.

"That woman has grit!" Grimshaw muttered aloud as he braced himself for the cellar and brought his bow sharply around so as to strike the great swell at right angles. He went through it, clean as an arrow. He went through it and twined and twisted onward, wondering how much more of such hell lay before them, hoping that in some way they might still ride that lashing madness until it wearied of its roaring and plunging and rearing back on itself. But hope wore thin as he found himself swept up to the brink of another violent descent. For one brief moment the staunch little craft steadied itself, paused, and seemed to take breath. But the next moment the pointed bow dipped, the stern went up like a kicking burro's, and Grimshaw found himself plunging down another foaming gorge where the roaring and hissing water broke amber and white over huge boulders that strove to block its way. It took all his strength to sheer off from these ominous patches of amber and white. But he knew, as he strained and tugged with his oar, that the birchbark canoe was still dancing on ahead of him. And again amid the roar and the tumult the hope grew up in him that all might yet be well.

Already, he felt, they had raced down miles of rapids. Sometime soon, he contended, there must be an end to it. And it was only reasonable to feel that the worst was already over. He nursed this delusion, forlornly, as they rocketed, for a mile or two, along a smooth-walled canyon which reeled past them with express-train speed, but the moderating roar behind him soon merged into a crescendo roar in front of him, and still again he saw a widening fan of shallows and the racing and frothing channels and the ominous green boulders that seemed to snarl, that seemed to snap like fangs, at the speeding flood they could not stop. Yet shallow as that water appeared, he knew that a human being could not hope for a footing in it. Immersion even to the knees meant being whisked off like a feather, meant being tossed helplessly along like a pebble on a thresher-screen. So he did not dare to look up until he had emerged into a darker and deeper run of the narrowing channel. Then he noticed, to his relief, that he was drawing closer to the birchbark canoe, which was riding lower in the water. It seemed loggish, less resilient, and it no longer danced lightly along the boiling inclines.

That worried Grimshaw, for it implied that the canoe had either sprung a leak or had shipped considerable water in one of the "cellars." Then all thought on the matter went from him in another racing and churning rapid spangled with white foam, with spray once more in his face and the booming roar of wasted power once more in his ears. He caught sight of a green-shouldered rock under his bow in time to sheer off from it. But in doing so he worked too far to the other side. A curling amber wave lifted his boat-bottom and thudded it down on a sharp-angled stone that held him like a spear-point. The york-boat swung slowly around, end for end, as the water boiled up through the rent in its bottom. Then it released itself, and went careening on, as Grimshaw half-stumbled and half-fell to its tilted rear-end. For one stupefied second he stared at the hole in the bottom. To sink in that maelstrom, he knew, meant death. And he did not want to die. So he tore off his pajama-jacket and with his oar-handle tried to plug the hole through which a disturbing amount of water was still seeping. Realizing the need for more wadding, he stripped off his drawers and tamped them into the crevice.

His own craft, he saw, was already low in the water, but he had no time for bailing. For still another cataract boomed ahead of him, a cataract over which hung a curtain of spray. He saw the birchbark canoe ahead of him draw closer to this curtaining mist. He saw the girl make a movement in the air with her paddle: whether it was meant for a signal to him or not he could not tell. But the next moment the mist engulfed her and he saw her no more.

He found, as he raced into that white turmoil after her, that his half-filled boat no longer responded to his prying-oar as it ought. But he did not give up. He struggled to keep to mid-channel. He fought to maintain his pointed bow headed down-stream. He strained every muscle of his naked and drenched body to sheer off from the rock-fangs that fringed and fashioned his course. Then in the veiled light he felt his bow dip, and rise, and dip again. A sensation of incredible speed, of being projected helpless through watery space, chilled his body. A stupefying roar filled his ears. He catapulted, down, down on a tumbling amber-green flood that fell away and rose again and threw him dizzy and helpless against solid rock.

He could feel the boat going to pieces, under his very feet, as he tried to stand in that boiling tumult. He felt the oar snatched from his hand as he was tossed and tumbled along. He felt his body thrown against stones mossed with velvet slime, stones on which his foolishly clutching fingers could retain no hold. He knew a second sensation of incredible speed, only this time he was plunging under uncounted depths of writhing green water, which spewed him again into the shallows where he was carried on between boulders worn smooth as ice, rounded and slimed so that his helpless body rolled against them and over them and was swept stunned into a whirl-pool which he circled twice before he found the strength to clutch at a dead spruce leaning down to him from a shore of sloping wide sand on which the morning sun shone yellow and warm.

He clung there, fighting to get his breath back, re-marshalling his scattered senses, telling himself he was still in the world of the living. And as he clung there, panting, he caught sight of a mottled blue and white mass on the surface of the circling amber flood flecked with splashes of cream-colored foam, a mottled blue and white mass that twisted a little as it swept toward him.

It was close beside him before he realized it was a woman, a drowning woman. He reached out with one hand and hooked his fingers in under the shoulder-strap of her woolen bathing-suit, ragged and torn from its long fight with the river-rocks. The current tried to take her away from him, yet he held firm. He held firm, but the upper portion of the bruised wool fabric came away in his hand and the faintly struggling body eddied off on the current.

When the whirl-pool brought it toward him for the second time he clutched frantically at what was left of the torn suit. But as he clung to it a white body slipped out of it, like a sword out of a scabbard. He flung away the sodden fragment of wool and let the current take it, for his mind was clearer by this time and he realized that no woman could live long with her head half-under water. So he dropped back into the eddy and swam after her.

It was not easy, for his body was bruised and strained and sore from end to end. He was weak, too, so weak that when he caught up to her he no longer had the strength to swim with only one hand, but was compelled to hold her up by taking her hair in his teeth as he struggled with shorter and shorter strokes to sustain himself on the circling current. And just as he realized that he could breathe no more, that any further movement was beyond him, he felt sand under his feet.

He staggered ashore, dragging the inert body after him and letting it lie where it fell as he stumbled full length on the sloping warmth of the white sand.

He lay there, moment by benumbed moment, without moving, letting the sunlight soak into his chilled body. He lay there until the will to live slipped back on its shaken throne. And then he remembered that he had more than himself to remember.