Part 5

"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."

Though she had thought that she was by this time far beyond it, the young woman blushed a little under the rich outdoor brown.

"Then I'm not growing haggard and old?" she inquired.

"Indeed, you are not!" he asserted loyally. "I'm the beauty of the two"--passing a hand over the three weeks' growth of stubble beard on his face. "You are putting on weight every day. In another week your face will be as round as a full moon. It may not sound like it, but that was meant for a compliment."

"Was I too thin?" she wanted to know.

"Er--not precisely thin, perhaps; but a little strenuous. You gave me the idea at first that Domestic Science, with gymnasium teaching on the side, had been a trifle too much for you. Had they?"

"No; I was perfectly fit. But one acquires the habit of living tensely in that other world that we have lost and can't find again. It is human to wish to make money, and then a little more money."

"What special use have you for a little more money?" Prime asked curiously.

"Travel," she said succinctly. "I should like to see the world; all of it."

"That wouldn't take so very much money. Goodness knows, the pen isn't much of a mining-pick, but with it I have contrived to dig out a year in Europe."

"You couldn't have done it teaching the daughters of retired farmers how to cook rationally," she averred. "Besides, my earning year is only nine months long."

"Then you really do want money?"

"Yes; not much money, but just enough. That is, if there is any such half-way stopping-point for the avaricious."

"There is," he asserted. "I have found it for myself. I should like to have money enough to enable me to write a book in the way a book ought to be written--in perfect leisure and without a single distracting thought of the royalty check. No man can do his best with one eye fixed firmly upon the treasurer's office."

"I had never thought of that," she mused. "I always supposed a writer worked under inspiration."

"So he does, the inspiration of the butcher and the baker and the anxious landlord. I can earn a living; I have done it for a number of years; but it is only a living for one, and there isn't anything to put aside against the writing of the leisurely book--or other things."

"Oh! then you have other ambitions, too."

"The one ambition that every normal-minded man ought to have: I want a wife and babies and a home."

"Then you certainly need money," she laughed.

"Sure I do; but not too much--always remember that--not too much."

"What would you call 'too much'?"

"Enough to spoil the children and to make it unnecessary for me ever to write another line."

This time her laugh was mocking. "Just now you said you wanted enough so that you could write without thinking of money," she reminded him.

"Oh, there is a golden mean; it doesn't have to be all honey or all vinegar. A nice tidy little income that would provide at a pinch for the butcher and the baker and the other people. You know what I mean."

"Yes, I think I do; and my ambition is hardly more soaring than yours. As you remarked, it doesn't cost so frightfully much to travel and live abroad."

He looked at her dubiously. "You don't mean that you'd wish to travel all the time, do you?"

"Why not?"

"Why--er--I don't know precisely. But you'd want to settle down and have a home some time, wouldn't you?"

"And cook for a man?" she put in. "Perhaps I haven't found the man."

Prime's laugh was boyishly blatant.

"I notice you are cooking pretty assiduously for a man these days. But perhaps that is only in self-defense. If the man cooked for you you wouldn't live very long."

"I am merely doing my bit, as the English say," was the cool retort. "I haven't said that I like to do it."

"But you do like to do it," he insisted. "If you didn't, you couldn't hit it off so cheerfully. I know a thing or two, and what I don't know I am learning. You are a perfectly normal woman, Lucetta, and normality doesn't mean continuous travel."

"You have changed your mind again. Last week you were calling me abnormal, and saying that you had never met a woman like me before."

"I hadn't; but that was my misfortune. I hope there are a good many like you; I've got to hope it for the sake of humanity and the good of the race. But this talk isn't getting us anywhere. We had better turn in; there is a hard day ahead of us tomorrow."

In the morning the prophecy seemed destined to fulfil itself in heaping measure. While Lucetta was getting breakfast Prime took to the woods and made a careful survey of some portion of the hazards ahead. He was gone for the better part of an hour, and when he came back his report was not encouraging.

"Worse and more of it," was the way he described the difficulties. "It is just one rapid after another, as far as I went; and that must have been a mile and a half or more. Coming back, I kept to the river bank, and tried to imagine us picking the way between the rocks in the channel. I believe we can do it if you have the nerve to try."

"If _I_ have the nerve?" she flung back. "Is that a revival of the sex idea?"

"I beg your pardon," he hastened to say. "It was simply a manner of speaking. Your nerve is like the rest of you--superb. We'll shoot the rapids if it takes a leg. It would ask for more than a leg to make the carry."

A little later they loaded the canoe carefully for the greater hazard, packing the dunnage securely and protecting the meal and the flour as well as they could by wrapping them tightly in the canvas roll. Past this, they cut strips from the remaining scraps of deerskin and tied everything, even to the utensils, the guns, and the axe, to the braces, taking time to make their preparations thorough.

It was well that they took the time while they had it. After the birch-bark had been headed into the first of the rapids there was no time for anything but the strenuous fight for life. Faster and still faster the frail craft leaped on its way, down one rapid and into another before they could congratulate themselves upon the latest hairbreadth dodging of the thickly strewn boulders.

From time to time in the brief respites Prime shouted encouragement to his canoe-mate. "Keep it up--it can't last forever! We're doing nobly. Look out for this big beggar just ahead!"

So it went on, from bad to worse and then to bad again, but never with a chance for a landing or a moment's rest from the engrossing vigilance. Prime gasped and was thankful that there were days of sharp muscle-hardening behind them to fit them for this crowning test. He was sure he could measure Lucetta's fortitude by his own. So long as he could endure the strain he knew he could count upon hearing the steady dip of her paddle keeping time with his own.

But the worst of the worst was yet to come. At the foot of a series of rapids which were like a steeply descending stair, they found themselves in a sluiceway where the enlarged river ran like a torrent in flood. On the still air of the summer day a hoarse clamor was rising to warn them that there was a cataract ahead. Prime's cry of alarm was not needed. With the first backing dip of the paddle he felt the braking impulse at the stern striking in with his own.

"Hold her!" he shouted. "We've got to make the shore, if it smashes us!" But the puny strength of the two pairs of arms was as nothing when pitted against the onsweep of the mighty flood. For a brief instant the downward rush of the canoe was checked; then it was caught in a whirling eddy and spun end for end as if upon a pivot. When it straightened up for the leap over the shallow fall it was headed the wrong way, and a moment later the crash came.

The young woman was the only one of the two who knew definitely what followed. In the tipping glide over the brink they were both thrown out of the canoe and spilled into the whirlpool at the foot of the cataract. Lucetta kept her head sufficiently to remember that Prime could not swim, and when she came up from the plunge she saw him, and saw that he was not struggling.

Two quick strokes enabled her to get her fingers in his hair, and then began a battle in which the strength of the single free arm had to match itself against the swirling current of the whirlpool. Twice, and yet once again, the young woman and her helpless burden were swept around the circle, each time drawing a little nearer to the recurving eddy under the fall. Lucetta knew well enough that a second ingulfing under the cataract meant death for both, and at the beginning of the fourth circling she made the supreme effort, winning the desperate battle and struggling out upon the low shingly bank of the pool, to fall exhausted when she had dragged her unconscious canoe-mate out of the water.

After a dazed minute or two she was able to sit up and realize the extent of the disaster. The canoe had disappeared after its leap into the pool, and she did not know what had become of it. And Prime was lying just as the dragging rescue had left him, with his arms flung wide. His eyes were closed, and his face, under the three weeks' growth of stubble beard, was haggard and drawn. In the dive over the fall he had struck his head, and the blood was oozing slowly from a great bruise on his forehead.

X

HORRORS

IT is a trite saying that even the weakest strand in the cable never knows how much it can pull until the demanding strain comes. As a young woman with athletic leanings, Lucetta had had arduous drillings in first-aid, and had drilled others. If Prime had been merely drowned she would have known precisely what to do. But the broken head was a different matter.

Nevertheless, when her own exhaustion was a little assuaged, she essayed the first-aid. Dragging the hapless one a little farther from the water's edge, she knelt beside him to examine the wound with fingers that trembled a little as they pressed, in spite of the brave diagnostic resolution. There was no skull fracture, but she had no means of determining how serious the concussion was. Prime was breathing heavily, and the bruise was already beginning to puff up and discolor.

With hope still in abeyance, she worked swiftly. Warmth was the first necessity. Her hands were shaking when she felt in the pocket of Prime's coat for the precious bottle of matches. Happily it was unbroken, and she could have wept for joy. There was plenty of fuel at hand, and in a few minutes she had a fire blazing brightly, before which she propped the wounded man to dry out, though his wet clothing gave him a sweltering steam bath before the desiccating process began. It was heroic treatment, but there was no alternative, and by the time she had him measurably dried and warm, her own soggy discomfort was also abating.

Having done what she could, her situation was still as forlorn as it could well be; she was alone in the heart of the forest wilderness with a wounded man, who might live or die as the chance should befall--and there was no food. She set her face determinedly against the erosive impatience of despair. There was nothing to do but to wait with what fortitude she could muster.

The afternoon dragged on interminably, and to make the prospect more dispiriting the sky clouded over and the sun disappeared. Toward evening Prime began to stir restlessly and to mutter in a sort of feeble delirium. The young woman hailed this as a hopeful symptom, and yet the mutterings of the unconscious man were inexpressibly terrifying. What if the recovery should be only of the body and not of the mind?

As the dusk began to gather, Lucetta found her strong resolution ebbing in spite of all she could do. The thunder of the near-by cataract deafened her, and the darkling shadows of the forest were thickly shot with unnerving suggestions. To add the finishing touch, her mind constantly reverted to the story of the finding and disposal of the two dead men and she could not drive the thought away. In a short time it became a frenzied obsession, and she found herself staring wildly in a sort of hypnotic trance at the waterfall, fully expecting to see one or both of the dead bodies come catapulting over it.

While it was still light enough to enable her to distinguish things dimly, something did come over the fall, a shapeless object about the size of a human body, shooting clear of the curving water wall, to drop with a sullen splash into the whirlpool. Lucetta covered her eyes with her hands and shrieked. It was the final straw, and she made sure her sanity was going.

She was still gasping and trembling when she heard a voice, and venturing to look she saw that Prime was sitting up and holding his head in his hands. The revulsion from mad terror to returning sanity was so sudden and overpowering that she wanted to go to him and fall on her knees and hug him merely because he was a man and alive, and hadn't died to leave her alone with the frightful horrors.

"Didn't I--didn't I hear you scream?" he mumbled, twisting his tongue to the words with the utmost difficulty. And then: "What on earth has happened to me? I feel--as if--I had been run through--a threshing-machine."

"You were pitched out of the canoe and hurt," she told him. "I--I was afraid you were going to die!"

"Was that why you screamed?" The words were still foolishly hard to find and still harder to set in order.

At this she cried out again, and again covered her eyes. "No--no! It is there yet--in the whirlpool--one of the--one of the dead men!"

Though Prime was still scarcely more than half conscious of his condition and cripplings, the protective instinct was clamoring to be heard, dinning in his ears to make him realize that his companion was a woman, and that her miraculous courage had for some cause reached its ultimate limit. With a brand from the fire for a torch, he crept half mechanically on hands and knees to the edge of the bowl-like whirlpool. In due time he had a glimpse of a black object circling past in the froth and spume, and he threw the firebrand at it. A moment later he was setting the comforting prop of explanation under Lucetta's toppling courage.

"It is nothing but a log--just a broken log of wood," he assured her. "Forget it, and tell me more about how I came to get this bushel-basket head of mine. It aches like sin!"

She described the plunge of the unmanageable canoe over the fall and its immediate consequences, minifying her own part in the rescue.

"You needn't try to wiggle out of it," he said soberly at the end of the brief recounting. "You saved my life. If you hadn't pulled me out, I'd be down there in that pool right now, going round and round like that bally log of wood. What do you charge for saving a man's life, Lucetta?"

"A promise from the man to be more careful in future. But we mustn't slide back into the artificial things, Donald. For all you know, my motive might have been altogether selfish--perhaps it was selfish. My first thought was a screaming horror of being left alone here in this wilderness. It made me fight, _fight_!"

"Is that the truth, Lucetta?" he inquired solemnly.

"Y-yes."

"All of the truth?"

"Oh, perhaps not quite all. There is such a thing as the life-saving instinct, isn't there? Even dogs have it sometimes. Of course I couldn't very well swim out and leave you to drown."

"No," he put in definitively, "you couldn't--and what's more, you hadn't the first idea of doing such a thing. And that other thing you told me was only to relieve my sense of obligation. You haven't relieved it--not an ounce. And I don't care to have it relieved. Let it go for the time being, and tell me what became of the canoe."

"I haven't the faintest notion. I didn't see it again after we went over the fall. Of course it is smashed and ruined and lost, and we are perfectly helpless again."

For a long minute Prime sat with his throbbing head in his hands, trying to think connectedly. When he looked up it was to say: "We are in a pretty bad box, Lucetta, with the canoe gone and nothing to eat. It is hammering itself into what is left of my brain that we can't afford to sit still and wait for something to turn up. If we push on down river we may find the canoe or the wreck of it, and there will surely be some little salvage. I don't believe the birch-bark would sink, even if it were full of water."

"You are not able to push on," she interposed quickly. "As it is, you can hardly hold your head up."

"I can do whatever it is needful to do," he declared, unconsciously giving her a glimpse of the strong thread in the rather loosely woven fabric of his character. "I have always been able to do what I had to do. Let's start out at once."

With a couple of firebrands for torches they set out down the river bank, following the stream closely and keeping a sharp lookout for the wreck. Before they had gone very far, however, the blinding headache got in its work, and Prime began to stumble. It was at Lucetta's insistence that they made another halt and gave up the search for the night.

"It is no manner of use," she argued. "You are not able to go on; and, besides, we can't see well enough to make sure that we are not passing the thing we are looking for. We had much better stop right where we are and wait for daylight."