Chapter III: Part 3

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."

The halt was made in a small opening in the wood, and the young woman persuaded Prime to lie down while she gathered the material for another camp-fire. Almost as soon as it was kindled Prime dropped off into a heavy sleep. Lucetta provided fuel to last through the night, and then sat down with her back to a tree, determined to stay awake and watch with the sick man.

XI

"A CRACKLING OF THORNS"

THOUGH she had formed her resolution with a fair degree of self-reliance, Lucetta Millington soon found that she had set herself a task calling for plenty of fortitude and endurance. Beyond the circle of firelight the shadows of the forest gloomed forbiddingly. They had seen but little of the wild life of the woods in their voyagings thus far, but now it seemed to be stirring uneasily on all sides of the lonely camp-fire.

Once some large-hoofed animal went crashing through the underbrush toward the river; and again there were other hoof-beats stopping abruptly at a little distance from the clearing. Lucetta, shading her eyes from the glow of the fire, saw two gleaming disks of light shining in the blackness of the backgrounding forest. Her reason told her that they were the eyes of the animal; that the unnerving apparition was probably a deer halted and momentarily fascinated by the sight of the fire. But the incident was none the less alarming to the town-bred young woman.

Later there were softly padding footfalls, and these gave her a sharper shock. She knew next to nothing about the fauna of the northern woods, nor did she have the comforting knowledge that the largest of the American cats, the panther, rarely attacks a human being unless wounded, or under the cruelest stress of winter hunger. Breathlessly she listened and watched, and presently she saw the eyes of the padding intruder glowing like balls of lambent green fire. Whereupon it was all she could do to keep from shrieking frantically and waking her companion.

After the terrifying green eyes had vanished it occurred to her to wonder why they had seen and heard so little of the night prowlers at their former camps. The reason was not far to seek. Days well filled with toil and stirring excitement had been followed by nights when sleep came quickly and was too sound to be disturbed by anything short of a cataclysm.

As midnight drew near, Prime began to mutter disconnectedly. Lucetta did not know whether he was talking in his sleep or whether he had become delirious again, but at all events this new development immeasurably increased the uncanny weirdness of the night-watch. Though many of the vaporings were mere broken sentences without rhyme or reason, enough of them were sufficiently clear to shadow forth a sketchy story of Prime's life.

Lucetta listened because she could not well help it, being awake and alert and near at hand. Part of the time Prime babbled of his boyhood on the western New York farm, and she gathered that some of the bits were curious survivals of doubtless long-forgotten talks with his grandfather. Breaking abruptly with these earlier scenes, the wandering underthought would skip to the mystery, charging it now to Watson Grider and again calling it a blessed miracle. With another abrupt change the babbler would be in Europe, living over again his trampings in the Tyrol, which, it seemed, had been taken in the company of an older man, a German, who was a Heidelberg professor.

Farther along, after an interval of silence in which Lucetta began to hope that the talkative fit had passed, Prime broke out again--this time waxing eloquent over his struggles in New York as a beginner in the writing trade. Here there were revelations to make her sorry that she was obliged to listen; for years, it seemed, the fight had gone discouragingly hard with him; there had been times when he had had to choose between giving up in defeat or going hungry.

Lucetta pieced together a pitiful little story of this starving time. Some one--once Prime called the some one Grider, and later gave him another name--had tempted the struggler with an offer of a comfortable income, the single condition precedent being an abandonment of the literary fight. Prime's mutterings made the outcome plain for the listener on the opposite side of the camp-fire: "No, I couldn't sell soap; it's honest enough, no doubt--and decent enough--everybody ought to use soap. But I've set my hand to the plough--no, that isn't it.... Oh, dammit, Peter, you know what I mean; I can't turn back; that is the one thing I've never learned how to do. No, and I can't take your money as a loan; that would be only another way of confessing defeat. No, by George, I won't go out to dinner with you, either!"

Lucetta wept a little in sheer sympathy. Her own experience had not been too easy. Left an orphan while she was still too young to teach, she knew what it meant to set the heart upon a definite end and to strive through thick and thin to reach it. She was relieved when Prime began to talk less coherently of other incidents in his life in the great metropolis. There were more references to Grider, and at last something that figured as Prime's part in a talk with the barbarian. "Yes, by Jove, Watson, the scoundrels tried to pull my leg; actually advertised for me in the _Herald_. No, of course, I didn't fall for it. I know perfectly well what it was ... same old gag about the English estate with no resident heirs in sight. No, the ad. didn't say so, but I know. What's that?--I'm a liar? Like Zeke I am!"

There were more of the vaporings, but neither these nor the young woman's anxiety about the wounded man's condition were disturbing enough at the last to keep her eyelids from drooping and her senses from fluttering over the brink of the sleep abyss. Once she bestirred herself to put more fuel on the fire, but after that the breeze blew the mosquitoes away, the warmth from the upleaping blaze added its touch, and she fell asleep.

When she awoke the sun had risen and Prime was up and mending the fire.

"Better," he said cheerfully, in answer to her instant question. "Much better; though my head reminds me of the day when I got the check for my first story--pretty badly swelled, you know. But after I've had a good cup of hot tea"--he stopped in mid-career with a wry laugh. "Bless my fool heart! If I hadn't totally forgotten that we haven't any tea or anything else! And here I've been up a quarter of an hour and more, trying to get a good cooking-fire started! Where were we when we left off last night?"

"We had set out to search for the wreck of the canoe," she explained, rising to stand before the fire. "We came this far, and concluded it was no use trying to go on in the dark. You were pretty badly off, too."

"It's coming back to me, a little at a time and often, as the cat remarked when it ate the grindstone," he went on, determined to make her smile if it were within the bounds of possibility. He knew she must have had a bad night of it, and the brightness of the gray eyes told him that even now she was not very far from tears. "Don't cry," he added abruptly; "it's all over now."

Her laugh was the sort that harbors next door to pathos.

"I'm hungry!" she said plaintively. "We had no dinner yesterday, and no supper last night, and there doesn't seem to be any very brilliant prospect for breakfast this morning."

Prime put his hand to his bruised head as if to satisfy himself that it was all there.

"Haven't you ever gone without a meal before for the raw reason that you couldn't get it?" he asked.

"Not since I can remember."

"I have; and it's bad medicine--mighty bad medicine. We'll put the fire out and move on. While there's life there's hope; and our hope this morning is that we are going to find the wreck of that canoe. Let's hike."

They set out courageously, keeping close to the bank of the river and scanning every eddy and backwater as they moved along. For this cause their progress was slow, and it was nearly or quite noon when they came to a quiet reach in the river, a placid pond with great trees overhanging its margins and wide stretches of reeds and bulrushes growing in the shallows. And on the opposite side of the pond-like expanse and apparently grounded among the bulrushes they saw their canoe. It was bottom side up with care, and on the wrong side of the river; also they knew that its lading, if any of this had survived the runaway flight, must be soaked and sodden. But the triumphant fact remained--the canoe was found.

XII

IN SEARCH OF AN ANCESTOR

FOR a moment neither of them spoke. Then Prime broke out in a sardonic laugh.

"That is a heavenly prospect for dinner, supper, breakfast, and dinner all rolled into one, isn't it, now? If there is anything left in the canoe, it's soaked to a pulp--to say nothing of the fact that we can't get to it. How are we going to raft ourselves over there without the axe?"

Lucetta went down to the margin of the pond-like reach and tested its depth with a tossed stone.

"It is deep," she said, "swimming-deep. The shallows must be all on the other side."

"I'll go down-stream a piece and see if there isn't some place where I can wade," Prime offered. But at this she shook her head.

"We passed out of all the wading depths days and days ago. If you will make a fire, I'll swim over and get the canoe."

Prime had a world of objections to offer to this, and he flung them into the breach one after another. It was no woman's job. The water was cold, and it would be a long swim--for a guess, not less than a hundred yards; she had gone without food so long that she was not fit for it; if she should try it and fail, he would have to go in after her, and that would mean suicide for both of them.

She heard him through with a quaint little lip-curl of amusement at his fertility in obstacle raising, and at the end calmly fished the remains of his handkerchief out of his pocket and bound it about her head.

"Another attack of the undying protective instinct," she retorted light-heartedly. "You go on and make the fire and I'll save the wreck, or what there is left of it." Whereupon she walked away up-stream, losing herself shortly for Prime in a thicket beyond the first bend of the river above.

Prime fell to work gathering fuel, feeling less like a man than at any time since the voyage had begun. It stabbed his _amour-propre_ to the heart to be compelled to let her take the man's part while he did the squaw's. But there seemed to be no help for it.

While he was kindling the fire he heard a plunge, and a little later saw the coifed head making diagonally across from the upper bend toward the canoe. She was swimming easily with the side stroke, and he could see the rhythmical flash and swing of a white arm as she made the overhand reach. Then he dutifully turned his back and gave his entire attention to the firemaking.

When he looked again she had righted the canoe and was coming across with it, swimming and pushing it ahead of her. At a little distance from the shore she called to him: "Take it; it's all yours"--giving the birch-bark a final shove. "I'll be with you in a few minutes." And with that she turned off and swam away up-stream to her dressing-thicket.

Prime gave her time to disappear and then went to draw the canoe out on the bank and to begin an inventory of the losses. Thanks to the care they had taken in tying everything in, nothing was missing save the paddles. Such food as was still in the original tin was undamaged, but the meat was soaked and the flour and meal were soggy masses of paste. Prime was dismayed. The small stock of potatoes would not last forever, and neither would the canned vegetables. They were not yet backwoodsmen enough to live upon meat alone; and another and crowning misfortune was the loss of the salt.

Prime was lamenting over the wet salt-sack and trying to save some little portion of the precious condiment when Lucetta came on the scene, looking as bright and fresh as the proverbial field-flower after her plunge and swim, and took over the culinary problem. Fortunately, they still had the salt pork, and the pretty _cuisiniere_ issued her orders promptly.

"Find some nice clean pieces of birch bark and spread this flour and meal out so that it will dry before the fire," she directed; and while he was doing that and hanging the blankets and tent canvas up to drip and dry, she opened a tin of baked beans and made another of the triumphant stews of jerked deer meat and potatoes seasoned with a bit of the salt pork. Upon these two dishes they presently feasted royally, making up for the three lost meals, and missing the bread only because they didn't have it.

"I have settled one thing in my own mind," Prime declared, while he was assiduously drying a leaf of the soaked tobacco for the after-dinner smoke. "If I am ever cast away again, I'm going to make dead sure that I have a Domestic Science expert for a fellow sufferer. Lucetta, you are simply great when it comes to making something out of nothing. What are we going to do with this flour-and-meal pudding?"

"We are going to dry it carefully and then grind it up again on a flat stone and go on as before," was the cheerful reply. "That is my part of it, and yours will be a good bit harder; you will have to make some new paddles and contrive some way to patch that big hole in the canoe."

Prime laughed hilariously. His head was still aching, but the disaster had fallen so far short of the ultimate fatalities that the small discomforts were as nothing.

"I can imagine both the paddles and the patch," he boasted. "It remains to be seen whether or not I can turn them into serviceable realities."

While the dunnage was drying and Lucetta was regrinding her flour and meal Indian-fashion on a smooth stone, Prime hacked manfully at a small spruce and finally got it down. It took him the better part of the afternoon to split the tree with wooden wedges and to get out two pieces to be hewn roughly with the axe into the paddle shape. Over the evening fire he whittled laboriously with the sharper of the two hunting-knives, and when the knife grew dull he learned by patient trial to whet it on a bit of stone. To keep him company, Lucetta had recourse to the fish-bone needle. Her clothes had not come scathless out of the cataract disaster and its aftermath.

"You have one of the best of the good qualities, Donald," she said, marking the patience with which the whittling went on. "You are not afraid to buckle down to the necessity and keep on trying."

"'Patient continuance in well-doing,'" he quoted, grinning. "I learned that, up one side and down the other, in the writing trade. It is about the only thing that gets you anywhere."

"You had a hard time making your start in the writing, didn't you?" she offered.

"When did I ever tell you that?"

"You told me something about it the first day we were together, and a good bit more last night."

"Huh! Talking in my sleep, was I? What did I say?"

"A lot of things; I can't remember them all. You talked about Mr. Grider, and the mystery, and the dead men, and I don't know what all."

"I didn't say anything about the girl, did I?"

"Not a word," she returned.

"For the best possible reason on earth, Lucetta: there hasn't been any girl. You don't believe that, I suppose. You wouldn't believe it of any man of my age, and--and temperament?"

"Yet you said night before last that you wanted a wife and children and a home. Doesn't that presuppose a girl?"

"In my case it presupposes a handsomely imaginary girl; I'm great on the imaginary things."

"What does she look like--this imaginary girl of yours?"

He glanced up from the paddle-whittling. "Some day, when we get back into the world again, I'll show you what she looks like. Can you wait until then?"

"You don't leave me any choice."

"We ran off the track," he went on, after a little interval of silence. "You were telling me what I talked about last night."

"Oh, yes; I have forgotten most of it, as I said; but along at the last there were a good many disjointed things about your fight for recognition. Once, I remember, you were talking to somebody about soap."

Prime's laugh was a guffaw.

"I can laugh at it now," he chuckled; "but it was mighty binding at the time--that soap incident. I was down in a hole, in the very bottom of the hole. I had written a book and couldn't get it published; couldn't get anybody to touch it with a ten-foot pole. I had friends who were willing to lend me money to go on with, and one who offered me a job writing advertisements for his soap factory. It was horribly tempting, but when I was built, the ability to let go, even of a failure, was left out. So I didn't become an ad. writer. What else did I say?"

"Oh, a lot of things that didn't make sense; one of them was about an advertisement you said you had seen in the _New York Herald_. I couldn't make out what it was; something about an English estate."

Prime looked up quickly.

"Isn't it odd how these perfectly inconsequent things bury themselves somewhere in the human brain, to rise up and sneak out some time when the bars happen to be left down," he speculated. "There was such an ad., and I saw it; but I don't believe I have given it a second thought from that time to this."

"When you spoke of it last night, you seemed to be telling Mr. Grider about it. Was it addressed to you?"

"It was addressed to the heirs of Roger Prime, of Batavia, and Roger Prime was my father. If I remember correctly, the advertisers gave a Canadian address--Ottawa, I think--and the 'personal' was worded in the usual fashion: 'If the heirs of Roger Prime will apply'--and so on; you know how they go. It was the old leg-pull."

"I don't quite understand," she demurred. "What do you mean by 'leg-pull'?"

"The swindle is so venerable that it ought to have whiskers by this time. Every once in a while a rumor leaks out that some great estate has been left in England, or somewhere else across the water, with no native heirs. You or I, if we happen to have a family name that fits in, are invited to contribute to a sum which is being made up to pay the cost of establishing the rights of the American descendants, and there you are. I suppose hundreds of thousands of dollars have been buncoed out of credulous Americans in that way, first and last."

"I wish you could remember the Canadian address which you say you think was Ottawa," rejoined the young woman reflectively.

"Why?"

"Because I saw in a Cleveland newspaper an advertisement of the same nature, addressed to the heirs of the body of Clarissa Millington, born Bradford. Clarissa Millington was my mother. There was no name signed, but a business address was given, and it was in Ottawa."

"You have forgotten the address?" said Prime.

"I didn't try to remember it. I wrote it down, and I have it in my luggage in Quebec."

The paddle-maker looked up with an accusing laugh.

"You were planning to return from Quebec by way of Ottawa; you were going to give those sharks some of your hard-earned teaching money. Don't deny it."

"I can't," she confessed. "I meant to do that very thing. And I thought I had plenty of time. There was a date limit set in the advertisement, and it was July thirty-first. Do you think it was a swindle?"

"There isn't the least doubt of it. Your kidnapping has saved you some money. The date limit was merely to make you hustle. I have seen the game worked before, and it is very plausible. And since it is usually worked from Canada, a citizen of the United States has no recourse in law. You had a narrow escape."

"We may call it that, anyway," was the young woman's reply. "The thirty-first of July will probably be nothing more than a memory by the time we find our way back to the world."

A busy silence followed the dismissal of the subject, and then Lucetta began to tell about the various alarms she had had during the previous night. "All of which goes to prove that I am still the normal woman," she concluded.

"You are a heroine, and one of these days I mean to put you in a book," Prime threatened. "You saved my life yesterday and my self-respect to-day; and that is more than a man ought to expect from the most normal woman in the world."

"Your self-respect?"

"Yes; you heard me babbling all night, and you have been good-hearted enough not to report anything that a man need be ashamed of."

"You didn't say anything to be ashamed of," she returned quickly. "Most of the talk was about the old farm near Batavia; that and your grandfather."

"Grandfather Bankhead," he mused; "they don't make any finer characters nowadays than he was--or as fine."

"Bankhead?" she asked suddenly; "was that your grandfather's name?"

"It was: Abner Greenlow Bankhead. It is not such a very usual name. Have you ever heard it before?"

"Heard it? Why--why, it was my mother's mother's maiden name! She was a Bankhead, and she married Josiah Greenlow Bradford!"

Prime dropped both paddle and knife.

"Well--wouldn't that jar you!" he exclaimed. "Can it be possible that--hold on a minute; my grandfather had a Bankhead cousin who grew up in the family, and she married and moved to Ohio, away along back in the other century. What was your grandmother's Christian name?"

"It was an old-fashioned one--Lorinda. I can remember her indistinctly as a little old lady with white hair and the brightest possible blue eyes."

Prime was wagging his head as one in a daze. "It is too wonderful to be true, Lucetta! But it must be true. My grandfather's cousin's name was Lorinda, and I can remember seeing an oil portrait of her, a horrible thing done by some local artist, hanging in the old farmhouse at Batavia. I can't figure it out, but the way it is working around, we ought to be cousins of some sort. Can you believe it?"

The young woman put her mending aside to trace the relationship thoughtfully, counting the generations on her finger-tips. When she had finally determined to her own satisfaction that they really had a common ancestor four generations back, she laughed.

"It is wonderful," she said; "almost too wonderful to be true. But the wonder of it is completely overshadowed by the unbelievable coincidence which dropped us two, cousins and descendants of that far-away Bankhead, down together on the beach of a forest lake in the wilds of the Canadian backwoods--a lake that neither of us ever saw or heard of before. Will the mysteries never end?"

"Wait a minute; let's get it straight," Prime interposed. "We are really cousins, aren't we? Don't you figure it out that way?"

"Third cousins; yes."

"You'll have to show me," he invited. "Genealogy is like Sanskrit to me."

She proceeded to show him, and from that the talk drifted rather excitedly into family reminiscences. After the manner of people who really have ancestors, neither of them was able to remember many of the traditions. Prime's recollections, indeed, stopped short with his grandfather, but Lucetta knew a little more about the older generations, and she dug the individuals out one by one, offering them to Prime as spurs to further rememberings.

"No, I don't remember anything about Jabez," he said. "And Elvira and Elmina and John I never heard mentioned. Grandfather Bankhead had no near relations that I know of except his brother Jasper and his cousin Lorinda, who grew up with him."

"I seem to remember something about grandmother's cousin Jasper," Lucetta put in. "Didn't something happen to him--something out of the usual?"

"Yes," was the prompt reply. "He disappeared--went to the Far West when he was a young man and was never heard of afterward. Grandfather often wondered what had become of him, and in his later years spoke of him quite frequently."

Lucetta went on with her mending, the fish-bone needle making her progress primitively slow. Prime got up and strolled down to the river-bank. When he returned he went around to her side of the fire to say:

"I'm mighty glad we have found out that we are cousins, Lucetta; twice glad, for your sake. It makes things a bit easier for you, doesn't it?"

She did not look up.

"Why should it?" she asked quietly.

"Oh, I don't know; we have both been throwing tin cans and brickbats at the conventions; but I haven't any idea that we have killed them off permanently. And they die harder in a woman than in a man. We have jollied things along pretty well, so far, but that isn't saying that I haven't known how hard it must have been for you. As matters stand now, I am your natural protector."

She looked up with the quaint little smile that he had learned to know, to interpret, and to love.

"What difference does the relationship make, Donald, so long as you are what you are? And what difference would it make if you happened to be the other kind of man?"

He stood smiling down upon her with his hands in his pockets.

"Your trust is the most wonderful thing in this world, Lucetta--and the most beautiful. I should have to be a much worse man than I have ever dared to be to do anything to spoil it," he said slowly, and with that he went to set up her sleeping-tent.

XIII

AT CAMP COUSIN

PRIME whittled through the better part of the succeeding forenoon on the paddles, and for the midday bread Lucetta tried her domestic-science hand upon the dried and reground flour. Not to draw too fine a comparison, the paddles were the better success, though the bread was eatable. In the afternoon the man of all work, with Lucetta for consulting engineer, tackled the broken canoe.

There was no lack of materials with which to make the repairs if they had only known how to use them. Attempts to sew a patch of birch bark over the hole with threads drawn from the blanket were dismal failures. At each of the thread punctures the patch would split and curl up most perversely; and when night came they had succeeded only in making a bad matter slightly worse.

After supper they put their heads together to become, if the oracles should prove auspicious, inventors in this hitherto untried field.

"If we only had a few drops of Indian blood in us!" Prime complained. "What do you suppose they daub this bark thing with to make it water-tight? It must be something they find in the woods."

Lucetta went over to the canoe, chipped a bit of the daubing from one of the seams, and tasted it appraisingly.

"It tastes like spruce-gum," she offered; "do you suppose it can be?"

Prime ate a little in his turn and confirmed the guess. "That is about what it is," he decided. "The next thing is to find out how they contrive to get enough of it. I wonder if they tap the trees as we do sugar-maples?"

"If we could find a tree that has been broken," Lucetta suggested. And then: "How have we managed to live so long without learning some of these perfectly simple things, Cousin Donald?"

"Too much education and too little instinct," he scoffed. "To-morrow morning I'll climb trees and become a gum-gatherer. It seems inexpressibly humbling to think that a small hole in a piece of birch bark is all that prevents us from going on our way rejoicing. Never mind, there is another day coming, and if there isn't, success or failure won't make any considerable difference to either of us."

Bright and early the next morning they tried the spruce-gum experiment. Prime found that he could have plenty of it for the gathering, and when they had a sufficient quantity they melted it in one of the empty vegetable tins and used it as a glue with which to make the patch adhere. The result was not entirely satisfactory. The melted gum hardened quickly, but it became so brittle that a touch would loosen it.

"This is where we set up a laboratory for original research," Lucetta said, laughing. "I wonder if some more cooking would do it any good."

"'The ruling passion strong in death,'" Prime quoted with good-natured sarcasm. "You are a born cook. Let's try it."

They tried it and merely succeeded in making the product still more brittle. They then tried adding a little grease from the fat pork to make it more flexible, and that ruined it completely.

"Two civilized brains, college-trained to a piano-polish finish, and not a single workable idea between them," Prime derided. "It's humiliating--disgusting!"

"The brains are still available," asserted the undaunted one. "Go and find some pine pitch and we'll mix it with the spruce."

This experiment promised better success. A gluey mixture resulted that stuck, not only to the canoe body and the patch, but to their fingers and to everything it touched. Inventing still further, they contrived a rude clamp to hold the patch in place while it was drying, if by good hap the glue would consent to dry at all; and with the new paddles whittled and scraped into shape, there was nothing to do but to wait upon the drying process.

Prime spent the afternoon fishing, with the tackle found in one of the gun-cases, and was lucky enough to accumulate a noble string of trout. Lucetta would not say what she was going to do, merely hinting that Prime's absence until supper-time would be a boon. Only the buzzard swinging in slow circles overhead could have told tales of the doing after the young woman had obtained her meed of solitude in the little glade, and possibly the buzzard had seen a sufficient number of blanketed women washing clothes at a river brink not to be unduly stirred at the sight.

Later, Prime came in to exhibit his string of fish with true sportsman's pride, and again they feasted royally, forgetting their late tribulations, and looking forward half-regretfully to a resumption of their journey on the morrow.

"It is astonishing how rapidly one can revert to the cave-man type," was Prime's phrasing of the regret. "I have been a person of pavements and cement walks all my life, as I suppose you have--of the paved streets and all that they stand for. Yet I shall go back to them with something like reluctance. Shan't you?"

She did not reply to the direct question.

"You speak as if you had some assurance that we are approaching the pavements. Have you?"

"A bare hint. I fished along the river for about a mile down-stream, spying out the land--or the water--as I went, for future reference. We can't claim this region by the right of discovery. Somebody has been here before us."

"You didn't find a house?" she ventured.

"Oh, no; nothing like that. But I did find the stump of a tree, and the tree had been felled with an axe. It wasn't recently; the stump was old and moss-grown. But it was axe work just the same."

She laughed softly.

"I don't know whether to be glad or sorry, Donald; for myself, I mean. Of course, you want to get back to your work."

"Do I?" he inquired. "I suppose I ought to want to. I left a book half finished in my New York attic."

"How could you do that? I should think such work would be ruined by having a vacation come along and cut it in two."

"I was sick of it," he confessed frankly. "It was another pen picture of the artificialities, and I shall never finish it now. I'll write a better one."

"Staging it in a Canadian forest?"

"Staging it among the realities, at least. And there shall be a real woman this time."