Stranded in Arcady Part 24

and he shook hands all around and backed away.

When they were left alone with the barbarian, Prime wheeled short upon him.

"Watson, will you raise your right hand and swear that this isn't another twist in your infernal joke?" he demanded. "Because, if it is----"

Grider fell back into the nearest chair and chuckled like a fat boy at a play.

"If it only were!" he gloated. "Wouldn't it be rich? Oh, Great Peter!

why didn't I think of it in time and run a sham lawyer in on you? It would have been as easy as rolling off a log. Unhappily, Don, it's all too true. I didn't invent it--more's the pity!"

Prime stood over the joker, menacing him with a clenched fist. "If you want to go on living and spending your swollen fortune, you'll tell us all the ins and outs of it," he rasped, in well-a.s.sumed ferocity.

"I was only waiting for an invitation," was the laughing rejoinder.

"When you didn't turn up in Boston to go motoring with me I ran over to New York and broke into your rooms. On your desk I found a telegram purporting to have come from me at Quebec. Since I hadn't wired you from Quebec, or anywhere else, I began to ask questions. Your janitor answered the first one: you had already gone to Canada. I couldn't imagine what was going on, but it seemed to be worth following up, so I took the next train for Quebec."

"And you didn't wire ahead?" said Prime.

"No; it didn't occur to me, but it wouldn't have done any good. Your disappearance was two days old when I reached Quebec. You weren't missed much, but Miss Millington was; the school-teachers were milling around and raising all sorts of a row. But in another day it quieted down flat.

Somebody started the story that you two had run off together to get married; that it had been all cut and dried between you beforehand."

"That was probably a part of the plot--to account for us in that way,"

Lucetta put in.

"No doubt it was," Grider went on. "But the elopement story didn't satisfy me. I knew there wasn't any reason in the wide world why Don shouldn't get married openly, if he could find any girl foolish enough to say 'yes,' so I simply discounted the gossip and wired for detectives. A very little sleuth work developed the fact that each of you had been seen last in company with one of the Bandishes. That gave us a sort of a clew, and we began to trail Mr. Horace Bandish and dig up his record."

"And while you were doing all this for us, we ... honestly, Mr. Grider, I am ashamed to tell you what we were saying of you," said the young woman in penitent self-abas.e.m.e.nt.

"Oh, that was all right. In times past I had given Don plenty of material of that sort to work on; only I wish I had known how you were looking at it--that you were charging it all up to me. It would have lightened the gloom immensely. But to get on: we trailed Bandish, as I say, and found that he had had an aeroplane s.h.i.+pped to him at Quebec a few days before your arrival there. That looked a bit suspicious, and a little more digging made it look more so. The 'plane had been unloaded and carted away, and a few days later had been brought back and s.h.i.+pped to Ottawa. That left a pretty plain trail, but still there was no evidence of criminality."

"Of course, you didn't know anything about the legacy, at that stage of it?" Prime threw in.

"Not a thing in the world. More than that, Bandish's record was decently good. We found that he had been a sort of general factotum for a rich old man, and had been left comfortably well off when his employer died.

There was absolutely no motive in sight; no reason on earth why he should drug a couple of total strangers and blot them out. Just the same, I was confident that he had done it, and that I should eventually find you by keeping cases on him. So I dropped the detectives, who were beginning to give me the laugh for being so pig-headed about an ordinary elopement, gathered up your belongings on the chance that you'd need 'em if I should make good in the search for you, and came here to Ottawa to keep in touch with Bandish."

Prime's smile was grim. "You were taking a lot of trouble for two people who were just about that time calling you all the hard names in the category," he interposed.

"Wasn't I?" said the barbarian with a grin. "But never mind about that.

I came here, as I said, and settled down to keep an eye on Horace. For quite some time I didn't learn anything new. I found that Bandish was a club man, well known and rather popular; also that he was an amateur aviator and had made a number of exhibition flights. Everybody knew him and everybody seemed to like him. In the course of time we met at one of the clubs, and I watched him carefully when we were introduced. If he had sent the forged telegram it was proof that he knew me by name, at least. But he never made a sign.

"It was about a week later than this when I stumbled upon Mr. Sh.e.l.laby and got my first real clew in the story of the legacy muddle. Of course, that opened all the doors, and after that I laid for Horace like a cat watching a mouse. Before long I could see that he was growing mighty nervous about something, and the next thing I knew he turned up missing.

Right there I lost my head and wasted two whole days trying to find out which railroad he had taken out of town. Late in the evening of the second day I learned, by the merest bit of bull-headed luck, that he had gone up the Riviere du Lievres in a motor-launch. I had a quick hunch that that motor-launch was pointing in your direction and that it was up to me to chase him and find you and get you back here before the thirty-first. Three hours later I had borrowed the _Sprite_ and was after him."

"He found us," said Prime, rather grittingly. "We had stopped to patch our canoe, and he came up in the night and cut another hole in it. I mistook him for you--which was the chief reason why I didn't take a pot-shot at him as he was running away."

"I knew I had no chance to overtake him," Grider went on, "but it seemed a safe bet that I'd get him coming out. I did; captured him, took him ash.o.r.e, built a fire, and told him I was going to roast him alive if he didn't come across with the facts. He held out for a while, but finally told me the whole of it: how he had figured to get you two together in Quebec after he had learned that you, Miss Millington, were due to be there with the teachers. You see, he knew all about you--both of you.

As Mr. Bankhead's secretary he had made, at Mr. Bankhead's dictation, all the former inquiries, and, of course, had carefully kept the answers from reaching the old gentleman. With a little more cooking he told me how he and the woman had drugged you both, after which he had carried you in the 'plane to the sh.o.r.e of some unp.r.o.nounceable lake in the north woods."

"What did he mean to do?--let us starve to death?" Prime asked.

"Oh, no; nothing so murderous as that! He had it all doped out beforehand. There is a Hudson Bay post on one of the streams flowing into the lake, and he had arranged with a couple of half-breed canoe-men to happen along and pick you up and bring you back, stipulating only that they should kill time enough to make the return trip use up the entire month of July. As the fatal date drew near, he grew uneasy and made the launch trip to see to it personally that you were not getting along too fast. He found your camp and cut your canoe merely to add a little more delay for good measure. He couldn't tell me what had become of his half-breeds."

Prime laughed. "I suppose the old Scotch under-sheriff told you, didn't he?"

"He tried to tell me that you and Miss Millington had a.s.sa.s.sinated the two men and stolen their canoe and outfit. You didn't do that?--or did you?"

"Hardly," Prime denied. Then he told the story of the finding of the dead men, capping it with an account of the chance visit of Jean Ba'tiste.

Grider left his chair and took a turn up and down the room.

"It was a great adventure," he declared, coming back to them. "Some day you are going to tell me all about it, and the kind of a time you had.

I'll bet it was fierce--some parts of it, anyway. I can't answer for you, Miss Millington; but what Don doesn't know about roughing it is--or used to be--good and plenty."

"You sent Bandish back to town after you were through with him?" Prime inquired.

"Yes. I had taken a pair of handcuffs along, just on general principles, and I lent him my engineer to run the launch. Afterward, I kept on up-stream in the _Sprite_, hoping to meet you coming down; and hoping against hope that we would be able to beat the calendar back to Ottawa."

"We never should have beaten it if the old Scotchman hadn't taken a hand," was Prime's comment. "He saved us at least a full day."

Grider was edging toward the door. "I guess you don't need me any more just now," he offered. "I'm due to go and thank the good-natured lumber king who lent me the _Sprite_. By and by, after the dust has settled a bit, I'll come around and show you where Mr. Sh.e.l.laby holds forth."

"One minute, Mr. Grider," Lucetta interposed hastily. "We can't let you go without asking your forgiveness for the way in which we have been vilifying you for a whole month, and for what we both said to you last night. I must speak for myself, at least, and----"

"Don't," said Grider, laughing again. "It's all in the day's work. As it happened, I wasn't the goat this time, but that isn't saying that I mightn't have done something quite as uncivilized if you had given me a chance. You two gave me one of the few perfect moments of a rather uneventful life last night when you made me understand that you were giving me credit for the whole thing--as a joke! I only wish I could invent one half as good. And that reminds me, Don; can you--er--do you think you'll be able to put a real woman into the next story?"

For some few minutes after the barbarian had ducked and disappeared a stiff little silence fell upon the two he had left behind. In writing about it Prime would have called it an interregnum of readjustment. He had gone to a window to stare aimlessly down into the busy street, and Lucetta was sitting with her chin in her cupped palms and her eyes fixed upon the rather garish pattern of the paper on the opposite wall. After a time Prime pulled himself together and went back to her.

"It is all changed, isn't it?" he said, in a rather flat voice.

"Everything is changed. You are no longer a teacher, working for your living. You are an heiress, with a snug little fortune in your own right."

She looked up at him with the bright little smile which had been brought over intact from the days of the banished conventions.

"Whatever you say I am, you are," she retorted cheerfully. "Only I can't quite believe it yet--about the money, you know."

"You'd better," he returned gloomily. "Besides, it is just what you said you wanted--neither too little nor too much: one hundred thousand at a good, safe six per cent will give you an income of six thousand a year.

You can travel on that for the remainder of your natural life."

"Easily," she rejoined. "And you can write the leisurely book and marry the girl. Perhaps you will be doing both while I am getting ready to go on my travels. You won't insist upon going back to Ohio with me now, will you? You--you ought to go straight to the girl, don't you think?"

"You are forgetting that I said she was an imaginary girl," he parried.

"You said so at first; but afterward you admitted that she wasn't. Also, you promised me you would show me her picture after we should get out of the woods."

"I have never had her picture," he denied. "I said I would show you what she looks like. Come to the window where the light is better."

She went with him half-mechanically. Between the two windows there was an old-fas.h.i.+oned pier-gla.s.s set in the wall. Before she realized what he was doing he had led her before the mirror.

"There she is, Lucetta," he said softly; "the only girl there is--or ever will be."

She started back with a little cry, putting out her hands as if to push him away.