Stranded in Arcady Part 9

"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

s.h.i.+PWRECK

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 pa.s.sage 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 a.s.serted loyally. "I'm the beauty of the two"--pa.s.sing 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 a.s.serted. "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."