Stranded in Arcady Part 12

"We pa.s.sed 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 pus.h.i.+ng it ahead of her. At a little distance from the sh.o.r.e 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 ma.s.ses 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 a.s.siduously 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-fas.h.i.+on 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 advertis.e.m.e.nts 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt 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 fas.h.i.+on: '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 establis.h.i.+ng 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt 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."