Stranded in Arcady Part 17

"No; come back here and sit down. They had a fight and killed each other."

The man returned hesitantly and squatted beside the fire to press another live coal into the bowl of his pipe. Prime switched the talk abruptly.

"You'd better change your mind about the offer I made you and pilot us to the nearest town. We will pay you well for it."

"You got money?" was the short question.

"Plenty of it."

At this the "ver' great trapper" a.s.sumed to take the proposal under consideration, smoking other pipes, chaffering and bargaining and prolonging his stay deep into the night. When he finally took his leave, saying that he must go on to his camp, which was a few miles up one of the smaller tributaries of the main stream, it was with a half promise to come back in the morning for the piloting.

Prime took counsel of prudence and did not settle himself for the night immediately after the sharp-eyed one had gone. Laying his pipe aside, he crept cautiously out to the river-bank and a.s.sured himself that his late visitor was doing what he had said he would do, namely, heading off up the river with clean, quick strokes of the paddle, which soon sent his light craft out of sight. Prime climbed down the bank, satisfied himself that the patched canoe and its partial lading had not been disturbed, and then went back to the fire to roll himself in his blankets. The incident, with its inquisitorial pryings, had been rather disturbing, in a way, but it was apparently an incident closed.

Turning in so late after a laborious day on the river, Prime overslept the next morning, and when he awoke he found Lucetta already up and frying the bacon.

"Your man didn't stay all night?" she questioned, after Prime had scolded her for not making him get up and do his part.

"No; he sat here until between ten and eleven o'clock and gave me two or three bad minutes. He recognized our canoe and one of the guns, told me the names of the dead men, and wanted to know what had become of them."

"You didn't tell him?" she gasped.

"In the cold light of the morning after, I am afraid I told him too much or too little. I told him the men who owned the canoe and its outfit were dead; that they'd had a fight and killed each other. Candidly, I don't think he believed it. It scared him until I thought he was going to have a fit. I had to jolly him up a bit before he would come back to the fire and talk some more."

"What does he believe?" she inquired anxiously.

"He wouldn't tell me, and I couldn't decide by merely looking at him. I hope I've hired him to pilot us to the nearest town. When he went away he intimated that he might be back this morning."

"Shall we wait for him?"

"No; if he isn't here by the time we are ready to start, we'll go on and take our chance of 'gettin' los',' as he put it. I think that was a bluff, anyway."

They breakfasted leisurely, and Prime even took time to smoke a pipe before beginning to break camp. But his first trip to the river-bank with a load of the dunnage brought him back on a run.

"Our canoe's gone!" he announced breathlessly. "That little wretch came back and stole it while we were asleep!"

Lucetta sat down and propped her chin in her hands.

"This is the beginning of the end, Donald," she said quite calmly and with a touch of resignation in her voice. "Do you know why he took the canoe?"

"Because he's an infernal thief!" Prime raged hotly.

"No," she contradicted. "It is because he thinks we have murdered the two owners of the canoe, and he wanted to make sure that we wouldn't run away while he went after help to arrest us."

XVI

_MARCHONS!_

PRIME leaned against a tree and took a full minute for a grasping of the new situation.

"I more than half believe you are right," he admitted at length. Then, with a crabbed laugh: "If there is any bigger dunce on earth than I am I should like to meet him--just as a matter of curiosity. I'll never brag on my imagination after this. I could see plainly enough that the fellow was fairly eaten up with suspicion, and it would have been so easy to have invented a plausible lie to satisfy him."

"Don't be sorry for that," the young woman put in quickly. "If they arrest us we shall have to tell the truth."

Prime was frowning thoughtfully. "That is where the shoe pinches. Do you realize that the story we have to tell is one that no sane magistrate or jury could ever believe, Lucetta? These two men, Beaujeau and Cambon, must have started from some known somewhere, alive and well. They disappear, and after a while we turn up in possession of their belongings and try to account for ourselves by telling a fantastic fairy-tale. It's simply hopeless!"

"You are killing the only suggestion I had in mind," was the dispirited rejoinder. "I was going to say that we might wait here until they came for us, but that won't do at all. We must hurry and disappear before they come back and find us!"

"I think it will be best," Prime decided promptly. "If we had a reasonable story to tell it would be different. But we haven't, and the chances are that we should get into all sorts of trouble trying to explain for other people a thing that we can't explain for ourselves. It is up to us to hit the trail. Are you fit for it?"

"Why shouldn't I be?" she asked, but there was no longer the old-time buoyancy in her tone.

"I have had a notion the last day or two that you were not feeling quite up to the mark," Prime explained soberly. "It is something about your eyes; they look heavy, as if you hadn't had sleep enough."

"I can do my part of anything that we have to do," she returned, rising; and together they made a judicious division of the dunnage, deciding what they could take and what they must leave behind.

The uncertainties made the decision hard to arrive at. If the tramp should last no more than three or four days they could carry the necessary food without much difficulty. But they could scarcely afford to give up the blankets and the shelter-tent, and Prime insisted that they must take at least one of the guns and the axe. These extras, with the provisions and the cooking-utensils, made one light load and one rather heavy one, and under this considerable handicap the day's march was begun.

The slow progress was difficult from the very outset. Since the river was their only guide, they did not dare to leave it to seek an easier path. By noon Prime saw that his companion was keeping up by sheer force of will, and he tried to get her to consent to a halt for the afternoon. But she would not give up.

"No," she insisted. "We must go on. I am tired; I'll admit it; but I should be something worse than tired if we should have to stop and be overtaken."

From the beginning of the day's march they seemed to have left behind all of the former hopeful signs, and were once more making their way through a primeval forest, untouched, so far as they could see, by the woodsman's axe. Their night camp was made among the solemn spruces by the side of a little brook winding its way to the nearby river. Prime made a couch of the spruce-tips, the folded tent cloth, and the blankets, and persuaded Lucetta to lie down while he prepared the supper.

When the meal was ready the subst.i.tute cook was the only one who could eat. Lucetta said she didn't care for anything but a cup of tea, and when Prime took it to her he saw that the slate-gray eyes were unnaturally bright and her face was flushed. Whereat a great fear seized upon him.

"You are sick!" he exclaimed, grappling helplessly with the unnerving fear. "Why didn't you tell me before? I thought--I hoped you were just tired out with the long tramp."

"I shall be better in the morning," she answered bravely. "It has been coming on for a day or two, I think. Why did we camp here in this close place, where it is so hot?"

Prime gripped his fleeting courage and held it hard. It was not hot under the spruces; on the contrary, the evening was almost chilly.

Bestirring himself quickly to do what little he was able to do, he moved the sick one gently and set up the tent to shelter her, dipped the remaining bit of the soft deerskin into the brook and made a cold compress for the aching head, and then sat down with a birch-bark fan to keep the mosquitoes away.

As the night wore on he realized more and more his utter helplessness.

He had had no experience with sickness or with the care of the sick, and if the remedies had been at hand he would not have known how to use them. Time and again, after Lucetta had fallen into a troubled sleep, he made his way to the riverbank to stare anxiously in the darkness up and down the stream in the faint hope that help might appear. But for all his longings the silent river gave back neither sight nor sound.

In the morning Lucetta's fever had abated, but it had left her weak and exhausted; much too weak to continue the march, though she was willing and anxious to make the trial. Prime vetoed that at once and tried his best to concoct something out of their diminished store of provisions that would prove appetizing to the invalid. She ate a little of the broth prepared from the smoked deer meat merely to please him, and drank thirstily of the tea; but still Prime was not encouraged.

During the afternoon Lucetta's temperature rose again, and, hara.s.sed and anxious as he was, Prime was thankful that the fever did not make her delirious. That, he told himself, would be the final straw. So far from wandering, she was able to talk to him; to talk and to thank him gratefully for his earnest but skilless attempts to make her more comfortable.

"It is simply maddening to think that there isn't anything really helpful that I can do," he protested, at one of these pathetic little outbreaks of grat.i.tude. "What do they do for people who have fevers?"

"Quinine," she said, with a twitching of the lips which was meant to be a smile. "Why don't you give me a good big dose of quinine, Donald?"

"Yes, why don't I?" he lamented. "Why do I have to sit here like a b.u.mp on a log and do nothing!"