VIII
CRACKING VENEERS
AT the foot of the long portage which had closed the week for them thetwo voyagers found the course of their river changing again to thesoutheastward, and were encouraged accordingly. In addition to thechanging course the stream was taking on greater volume, and, while therapids were not so numerous, they were more dangerous, or at least theylooked so.
By this time they were acquiring considerable skill with the paddles,together with a fine, woodcrafty indifference to the hardships. In thequick water they were never dry, and they came presently to disregardthe wettings, or rather to take them as a part of the day's work. As thecomradeship ripened, their attitude toward each other grew more and moreintolerant of the civilized reservations.
Over the night fires their talk dug deeply into the abstractions, losingartificiality in just proportion to the cracking and peeling of theveneers.
"I am beginning to feel as though I had never touched the real realitiesbefore," was the way Prime expressed it at the close of a day in whichthey had run a fresh gamut of all the perils. "Life, the life that thevast majority of people thrive upon, will always seem ridiculouslytrivial and commonplace to me after this. I never understood before thatcivilization is chiefly an overlaying of extraneous things, and that,given a chance, it would disintegrate and fall away from us even as ourcivilized clothes are doing right now."
The young woman looked up with a quaint little grimace. She was tryingto patch the frayed hem of her skirt, sewing with a thread drawn fromone of the blankets and a clumsy needle Prime had fashioned for her outof a fish-bone.
"Please don't mention clothes," she begged. "If we had more of thedeerskin I'd become a squaw at once. The fringes wouldn't look so bad ifthey were done in leather."
"Mere accessories," Prime declared, meaning the clothes. "Civilizationprescribes them, their cut, fashion, and material. The buckskin Indianshave the best of us in this, as in many other things."
"The realities?" she queried.
"The simplicities," he qualified. "Life as we have lived it, and as weshall probably live it again if we ever get out of this, is much toocomplex. We are learning how few the real necessities are, and it isgood for the soul. I wouldn't take a fortune for what I've been learningin these weeks, Lucetta."
"I have been learning, too," she admitted.
"Other things besides the use of a paddle and a camp-fire?"
"Many other things. I have forgotten the world I knew best, and it isgoing to require a tremendous effort to remember it again when the needarises."
"I shall never get back to where I was before," Prime asserted withcheerful dogmatism. Then, in a fresh burst of confidence: "Lucetta, I'mcoming to suspect that I have always been the merest surface-skimmer. Ithought I knew life a little, and was even brash enough to attempt towrite about it. I thought I could visualize humanity and itspossibilities, but what I saw was only the outer skin--of people and ofthings. But my greatest impertinence has been in my handling of women."
"Injustice?" she inquired.
"Not intentional; just crass ignorance. I know now that I was merelyimitative, choosing for models the character-drawings of men who kneweven less about women than I did. Vapid sentimentality was about as faras I could get. It revolts me to think of it now."
Her laugh was as unrestrained as that of a child. "You amuse me, Donald.Most women are hopelessly sentimental. Don't you know that?"
"You are not," he retorted soberly.
"How do you know?"
"Heavens and earth! if I haven't had an opportunity to find out----"
"You haven't," she returned quietly; "not the least little morsel of anopportunity. A few days ago we were thrown together--a man and a womanwho were total strangers, to live or die as the chance might fall. Idefy any one to be sentimental in such circumstances. Sentiment thrivesonly in the artificialities; they are the very breath of its life. Ifmen and women could know each other as they really are, there would befewer marriages, by far."
"And the few would be far happier," Prime put in.
"Do you think so? I doubt it very much."
"Why?"
"Because, in the most admirable marriage there must be some preservationof the reticences. It is possible for people to know each other toowell."
"I don't think so, if the qualities are of the kind that will stand thetest."
"Who has such qualities?" she asked quickly.
"You have, for one. I didn't believe there was a human woman on earthwho could go through what you have and still keep sweet. Setting asidethe hardships, I fancy most other women would have gone stark, staringmad puzzling over the mystery."
"Ah, yes; the mystery. Shall we ever be able to explain it?"
"Not if we decide to throw Grider overboard, I'm afraid."
"Doesn't the Mr. Grider solution seem less and less possible to you astime goes on?" she asked. "It does to me. The motive--a mere practicaljoke--isn't strong enough. Whoever abducted us was trying for somethinglarger than a laugh at our expense."
"You'd think so, wouldn't you? Big risks were incurred, and the expensemust have been considerable, too. Still, as I have said before, if weleave Grider out of it we abandon the one only remotely tenableexplanation. I grant you that the joke motive is weak, but aside fromthat there is no motive at all. Nobody in this world could have anypossible object in getting rid of me, and I am sure that the assumptionapplies with equal force to you. You see where it leaves us."
"I know," was the ready rejoinder. "If the mystery had stopped with ourdiscovery of the aeroplane-tracks, it would have been different. But itdidn't stop there. It continued with our finding of the ownerless canoestocked for a long journey. Was the canoe left for us to find?"
Prime knew his companion well enough by this time to be willing to trusther with the grewsome truth.
"I don't know what connection the canoe may have had with ourkidnapping, if any, but I am going to tell you something that I didn'tcare to tell you until we were far enough away from the scene of it. Wereasoned that there were two owners for the canoe, arguing from the tworifles and the two hunting-knives. Do you know why they didn't turn upwhile we were waiting for them?"
"No."
"It was because they couldn't. They were dead."
"You knew it at the time?" she asked.
"Yes. I found them. It was in a little glade just below our camp at theriver-head. They had fought a duel with knives. It was horrible, and Ithought it best not to tell you--it seemed only the decent thing not totell you."
"When did you find them?"
"It was when I went over to the river on the excuse of trying to getsome berries while you were cooking supper. I had seen the canoe when Iwent after the can of water. Instead of looking for berries I began tohunt around for the owners, thinking that probably they were campedsomewhere near by. I didn't find any traces of a camp; but in the gladethere were the ashes of five fires arranged in the shape of a Greekcross: one fire in the middle and one at the end of each arm. Thismystified me still more, but it was then growing so dark that it was nouse to look farther. Just as I was leaving the glade I stumbled over thetwo men, locked in each other's arms; they had evidently been dead forsome hours, or maybe days."
"How perfectly frightful!" she exclaimed. "I don't wonder that youlooked ill when you came back."
"It nearly knocked me out," Prime confessed. "But I realized at oncethat it wasn't necessary to multiply the shock by two. After you wereasleep that night I went over and buried the two men--weighted themwith stones and sunk them in the river, since I didn't have anything todig with. Afterward, while I was searching for the other knife, I founda little buckskin bag filled with English sovereigns, lying, as Isupposed, where one of them had dropped it. It seemed to indicate themotive for the desperate fight."
"But it adds just that much more to the mystery," was the young woman'scomment. "Were they white men?"
&
nbsp; "Half-breeds or Indians, I couldn't tell which."
"Somebody hired them to do something with us?" she suggestedtentatively.
"That is only a guess. I have made it half a dozen times only to have itpushed aside by the incredibilities. If we are to connect these two menwith 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-firesof some kind; but even in that case the arrangement in the form of across wouldn't mean anything."
The young woman had finished her mending and was putting the fish-boneneedle carefully away against a time of future need.
"The arrangement might mean something if one were looking down upon itfrom 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 thoughtof that," he said, with a short laugh. "It was a signal, and it waslighted for the benefit of our aeroplane. How much farther does that getus?"
The young woman was letting down the flaps of her sleeping-tent, and heranswer was entirely irrelevant.
"I am glad the protective instinct was sufficiently alive to keep youfrom telling me at the time," she said, with a little shudder which shedid not try to conceal. "You may not believe it, Donald Prime, but Istill have a few of the civilized weaknesses. Good night; and don't situp too long with that horrid tobacco."
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