XII
IN SEARCH OF AN ANCESTOR
FOR a moment neither of them spoke. Then Prime broke out in a sardoniclaugh.
"That is a heavenly prospect for dinner, supper, breakfast, and dinnerall rolled into one, isn't it, now? If there is anything left in thecanoe, it's soaked to a pulp--to say nothing of the fact that we can'tget to it. How are we going to raft ourselves over there without theaxe?"
Lucetta went down to the margin of the pond-like reach and tested itsdepth with a tossed stone.
"It is deep," she said, "swimming-deep. The shallows must be all on theother side."
"I'll go down-stream a piece and see if there isn't some place where Ican wade," Prime offered. But at this she shook her head.
"We passed out of all the wading depths days and days ago. If you willmake a fire, I'll swim over and get the canoe."
Prime had a world of objections to offer to this, and he flung them intothe 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 sheshould try it and fail, he would have to go in after her, and that wouldmean suicide for both of them.
She heard him through with a quaint little lip-curl of amusement at hisfertility in obstacle raising, and at the end calmly fished the remainsof his handkerchief out of his pocket and bound it about her head.
"Another attack of the undying protective instinct," she retortedlight-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 ofthe river above.
Prime fell to work gathering fuel, feeling less like a man than at anytime since the voyage had begun. It stabbed his _amour-propre_ to theheart to be compelled to let her take the man's part while he did thesquaw's. But there seemed to be no help for it.
While he was kindling the fire he heard a plunge, and a little later sawthe coifed head making diagonally across from the upper bend toward thecanoe. She was swimming easily with the side stroke, and he could seethe rhythmical flash and swing of a white arm as she made the overhandreach. Then he dutifully turned his back and gave his entire attentionto the firemaking.
When he looked again she had righted the canoe and was coming acrosswith it, swimming and pushing it ahead of her. At a little distance fromthe shore she called to him: "Take it; it's all yours"--giving thebirch-bark a final shove. "I'll be with you in a few minutes." And withthat 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 onthe bank and to begin an inventory of the losses. Thanks to the carethey had taken in tying everything in, nothing was missing save thepaddles. Such food as was still in the original tin was undamaged, butthe meat was soaked and the flour and meal were soggy masses of paste.Prime was dismayed. The small stock of potatoes would not last forever,and neither would the canned vegetables. They were not yet backwoodsmenenough to live upon meat alone; and another and crowning misfortune wasthe loss of the salt.
Prime was lamenting over the wet salt-sack and trying to save somelittle portion of the precious condiment when Lucetta came on the scene,looking as bright and fresh as the proverbial field-flower after herplunge and swim, and took over the culinary problem. Fortunately, theystill had the salt pork, and the pretty _cuisiniere_ issued her orderspromptly.
"Find some nice clean pieces of birch bark and spread this flour andmeal out so that it will dry before the fire," she directed; and whilehe was doing that and hanging the blankets and tent canvas up to dripand dry, she opened a tin of baked beans and made another of thetriumphant stews of jerked deer meat and potatoes seasoned with a bitof the salt pork. Upon these two dishes they presently feasted royally,making up for the three lost meals, and missing the bread only becausethey didn't have it.
"I have settled one thing in my own mind," Prime declared, while he wasassiduously drying a leaf of the soaked tobacco for the after-dinnersmoke. "If I am ever cast away again, I'm going to make dead sure that Ihave a Domestic Science expert for a fellow sufferer. Lucetta, you aresimply great when it comes to making something out of nothing. What arewe going to do with this flour-and-meal pudding?"
"We are going to dry it carefully and then grind it up again on a flatstone and go on as before," was the cheerful reply. "That is my part ofit, and yours will be a good bit harder; you will have to make some newpaddles and contrive some way to patch that big hole in the canoe."
Prime laughed hilariously. His head was still aching, but the disasterhad fallen so far short of the ultimate fatalities that the smalldiscomforts were as nothing.
"I can imagine both the paddles and the patch," he boasted. "It remainsto be seen whether or not I can turn them into serviceable realities."
While the dunnage was drying and Lucetta was regrinding her flour andmeal Indian-fashion on a smooth stone, Prime hacked manfully at a smallspruce and finally got it down. It took him the better part of theafternoon to split the tree with wooden wedges and to get out two piecesto be hewn roughly with the axe into the paddle shape. Over the eveningfire 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 abit of stone. To keep him company, Lucetta had recourse to the fish-boneneedle. Her clothes had not come scathless out of the cataract disasterand 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 notafraid to buckle down to the necessity and keep on trying."
"'Patient continuance in well-doing,'" he quoted, grinning. "I learnedthat, up one side and down the other, in the writing trade. It is aboutthe only thing that gets you anywhere."
"You had a hard time making your start in the writing, didn't you?" sheoffered.
"When did I ever tell you that?"
"You told me something about it the first day we were together, and agood 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 anygirl. You don't believe that, I suppose. You wouldn't believe it of anyman of my age, and--and temperament?"
"Yet you said night before last that you wanted a wife and children anda home. Doesn't that presuppose a girl?"
"In my case it presupposes a handsomely imaginary girl; I'm great on theimaginary things."
"What does she look like--this imaginary girl of yours?"
He glanced up from the paddle-whittling. "Some day, when we get backinto the world again, I'll show you what she looks like. Can you waituntil 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 lastthere were a good many disjointed things about your fight forrecognition. 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 thetime--that soap incident. I was down in a hole, in the very bottom ofthe hole. I had written a book and couldn't get it published; couldn'tget anybody to touch it with a ten-foot pole. I had friends who werewilling to lend me money to go on with, and one who offered me a jobwriting advertisements for his soap factory. It was horribly tempting,but when I was built, the ability to let go, even of a failure, was leftout. 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 anadvertisement you said you had seen in the _New York Herald_. I couldn'tmake out what it was; something about an English estate."
Prime looked up quickly.
"Isn't it odd how these perfectly inconsequent things bury themselvessomewhere in the human brain, to rise up and sneak out some time whenthe 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 fromthat time to this."
"When you spoke of it last night, you seemed to be telling Mr. Griderabout it. Was it addressed to you?"
"It was addressed to the heirs of Roger Prime, of Batavia, and RogerPrime was my father. If I remember correctly, the advertisers gave aCanadian address--Ottawa, I think--and the 'personal' was worded in theusual fashion: 'If the heirs of Roger Prime will apply'--and so on; youknow 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 thistime. Every once in a while a rumor leaks out that some great estate hasbeen left in England, or somewhere else across the water, with no nativeheirs. You or I, if we happen to have a family name that fits in, areinvited to contribute to a sum which is being made up to pay the cost ofestablishing the rights of the American descendants, and there you are.I suppose hundreds of thousands of dollars have been buncoed out ofcredulous Americans in that way, first and last."
"I wish you could remember the Canadian address which you say you thinkwas Ottawa," rejoined the young woman reflectively.
"Why?"
"Because I saw in a Cleveland newspaper an advertisement of the samenature, addressed to the heirs of the body of Clarissa Millington, bornBradford. 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 myluggage in Quebec."
The paddle-maker looked up with an accusing laugh.
"You were planning to return from Quebec by way of Ottawa; you weregoing to give those sharks some of your hard-earned teaching money.Don't deny it."
"I can't," she confessed. "I meant to do that very thing. And I thoughtI had plenty of time. There was a date limit set in the advertisement,and it was July thirty-first. Do you think it was a swindle?"
"There isn't the least doubt of it. Your kidnapping has saved you somemoney. The date limit was merely to make you hustle. I have seen thegame worked before, and it is very plausible. And since it is usuallyworked from Canada, a citizen of the United States has no recourse inlaw. You had a narrow escape."
"We may call it that, anyway," was the young woman's reply. "Thethirty-first of July will probably be nothing more than a memory by thetime we find our way back to the world."
A busy silence followed the dismissal of the subject, and then Lucettabegan to tell about the various alarms she had had during the previousnight. "All of which goes to prove that I am still the normal woman,"she concluded.
"You are a heroine, and one of these days I mean to put you in a book,"Prime threatened. "You saved my life yesterday and my self-respectto-day; and that is more than a man ought to expect from the most normalwoman in the world."
"Your self-respect?"
"Yes; you heard me babbling all night, and you have been good-heartedenough not to report anything that a man need be ashamed of."
"You didn't say anything to be ashamed of," she returned quickly. "Mostof the talk was about the old farm near Batavia; that and yourgrandfather."
"Grandfather Bankhead," he mused; "they don't make any finer charactersnowadays than he was--or as fine."
"Bankhead?" she asked suddenly; "was that your grandfather's name?"
"It was: Abner Greenlow Bankhead. It is not such a very usual name. Haveyou ever heard it before?"
"Heard it? Why--why, it was my mother's mother's maiden name! She was aBankhead, and she married Josiah Greenlow Bradford!"
Prime dropped both paddle and knife.
"Well--wouldn't that jar you!" he exclaimed. "Can it be possiblethat--hold on a minute; my grandfather had a Bankhead cousin who grew upin the family, and she married and moved to Ohio, away along back in theother century. What was your grandmother's Christian name?"
"It was an old-fashioned one--Lorinda. I can remember her indistinctlyas a little old lady with white hair and the brightest possible blueeyes."
Prime was wagging his head as one in a daze. "It is too wonderful to betrue, Lucetta! But it must be true. My grandfather's cousin's name wasLorinda, and I can remember seeing an oil portrait of her, a horriblething done by some local artist, hanging in the old farmhouse atBatavia. I can't figure it out, but the way it is working around, weought to be cousins of some sort. Can you believe it?"
The young woman put her mending aside to trace the relationshipthoughtfully, counting the generations on her finger-tips. When she hadfinally determined to her own satisfaction that they really had a commonancestor four generations back, she laughed.
"It is wonderful," she said; "almost too wonderful to be true. But thewonder of it is completely overshadowed by the unbelievable coincidencewhich dropped us two, cousins and descendants of that far-away Bankhead,down together on the beach of a forest lake in the wilds of the Canadianbackwoods--a lake that neither of us ever saw or heard of before. Willthe mysteries never end?"
"Wait a minute; let's get it straight," Prime interposed. "We are reallycousins, aren't we? Don't you figure it out that way?"
"Third cousins; yes."
"You'll have to show me," he invited. "Genealogy is like Sanskrit tome."
She proceeded to show him, and from that the talk drifted ratherexcitedly into family reminiscences. After the manner of people whoreally have ancestors, neither of them was able to remember many of thetraditions. Prime's recollections, indeed, stopped short with hisgrandfather, but Lucetta knew a little more about the older generations,and she dug the individuals out one by one, offering them to Prime asspurs to further rememberings.
"No, I don't remember anything about Jabez," he said. "And Elvira andElmina and John I never heard mentioned. Grandfather Bankhead had nonear relations that I know of except his brother Jasper and his cousinLorinda, who grew up with him."
"I seem to remember something about grandmother's cousin Jasper,"Lucetta put in. "Didn't something happen to him--something out of theusual?"
"Yes," was the prompt reply. "He disappeared--went to the Far West whenhe was a young man and was never heard of afterward. Grandfather oftenwondered what had become of him, and in his later years spoke of himquite frequently."
Lucetta went on with her mending, the fish-bone needle making herprogress primitively slow. Prime got up and strolled down to theriver-bank. When he returned he went around to her side of the fire tosay:
"I'm mighty glad we have found out that we are cousins, Lucetta; twiceglad, for your sake. It makes things a bit easier for you, doesn't it?"
She did not look up.
"Why should it?" she asked quietly.
"Oh, I don't know; we have both been throwing tin cans and brickbats atthe conventions; but I haven't any idea that we have killed them offpermanently. And they die harder in a woman than in a man. We havejollied things along pretty well, so far, but that isn't saying that Ihaven't known how hard it must have been for you. As matters stand now,I am your natural protector."
She looked up with the quaint little smile that he had learned to know,to interpret, and to love.
"What difference does the relationship make, Donald, so long as you arewhat you are? And what difference would it make if you happened to bethe other kind of man?"
He stood smiling down upon her with his hands in his pockets.
"Your trust is the most wonderful thing in this world, Lucetta--and themost beautiful. I should have to be a much worse man than I have e
verdared to be to do anything to spoil it," he said slowly, and with thathe went to set up her sleeping-tent.
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