XIII
AT CAMP COUSIN
PRIME whittled through the better part of the succeeding forenoon on thepaddles, and for the midday bread Lucetta tried her domestic-sciencehand upon the dried and reground flour. Not to draw too fine acomparison, the paddles were the better success, though the bread waseatable. In the afternoon the man of all work, with Lucetta forconsulting engineer, tackled the broken canoe.
There was no lack of materials with which to make the repairs if theyhad only known how to use them. Attempts to sew a patch of birch barkover the hole with threads drawn from the blanket were dismal failures.At each of the thread punctures the patch would split and curl up mostperversely; and when night came they had succeeded only in making a badmatter slightly worse.
After supper they put their heads together to become, if the oraclesshould prove auspicious, inventors in this hitherto untried field.
"If we only had a few drops of Indian blood in us!" Prime complained."What do you suppose they daub this bark thing with to make itwater-tight? It must be something they find in the woods."
Lucetta went over to the canoe, chipped a bit of the daubing from one ofthe seams, and tasted it appraisingly.
"It tastes like spruce-gum," she offered; "do you suppose it can be?"
Prime ate a little in his turn and confirmed the guess. "That is aboutwhat it is," he decided. "The next thing is to find out how theycontrive to get enough of it. I wonder if they tap the trees as we dosugar-maples?"
"If we could find a tree that has been broken," Lucetta suggested. Andthen: "How have we managed to live so long without learning some ofthese perfectly simple things, Cousin Donald?"
"Too much education and too little instinct," he scoffed. "To-morrowmorning I'll climb trees and become a gum-gatherer. It seemsinexpressibly humbling to think that a small hole in a piece of birchbark is all that prevents us from going on our way rejoicing. Nevermind, there is another day coming, and if there isn't, success orfailure won't make any considerable difference to either of us."
Bright and early the next morning they tried the spruce-gum experiment.Prime found that he could have plenty of it for the gathering, and whenthey had a sufficient quantity they melted it in one of the emptyvegetable tins and used it as a glue with which to make the patchadhere. The result was not entirely satisfactory. The melted gumhardened quickly, but it became so brittle that a touch would loosen it.
"This is where we set up a laboratory for original research," Lucettasaid, laughing. "I wonder if some more cooking would do it any good."
"'The ruling passion strong in death,'" Prime quoted with good-naturedsarcasm. "You are a born cook. Let's try it."
They tried it and merely succeeded in making the product still morebrittle. They then tried adding a little grease from the fat pork tomake it more flexible, and that ruined it completely.
"Two civilized brains, college-trained to a piano-polish finish, and nota single workable idea between them," Prime derided. "It'shumiliating--disgusting!"
"The brains are still available," asserted the undaunted one. "Go andfind some pine pitch and we'll mix it with the spruce."
This experiment promised better success. A gluey mixture resulted thatstuck, not only to the canoe body and the patch, but to their fingersand to everything it touched. Inventing still further, they contrived arude clamp to hold the patch in place while it was drying, if by goodhap the glue would consent to dry at all; and with the new paddleswhittled and scraped into shape, there was nothing to do but to waitupon the drying process.
Prime spent the afternoon fishing, with the tackle found in one of thegun-cases, and was lucky enough to accumulate a noble string of trout.Lucetta would not say what she was going to do, merely hinting thatPrime's absence until supper-time would be a boon. Only the buzzardswinging in slow circles overhead could have told tales of the doingafter the young woman had obtained her meed of solitude in the littleglade, and possibly the buzzard had seen a sufficient number ofblanketed women washing clothes at a river brink not to be undulystirred at the sight.
Later, Prime came in to exhibit his string of fish with true sportsman'spride, and again they feasted royally, forgetting their latetribulations, and looking forward half-regretfully to a resumption oftheir journey on the morrow.
"It is astonishing how rapidly one can revert to the cave-man type," wasPrime's phrasing of the regret. "I have been a person of pavements andcement walks all my life, as I suppose you have--of the paved streetsand all that they stand for. Yet I shall go back to them with somethinglike reluctance. Shan't you?"
She did not reply to the direct question.
"You speak as if you had some assurance that we are approaching thepavements. Have you?"
"A bare hint. I fished along the river for about a mile down-stream,spying out the land--or the water--as I went, for future reference. Wecan't claim this region by the right of discovery. Somebody has beenhere before us."
"You didn't find a house?" she ventured.
"Oh, no; nothing like that. But I did find the stump of a tree, and thetree had been felled with an axe. It wasn't recently; the stump was oldand moss-grown. But it was axe work just the same."
She laughed softly.
"I don't know whether to be glad or sorry, Donald; for myself, I mean.Of course, you want to get back to your work."
"Do I?" he inquired. "I suppose I ought to want to. I left a book halffinished in my New York attic."
"How could you do that? I should think such work would be ruined byhaving a vacation come along and cut it in two."
"I was sick of it," he confessed frankly. "It was another pen picture ofthe artificialities, and I shall never finish it now. I'll write abetter one."
"Staging it in a Canadian forest?"
"Staging it among the realities, at least. And there shall be a realwoman this time."
In his new character of cousin-in-authority, Prime sent Lucetta early tobed to catch up on her arrears of sleep. After she had disappearedbehind the curtains of the small shelter-tent, he sat for a long timebefore the fire smoking the rank tobacco and letting his thoughts roveat will through the mazes of the strange adventure which had befallenhim and this distant cousin, of whose very existence he had beenignorant.
More and more the mazes perplexed him, and the coincidences, if theywere coincidences, began to verge upon the fantastic or the miraculous.Was it by accident or design that they had both chanced to be in Quebecat the same time? If the plot were of Grider's concocting, did thebarbarian know of the cousinship beforehand? Prime was charitable enoughto hope that he did. It made the brutal joke--if it were a joke--alittle less criminal to suppose that Grider knew of the relationship.
Still, it was all vastly incredible on any joking hypothesis. Takingthe most lenient view of it--that Grider had pre-arranged the assaultupon their liberty and had hired the two half-breeds to pick them up andconvoy them out of the wilderness--it was unbelievable that thebarbarous one, with all of his known disregard for the common humanitieswhere his Homeric sense of humor was involved, would have turned themover to the tender mercies of two semi-savages whose character had beensufficiently demonstrated by the manner of their death.
"It simply _can't_ have been Watson Grider," Prime mused over his sixthcigarette--he was rolling them now in the label paper of the vegetabletins, frugally soaked off and saved. "If it had been his joke, hewouldn't have left it up in the air; he would have followed along to getthe good of it. But if it isn't Grider, who is it, and what is it allabout?"
The riddle always worked around thus to the same tormenting question,with no hint of an answer; and, as many times before, Prime was obligedto leave it hanging, like Mohammed's coffin, between heaven and earth.But when he renewed the fire and rolled himself in his blankets for thenight, he was still casting about for some means of bringing it toearth.
Figuring it out afterward, he was certain that he could not have beenasleep
for more than an hour or two before he was awakened, with theecho of a noise like volley-firing of some sort still ringing in hisears. His first impulse was to spring up, but the second, which was theone he obeyed, was more in keeping with the new character development.Deftly freeing himself from the blanket wrappings, he reached over tomake sure that one of the guns could be caught up quickly, and layquiet.
For some little time nothing happened, and the night silence of theforest was undisturbed. Just as he was beginning to think that it hadbeen the mosquitoes, and not a noise, which had awakened him, and wasabout to get up and renew the smudge which he had made to windwardbefore turning in, he heard cautious footsteps as of some oneapproaching from the direction of the river.
The measured tread assured him that the footfalls were human, and hishold tightened mechanically upon the grip of the gun-stock. By this timehe was thinking quite clearly, and he told himself that the militantprecaution was doubtless unnecessary; that there was little chance thatthe approaching intruder--any intruder who would be attracted by thelight of the camp-fire--would be unfriendly. Yet it was the part ofprudence to be prepared.
After a moment or two he was able to note that the approaching footstepswere growing more cautious. At this he rolled over by imperceptibleinchings to face toward the river, drawing the gun with him. It wasuseless to try to penetrate the black shadows of the background. Thefire had died down to a mass of glowing embers, its bedtime replenishingof dried wood blazing up fitfully only now and then to illumine aslightly wider circle. Prime saw nothing, and, for a time after thefootfalls ceased, heard nothing. But the next manifestation wasstartling enough. At a moment when he was beginning to wonder if hisimagination had been playing tricks on him, he heard a curious rippingsound coming, this time, from behind the inverted canoe.
Silently he rose to his knees with the rifle held low. For shelter, incase of a shower, the provisions had been placed under the invertedbirch-bark, and he decided instantly that the intruder was trying tosteal them. Not wishing to alarm Lucetta, he got upon his feet andwalked toward the canoe, meaning to put the man behind it betweenhimself and the firelight.
The manoeuvre was never completed. Before he had taken half a dozensteps a blinding flashlight was turned upon him from behind the canoe,and it stopped him as suddenly as if the dazzling radiance had been avolley from a machine-gun. But the stopping shock was only momentary.Dashing forward around the end of the canoe, he had a glimpse of abig-bodied man in a golf cap and sweater crashing his way through theundergrowth toward the river, and promptly gave chase.
"Grider!--Watson!" he called, but there was no reply. The intruder, ashe ran, had the benefit of his flashlight; Prime could see the momentarygleams as the runner took a diagonal course which would bring him out ahundred yards down-stream from a point directly opposite the camp-fire.
Prime collided with a tree, stumbled and fell, and sprang up to callagain. The retreating footfalls were no longer audible, but now therewas another cacophony of noise--the sputtering exhausts of amotor-boat--and Prime reached the river-bank in time to see the darkshape of the power-driven craft losing itself in the starlight in itsswift rush down the river.
In the first flush of his rage at what figured as a second heartlessdesertion, Prime was strongly tempted to open fire on the retreatingmotor-boat and its occupant. This was purely a cave-man prompting, andbefore it could translate itself into action the opportunity was gone.When the motor-boat had disappeared, losing itself to sight and sound,the breathless pursuer went back to his blankets, swearing gloomily atthe spiteful chance which had opened the door of misfortune by makinghim a college classmate of one Watson Grider.
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