XX
WATSON GRIDER
PRIME had often made his fictional heroes "see red" in exceptionallyvigorous crises, and he was now able to verify the colorful figure ofspeech in his own proper person. Like a submerging wave the recollectionof all that the heartless joke might have meant to a pair of helplessvictims--of all that it had actually entailed in hardships and peril andsickness--rushed over him as he faced the handsome young giant at thewheel of the motor-cruiser.
"So it _was_ you, after all!" he gritted. Then: "There are some fewthings that won't keep, Grider. Put this boat ashore where we can have alittle more room. The account between us is too long to wait fordaylight!"
The barbarian's answer to this was a shout of derisive laughter, and hemade a show of putting the small steering-wheel between himself and hisbelligerent passenger.
"Give me time, Don--just a little time to take it all in!" he gurgled."Oh, my sainted grandmother! what a perfectly ripping fling you musthave had, to make you turn loose all holds like this! And thelady--won't you--won't you introduce me?"
Lucetta faced about, and, if a look could have crippled, themotor-cruiser would have lost its steersman.
"Cousin Donald has tried to tell me about you, but the reality is worsethan he or anybody could put into words!" she broke out in indignantscorn. "Of all the inhuman, dastardly things that have ever been done inthe name of a practical joke, yours is certainly the climax, Mr.Grider!"
The young man at the wheel pursed his lips as if he were going towhistle; then he appeared to comprehend suddenly and went off in anothergust of Hudibrastic mirth.
"I've been figuring it all out as I came along up river," he choked;"how you had tried to account for yourselves to each other--how you hadbeen wrestling with the lack of all the little civilized knickknacks andnotions--how you'd look when you came out. Excuse me, but your--yourclothes, you know; you're a pair to make a wooden idol hold his sidesand chortle himself to death!"
This seemed to be adding insult to injury, and by this time Prime wasspeechless, Berserk-mad, as he himself would have written it. Nothingbut Lucetta's restraining hand upon his arm kept him from hurlinghimself, reckless of consequences, upon the heartless jester. When hecould control his symptoms sufficiently to find a few coherent words, hecontrived to ease the soul-nausea--in some small measure.
"There is another day coming, Grider; don't you lose sight of that for asingle minute!" he raged. "I'm not saying anything about myself; perhapsI have given you cause to assume that you can pull off your brutalinitiation stunts on me whenever you feel like it. That's all right, butyou've overdone the thing this time. Miss Millington's quarrel is myquarrel. If I can't get you in any other way, I'll post you in everyclub you belong to as the man who plays horse-laugh jokes on women!"
"The account between us is too long to wait fordaylight!"]
At this outburst Grider only laughed again, appearing to be entirely andquite joyously impervious to either scorn or red rage.
"Perhaps I do owe you both an apology--not for the joke--that is tooripping good to be spoiled--but for breaking your night's rest in thatpeppery Scotchman's birch-bark," he offered. "If you'll duck under theraised deck, you'll find two dog-kennel staterooms. The port-side kennelis yours, Don, and the other is Miss Millington's. Suppose you turn inand get your nap out. To-morrow morning, if you still feel in the humorfor it, you can get together and give me what you seem to think iscoming to me. _Shoo!_ I can't steer this boat and play skittles with youat the same time. Run along to bed--both of you!"
With such a case-hardened barbarian for a host, there seemed to benothing else to be done, and Prime took Lucetta's arm and helped herdown into the tiny cabin. It was lighted, and the doors of the twobox-like staterooms were open. Prime felt for the button on the jamb ofthe right-hand door and Lucetta's sleeping-niche sprang alight. Shelooked in and gave a little cry of astonishment.
"My suitcases!" she exclaimed; "the ones I left in the Quebec hotel!"
Prime snapped the opposite switch and looked on his own side. "My autotrunk, too," he conceded sourly. "We didn't need any more evidence, butthis is conclusive. Grider has had his horse-laugh, and the least hecould do in the wind-up was to bring us our belongings. I suppose we arecompelled to be indebted to him for getting us out of the scrape withMacdougal, much as it goes against the grain; but to-morrow we'll settlewith him."
Lucetta braced herself in her doorway against the surge and swing of theracing cruiser.
"He doesn't look like a man who could be so wholly lost to all senseof--of the fitness of things, Donald," she ventured, as one who wouldnot be immitigably vindictive.
"He looks, and acts, like a wild ass of the desert!" Prime stormed, in afresh access of resentment. And then: "You'd best go to bed and getwhat sleep you can. Heaven only knows what new piece of buffoonery willbe sprung upon us to-morrow morning."
She looked up with the adorable little grimace, a copy of which he hadlong since resolved to wish upon his next and most bewitching heroine.
"I believe you are angry yet," she chided, half in mockery. "I like youbest when you don't scowl so ferociously, Cousin Donald. You forget thatwe have agreed that it wasn't all bad. Good night." And she closed herdoor.
Turning out of his box-berth the next morning, Prime found the sunshining broadly in at the stateroom port-light. The motorboat was atrest and the machinery was stopped. A bath, a shave, and a completechange to fresh haberdashery made him feel somewhat less pugnacious, andstumbling up the companion to the cockpit he saw that the cruiser wastied up at a wharf on the river fringe of a considerable city; saw,also, that Lucetta, likewise renewed as to her outward appearance, wasawaiting him.
"Where is Grider?" he demanded shortly.
"He has gone somewhere to get an auto to take us to a hotel."
"What city is this?"
"It is Ottawa. Don't you see the government buildings up there on thehill?"
Prime was silent for a moment. Then he said: "He needn't think he isgoing to smooth it all over by showing us a few little neighborlyattentions. We are back in the good old civilized world once more, andwe are not asking any favors of Watson Grider."
"Oh, I shouldn't feel that way, if I were you," she qualified. "He seemsvery humble and penitent this morning, though he is still twinkly-eyed,and I couldn't make him talk much. He said we'd want to be having ourbreakfast, and----"
"We don't breakfast with him," was the crabbed rejoinder.
"Why, Donald!" she protested, in a laughing mockery of deprecatoryconcern. "I believe you are still angry. You really mustn't hold spite,that way. It isn't nice--or Bankhead-y."
He looked her fairly in the eyes. "Don't begin by throwing the oldminister ancestor up at me, Lucetta. I can't help the grouch, and Idon't know as I want to help it. Every time I think of you lying thereunder the big spruces, sick and discouraged, suffering for the commonestnecessities and with no possible chance of getting them, I want to goout and swear like a pirate and murder somebody. Why doesn't he bringthat auto, if he is going to?"
As if the impatient demand had evoked him, Grider appeared on the wharfand beckoned to them. Prime helped his companion up to the string-piece,and had only a scowl for their late host as Grider led the way to thestreet and a waiting auto. The barbarian stood aside while Prime wasputting Lucetta into the car and clambering in after her. Then he tookthe seat beside the driver, and no word was said until the car wasstopped before the entrance of an up-town hotel, where Grider got downto open the tonneau door for the pair on the rear seat.
"You'll want to have your first civilized breakfast by yourselves and Ishan't butt in," he offered good-naturedly. "Later on, say about teno'clock, I'll be glad to see you both in the ladies' parlor--if you canforgive me that far."
Prime made no reply, but after they were seated in the comfortablebreakfast-room and were revelling in their surroundings and in theefficient service he broke out agai
n.
"Grider still has his brass-bound nerve with him; to ask us to meet him!I'd see him in kingdom come first, if I wasn't spoiling to tell him afew things."
"Perhaps he wishes to try to explain," came from the less vindictiveside of the table-for-two. "Think a moment, Cousin Donald: you two havebeen friends and college chums, and--and Mr. Grider has been brotherlygood to you in times past, hasn't he? And I don't want you to quarrelwith him."
"Why don't you?"
"Because you have said enough to make me understand that you are doingit for my sake. That won't answer at all, you know."
"I don't see why it won't," Prime objected with sudden obtuseness.
"For the best possible reason; there is another woman to be considered.Sooner or later she will hear that you have broken with your best friendon account of a--a person she has never even heard of, and there will beconsequences."
"Oh, if that is all"--and then he laughed. "You are either the mostchildlike bit of femininity the world has ever seen--or the mostwilfully blind, Lucetta."
"'Cousin Lucetta,'" she corrected. "We are back among the conventions,now."
He took the implied readjustment of their relations rather hard.
"That wasn't worthy of you," he protested warmly. "We have been too muchto each other in the past month to go back of the returns in that way,don't you think?"
"I can tell better what I think after I have climbed down into my littlegroove in the girls' school," she returned half-absently, and beyondthis the talk concerned itself with their plans for the immediatefuture, Prime still insisting that he meant to see his table companionsafely home and setting the difficulties and objections aside as one whohad a perfect right to do so.
When the leisurely meal was finished Prime pushed his chair back andglanced at his watch.
"It is nearly ten o'clock," he announced. "Shall we go and meet Grider?Or shall we give him the cold shoulder he so richly deserves and go huntup the railroad timetables? It is for you to say."
She decided instantly.
"I think we ought to go and hear what Mr. Grider has to say for himself.We owe him that much for rescuing us from that terrible old Scotchunder-sheriff."
And together they sought the hotel parlors.
Stranded in Arcady Page 22