This time her laugh was mocking. "Just now you said you wanted enough so that you could write without thinking of money," she reminded him.
"Oh, there is a golden mean; it doesn"t have to be all honey or all vinegar. A nice tidy little income that would provide at a pinch for the butcher and the baker and the other people. You know what I mean."
"Yes, I think I do; and my ambition is hardly more soaring than yours.
As you remarked, it doesn"t cost so frightfully much to travel and live abroad."
He looked at her dubiously. "You don"t mean that you"d wish to travel all the time, do you?"
"Why not?"
"Why--er--I don"t know precisely. But you"d want to settle down and have a home some time, wouldn"t you?"
"And cook for a man?" she put in. "Perhaps I haven"t found the man."
Prime"s laugh was boyishly blatant.
"I notice you are cooking pretty a.s.siduously for a man these days. But perhaps that is only in self-defense. If the man cooked for you you wouldn"t live very long."
"I am merely doing my bit, as the English say," was the cool retort. "I haven"t said that I like to do it."
"But you do like to do it," he insisted. "If you didn"t, you couldn"t hit it off so cheerfully. I know a thing or two, and what I don"t know I am learning. You are a perfectly normal woman, Lucetta, and normality doesn"t mean continuous travel."
"You have changed your mind again. Last week you were calling me abnormal, and saying that you had never met a woman like me before."
"I hadn"t; but that was my misfortune. I hope there are a good many like you; I"ve got to hope it for the sake of humanity and the good of the race. But this talk isn"t getting us anywhere. We had better turn in; there is a hard day ahead of us tomorrow."
In the morning the prophecy seemed destined to fulfil itself in heaping measure. While Lucetta was getting breakfast Prime took to the woods and made a careful survey of some portion of the hazards ahead. He was gone for the better part of an hour, and when he came back his report was not encouraging.
"Worse and more of it," was the way he described the difficulties. "It is just one rapid after another, as far as I went; and that must have been a mile and a half or more. Coming back, I kept to the river bank, and tried to imagine us picking the way between the rocks in the channel. I believe we can do it if you have the nerve to try."
"If _I_ have the nerve?" she flung back. "Is that a revival of the s.e.x idea?"
"I beg your pardon," he hastened to say. "It was simply a manner of speaking. Your nerve is like the rest of you--superb. We"ll shoot the rapids if it takes a leg. It would ask for more than a leg to make the carry."
A little later they loaded the canoe carefully for the greater hazard, packing the dunnage securely and protecting the meal and the flour as well as they could by wrapping them tightly in the canvas roll. Past this, they cut strips from the remaining sc.r.a.ps of deerskin and tied everything, even to the utensils, the guns, and the axe, to the braces, taking time to make their preparations thorough.
It was well that they took the time while they had it. After the birch-bark had been headed into the first of the rapids there was no time for anything but the strenuous fight for life. Faster and still faster the frail craft leaped on its way, down one rapid and into another before they could congratulate themselves upon the latest hairbreadth dodging of the thickly strewn boulders.
From time to time in the brief respites Prime shouted encouragement to his canoe-mate. "Keep it up--it can"t last forever! We"re doing n.o.bly.
Look out for this big beggar just ahead!"
So it went on, from bad to worse and then to bad again, but never with a chance for a landing or a moment"s rest from the engrossing vigilance.
Prime gasped and was thankful that there were days of sharp muscle-hardening behind them to fit them for this crowning test. He was sure he could measure Lucetta"s fort.i.tude by his own. So long as he could endure the strain he knew he could count upon hearing the steady dip of her paddle keeping time with his own.
But the worst of the worst was yet to come. At the foot of a series of rapids which were like a steeply descending stair, they found themselves in a sluiceway where the enlarged river ran like a torrent in flood. On the still air of the summer day a hoa.r.s.e clamor was rising to warn them that there was a cataract ahead. Prime"s cry of alarm was not needed.
With the first backing dip of the paddle he felt the braking impulse at the stern striking in with his own.
"Hold her!" he shouted. "We"ve got to make the sh.o.r.e, if it smashes us!"
But the puny strength of the two pairs of arms was as nothing when pitted against the onsweep of the mighty flood. For a brief instant the downward rush of the canoe was checked; then it was caught in a whirling eddy and spun end for end as if upon a pivot. When it straightened up for the leap over the shallow fall it was headed the wrong way, and a moment later the crash came.
The young woman was the only one of the two who knew definitely what followed. In the tipping glide over the brink they were both thrown out of the canoe and spilled into the whirlpool at the foot of the cataract.
Lucetta kept her head sufficiently to remember that Prime could not swim, and when she came up from the plunge she saw him, and saw that he was not struggling.
[Ill.u.s.tration: "Hold her!" he shouted. "We"ve got to make the sh.o.r.e, if it smashes us!"]
Two quick strokes enabled her to get her fingers in his hair, and then began a battle in which the strength of the single free arm had to match itself against the swirling current of the whirlpool. Twice, and yet once again, the young woman and her helpless burden were swept around the circle, each time drawing a little nearer to the recurving eddy under the fall. Lucetta knew well enough that a second ingulfing under the cataract meant death for both, and at the beginning of the fourth circling she made the supreme effort, winning the desperate battle and struggling out upon the low shingly bank of the pool, to fall exhausted when she had dragged her unconscious canoe-mate out of the water.
After a dazed minute or two she was able to sit up and realize the extent of the disaster. The canoe had disappeared after its leap into the pool, and she did not know what had become of it. And Prime was lying just as the dragging rescue had left him, with his arms flung wide. His eyes were closed, and his face, under the three weeks" growth of stubble beard, was haggard and drawn. In the dive over the fall he had struck his head, and the blood was oozing slowly from a great bruise on his forehead.
X
HORRORS
IT is a trite saying that even the weakest strand in the cable never knows how much it can pull until the demanding strain comes. As a young woman with athletic leanings, Lucetta had had arduous drillings in first-aid, and had drilled others. If Prime had been merely drowned she would have known precisely what to do. But the broken head was a different matter.
Nevertheless, when her own exhaustion was a little a.s.suaged, she essayed the first-aid. Dragging the hapless one a little farther from the water"s edge, she knelt beside him to examine the wound with fingers that trembled a little as they pressed, in spite of the brave diagnostic resolution. There was no skull fracture, but she had no means of determining how serious the concussion was. Prime was breathing heavily, and the bruise was already beginning to puff up and discolor.
With hope still in abeyance, she worked swiftly. Warmth was the first necessity. Her hands were shaking when she felt in the pocket of Prime"s coat for the precious bottle of matches. Happily it was unbroken, and she could have wept for joy. There was plenty of fuel at hand, and in a few minutes she had a fire blazing brightly, before which she propped the wounded man to dry out, though his wet clothing gave him a sweltering steam bath before the desiccating process began. It was heroic treatment, but there was no alternative, and by the time she had him measurably dried and warm, her own soggy discomfort was also abating.
Having done what she could, her situation was still as forlorn as it could well be; she was alone in the heart of the forest wilderness with a wounded man, who might live or die as the chance should befall--and there was no food. She set her face determinedly against the erosive impatience of despair. There was nothing to do but to wait with what fort.i.tude she could muster.
The afternoon dragged on interminably, and to make the prospect more dispiriting the sky clouded over and the sun disappeared. Toward evening Prime began to stir restlessly and to mutter in a sort of feeble delirium. The young woman hailed this as a hopeful symptom, and yet the mutterings of the unconscious man were inexpressibly terrifying. What if the recovery should be only of the body and not of the mind?
As the dusk began to gather, Lucetta found her strong resolution ebbing in spite of all she could do. The thunder of the near-by cataract deafened her, and the darkling shadows of the forest were thickly shot with unnerving suggestions. To add the finishing touch, her mind constantly reverted to the story of the finding and disposal of the two dead men and she could not drive the thought away. In a short time it became a frenzied obsession, and she found herself staring wildly in a sort of hypnotic trance at the waterfall, fully expecting to see one or both of the dead bodies come catapulting over it.
While it was still light enough to enable her to distinguish things dimly, something did come over the fall, a shapeless object about the size of a human body, shooting clear of the curving water wall, to drop with a sullen splash into the whirlpool. Lucetta covered her eyes with her hands and shrieked. It was the final straw, and she made sure her sanity was going.
She was still gasping and trembling when she heard a voice, and venturing to look she saw that Prime was sitting up and holding his head in his hands. The revulsion from mad terror to returning sanity was so sudden and overpowering that she wanted to go to him and fall on her knees and hug him merely because he was a man and alive, and hadn"t died to leave her alone with the frightful horrors.
"Didn"t I--didn"t I hear you scream?" he mumbled, twisting his tongue to the words with the utmost difficulty. And then: "What on earth has happened to me? I feel--as if--I had been run through--a threshing-machine."
"You were pitched out of the canoe and hurt," she told him. "I--I was afraid you were going to die!"
"Was that why you screamed?" The words were still foolishly hard to find and still harder to set in order.
At this she cried out again, and again covered her eyes. "No--no! It is there yet--in the whirlpool--one of the--one of the dead men!"
Though Prime was still scarcely more than half conscious of his condition and cripplings, the protective instinct was clamoring to be heard, dinning in his ears to make him realize that his companion was a woman, and that her miraculous courage had for some cause reached its ultimate limit. With a brand from the fire for a torch, he crept half mechanically on hands and knees to the edge of the bowl-like whirlpool.
In due time he had a glimpse of a black object circling past in the froth and spume, and he threw the firebrand at it. A moment later he was setting the comforting prop of explanation under Lucetta"s toppling courage.
"It is nothing but a log--just a broken log of wood," he a.s.sured her.
"Forget it, and tell me more about how I came to get this bushel-basket head of mine. It aches like sin!"
She described the plunge of the unmanageable canoe over the fall and its immediate consequences, minifying her own part in the rescue.