VI
"I am," Mr. McDonald said, as the cigarette steamed, "the son of poor but honest parents. All my life I have been obliged to labor. You may say that my English is surprisingly pure, under such conditions. As a matter of fact, I educated myself at night, using a lantern in the top of my father"s stable."
"I thought you said he was poor," Hutchins put in nastily. "How did he have a stable?"
"He kept a livery stable. Any points that are not clear I will explain afterward. Once the thread of a narrative is broken, it is difficult to resume, Miss Hutchins. Near us, in a large house, lived the lady of my heart."
"The pink tam-o"-shanter girl!" said Aggie. "I begin to understand."
"But," he added, "near us also lived a red-headed boy. She liked him very much, and even in the long-ago days I was fiercely jealous of him.
It may surprise you to know that in those days I longed--fairly longed--for red hair and a red mustache."
"I hate to interrupt," said Hutchins; "but did he have a mustache as a boy?"
He ignored her. "We three grew up together. The girl is beautiful--you"ve probably noticed that--and amiable. The one thing I admire in a young woman is amiability. It would not, for instance, have occurred to her to isolate an entire party on the bosom of a northern and treacherous river out of pure temper."
"To think," said Aggie softly, "that she is just over there by the camp-fire! Don"t you suppose, if she loves you, she senses your nearness?"
"That"s it exactly," he replied in a gloomy voice, "if she loves me! But does she? In other words, has she come up the river to meet me or to meet my rival? She knows we are here. Both of us have written her. The presence of one or the other of us is the real reason for this excursion of hers. But again the question is--which?"
Here the match he was holding under the cigarette burned his fingers and he flung it overboard with a violent gesture.
"The detective, of course," said Tish. "I knew it from the beginning of your story."
"The detective," he a.s.sented. "You see his very profession attracts.
There"s an element of romance in it. I myself have kept on with my father and now run the--er--livery stable. My business is a handicap from a romantic point of view.
"I am aware," Mr. McDonald went on, "that it is not customary to speak so frankly of affairs of this sort; but I have two reasons. It hurts me to rest under unjust suspicion. I am no spy, ladies. And the second reason is even stronger. Consider my desperate position: In the morning my rival will see her; he will paddle his canoe to the great rock below your camp and sing his love song from the water. In the morning I shall sit here helpless--ill, possibly--and see all that I value in life slip out of my grasp. And all through no fault of my own! Things are so evenly balanced, so little will shift the weight of her favor, that frankly the first one to reach her will get her."
I confess I was thrilled. And even Tish was touched; but she covered her emotion with hard common sense.
"What"s her name?" she demanded.
"Considering my frankness I must withhold that. Why not simply refer to her as the pink tam-o"-shanter--or, better still and more briefly, the P.T.S.? That may stand for pink tam-o"-shanter, or the Person That Smiles,--she smiles a great deal,--or--or almost anything."
"It also stands," said Hutchins, with a sniff, "for Pretty Tall Story."
Tish considered her skepticism unworthy in one so young, and told her so; on which she relapsed into a sulky silence.
In view of what we knew, the bonfire at our camp and the small figure across the river took on a new significance.
As Aggie said, to think of the red-haired man sleeping calmly while his lady love was so near and his rival, so to speak, _hors de combat!_ Shortly after finishing his story, Mr. McDonald went to the stern of the boat and lifted the anchor rope.
"It is possible," he said, "that the current will carry us to my island with a little judicious management. Even though we miss it, we"ll hardly be worse off than we are."
It was surprising we had not thought of it before, for the plan succeeded admirably. By moving a few feet at a time and then anchoring, we made slow but safe progress, and at last touched sh.o.r.e. We got out, and Mr. McDonald built a large fire, near which we put Aggie to steam.
His supper, which he had not had time to eat, he generously divided, and we heated the tea. Hutchins, however, refused to eat.
Warmth and food restored Tish"s mind to its usual keenness. I recall now the admiration in Mr. McDonald"s eyes when she suddenly put down the sandwich she was eating and exclaimed:--
"The flags, of course! He told her to watch for a red flag as she came up the river; so when the party saw ours they landed. Perhaps they still think it is his camp and that he is away overnight."
"That"s it, exactly," he said. "Think of the poor wretch"s excitement when he saw your flag!"
Still, on looking back, it seems curious that we overlooked the way the red-headed man had followed Hutchins about. True, men are polygamous animals, Tish says, and are quite capable of following one woman about while they are sincerely in love with somebody else. But, when you think of it, the detective had apparently followed Hutchins from the start, and had gone into the wilderness to be near her, with only a suitcase and a mackintosh coat; which looked like a mad infatuation.
[Tish says she thought of this at the time, and that; from what she had seen of the P.T.S., Hutchins was much prettier. But she says she decided that men often love one quality in one girl and another in another; that he probably loved Hutchins"s beauty and the amiability of the P.T.S.
Also, she says, she reflected that the polygamy of the Far East is probably due to this tendency in the male more than to a preponderance of women.]
Tish called me aside while Mr. McDonald was gathering firewood. "I"m a fool and a guilty woman, Lizzie," she said. "Because of an unjust suspicion I have possibly wrecked this poor boy"s life."
I tried to soothe her. "They might have been wretchedly unhappy together, Tish," I said; "and, anyhow, I doubt whether he is able to support a wife. There"s nothing much in keeping a livery stable nowadays."
"There"s only one thing that still puzzles me," Tish observed: "granting that the grocery order was a grocery order, what about the note?"
We might have followed this line of thought, and saved what occurred later, but that a new idea suddenly struck Tish. She is curious in that way; her mind works very rapidly at times, and because I cannot take her mental hurdles, so to speak, she is often impatient.
"Lizzie," she said suddenly, "did you notice that when the anchor was lifted, we drifted directly to this island? Don"t stare at me like that.
Use your wits."
When I failed instantly to understand, however, she turned abruptly and left me, disappearing in the shadows.
For the next hour nothing happened. Tish was not in sight and Aggie slept by the fire. Hutchins sat with her chin cupped in her hands, and Mr. McDonald gathered driftwood.
Hutchins only spoke once. "I"m awfully sorry about the canoe, Miss Lizzie," she said; "it was silly and--and selfish. I don"t always act like a bad child. The truth is, I"m rather upset and nervous. I hate to be thwarted--I"m sorry I can"t explain any further."
I was magnanimous. "I"m sure, until to-night, you"ve been perfectly satisfactory," I said; "but it seems extraordinary that you should dislike men the way you do."
She only eyed me searchingly.
It is my evening custom to prepare for the night by taking my switch off and combing and braiding my hair; so, as we seemed to be settled for the night, I asked Mr. McDonald whether the camp afforded an extra comb. He brought out a traveling-case at once from the tent and opened it.
"Here"s a comb," he said. "I never use one. I"m sorry this is all I can supply."
My eyes were glued to the case. It was an English traveling-case, with gold-mounted fittings. He saw me staring at it and changed color.
"Nice bag, isn"t it?" he said. "It was a gift, of course. The--the livery stable doesn"t run much to this sort of thing."
But the fine edge of suspicion had crept into my mind again.
Tish did not return to the fire for some time. Before she came back we were all thoroughly alarmed. The island was small, and a short search convinced us that she was not on it!
We wakened Aggie and told her, and the situation was very painful. The launch was where we had left it. Mr. McDonald looked more and more uneasy.