Kitobni o'qish: «Stranded in Arcady»

I
THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE

At the half-conscious moment of awakening Prime had a confused impression that he must have gone to bed leaving the electric lights turned on full-blast. Succeeding impressions were even more disconcerting. It seemed that he had also gone to bed with his clothes on; that the bed was unaccountably hard; that the pillow had borrowed the characteristics of a pillory.

Sitting up to give these chaotic conclusions a chance to clarify themselves, he was still more bewildered. That which had figured as the blaze of the neglected electrics resolved itself into the morning sun reflecting dazzlement from the dimpled surface of a woodland lake. The hard bed proved to be a sandy beach; the pillory pillow a gnarled and twisted tree root which had given him a crick in his neck.

When he put his hand to the cramped neck muscle and moved to escape the bedazzling sun reflection, the changed point of view gave him a shock. Sitting with her back to a tree at a little distance was a strange young woman – strange in the sense that he was sure he had never seen her before. Like himself, she had evidently just awakened, and she was staring at him out of wide-open, slate-gray eyes. In the eyes he saw a vast bewilderment comparable to his own, something of alarm, and a trace of subconscious embarrassment as she put her hands to her hair, which was sadly tumbled.

Prime scrambled to his feet and said, "Good morning" – merely because the conventions, in whatever surroundings, die hard. At this the young woman got up, too, patting and pinning the rebellious hair into subjection.

"Good morning," she returned, quite calmly; and then: "If you – if you live here, perhaps you will be good enough to tell me where I am."

Prime checked a smile. "You beat me to it," he countered affably. "I was about to ask you if you could tell me where I am."

"Don't you know where you are?" she demanded.

"Only relatively; this charming sylvan environment is doubtless somewhere in America, but, as to the precise spot, I assure you I have no more idea than the man in the moon."

"It's a dream – it must be!" the young woman protested gropingly. "Last night I was in a city – in Quebec."

"So was I," was the prompt rejoinder. Then he felt for his watch, saying: "Wait a moment, let's see if it really was last night."

She waited; and then – "Was it?" she inquired eagerly.

"Yes, it must have been; my watch is still running."

She put her hand to her head. "I can't seem to think very clearly. If we were in Quebec last night, we can't be so very far from Quebec this morning. Can't you – don't you recognize this place at all?"

Prime took his first comprehensive survey of the surroundings. So far as could be seen there was nothing but the lake, with its farther shore dimly visible, and the primeval forest of pine, spruce, fir, and ghostly birch – a forest all-enveloping, shadowy, and rather forbidding, even with the summer morning sunlight playing upon it.

"It looks as if we might be a long way from Quebec," he ventured. "I am not very familiar with the Provinces, but these woods – "

She interrupted him anxiously. "A long way? How could it be – in a single night?" Then: "You are giving me to understand that you are not – that you don't know how we come to be here?"

"You must believe that, if you can't believe anything else," he hastened to say. "I don't know where we are, or how we got here, or why we should be here. In other words, I am not the kidnapper; I'm the kidnapped – or at least half of them."

"It seems as if it must be a bad dream," she returned, with the frown of perplexity growing between the pretty eyes. "Things like this don't really happen, you know."

"I know they don't, as a rule. I've tried to make them happen, now and then, on paper, but they always seem to lack a good bit in the way of verisimilitude."

The young woman turned away to walk down to the lake edge, where she knelt and washed her face and hands, drying them afterward on her handkerchief.

"Well," she asked, coming back to him, "have you thought of anything yet?"

He shook his head. "Honestly, I haven't anything left to think with. That part of my mind has basely escaped. But I have found something," and he pointed to a little heap of provisions and utensils piled at the upper edge of the sand belt: a flitch of bacon, sewn in canvas, a tiny sack of flour, a few cans of tinned things, matches, a camper's frying-pan, and a small coffee-pot. "Whoever brought us here didn't mean that we should starve for a day or two, at least. Shall we breakfast first and investigate afterward?"

"'We?'" she said. "Can you cook?"

"Not so that any one would notice it," he laughed. "Can you?"

She matched the laugh, and it relieved him mightily. It was her undoubted right as a woman to cry out, or faint, or be foolishly hysterical if she chose; the circumstances certainly warranted anything. But she was apparently waiving her privilege.

"Yes, I ought to be able to cook. When I am at home I teach domestic science in a girls' school. Will you make a fire?"

Prime bestirred himself like a seasoned camper – which was as far as possible from being the fact. There was plenty of dry wood at hand, and a bit of stripped birch bark answered for kindling. The young woman removed her coat and pulled up her sleeves. Prime cut the bacon with his pocket-knife, and, much to the detriment of the same implement, opened a can of peaches. For the bread, Domestic Science wrestled heroically with a lack of appliances; the batter had to be stirred in the tiny skillet with water taken from the lake.

The cooking was also difficult. Being strictly city-bred, neither of them knew enough to let the fire burn down to coals, and they tried to bake the pan-bread over the flames. The result was rather smoky and saddening, and the young woman felt called upon to apologize. But the peaches, fished out of the tin with a sharpened birch twig for a fork, were good, and so was the bacon; and for sauce there was a fair degree of outdoor hunger. Over the breakfast they plunged once more into the mystery.

"Let us try it by the process of elimination," Prime suggested. "First, let me see if I can cancel myself. When I am at home in New York my name is Donald Prime, and I am a perfectly harmless writer of stories. The editors are the only people who really hate me, and you could hardly charge this" – with an arm-wave to include the surrounding wilderness – "to the vindictiveness of an editor, could you?"

He wished to make her laugh again, and he succeeded – in spite of the sad pan-bread.

"Perhaps you have been muck-raking somebody in your stories," she remarked. "But that wouldn't include me. I am even more harmless than you are. My worst enemies are frivolous girls from well-to-do families who think it beneath them to learn to cook scientifically."

"It's a joke," Prime offered soberly; "it can't be anything else." Then: "If we only knew what is expected of us, so that we could play up to our part. What is the last thing you remember – in Quebec?"

"The most commonplace thing in the world. I am, or I was, a member of a vacation excursion party of school-teachers. Last evening at the hotel somebody proposed that we go to the Heights of Abraham and see the old battle-field by moonlight."

"And you did it?"

"Yes. After we had tramped all over the place, one of the young women asked me if I wouldn't like to go with her to the head of the cove where General Wolfe and his men climbed up from the river. We went together, and while we were there the young woman stumbled and fell and turned her ankle – or at least she said she did. I took her arm to help her back to the others, and in a little while I began to feel so tired and sleepy that I simply couldn't drag myself another step. That is the last that I remember."

"I can't tell quite such a straight story," said Prime, taking his turn, "but at any rate I shan't begin by telling you a lie. I'm afraid I was – er – drunk, you know."

"Tell me," she commanded, as one who would know the worst.

"I, too, was on my vacation," he went on. "I was to meet a friend of mine in Boston, and we were to motor together through New England. At the last moment I had a telegram from this friend changing the plan and asking me to meet him in Quebec. I arrived a day or so ahead of him, I suppose; at least, he wasn't at the hotel where he said he'd be."

"Go on," she encouraged.

"I had been there a day and a night, waiting, and, since I didn't know any one in Quebec, it was becoming rather tiresome. Last evening at dinner I happened to sit in with a big, two-fisted young fellow who confessed that he was in the same boat – waiting for somebody to turn up. After dinner we went out together and made a round of the movies, with three or four cafés sandwiched in between. I drank a little, just to be friendly with the chap, and the next thing I knew I was trying to go to sleep over one of the café tables. I seem to remember that my chance acquaintance got me up and headed me for the hotel; but after that it's all a blank."

"Didn't you know any better than to drink with a total stranger?" the young woman asked crisply.

"Apparently I didn't. But the three or four thimblefuls of cheap wine oughtn't to have knocked me out. It was awful stuff; worse than the vin ordinaire they feed you in the Paris wine-shops."

"It seems rather suspicious, doesn't it?" she mused; "your sudden sleepiness? Are you – are you used to drinking?"

"Tea," he laughed; "I'm a perfect inebriate with a teapot."

"There must be an explanation of some sort," she insisted. Then: "Can you climb a tree?"

He got up and dusted the sand from his clothes.

"I haven't done it since I used to pick apples in my grandfather's orchard at Batavia, but I'll try," and he left her to go in search of a tree tall enough to serve for an outlook.

The young woman had the two kitchen utensils washed and sand-scoured by the time he came back.

"Well?" she inquired.

"A wild and woolly wilderness," he reported; "just a trifle more of it than you can see from here. The lake is five or six miles wide and perhaps twice as long. There are low hills to the north and woods everywhere."

"And no houses or anything?"

"Nothing; for all I could see, we might be the only two human beings on the face of the earth."

"You seem to be quite cheerful about it," she retorted.

He grinned good-naturedly. "That is a matter of temperament. I'd be grouchy enough if it would do any good. I shall lose my motor trip through New England."

"Think – think hard!" the young woman pleaded. "Since there is no sign of a road, we must have come in a boat; in that case we can't be very far from Quebec. Surely there must be some one living on the shore of a lake as big as this. We must walk until we find a house."

"We'll do anything you say," Prime agreed; and they set out together, following the lake shore to the left, chiefly because the beach broadened in that direction and so afforded easy walking.

A tramp of a mile northward scarcely served to change the point of view. There was no break in the encircling forest, and at the end of the mile they came to a deeply indented bay, where the continuing shore was in plain view for a doubling of another mile. The search for inhabitants seeming to promise nothing in this direction, they turned and retraced their steps to the breakfast camp, still puzzling over the tangle of mysteries.

"Can't you think of any way of accounting for it?" the young woman urged for the twentieth time in the puzzlings.

"I can think of a million ways – all of them blankly impossible," said Prime. "It's simply a chaotic joke!"

The young woman shook her head. "I have lost my sense of humor," she confessed, adding: "I shall go stark, staring mad if we can't find out something!"

More to keep things from going from bad to worse than for any other reason, Prime suggested a walk in the opposite direction – southward from the breakfast camp. While they were still within sight of the ashes of the breakfast fire they made a discovery. The loose beach sand was tracked back and forth, and in one place there were scorings as if some heavy body had been dragged. Just beyond the footprints there were wheel tracks, beginning abruptly and ending in the same manner a hundred yards farther along. The wheel tracks were parallel but widely separated, ill-defined in the loose sand but easily traceable.

"A wagon?" questioned the young woman.

"No," said Prime soberly; "it was – er – it looks as if it might have been an aeroplane."

II
AMATEUR CASTAWAYS

Lucetta Millington – she had told Prime her name on the tramp to the northward – sat down in the sand, elbows on knees and her chin propped in her hands.

"You say 'aeroplane' as if it suggested something familiar to you, Mr. Prime," she prompted.

Truly it did suggest something to Prime, and for a moment his mouth went dry. Grider, the man he was to have met in Quebec, was a college classmate, a harebrained young barbarian, rich, an outdoor fanatic, an owner of fast yachts, a driver of fast cars, and latterly a dabbler in aviatics. Idle enough to be full of extravagant fads and fancies, and wealthy enough to indulge them, this young barbarian made friends of his enemies and enemies of his friends with equal facility – the latter chiefly through the medium of conscienceless practical jokes evolved from a Homeric sense of humor too ruthless to be appreciated by mere twentieth-century weaklings.

Prime had more than once been the good-natured victim of these jokes, and his heart sank within him. It was plain now that they had both been conveyed to this outlandish wilderness in an aircraft of some sort, and there was little doubt in his mind that Grider had been at the controls.

"It's a – it's a joke, just as I have been trying to tell you," he faltered at length. "We have been kidnapped, and I'm awfully afraid I know the man who did it," and thereupon he gave her a rapid-fire sketch of Grider and Grider's wholly barbarous and irresponsible proclivities.

Miss Millington heard him through without comment, still with her chin in her hands.

"You are standing there and telling me calmly that he did this – this unspeakable thing?" she exclaimed when the tale was told. Then, after a momentary pause: "I am trying to imagine the kind of man who could be so ferociously inhuman. Frankly, I can't, Mr. Prime."

"No, I fancy you can't; I couldn't imagine him myself, and I earn my living by imagining people – and things. Grider is in a class by himself. I have always told him that he was born about two thousand years too late. Back in the time of Julius Cæsar, now, they might have appreciated his classic sense of humor."

He stole a glance at the impassive face framed between the supporting palms. It was evident that Miss Millington was freezing silently in a heroic effort to restrain herself from bursting into flames of angry resentment.

"You may enjoy having such a man for your friend," she suggested with chilling emphasis, "but I think there are not very many people who would care to share him with you. Perhaps you have done something to earn the consequences of this wretched joke, but I am sure I haven't. Why should he include me?"

Prime suspected that he knew this, too, and he had to summon all his reserves of fortitude before he could bring himself to the point of telling her. Yet it was her due.

"I don't know what you will think of me, Miss Millington, but I guess the truth ought to be told. Grider has always ragged me about my women – er – that is, the women in my stories, I mean. He says they are all alike, and all sticks; merely wooden manikins – womanikins, he calls them – upon which to hang an evening gown. I shouldn't wonder if it were partly true; I don't know women very well."

"Go on," she commanded.

"The last time I was with Grider – it was about two weeks ago – he was particularly obnoxious about the girl in my last bit of stuff – the story that was printed in the New Era last month. He said – er – he said I ought to be marooned on some desert island with a woman; that after an experience of that kind I might be able to draw something that wouldn't be a mere caricature of the sex."

At this, as was most natural, Miss Millington's ice melted in a sudden and uncontrollable blaze of indignation.

"Are you trying to tell me that this atrocious friend of yours has taken me, a total stranger, to complete his cast of characters in this wretched burlesque?" she flashed out.

"I don't wish to believe it," he protested. "It doesn't seem possible for any human being to do such a thing. But I know Grider so well – "

"It is the smallest possible credit to you, Mr. Prime," she snapped. "You ought to be ashamed to have such a man for a friend!"

"I am," he acceded, humbly enough. "Grider weighs about fifty pounds more than I do, and he took three initials in athletics in the university. But I pledge you my word I shall beat him to a frazzle for this when I get the chance."

"A lot of good that does us now!" scoffed the poor victim. And then she got up and walked away, leaving him to stand gazing abstractedly at the wheel tracks of the kidnapping air-machine.

Having lived the unexciting life of a would-be man of letters, Prime had had none of the strenuous experiences which might have served to preface a situation such as this in which he found himself struggling like a fly in a web. It was absurdly, ridiculously impossible, and yet it existed as a situation to be met and dealt with. Watching the indignant young woman furtively, he saw that she went back to sit down beside the ashes of the breakfast fire, again with her chin in her hands. Meaning to be cautiously prudent, he rolled and smoked a cigarette before venturing to rejoin her, hoping that the lapse of time might clear the air a little.

She was staring aimlessly at the dimpled surface of the lake when he came up and took his place on the opposite side of the ashes. The little heap of provisions gave him an idea and an opening, but she struck in ahead of him.

"Let me know when you expect me to pose for you," she said without turning her head.

"I was an idiot to tell you that!" he exploded. "Can't you understand that that fool suggestion about the desert island and a – er – a woman was Grider's and not mine? How could I know that he would ever be criminal enough to turn it into a fact?"

"Oh, if you can call it criminal, and really mean it – " she threw out.

"I'll call it anything in the vocabulary if only you won't quarrel with me. Goodness knows, things are bad enough without that!"

She let him see a little more of her face. The frown had disappeared, and there were signs that the storm of indignation was passing.

"I suppose it isn't a particle of use to quarrel," she admitted. "What is done is done and can't be helped, however much we may agree to despise your barbarous friend, Mr. Grider. How is it all going to end?"

At this Prime aired his small idea. "Our provisions won't last more than a day or two; they were evidently not intended to. If that means anything, it means that Grider will come back for us before long. He certainly can't do less."

"To-day?"

"Let us hope so. Have you ever camped out in the woods before?"

"Never."

"Neither have I. What I don't know about woodcraft would make a much larger book than any I ever hope to write. You probably guessed that when you saw me make the fire."

The corners of the pretty mouth were twitching. "And you probably guessed my part of it when you saw me try to make that dreadful pan-bread. I can cook; really I can, Mr. Prime; but when one has been used to having everything imaginable to do it with – "

Prime thought he might venture to laugh once more. "Your revenge is in your own hands; all you have to do is to continue to make the bread. It'll get me in time. My digestion isn't particularly good, you know."

"Do you really think we shall be rescued soon?"

"For the sake of my own sanity, I'm obliged to think it."

"And in the meantime we must sit here and wait?"

"We needn't make the waiting any harder than we are obliged to. Suppose we call it a – er – a sort of surprise-party picnic. I imagine it is no use for us to try to escape. Grider probably picked the lonesomest place he knew of."

She fell in with the idea rather more readily than he could have hoped, and it gave him a freshening interest in her. The women he knew best were not so entirely sensible. During what remained of the forenoon they rambled together in the forest, care-free for the moment and postponing the evil day. In such circumstances their acquaintance grew by leaps and bounds, and when they came back to make a renewed attack upon the provisions, the picnic spirit was still in the saddle.

The afternoon was spent in much the same manner; and in the absence of the conventional restraints, a good many harmless confidences were exchanged. Before the day was ended the young woman had heard the moving story of Prime's struggle for a foothold in the field of letters, a struggle which, he was modest enough to say, was still in the making; and in return she had given her own story, which was commonplace enough – so many years of school, so many in a Middle Western coeducational college, two more of them as a teacher in the girls' school.

"Humdrum, isn't it?" she said. They had made the evening fire, and she was trying to cook two vegetables and the inevitable pan-bread in the one small skillet. "This is my first real adventure. I wish I might know whether I dare enjoy it as much as I'd like to."

"Why not?" he asked.

"Oh, the conventions, I suppose. We can't run fast enough or far enough to get away from them. I am wondering what the senior faculty would say if it could see me just now."

Prime grinned appreciatively. "It would probably shriek and expire."

"Happily it can't see; and to-morrow – surely Mr. Grider will come back for us to-morrow, won't he?"

"We are going to sleep soundly in that comforting belief, anyway. Which reminds me: you will have to have some sort of a place to sleep in. Why didn't I think of that before dark?"

Immediately after supper, and before he would permit himself to roll a cigarette from the diminishing supply of precious tobacco, Prime fell upon his problem, immensely willing but prodigiously inexperienced. At first he thought he would build a shack, but the lack of an axe put that out of the question. Round by round, ambition descended the ladder of necessity, and the result was nothing better than a camper's bed of broken pine twigs sheltered and housed in by a sort of bower built from such tree branches as he could break off by main strength.

The young woman did not withhold her meed of praise, especially after she had seen his blistered hands, which were also well daubed with pitch from the pines.

"It's a shame!" she said. "I ought not to have let you work so hard. If it should happen to rain, you'd need the shelter much more than I should."

"Why do you say that?"

"You don't look so very fit," was the calm reply; "and I am fit. Do you know, my one ambition, as a little girl, was to grow up and be an acrobat in a circus?"

"And yet you landed in the laboratory of a girls' school," he laughed.

"Not exclusively," she countered quickly. "Last year I was also an assistant in the gymnasium. Swimming was my specialty, but I taught other things as well."

Prime laughed again. "And I can't swim a single stroke," he confessed. "Isn't that a humiliating admission on the part of a man who has lived the greater part of his life in sight of the ocean?"

Miss Millington said she thought it was, and in such gladsome fashion the evening wore away. When it came time to sleep, the lately risen moon lighted the young woman to her bower; and Prime, replenishing the fire, made his bed in the sand, the unwonted exertions of the day and evening putting him to sleep before he had fairly fitted himself to the inequalities of his burrow below the tree roots.