VI
CANOEDLINGS
On the fifth morning—their third at the peninsula camp—Prime registered a solemn vow to make this the last day of the entirely unnecessary delay. More and more he was tormented by the fear that the dead men might escape from their weightings and rise to become a menace to Lucetta's sanity or his own; and, though he had been given the best possible proof that his companion was above reproach in the matter of calm courage and freedom from hysteria, he meant to take no chances—for her or for himself.
At his suggestion they began the day by making another essay at the paddling, embarking in the emptied canoe shortly after breakfast. Gaining a little facility after an hour or so, they headed the birch-bark downstream past the point which they had reached the previous afternoon, and soon found themselves in a quickening current. Prime, kneeling in the bow, gave the word, and Lucetta obeyed it.
"We'll try the quick water," he flung back to her. "We'll have to have the experience, and we had better get it with the empty canoe, rather than with the load."
This seemed logical, but it led to results. In a short time the shores grew rocky and there was no safe place to land. Moreover, the little river was now running so swiftly that they were afraid to try to turn around. Rapid after rapid was passed in vain struggles to stop the triumphal progress, and if the canoe's lading had been aboard, Prime would have been entirely happy, since every rapid they shot was taking them farther away from the scene of the tragedy. But the lading was not aboard.
"We've got to do something to head off this runaway!" the bowman shouted back over his shoulder in one of the quieter raceways. "We're leaving our commissary behind."
"Anything you say," chimed in the steers-woman from the stern of the dancing runaway. "My knees are getting awfully tired, but I can stand it as long as you can."
"That is the trouble," Prime called back. "We're staying with it too long. The next pool we come to, you paddle like mad, all on one side, and I'll do the same. We've simply got to turn around!"
The manœuvre worked like a charm. A succession of the eddy-pools came rushing up from down-stream, and in the third of them they contrived to get the birch-bark reversed and pointed up-stream. Then it suddenly occurred to the young woman that they had had their trouble for nothing; that the same end might have been gained if they had merely turned themselves around and faced the other way. Her shriek of laughter made Prime stop paddling for the moment.
"I need a guardian—we both need guardians!" he snorted, when she told him what she was laughing at, and then they dug their paddles in a frantic effort to stem the swift current.
It was no go—less than no go. In spite of all they could do the birch-bark refused to be driven up-stream. What was worse, it began to drift backward, slowly at first, but presently at a pace which made them quickly turn to face the other way lest they be smashed in a rapid. A mile or more fled to the rear before they could take breath, and two more rapids were passed, up which Prime knew they could never force the canoe with any skill they possessed or were likely to acquire.
Taking advantage of the next lull in the unmanageable flight, he shouted again.
"We'll have to go ashore! We are getting so far away now that we shall never get back. You're steering: try it in the next quiet place we come to, and I'll do all I can to help."
The "next quiet place" proved to be a full half-mile farther along, and they had a dozen hairbreadth escapes in more of the quick stretches before they reached it. Prime lived years in moments in the swifter rushes. Knowing his own helplessness in the water, he was in deadly fear of a capsize, not from any unmanly dread of death but because he had a vivid and unnerving picture of Lucetta's predicament if she should escape and be left alone and helpless in the heart of the forest wilderness. He drew his first good breath after the runaway canoe had been safely beached on the shore of an eddy and they had tottered carefully out of it to drag it still higher upon the shelving bank.
"My heavens!" he panted, throwing himself down to gasp at leisure. "I wouldn't go through that again for a farm in Paradise! Weren't you scared stiff?"
"I certainly was," was the frank admission. The young woman had taken her characteristic attitude, sitting down with her chin propped in her hands.
"But, just the same, you didn't forget to paddle!" Prime exulted. "You are a comrade, right, Lucetta! It's a thousand pities you aren't a man!"
"Isn't it?" she murmured, without turning her head.
"Do you know—I was simply paralyzed at the thought of what would happen if we should upset—not so much at the thought of what would be certain to happen to me, but on your account."
"The protective instinct," she remarked; "it is like a good many other things which we have outgrown—or are outgrowing—quite useless, but stubbornly persistent."
"You mean that you don't need it?"
"I haven't needed it yet, have I?"
"No," he admitted soberly. "So far, you have had the nerve, and more than your share of the physique."
"I have had better training, perhaps," she offered, as if willing to make it easier for him. "A little farther along you will begin to develop, while I shall stand still."
But Prime would not let it rest at that.
"I have always maintained that most women have a finer nerve, and finer courage, than most men; I am speaking now of the civilized average. You are proving my theory, and I owe you something. But to get back to things present; doesn't it occur to you that we have gotten ourselves into a rather awkward mess?"
"It does, indeed. We must be miles from anything to eat, and if you know of any way to take this canoe up-stream I wish you would tell me; I don't."
"It will be by main strength and awkwardness, as the Irishman played the cornet, if we do it at all," Prime decided.
"And if, in the meantime, the owners come back and find it gone——"
Prime got up stiffly. "I have a feeling that they haven't come back yet, and it is growing fast into a feeling that they are not going to come back at all. Shall we try a towing stunt?"
They tried it, though they had no towline and were reduced to the necessity of dragging the canoe along in the shallows, each with a hand on the gunwale. This did not answer very well, and after fighting for a half-hour in the first of the rapids and getting thoroughly wet and bedraggled they had to give it up and reverse the process, letting the birch-bark drift down to the safe dockage again.
While they were resting from their labors, and the hampered half of the towing squad was wringing the water from her skirts, Prime looked at his watch.
"Heavens and earth!" he exclaimed. "It is noon already! I thought I was beginning to feel that way inside. Why didn't we have sense enough to take a bite along with us when we left camp this morning?"
"Oh, if you are going into the whys, why didn't we have sense enough to know that we couldn't handle the canoe? How far have we come?"
Prime shook his head. "You couldn't prove it by me. A part of the time it seemed to me that we were bettering a mile a minute." He got up and hobbled back and forth on the little beach to work the canoe-cramp out of his knees. "It looks to me as if we are up against it good and hard; the canoe is here, and the dunnage is up yonder. Which do we do: carry the canoe to the dunnage, or the dunnage to the canoe? It's a heavenly choice either way around. What do you say?"
Lucetta voted at once for the canoe-carrying, if it were at all possible. So much, she said, they owed to the owners, who had every right to expect to find their property where they had left it. Again Prime was tempted to say hard things about the ghosts which so stubbornly refused to be laid, and again he denied himself.
"The canoe it is," he responded grimly, but by the time they had dragged the light but unwieldy craft out of the water and part way up the bank they were convinced that the other alternative was the only one. A short portage they might have made, or possibly a long one, if they had known enough to turn the birch-bark bottom-side up and carry it on their heads voyageur-fashion. But they still had this to learn.
"It's a frost," was Prime's decision after they had tugged and stumbled a little way with the clumsy burden knocking at their legs. "The mountain won't go to Mohammed—that much is perfectly plain. Are you game for a long portage with the camp outfit? It seems to be the only thing there is left for us to do."
The young woman was game, and since they were on the wrong side of the river they put the canoe into the water again and paddled to the other side, leaving the birch-bark drawn out upon the bank of the eddy-pool. From that they went on, hunger urging them and the water-softened moccasins holding them back and making them pick their way like children in the first few days of the barefoot season. The distance proved to be about three miles and they made it in something over an hour. The embers of their morning fire were still alive, and the belated midday meal was quickly cooked and despatched.
"Now for the hard part of it," Prime announced, as he began to pack the camp outfit. "You sit right still and rest, and I'll get things ready for the tote."
"Then you have determined to ride roughshod over the rights of the people who own the things?" the young woman asked.
Prime turned his back deliberately upon the pool of dread.
"Necessity knows no law, and we can't stay here forever waiting for something to turn up. Somebody has given us a strong-hand deal, for what reason God only knows, and we've got to fight out of it the best way we can. We'll take these things, and we are willing to pay for them if anybody should ask us to; but in any event we are going to take them, because it is a matter of life and death to us. I'll shoulder all the responsibility, moral and otherwise."
She laughed a little at this. "More of the protective instinct? I can't allow that—my conscience is my own. But I suppose you are right. There doesn't seem to be anything else to do. And you needn't fit all of those packs to your own back; I propose to carry my share."
He protested at that, and learned one more thing about Lucetta Millington: up to a certain point she was as docile and leadable as the woman of the Stone Age is supposed to have been, and beyond that she was adamant.
"You said a little while ago it was a pity I wasn't a man: it is the woman's part nowadays to ask no odds. Will you try to remember that?"
Here was a hint of a brand-new Lucetta, and Prime wondered how he had contrived to live twenty-eight years in a world of women only to be brought in contact for the first time with the real, simon-pure article in the heart of a Canadian wilderness. Nevertheless he took her at her word and made a small pack for her, with a carrying-strap cut from the remains of the deerskin. At the very best the portage promised to demand three trips, which was appalling.
It was well past the middle of the afternoon when they reached the canoe at the end of the first carry. The three-mile trudge had been made in silence, neither of the amateur carriers having breath to spare for talk. Since they had the tent and one of the blanket-rolls and sufficient food, Prime was for putting off the remaining double carry to another day, but again Lucetta was adamant.
"If we do that we shall lose all day tomorrow," was the form her protest took; "and now that we have started we had better keep on going."
"Oh, what is the frantic hurry?" Prime cut in. "You said your school didn't begin until September. Haven't we the entire, unspoiled summer ahead of us?"
"Clothes," she remarked briefly. "Yours may last all summer, but mine won't—not if we have to go on tramping through the woods every day."
Prime's laugh was a shout. "We'll be blanket Indians, both of us, before we get out of this. I feel that in my bones, too. But about the second carry; we'll make it if you say so. It will at least give us a good appetite for supper."
They made it, reaching the end of the six-mile doubling a short while before the late sunset. Prime was all in, down, and out, but he would not admit it until after the supper had been eaten and the shelter-tent set up over its bed of spruce-tips. Then he let go with both hands.
"I'm dog-tired, and I am not ashamed to admit it," he confessed. "But you—you look as fresh as a daisy. What are you made of—spring steel?"
"Not by any manner of means; but I wasn't going to be the first to say anything. I feel as if I were slowly ossifying. I wouldn't walk another mile to-night for a fortune."
Prime stretched himself lazily before the fire with his hands under his head. "Luckily, you don't have to. You had better turn in and get all the sleep that is coming to you. I'm going to hit the blankets after I smoke another pinch of this horrible tobacco."
As he sat up to roll the pinch a rising wind began to swish through the tree-tops. A little later there was a fitful play of lightning followed by a muttering of distant thunder.
"That means rain, and you are going to get wet," said the young woman, as she was preparing to creep under her canvas. An instant later a gusty blast came down the river, threatening to scatter the fire. Prime sprang up at once and began to take the necessary precautions against a conflagration. In the midst of the haste-making he heard his companion say: "We might drag the canoe up here and turn it over so that you could have it for a shelter."
With the fire safely banked they went together to the river's edge to carry out her suggestion. By this time the precursor blast of the shower was lashing the little river into foam, and the spray from the rapid just above them wet their faces. One glance, lightning assisted, at the little beach where they had drawn up the canoe was enough. The birch-bark was gone.
The young woman was the first to find speech. At another lightning-flash she cried out quickly:
"There it is! Don't you see it?—going down the river! The wind is blowing it away!"
Immediately they dashed off in pursuit, stumbling through the forest in darkness, which, between the lightning-flashes, was like a blanketing of invisibility. The race was a short one. One flash showed them the canoe dancing down the raceway of a lower rapid, and at the next it had disappeared.