VIII
CRACKING VENEERS
At the foot of the long portage which had closed the week for them the two voyagers found the course of their river changing again to the southeastward, and were encouraged accordingly. In addition to the changing course the stream was taking on greater volume, and, while the rapids were not so numerous, they were more dangerous, or at least they looked so.
By this time they were acquiring considerable skill with the paddles, together with a fine, woodcrafty indifference to the hardships. In the quick water they were never dry, and they came presently to disregard the wettings, or rather to take them as a part of the day's work. As the comradeship ripened, their attitude toward each other grew more and more intolerant of the civilized reservations.
Over the night fires their talk dug deeply into the abstractions, losing artificiality in just proportion to the cracking and peeling of the veneers.
"I am beginning to feel as though I had never touched the real realities before," was the way Prime expressed it at the close of a day in which they had run a fresh gamut of all the perils. "Life, the life that the vast majority of people thrive upon, will always seem ridiculously trivial and commonplace to me after this. I never understood before that civilization is chiefly an overlaying of extraneous things, and that, given a chance, it would disintegrate and fall away from us even as our civilized clothes are doing right now."
The young woman looked up with a quaint little grimace. She was trying to patch the frayed hem of her skirt, sewing with a thread drawn from one of the blankets and a clumsy needle Prime had fashioned for her out of a fish-bone.
"Please don't mention clothes," she begged. "If we had more of the deerskin I'd become a squaw at once. The fringes wouldn't look so bad if they were done in leather."
"Mere accessories," Prime declared, meaning the clothes. "Civilization prescribes them, their cut, fashion, and material. The buckskin Indians have the best of us in this, as in many other things."
"The realities?" she queried.
"The simplicities," he qualified. "Life as we have lived it, and as we shall probably live it again if we ever get out of this, is much too complex. We are learning how few the real necessities are, and it is good for the soul. I wouldn't take a fortune for what I've been learning in these weeks, Lucetta."
"I have been learning, too," she admitted.
"Other things besides the use of a paddle and a camp-fire?"
"Many other things. I have forgotten the world I knew best, and it is going to require a tremendous effort to remember it again when the need arises."
"I shall never get back to where I was before," Prime asserted with cheerful dogmatism. Then, in a fresh burst of confidence: "Lucetta, I'm coming to suspect that I have always been the merest surface-skimmer. I thought I knew life a little, and was even brash enough to attempt to write about it. I thought I could visualize humanity and its possibilities, but what I saw was only the outer skin—of people and of things. But my greatest impertinence has been in my handling of women."
"Injustice?" she inquired.
"Not intentional; just crass ignorance. I know now that I was merely imitative, choosing for models the character-drawings of men who knew even less about women than I did. Vapid sentimentality was about as far as I could get. It revolts me to think of it now."
Her laugh was as unrestrained as that of a child. "You amuse me, Donald. Most women are hopelessly sentimental. Don't you know that?"
"You are not," he retorted soberly.
"How do you know?"
"Heavens and earth! if I haven't had an opportunity to find out——"
"You haven't," she returned quietly; "not the least little morsel of an opportunity. A few days ago we were thrown together—a man and a woman who were total strangers, to live or die as the chance might fall. I defy any one to be sentimental in such circumstances. Sentiment thrives only in the artificialities; they are the very breath of its life. If men and women could know each other as they really are, there would be fewer marriages, by far."
"And the few would be far happier," Prime put in.
"Do you think so? I doubt it very much."
"Why?"
"Because, in the most admirable marriage there must be some preservation of the reticences. It is possible for people to know each other too well."
"I don't think so, if the qualities are of the kind that will stand the test."
"Who has such qualities?" she asked quickly.
"You have, for one. I didn't believe there was a human woman on earth who could go through what you have and still keep sweet. Setting aside the hardships, I fancy most other women would have gone stark, staring mad puzzling over the mystery."
"Ah, yes; the mystery. Shall we ever be able to explain it?"
"Not if we decide to throw Grider overboard, I'm afraid."
"Doesn't the Mr. Grider solution seem less and less possible to you as time goes on?" she asked. "It does to me. The motive—a mere practical joke—isn't strong enough. Whoever abducted us was trying for something larger than a laugh at our expense."
"You'd think so, wouldn't you? Big risks were incurred, and the expense must have been considerable, too. Still, as I have said before, if we leave Grider out of it we abandon the one only remotely tenable explanation. I grant you that the joke motive is weak, but aside from that there is no motive at all. Nobody in this world could have any possible object in getting rid of me, and I am sure that the assumption applies with equal force to you. You see where it leaves us."
"I know," was the ready rejoinder. "If the mystery had stopped with our discovery of the aeroplane-tracks, it would have been different. But it didn't stop there. It continued with our finding of the ownerless canoe stocked for a long journey. Was the canoe left for us to find?"
Prime knew his companion well enough by this time to be willing to trust her with the grewsome truth.
"I don't know what connection the canoe may have had with our kidnapping, if any, but I am going to tell you something that I didn't care to tell you until we were far enough away from the scene of it. We reasoned that there were two owners for the canoe, arguing from the two rifles and the two hunting-knives. Do you know why they didn't turn up while we were waiting for them?"
"No."
"It was because they couldn't. They were dead."
"You knew it at the time?" she asked.
"Yes. I found them. It was in a little glade just below our camp at the river-head. They had fought a duel with knives. It was horrible, and I thought it best not to tell you—it seemed only the decent thing not to tell you."
"When did you find them?"
"It was when I went over to the river on the excuse of trying to get some berries while you were cooking supper. I had seen the canoe when I went after the can of water. Instead of looking for berries I began to hunt around for the owners, thinking that probably they were camped somewhere near by. I didn't find any traces of a camp; but in the glade there were the ashes of five fires arranged in the shape of a Greek cross: one fire in the middle and one at the end of each arm. This mystified me still more, but it was then growing so dark that it was no use to look farther. Just as I was leaving the glade I stumbled over the two men, locked in each other's arms; they had evidently been dead for some hours, or maybe days."
"How perfectly frightful!" she exclaimed. "I don't wonder that you looked ill when you came back."
"It nearly knocked me out," Prime confessed. "But I realized at once that it wasn't necessary to multiply the shock by two. After you were asleep that night I went over and buried the two men—weighted them with stones and sunk them in the river, since I didn't have anything to dig with. Afterward, while I was searching for the other knife, I found a little buckskin bag filled with English sovereigns, lying, as I supposed, where one of them had dropped it. It seemed to indicate the motive for the desperate fight."
"But it adds just that much more to the mystery," was the young woman's comment. "Were they white men?"
"Half-breeds or Indians, I couldn't tell which."
"Somebody hired them to do something with us?" she suggested tentatively.
"That is only a guess. I have made it half a dozen times only to have it pushed aside by the incredibilities. If we are to connect these two men with our kidnapping, it presupposes an arrangement made far in advance. That in itself is incredible."
"What do you make of the five fires?"
"I could make nothing of them unless they were intended for signal-fires of some kind; but even in that case the arrangement in the form of a cross wouldn't mean anything."
The young woman had finished her mending and was putting the fish-bone needle carefully away against a time of future need.
"The arrangement might mean something if one were looking down upon it from above," she put in quietly.
Prime got up to kick the burned log-ends into the heart of the fire.
"If I didn't have such a well-trained imagination, I might have thought of that," he said, with a short laugh. "It was a signal, and it was lighted for the benefit of our aeroplane. How much farther does that get us?"
The young woman was letting down the flaps of her sleeping-tent, and her answer was entirely irrelevant.
"I am glad the protective instinct was sufficiently alive to keep you from telling me at the time," she said, with a little shudder which she did not try to conceal. "You may not believe it, Donald Prime, but I still have a few of the civilized weaknesses. Good night; and don't sit up too long with that horrid tobacco."