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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 assuaged, 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 fortitude 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 assured 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.
"You needn't try to wiggle out of it," he said soberly at the end of the brief recounting. "You saved my life. If you hadn't pulled me out, I'd be down there in that pool right now, going round and round like that bally log of wood. What do you charge for saving a man's life, Lucetta?"
"A promise from the man to be more careful in future. But we mustn't slide back into the artificial things, Donald. For all you know, my motive might have been altogether selfish—perhaps it was selfish. My first thought was a screaming horror of being left alone here in this wilderness. It made me fight, fight!"
"Is that the truth, Lucetta?" he inquired solemnly.
"Y-yes."
"All of the truth?"
"Oh, perhaps not quite all. There is such a thing as the life-saving instinct, isn't there? Even dogs have it sometimes. Of course I couldn't very well swim out and leave you to drown."
"No," he put in definitively, "you couldn't—and what's more, you hadn't the first idea of doing such a thing. And that other thing you told me was only to relieve my sense of obligation. You haven't relieved it—not an ounce. And I don't care to have it relieved. Let it go for the time being, and tell me what became of the canoe."
"I haven't the faintest notion. I didn't see it again after we went over the fall. Of course it is smashed and ruined and lost, and we are perfectly helpless again."
For a long minute Prime sat with his throbbing head in his hands, trying to think connectedly. When he looked up it was to say: "We are in a pretty bad box, Lucetta, with the canoe gone and nothing to eat. It is hammering itself into what is left of my brain that we can't afford to sit still and wait for something to turn up. If we push on down river we may find the canoe or the wreck of it, and there will surely be some little salvage. I don't believe the birch-bark would sink, even if it were full of water."
"You are not able to push on," she interposed quickly. "As it is, you can hardly hold your head up."
"I can do whatever it is needful to do," he declared, unconsciously giving her a glimpse of the strong thread in the rather loosely woven fabric of his character. "I have always been able to do what I had to do. Let's start out at once."
With a couple of firebrands for torches they set out down the river bank, following the stream closely and keeping a sharp lookout for the wreck. Before they had gone very far, however, the blinding headache got in its work, and Prime began to stumble. It was at Lucetta's insistence that they made another halt and gave up the search for the night.
"It is no manner of use," she argued. "You are not able to go on; and, besides, we can't see well enough to make sure that we are not passing the thing we are looking for. We had much better stop right where we are and wait for daylight."
The halt was made in a small opening in the wood, and the young woman persuaded Prime to lie down while she gathered the material for another camp-fire. Almost as soon as it was kindled Prime dropped off into a heavy sleep. Lucetta provided fuel to last through the night, and then sat down with her back to a tree, determined to stay awake and watch with the sick man.