XX
WATSON GRIDER
Prime had often made his fictional heroes "see red" in exceptionally vigorous crises, and he was now able to verify the colorful figure of speech in his own proper person. Like a submerging wave the recollection of all that the heartless joke might have meant to a pair of helpless victims—of all that it had actually entailed in hardships and peril and sickness—rushed over him as he faced the handsome young giant at the wheel of the motor-cruiser.
"So it was you, after all!" he gritted. Then: "There are some few things that won't keep, Grider. Put this boat ashore where we can have a little more room. The account between us is too long to wait for daylight!"
The barbarian's answer to this was a shout of derisive laughter, and he made a show of putting the small steering-wheel between himself and his belligerent passenger.
"Give me time, Don—just a little time to take it all in!" he gurgled. "Oh, my sainted grandmother! what a perfectly ripping fling you must have had, to make you turn loose all holds like this! And the lady—won't you—won't you introduce me?"
Lucetta faced about, and, if a look could have crippled, the motor-cruiser would have lost its steersman.
"Cousin Donald has tried to tell me about you, but the reality is worse than he or anybody could put into words!" she broke out in indignant scorn. "Of all the inhuman, dastardly things that have ever been done in the name of a practical joke, yours is certainly the climax, Mr. Grider!"
The young man at the wheel pursed his lips as if he were going to whistle; then he appeared to comprehend suddenly and went off in another gust of Hudibrastic mirth.
"I've been figuring it all out as I came along up river," he choked; "how you had tried to account for yourselves to each other—how you had been wrestling with the lack of all the little civilized knickknacks and notions—how you'd look when you came out. Excuse me, but your—your clothes, you know; you're a pair to make a wooden idol hold his sides and chortle himself to death!"