"It simply can't have been Watson Grider," Prime mused over his sixth cigarette—he was rolling them now in the label paper of the vegetable tins, frugally soaked off and saved. "If it had been his joke, he wouldn't have left it up in the air; he would have followed along to get the good of it. But if it isn't Grider, who is it, and what is it all about?"
The riddle always worked around thus to the same tormenting question, with no hint of an answer; and, as many times before, Prime was obliged to leave it hanging, like Mohammed's coffin, between heaven and earth. But when he renewed the fire and rolled himself in his blankets for the night, he was still casting about for some means of bringing it to earth.
Figuring it out afterward, he was certain that he could not have been asleep for more than an hour or two before he was awakened, with the echo of a noise like volley-firing of some sort still ringing in his ears. His first impulse was to spring up, but the second, which was the one he obeyed, was more in keeping with the new character development. Deftly freeing himself from the blanket wrappings, he reached over to make sure that one of the guns could be caught up quickly, and lay quiet.
For some little time nothing happened, and the night silence of the forest was undisturbed. Just as he was beginning to think that it had been the mosquitoes, and not a noise, which had awakened him, and was about to get up and renew the smudge which he had made to windward before turning in, he heard cautious footsteps as of some one approaching from the direction of the river.
The measured tread assured him that the footfalls were human, and his hold tightened mechanically upon the grip of the gun-stock. By this time he was thinking quite clearly, and he told himself that the militant precaution was doubtless unnecessary; that there was little chance that the approaching intruder—any intruder who would be attracted by the light of the camp-fire—would be unfriendly. Yet it was the part of prudence to be prepared.
After a moment or two he was able to note that the approaching footsteps were growing more cautious. At this he rolled over by imperceptible inchings to face toward the river, drawing the gun with him. It was useless to try to penetrate the black shadows of the background. The fire had died down to a mass of glowing embers, its bedtime replenishing of dried wood blazing up fitfully only now and then to illumine a slightly wider circle. Prime saw nothing, and, for a time after the footfalls ceased, heard nothing. But the next manifestation was startling enough. At a moment when he was beginning to wonder if his imagination had been playing tricks on him, he heard a curious ripping sound coming, this time, from behind the inverted canoe.
Silently he rose to his knees with the rifle held low. For shelter, in case of a shower, the provisions had been placed under the inverted birch-bark, and he decided instantly that the intruder was trying to steal them. Not wishing to alarm Lucetta, he got upon his feet and walked toward the canoe, meaning to put the man behind it between himself and the firelight.
The manœuvre was never completed. Before he had taken half a dozen steps a blinding flashlight was turned upon him from behind the canoe, and it stopped him as suddenly as if the dazzling radiance had been a volley from a machine-gun. But the stopping shock was only momentary. Dashing forward around the end of the canoe, he had a glimpse of a big-bodied man in a golf cap and sweater crashing his way through the undergrowth toward the river, and promptly gave chase.
"Grider!—Watson!" he called, but there was no reply. The intruder, as he ran, had the benefit of his flashlight; Prime could see the momentary gleams as the runner took a diagonal course which would bring him out a hundred yards down-stream from a point directly opposite the camp-fire.
Prime collided with a tree, stumbled and fell, and sprang up to call again. The retreating footfalls were no longer audible, but now there was another cacophony of noise—the sputtering exhausts of a motor-boat—and Prime reached the river-bank in time to see the dark shape of the power-driven craft losing itself in the starlight in its swift rush down the river.