“Good night,” came Betty’s voice from the canoe.
“Good night.”
Silence reigned. We were tired; soon we grew drowsy. Just before she fell asleep Betty murmured—
“Mr. Pitt!”
“Yes.”
“I still insist ’tisn’t fair—we haven’t got—two canoes.”
XXX
The cave became still. Snuggled down in her bed in the canoe Betty had fallen asleep as readily as if in her bed in the owner’s suite aboard the Wanderer. Sleep pressed on my eyelids, too; my body, tired from the unwonted exertions of the day, demanded insistently the boon of recreating slumber.
I fought off my drowsiness, however, and lay curled up on my bed of boughs, facing the cave’s mouth, and tried to think. Yet though I realized that I was awake it all seemed like a dream, such a dream as youth dreams when the call of Romance and Adventure still is real.
I was Gardner Pitt, writing man; my accustomed environment, the carefully barbered, denaturalized life of my set in New York. No, that must be a mistake. That New York existence seemed too far away to be a part of my present life. That was the dream; this the reality. I was Gardner Pitt, but I was not a writer; I was simply a hundred and sixty pounds of man, and I was sleeping on a pile of brush at the mouth of a cavern, in which slept a woman guarded by my presence. And it all seemed so natural, so vital and true a field for a man’s activities, that for the time nothing else had significance. True, this was not my woman that I was guarding, but another’s. But no thought of this entered my mind at the time. I did not think at all beyond the problem of escaping from Brack.