Stranded in Arcady. Lynde Francis

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СКАЧАТЬ didn't I think of that before dark?"

      Immediately after supper, and before he would permit himself to roll a cigarette from the diminishing supply of precious tobacco, Prime fell upon his problem, immensely willing but prodigiously inexperienced. At first he thought he would build a shack, but the lack of an axe put that out of the question. Round by round, ambition descended the ladder of necessity, and the result was nothing better than a camper's bed of broken pine twigs sheltered and housed in by a sort of bower built from such tree branches as he could break off by main strength.

      The young woman did not withhold her meed of praise, especially after she had seen his blistered hands, which were also well daubed with pitch from the pines.

      "It's a shame!" she said. "I ought not to have let you work so hard. If it should happen to rain, you'd need the shelter much more than I should."

      "Why do you say that?"

      "You don't look so very fit," was the calm reply; "and I am fit. Do you know, my one ambition, as a little girl, was to grow up and be an acrobat in a circus?"

      "And yet you landed in the laboratory of a girls' school," he laughed.

      "Not exclusively," she countered quickly. "Last year I was also an assistant in the gymnasium. Swimming was my specialty, but I taught other things as well."

      Prime laughed again. "And I can't swim a single stroke," he confessed. "Isn't that a humiliating admission on the part of a man who has lived the greater part of his life in sight of the ocean?"

      Miss Millington said she thought it was, and in such gladsome fashion the evening wore away. When it came time to sleep, the lately risen moon lighted the young woman to her bower; and Prime, replenishing the fire, made his bed in the sand, the unwonted exertions of the day and evening putting him to sleep before he had fairly fitted himself to the inequalities of his burrow below the tree roots.

      III

      SENSIBLE SHOES

      The dawn of the second morning was much like that of the first, cool and crystal clear, and with the sun beating out a pathway of molten gold across the mirror-like surface of the solitary lake.

      Prime bestirred himself early, meaning to get the breakfast under way single-handed while Miss Millington slept. But the young woman who had described herself as being "fit" had stolen a march upon him. He was frying the bacon when she came skimming up the beach with her hair flying.

      "I got up early and didn't want to disturb you," she told him. "There is a splendid swimming place just around that point; I don't know when I've enjoyed a dip more. Wouldn't you like to try it while I dry my hair and make some more of the homicidal bread?"

      Prime went obediently and took the required bath, finding the water bracingly cold and scarcely shallow enough to be reassuring to a non-swimmer. Over the breakfast which followed, the picnic spirit still presided, though by now it was beginning to lose a little of the lilt. For one thing, the bacon and the pan-bread, though they were ameliorated somewhat by the tinned things, were growing a trifle monotonous; for another, the limitless expanse of lake and sky and forest gave forth no sign of the hoped-for rescue.

      After breakfast they made a careful calculation to determine how long their provisions would last. This, too, was unhopeful. With reasonable economy they might eat through another day. Beyond that lay a chance of famine.

      "Surely Grider will come back for us to-day," Prime asserted when Domestic Science had done its best in apportioning the supplies. But at this the young woman shook her head doubtfully.

      "I have had time to think," she announced. "It is all a guess, you know – this about Mr. Grider – and the more I think of it the more incredible it seems. Consider a moment. To make the kidnapping possible we must both have been drugged. That is a serious matter – too serious to have a part in the programme of the most reckless practical joker."

      Prime looked up quickly. "I might have been drugged very easily. But you?"

      The young woman bared a rounded arm to show a minute red dot half-way between wrist and elbow. "I told you about the young woman who stumbled and turned her ankle: when I took hold of her to help her, something pricked my arm. She said it was a pin in the sleeve of her coat and apologized for having been so careless as to leave it there."

      Prime looked closely at the red dot.

      "A hypodermic needle?" he suggested.

      She nodded. "That is why I became so sleepy. And your potion was put in the wine, which you say tasted so bad."

      Prime admitted the deduction without prejudice to his belief that Grider was the arch-plotter, saying: "Grider is quite capable of anything, if the notion appealed to him. And, of course, he must have had hired confederates; he couldn't manage it all alone."

      "Still," she urged, "it seems to me that we ought to be trying to help ourselves in some way. It doesn't seem defensible just to sit here and wait, on the chance that your guess is going to prove true."

      Prime laughed. "You are always and most eminently logical. Where shall we begin?"

      "At the geography end of it," she replied calmly. "How far could an aeroplane fly in a single night?"

      Prime took time to think about it. He had never had occasion to use a long aeroplane flight in any of his stories; hence the special information was lacking. But common sense and a few figures helped out – so many hours, so many miles an hour, total distance so much.

      "Two hundred miles, let us say, as an extreme limit," he estimated, and at this the young woman gave a faint little shriek.

      "Two hundred miles! Why, that is as far as from Cincinnati to Lake Erie! Surely we can't be that far from Quebec!"

      "I merely mentioned that distance as the limit. We are evidently somewhere deep in the northern woods. I don't know much about the geography of this region – never having had to stage a story in it – but a lake of this size, with miles of marketable timber on its shores, argues one of two things: it is too far from civilization to have yet tempted the lumbermen, or else it has no outlet large enough to admit of logging operations. You may take your choice."

      "But two hundred miles!" she gasped. "If some one doesn't come after us, we shall never get out alive!"

      "That is why I think we ought to wait," said Prime quietly.

      So they did wait throughout the entire forenoon, sitting for the most part under the shade of the shore trees, killing time and talking light-heartedly against the grim conclusion that each passing hour was forcing upon them. They contrived to keep it up to and through the noonday séance with the cooking fire; but after that the barriers, on the young woman's part, went out with a rush.

      "I simply can't stand it any longer," she protested. "We must do something, Mr. Prime. We can at least walk somewhere and carry the bits of provisions along with us. Why should we stay right in this one spot until we starve?"

      "I am still clinging to the Grider supposition," Prime admitted. "If we move away from here he might not be able to find us."

      "It is only a supposition," she countered quickly. "You accept it, but, while I haven't anything better to offer, I cannot make it seem real."

      "If you throw Grider out of it, it becomes an absolutely impossible riddle."

      "I know; but everything is impossible. СКАЧАТЬ