Prime went back to the river and, kneeling at the water's edge, scoured the two knives with sand to remove the blood-stains. That done, and the knives well hidden in the bow of the canoe, he made another journey to the glade and carefully scattered the ashes of the five fires.
Owing to the civilized pre-existence, he was fagged and weary to the point of collapse when he finally returned to the campfire on the lake beach and flung himself down beside it to sleep. But for long hours sleep would not come, and when it did come it was little better than a succession of hideous nightmares in which two dark-faced men were reproachfully throttling him and dragging him down into the bottomless depths of the outlet river.
V
A SECRET FOR ONE
Prime awoke unrefreshed at the moment when the morning sun was beginning to gild the tops of the highest trees, to find his campmate up and busying herself housewifely over the breakfast fire.
"You looked so utterly tired and worn out I thought I'd let you sleep as long as you could," she offered. "Are you feeling any better this morning?"
"I'm not sick," he protested, wincing a little in spite of himself in deference to the stiffened thews and sinews.
"You mustn't be," she argued cheerfully. "To-day is the day when we must go back a few thousand years and become Stone-Age people."
"Meaning that the provisions will be gone?"
"Yes."
"There are rabbits," he asserted. "I saw two of them yesterday. Does the domestic-science course include the cooking of rabbits au voyageur?"
"It is going to include the cooking of anything we can find to cook. Does the literary course include the catching of rabbits with one's bare hands?"
"It includes an imagination which is better than the possession of many traps and weapons," he jested. "I feel it in my bones that we are not going to starve."
"Let us be thankful to your bones," she returned gayly, and at this Prime felt the grisly night and its horrors withdrawing a little way.
There was more of the cheerful badinage to enliven the scanty breakfast, but there was pathos in the air when Prime felt for his cigarette-papers and mechanically opened his empty tobacco-pouch.
"You poor man!" she cooed, pitying him. "What will you do now?"
Prime had a thought which was only partly regretful. He might have searched in the pockets of the dead men for more tobacco, but it had not occurred to him at the time. He dismissed the thought and came back to the playing of his part in the secret for one.
"The lack of tobacco is a small consideration, when there is so much else at stake," he maintained. "If the Grider guess is the right one, it is evident that something has turned up to tangle it. Unscrupulous as he is in the matter of idiotic jokes, I know him well enough to be sure that he wouldn't leave us here to famish. He is only an amateur aviator, and it is quite within the possibilities that he has wrecked himself somewhere. It seems to me that we ought to take this river for a guide and push on for ourselves. Doesn't it appear that way to you?"
"If we only had a boat of some kind," she sighed. "But even then we couldn't push very far without something to eat."
It was time to usher in the glad surprise, and Prime began to gather up the breakfast leavings. "We'll go over and have a look at the river, anyway," he suggested, and a few minutes later he had led the way across the point of land, and had heard the young woman's cry of delight and relief when she discovered the stranded canoe.
"You knew about this all the time," was her reproachful accusation. "You were over here last night. That is why you had the prophetic bones a little while ago. Why didn't you tell me before?"
He grinned. "At the moment you seemed cheerful enough without the addition of the good news. Do you know what is in that canoe?"
"No."
"Things to eat," he avouched solemnly; "lots of them! More than we could eat in a month."
"But they are not ours," she objected.
"No matter; we are going to eat them just the same."
"You mean that we can hire the owners to take us out of this wilderness? Have you any money?"
"Plenty of it," he boasted, chinking the buckskin bag in his pocket, the finding of which he had, up to this moment, entirely forgotten.
"But where are the owners? I don't see any camp."
"That is one reason why I didn't tell you last night. I found the canoe, but I didn't find anything that looked – er – like a camp."
"Then we shall have to sit down patiently and wait until they come back. They wouldn't go very far away and leave a loaded canoe alone like this, would they?"
Prime gave a furtive side glance at the shadowy pool in the eddy. Truly the canoe-owners had not gone very far, but it was quite far enough. If he could have framed any reasonable excuse for it, he would have urged the immediate borrowing of the canoe, and an equally immediate departure from the spot of grisly associations. Indeed, he did go so far as to suggest it, and was brought up standing, as he more than half expected to be, against Miss Millington's conscience.
"Why, certainly we couldn't do anything like that!" she protested. "It would be highway robbery! We must wait until they return. Surely they won't be gone very long."
There was no help for it except in telling her the shocking truth, and Prime was not equal to that. So he reconciled himself as best he could to the enforced delay, hoping that the tender conscience would not demand too much time.
Almost at once the owner of the conscience suggested that they make a round through the adjoining forest in an attempt to discover the camp of the missing men. Prime acceded cheerfully enough, though he was impatient to examine the canoe-load, in which he was hoping there might prove to be a supply of tobacco. For the better part of the forenoon they quartered the forest around and about between the river and the lake in widening circles, missing nothing but the glade of horrors, which Prime took good care to avoid. At noon they came back to the canoe-landing and made a frugal meal on the remains of their own store of food.
"We are too punctiliously foolish," Prime declared when the second meal without its tobacco aftermath had been endured. "You say we are obliged to wait, and in that case we shall have to borrow, sooner or later. I don't see any reason why we shouldn't begin it now. We can explain everything, you know; and, besides, I have money with which to pay for what we take."
"But your money isn't Canadian money," was the ready objection voiced by the tender conscience.
Prime's laugh did not ring quite true. "That is where you are mistaken," he retorted. "It is good English gold, in sovereigns."
If the young woman were surprised to learn that a man who had expected to motor out of Canada in a day or two at the most had supplied himself with a stock of English sovereigns, she did not question the fact. But for fear she might, Prime went on hastily:
"I always like to be prepared for all kinds of emergencies when I leave home, and this time I wasn't sure just where I was going to bring up, you know – after Grider had changed his mind as to our starting-point."
The evasion served its purpose, and the young woman assented to an immediate examination of the canoe-load. Prime helped her down the steep bank, and they began to rummage, spreading their findings out on the little beach. As Prime had intimated, there was a liberal stock of provisions – jerked deer-meat, smoke-cured bacon, flour, meal, salt, baking-powder, tea, and sugar, but no coffee, a few tins of vegetables, a small sack of potatoes, and, last but not least, a canvas-covered mass of something which they decided was pemmican.
Rummaging further, the precious tobacco came to light – two huge twists of it hidden in the centre of one of the two remaining blanket-rolls. Prime stopped right where he was, crumbled a bit of