The dawning of the second day in the camp under the great spruces found Prime still struggling desperately with the problem of what to do. Lucetta's condition seemed to be rather worse than better. There was the usual morning abatement of the fever, but she was evidently growing weaker. Prime's too vivid imagination pictured an impending catastrophe, and the canoe thief, no less than Watson Grider, came in for wordless and despairing maledictions. If the canoe had not been stolen they might by now be within reach of help.

It was when matters were at this most distressing pass that the writing-man's invention, pricked alive by what Lucetta had said concerning her mother's skill with simples, opened a temerarious door of hope. Making his charge as comfortable as he could, and leaving a cup of water where she could reach it, he told her he was going for a walk.

Taking the brook for a pathfinder, he traced its course until it led him into a region of opener spaces where there was a better chance for ground growth. In the first weed patch he came to he began to pluck and taste. Unhappily, his knowledge of botany was perilously near a minus quantity; there were few of the weeds that he knew even by name. At the imminent risk of poisoning himself, he went on, chewing a leaf here and there, not knowing in the least what he was looking for, but having an inchoate idea that a febrifuge ought to be something bitter.

The tasting process gave him a variety of new experiences. The leaves of one weed burned his mouth like fire, and he had to stop and plunge his face into the brook to extinguish the conflagration. Those of another made him deathly sick. Finally he came to a tall plant with bluish-white flowers which looked familiar, in a way, though he could not recall its name. A chewed leaf convinced him at once that he need seek no farther. There was the bitterness of hopeless sorrow in its horrible acridity; it clung to him tenaciously while he was gathering an armful of the plant, and went with him on his return to the camp – this, in spite of the fact that he stopped frequently to wash his mouth with brook water.

"What have you there?" was Lucetta's query when he came in with his burden.

"I don't know, but I am hoping you can tell me," he said, giving her a spray of the weed to look at. "Have you ever seen it before?"

"Hundreds of times," she returned. "It is a common weed in Ohio. But I haven't the slightest idea what it is."

Prime groaned. "More of the town-bred education," he deprecated. "But never mind; they can't call us nature-fakirs, whatever other foolish name we may be earning for ourselves."

"What are you going to do with it?" she asked.

"Wait and you'll see."

With the bread-mixing tin for a stew-pan Prime made a rich decoction of the leaves. When the mess began to simmer and steam the poor patient raised herself on one elbow to look at it.

"You are not going to make me drink all that, are you, Donald?" she protested weakly.

"Oh, no; not all of it. Wait until it's properly cooked and I'll show you what I am going to do with it."

The cooking took some time, but the culinary effort offered a mild diversion and was at least a change from the deadly routine of doing nothing. The steam rising from the stewing leaves gave off a peculiarly afflicting odor, and Lucetta sniffed it apprehensively.

"It smells very horrible," she ventured. "Is it going to taste as bad as it smells?"

"That, my dear girl, is on the knees of the gods," he returned oracularly.

"How did you find it?" she wanted to know.

"By the simple process of cut and try. And I can assure you that, however bad it may smell or taste, it hasn't anything on some of the leaves I've been chewing this morning."

When the dose was sufficiently cooked Prime fished the leaves out of the liquor with a forked twig, and carried the stew-pan to the brook to take the scalding edge off of the ill-smelling decoction.

"Are you ready to be poisoned?" he asked when he came back.

"You're – you're sure it isn't poison, aren't you?" she quavered.

"No, but I am going to be," and with that he shut his eyes, held his breath, and took a long drink from the stew-pan of fate, disregarding easily, in the frightful bitterness of the draft, Lucetta's little cry of dismay.

"Merely trying it on the dog," he gasped when he put the pan down and turned away so that she should not see the face contortions – grimaces forthshowing the resentment of an outraged palate. Then he went to sit on his blanket-roll to await results. "If – if it doesn't kill me, then you can try it; but – but we'll wait a few minutes and see what it's going to do to me."

When the results proved to be merely embittering and not immediately deadly, he became a nurse again.

"I have left it as hot as you can drink it," he said, offering the basin. "It seems as if it ought to do more good that way. Take a good long swig, if you can stand it."

Lucetta put her lips to the mixture and made a face of disgust.

"Ou-e-e-e! —boneset!" she shuddered. "I'd know it if I should meet it in another world – it takes me right back to my childhood and mother's roots and herbs! I can't, Donald; I simply can't drink all of that!"

"Drink as much as you can. It's good for little sick people," he urged, trying to twist the wryness of his own aftermath into a smile. "If the horrible taste counts for anything, it ought to make you well in five minutes."

Lucetta did her duty bravely, and when the worst was over Prime tucked her up in the blankets, adding his own for good measure. Then he made up a roasting fire, having some vague notion brought over from his boyhood that fever patients ought to sweat. Past this, he made a sad cake of pan-bread for his own midday meal, and when it was eaten he found that Lucetta had fallen asleep, and was further encouraged when he saw that fine little beads of perspiration had broken out on her forehead.

It was late in the afternoon before she awoke and called him.

"Are you feeling any better?" he asked.

"Much better; only I'm so warm I feel as if I should melt and run away. Can't you take at least one of the blankets off?"

"Not yet. You like to cook things, and I am giving you some of your own medicine. This is Domestic Science as applied to the human organization. Just imagine you are a missionary on one of the South Sea Islands, and that you are going to be served up presently à la Fiji. Shall I try to fix you up something to eat?"

"Not yet. But I feel as if I could drink the brook dry."

"No cold water," he decided authoritatively. "The doctor forbids it. But you may have another drink of hot boneset tea."

"Oh, please, not again!" she pleaded; and at that he made her a cup of the other kind of tea, which she drank gratefully.

"Taste good?" he inquired.

"It tastes like the boneset – everything is going to taste like boneset for the next six weeks."

"Don't I know?" he chuckled. "Hasn't it already spoiled my dinner for me? I could taste it in everything." Then he told her about his experiment in pan-bread, adding: "I have saved a piece of it so that if you wish to commit suicide after you get well, the means will be at hand."

"Do you think I am going to get well, Donald?"

"Sure you are! You'll have to do it in self-defense. Just think of the oceans of bitterness you'll have to swallow if you don't. What is puzzling me now is to know what I am going to feed you. Do you suppose you could tell me how to make some pap or gruel, or something of that sort?"

She smiled at this, as he hoped she would, and said there was no need of crossing that bridge until they should come to it. Shortly after this she fell asleep again, and by nightfall Prime was overjoyed to find that her breathing was more natural, and that the fever was not rising. With the coming of the darkness a fine breeze blew up from the river, and he was overjoyed again when it proved strong enough to drive the tormenting mosquitoes back into the forest.

That night he was able to make up some of the lost sleep of the two preceding nights, and when daybreak came another burden was lifted. Lucetta had slept all night, and she declared she was feeling much better; that the fever seemed to be entirely gone. This brought the question of nourishment to the fore again, and Prime attacked it bravely, opening their last tin of peas and making a broth of the liquor thickened with a little of the reground flour. Lucetta ate it to oblige him, though it was as flat and tasteless as any unsalted mixture must be.

"Are you always as good as this to every strange woman you meet, Cousin Donald?" she said, meaning to make the query some expression of her own gratitude.

"Always," he returned promptly. "I can't help it, you know; I'm built that way. But you are no strange woman, Lucetta. If I can't do more for you, I couldn't very well do less. We are partners, and thus far we have shared things as they have come along – the good and the bad. What is troubling me most now is the same thing that was troubling me last night: I don't know what I am going to feed you. You need a meat broth of some kind."

"Not any more of the smoked venison, please!" she begged.

"No, it ought to be fresh meat of some sort. By and by, if the fever doesn't come back, I'll take the gun and see if I can't get a rabbit. I saw three yesterday morning while I was out chewing leaves. You won't be afraid to be left alone for a little while, will you?"

"After what we have been through, I think I shall never be afraid of anything again," she averred soberly. "And to think that I was once afraid of a mouse!"

"That is nothing," he laughed; "you probably will be afraid of a mouse again when you get back to an environment in which the mouse is properly an object of terror. I shan't think any the less of you if that does happen."

She smiled up at him.

"Men always talk so eloquently about the womanly woman: just what do they mean by that, Donald? Is it the mouse-coward?"

"It differs pretty widely with the man, I fancy," he returned. "I know my own ideal."

"She is the imaginary girl whose picture you are going to show me when we get out?"

He laughed happily. "You mustn't make me talk about that girl now, Lucetta. Some day I'll tell you all about her. Perhaps it is only fair to say that she is not so terribly imaginary as she might be."

"Of course not – if you have her picture," was the quiet reply; and a little while after that she told him she was sleepy again, and that he might take the gun and go after a rabbit if that was what he wished to do.

She did go to sleep, but Prime did not go hunting until after the midday meal; and thus it happened that when Lucetta awoke, along in the afternoon, she found herself alone. For an hour or two she was content to lie quietly, waiting for Prime to return, but when the afternoon drew to a close and he still failed to put in an appearance she got up, rather totteringly, and replenished the camp-fire.

Another hour passed and she began to grow anxious. The spruce grove was plunged in shadows, but the sun had not yet set for the upper regions of the air. By the time it was fully dark she knew that Prime was lost, and in this new terror she was able to forget, in some measure at least, the effects of her late illness. Bestirring herself once more, she put more wood on the fire, hoping that it might blaze high enough to serve as a signal for the wanderer.

It was all she could do, and having done it she sat down to wait, her anxiety growing sharper as the evening wore on and there was neither sight nor sound to foreshadow the lost one's return.

XVIII
HEIGHTS AND DEPTHS

If she had not known it before, Lucetta was to learn now that sickness of any sort is but a poor preparation for a battle of anxiety and endurance. On the one other occasion when she had been thrown upon her own resources Prime had been at least visibly present, and his helplessness had given her strength to fight off the terrors. But now she was alone and the terrors pressed thickly.

What if something had happened to the rabbit-hunter? She knew his utter lack of gun dexterity, and her terrified imagination conjured up harrowing pictures of the missing one lying wounded and helpless in some distant forest solitude, a victim of his unselfish effort to provide not for his own needs but for hers. The thought was a keen torture, but she could not banish it, and as the hours lengthened it threatened to drive her mad. There was nothing she could do save to keep the fire burning brightly, and this she did, breaking the monotony of the unnerving suspense from time to time by collecting dry wood to heap upon the blaze.

It was nearly midnight before the agony came to a sudden end. She was lying on the blanket pallet, with her face hidden in the crook of an elbow when she looked up and saw Prime standing beside her. It was not in human nature to undergo the revulsion from the depths of despair calmly.

"Donald!" she shrieked faintly, and forgetting her weakness, she sprang up and flung herself into his arms, sobbing in an ecstasy of relief.

He took it in good brotherly fashion, and if the fraternal attitude was not strictly sincere, it was made to appear so.

"There, there, little woman," he comforted, "you mustn't turn loose that way – you'll make yourself sick again. It's all over now, and I got your rabbit. See, here it is" – drawing it from his pocket and dangling it before her as if it were a new toy and she a child to be hastily diverted.

The diversion was not needed; she was freeing herself from the clasp of the remaining reassuring arm, and her cheeks were aflame.

"I didn't know I could be so silly! Please don't hold it against me, Donald," she begged. "If you only knew what I have been through since it grew dark! You'll forgive me and – and not remember it after we – after we – "

His weariness fell from him like a castoff garment. "Not if you don't want me to, Lucetta. But it was rather – er – pleasant, you know – to find that some one really cared enough about what had become of me to – to sort of forget herself for a moment."

The firelight was strong, and if he saw the adoring look that flashed into the gray eyes he was magnanimous enough, or modest enough, to pass it over to the sudden transition from despair to relief.

"It must have been something fierce for you," he went on; "but I did the best I could after I had been idiotic enough to get lost. Of course, since I had the gun with me, it was hours before I got sight of a rabbit; and even then I had to shoot at half a dozen of them before I could manage to hit one. By that time it was getting on toward sunset, and I had lost the brook which I had taken for a guide."

"I knew you would," she broke in. "But that wasn't the worst of it. I kept imagining that you had shot yourself accidentally, and every time I closed my eyes I could see you lying wounded and helpless!"

"You poor little worrier!" he pitied; "I knew you would be scared stiff if I didn't get back by dark, and in my hurry I bore too far to the left; a great deal too far, as it turned out, for when I reached the river I recognized the place. It was just this side of the grove where we were camping when the canoe was stolen."

"Horrors!" she gasped faintly. "And you have walked all that distance?"

"No," he grinned; "I ran a good part of it. When I came in a few minutes ago I was dead from the waist down; but I am all right now. You sit down and drink broth while I skin this rabbit. It's a juicy one – as fat as butter."

Fifteen minutes later the rabbit was stewing in the larger skillet, and Prime found time to ask Lucetta how she was feeling.

"Just plain hungry," she returned. "The fever hasn't come back any more, and if I ever have a medicine-chest of my own there will be boneset in it; great, big, smelly packages of it. Aren't you going to let me make a bit of bread to eat with that delicious gravy broth?"

"If it won't tire you too much," he consented, and at that he sat back and watched her while she mixed the bread, a housewifely little figure kneeling before the fire and patting the dough into a cake with hands that not all the rough work of the adventure weeks had made misshapen.

Somewhat beyond this they made their post-midnight meal, and were once more light-hearted and care-free. In the aftermath of it, when Prime had lighted his homemade pipe, they were even buoyant enough to plan for the future.

"We'll go on again to-morrow, shan't we?" the young woman assumed. "We can't be so very far from the towns now, with the river grown so large."

"I fancy we are nearer than we thought we were," Prime replied. "Over to the west, where I went this afternoon, there is another and still larger river. On its banks the timber has all been cut off and there is nothing but second and third growth. It is a safe bet that the two rivers come together a little below here, and if we are not stopped by our inability to cross the bigger river – "

"We are not going to be stopped," she prophesied hopefully. "I have a feeling that our troubles, or the worst of them, are all over."

Prime smiled. "The joyous reaction is still with you, but that is all right and just as it should be. We'll keep on going until we come to a town or a railroad, and then – "

She was sufficiently light-hearted to laugh with him when he glanced down at his torn and travel-worn clothes.

"And then we shall be arrested for tramps," she finished for him. "There is one consolation – neither of us will look any worse than the other."

"When we find a town we shall find clothes," he asserted. "Luckily we have English money to buy with."

"Would you – would you spend that money?" she asked, half fearfully.

"Why not? I'd hock the dead men themselves if we had them and there wasn't any other way to raise the wind. But I have some good, old-fashioned American money, too."

"I shall have to borrow of you when we get to where we can buy things," she said, with a sudden access of shyness that was new to him. "I had a purse with a little money in it that night at Quebec, but it disappeared."

"What is mine is yours, Lucetta; surely you don't have to be told that, at this stage of the game."

"Thank you," she said softly. "That goes with everything else you have done for me." Then, after a pause: "Will you tell the other girl about this – about this adventure of ours, Donald?"

"Don't you think I ought to tell her? Isn't it her right to know?"

She took time to consider.

"I'm not sure; women are singular about some things; they don't always understand. Perhaps they don't care to understand – too much. Then there is always the difficulty of explaining things just as they were. I could tell better if I knew the girl. Is she young?"

"Why, y-yes – some years younger than I am. But she is all kinds of sensible."

"Is she in New York?"

"No," he answered soberly. "She is not in New York."

She took it as a hint that she was not to ask any more questions about the girl and changed the subject abruptly.

"Shall you go and look for Mr. Grider after we find a railroad?"

"Not immediately. I shall first see you safe at home in your girls'-school town in Ohio," he assured her firmly.

"Oh, that won't be necessary," she protested. "I have travelled alone many times. And I have my return ticket; or I shall have it when I get back to Quebec."

"Nevertheless, I am going home with you," Prime insisted stubbornly. "It is up to me to see you out of this, and I shall make a job of it while I am about it. When it is done I shall come back to Canada to find out who shanghaied us and what for. And when I find the people who did it they are going to pay for it."

"Even if they include Mr. Grider?"

"Yes, by Jove! Even if the man higher up happens to be Watson Grider. I don't mind the kidnapping so much for myself, but the man doesn't live, Lucetta, who can make you go through what you have gone through in the past month and get away with it."

"I don't ask you to fight for me, Donald," she interposed. "And, besides, it hasn't been all bad – or has it?"

"We have agreed every little while, between jolts, that it hasn't. I'll go further now, and say that it is the finest, truest, happiest thing that has ever happened to me – hardships and all."

"You mean because it has given you new working material?"

"No; I wasn't thinking so much of that, though the new material, and more especially the new angle, are worth something, of course. But there are bigger consequences than these – for me – Lucetta." Then he broke off and plunged headlong into something else. "How much of an income should a man have before he can ask a girl to marry him? Does the Domestic Science course include any such practical data as that?"

"Is that all you are waiting for?" she inquired, ignoring his question. "Have you asked the girl?"

"No; I haven't asked her yet. And the money is the main thing that I shall be waiting for from this time on."

"I should say it would depend entirely upon the girl – upon what she had been used to."

"I think – she hasn't – been used to having things made so very soft for her," he answered rather uncertainly. "But she has at least one ambition that is going to ask for a good chunk of money at first, until she – until she gets ready to – to settle down."

"And that is – ?"

The suggestive query was never answered.

As Prime laid his pipe aside and was about to speak, the dark backgrounding of shadows beyond the circle of firelight filled suddenly with a rush of men. Prime saw the glint of the firelight upon a pair of brown gun-barrels, and when he mechanically reached for his own weapon a harsh voice with a broad Scottish burr in it broke raggedly into the stillness.

"None o' that, now! Ye'll be puttin' yer hands up ower yer heids – the baith o' ye – or it'll be the waur f'r ye! I'd have ye know I'm an under-sheriff o' this deestrict, and ye'll be reseestin' the officers o' the law at yer eril!"