CHAPTER V
THE GIRL FROM THE LAKE
DICK rested for a long time. Then leaning upon the girl's firm shoulder, he got to his feet and moved slowly with her to the boat. When he had sunk in a huddled heap in the narrow craft, his pulses beating wildly, his head whirling, he began to realize he had a great deal besides a scalp wound and a broken wrist to reckon with.
With a swift flash of a glance at his white lips and the little drops upon his forehead, the girl stepped into the boat, took up the paddle and pushed out into the lake. And under her strong hands the canoe shot through the water, headed for the north end of the lake and for a little cove, cliff-bound.
Dick half slept as the canoe sped on and on. Finally he roused as they rounded a rocky point, flashed by a little green cove into which a narrow spray of water fell from the cliffs above, skirted a dense pine grove, and turned suddenly into a second tiny bay, sandy-beached. The canoe, its slender nose thrust into the pebbles and white sand, held there, swaying gently. Before Farley could move, the girl was out, standing in the shallow water, her left hand steadying the boat while her right reached out to help him.
"If you feel strong enough, it's only a little way, and you will rest better."
Ashamed of his weakness in the face of her confident young strength, he got to his feet. Already it was a harder thing for him to stand than it had been ten minutes ago. His right shoulder, side and arm were utterly useless. His leg, when he put a little or his weight upon it, pained him so that with his lip caught sharply between his teeth it cost him much to keep back a cry of agony.
But in the end, leaning upon her, her arm tight about him, he got into the water and to the strip of sand. Looking anxiously for some sort of camp, he saw ahead only a thick grove of pine and fir like the one they had passed, and the sheer cliffs beyond.
"I think," she was saying to him, "that if you rest again you will only be the stiffer, sorer for it. Can you manage to walk a little further?"
He nodded. And now he staggered on with his guide and into the trees. And when at last she stopped he again looked up, expecting to see the camp. Instead, he saw that they had brought up at the edge of the level strip with the cliff-wall in front of them.
"We're going up there," she answered the puzzled look in his eyes. "It isn't as hard as it looks. Can you go a little further?"
He nodded again painfully. So again they moved on, ten feet along the cliffs, and came, unexpectedly for him, upon a great, gently slanting cut in the rocks, into which bits of stone had been flung so as to make rude, rough steps. It was harder now, slower; for he had to lift his left foot each time, while she helped relieve the weight upon the other, and wearily pull himself up. Ten minutes dragged by before they had climbed the twenty feet.
Upon the top was a plateau perhaps a mile long, broken with trees and boulders, five hundred yards wide. The fringe of trees and ragged cliffs upon the side toward the lake hid the table-land completely from that direction. And, set between two gnarled cedars, at the very edge of a dense bit of the forest where it ran out from the sea of verdure like a cape, was a low, rambling log cabin, a thin spiral of smoke winding up from its stone chimney. Here was "home."
The cabin had all the signs of age, discolored by many Winters, a vine a dozen years old climbing over it. And Johnny Watson, who had known the Devil's Pocket for a quarter of a century, had said that no man ever lived here!
But Dick Farley was in little mood for speculation. He stumbled on conscious only of the dizzy nausea which drove even the pain of his hurt side into a dim, faraway background. After an endless groping through a thickening fog he knew that they had stepped from the sunlight into the shade; felt rough boards under his boots; felt that two arms, not just one, were tight around his body; knew with a grateful, long-drawn sobbing breath that he was lying upon blankets.
It was dusk in the cabin—twilight fragrant with the spicy odors dropping down from the grove—when he found himself at first groping for reality in a confused chaos of emotions and then gradually coming to full understanding. It was a great, low-walled room, a rectangle of light marking the door, two squares showing him the windows and a deep-mouthed fireplace crackling with a newly lighted fire.
Across the room from his bunk were a heavy little table and rough chair. His eyes went slowly to the floor—over the squared saplings which went to make it, across a bearskin, and to another door, smaller, lower than the other, leading into another room. He tried to lift himself upon his elbow, and fell back stabbed by the sharp pain in his shoulder. And then he turned his head quickly toward the narrow door. Then he had heard a step.
She came swiftly to him, looking down at him with her great eyes filled with concern. When she saw the look in his she smiled, and sitting down upon the edge of his bed put her hand upon his forehead.
"You are better," her rich voice was saying in a matter-of-fact way. "You're not so feverish, and you know where you are, don't you?"
"Yes. Much better." He called up a twisted smile to meet hers. And then, "I have been an awful nuisance."
"You mustn't say such things"
But he insisted, looking steadily at her.
"If you hadn't happened along—if you hadn't found me then, or soon—do you know what would have happened to me? If I hadn't died from my fall and exposure, I'd have died pretty soon from starvation. Do you know that?"
"I know," she retorted with great mock severity, "that this is my case; you're my patient, and I'm the doctor and the nurse. And that you're talking, while I believe the proper thing for people who are sick is to lie still. Also, you're not going to die of starvation now. When I heard you stir, I was just making some soup for you. For—I'm the cook, too!"
When she had come back with a smoking bowl of broth, she set the thing down upon the floor for a moment while she insisted on propping him up with pillows. She shook her head at him when he opened his lips to protest, and thrust a spoonful of the soup between them by way of further silencing him.
"Good?" she demanded, when she had set the empty bowl down on the floor. "And now, do you know I am afraid that I have about reached the end of my medical knowledge! I've forbidden you to talk, and I've fed you some broth. What next?"
"There'll be nothing next. I'm going to be all right soon."
"Of course you are! But we must do something for your poor, hurt side. I have some liniment"
"Just the thing," he assured her. "I'll give myself a good rubbing"
"You are very stupid," she frowned at him. "You will do nothing of the sort. I haven't dismissed my case yet, have I, Mr. Man?"
"You're discharged, Miss Girl!" he grinned up at her. "And my other name is Farley—Dick Farley."
"I won't be discharged that way, and my name is Virginia Dalton, and you lie right still, Dick Farley!" she laughed at him.
And when she came back she made him lie upon his left side while she slit his shirt from the shoulder down and bathed the bruised muscles with the stinging oil. The wrist, swollen and ugly, she bandaged with soft white cloth. When she had finished she sat back, flushed but triumphant, and nodded at him approvingly.
With the fire roaring in the deep fireplace, for cheeriness rather than from the need of warmth, with a couple of misshapen, homemade candles upon the mantelpiece, her chair drawn up facing the bunk upon which her guest and patient lay—at her request he was smoking his pipe and enjoying it—Virginia Dalton at last satisfied the man's curiosity as well as she could.
She and her father had lived here together, for fifteen years. He had brought her, a baby of four, into this wilderness with him, had built the cabin, had made this home. Of the world outside she knew little more than she had known little more than when her father brought her here—perhaps less; as even the child's images of men and women and cities, and the things thereof, had been lost in the years. The father had taught her, had brought with them a few books, had been always very dear to her. She did not know why he lived here, away from his kind. He had once, long ago, told her that his health demanded it. Of late they had not mentioned the matter.
"But," she ended, with a flush of eagerness lighting her face, "it's nearly over! We're going to leave soon; go back to the world where people are. Dear old Daddy came in just this afternoon, a little while before I went down to the lake, and I could see right away that something had happened. He didn't say what it was—he doesn't say much at any time; but he told me that he was going out again and might be gone all night; but that when he came back I could get ready to go! Isn't it glorious?"
But Dick, to whom there had come a sudden fear, made no answer, frowning as he lay back staring up at the rough rafters.