forced to swing to the shady side of the snag. The time dragged endlessly;
a wind piping down the watercourse cut like a hundred whips through my wet
clothes; and I think in the end I only kept my hold because my fingers
were too stiff to let go. But at last the Indians stretched themselves
once more on the ground; their fire burned low, and I wormed myself up
within reach of a friendly young hemlock, grasped a bough, and gained
shelving rock. The next moment I relaxed, all but done for, on a dry bed
of needles."
Tisdale paused, looking again from face to face, while the humor gleamed
in his own. "I am making a long story of it," he said modestly. "You must
be tired!"
"Tired!" exclaimed Elizabeth, "It's the very best story I ever heard.
Please go on."
"Of course you escaped," supplemented Marcia Feversham, "but we want to
know how. And what was your chum doing all the time? And wasn't there
another woman?"
Frederic Morganstein rumbled a short laugh. "Maybe you made the Lilliwaup,
but I'll bet ten to one you missed your steamer."
Tisdale's eyes rested involuntarily again on Mrs. Weatherbee. She did not
say anything, but she met the look with her direct gaze; her short upper
lip parted, and the color burned softly in her cheek. "I made the
Lilliwaup," he went on, "about two miles from the mouth, between the upper
and lower falls. The river breaks in cascades there, hundreds of them as
far as one can see, divided by tremendous boulders."
"We know the place," said Elizabeth quickly. "Our first cruise on the
_Aquila_ was to the Lilliwaup. We climbed to the upper falls and spent
hours along the cascades. Those boulders, hundreds of them, rose through
the spray, all covered with little trees and ferns. There never was
anything like it, but we called it The Fairy Isles."
Tisdale nodded. "It was near the end of that reach I found myself. The
channels gather below, you remember, and pour down a steep declivity under
a natural causeway. But the charm and grandeur were lost on me that day. I
wanted to reach the old trail from the falls on the opposite shore, and I
knew that stone bridge fell short a span, so I began to work my way from
boulder to boulder out to the main stream. It was a wide chasm to leap,
with an upward spring to a tilted table of basalt, and I overbalanced,
slipped down, and, coasting across the surface, recovered enough on the
edge to ease myself off to a nearly submerged ledge. There I stopped." He
paused an instant, and his eyes sought Marcia Feversham's; the amusement
played lightly on his flexible lips. "I had stumbled on another woman. She
was seated on a lower boulder, sketching the stone bridge. I was behind
her, but I saw a pretty hand and forearm, some nice brown hair tucked
under a big straw hat, and a trim and young figure in a well-made gown of
blue linen. Then she said pleasantly, without turning her head: 'Well,
John, what luck?'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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