CHAPTER ONE
RICKLY heat jabbed its claws into Ralph’s sweaty neck as he staggered under the load. All through the long portage and the torture of paddling afterward, he had looked forward to the shooting of Ghost Rapids, as anxiously as he looked backward to the man who was in pursuit.
He was glad to get it done, to come at last to those notorious rapids and see Lawrence Jackfish leap up in the bow, pointing with his paddle toward the one safe passage through the frenzy of broken currents. The stream poured between gnarled rocks in a gush smooth as a sculpture of polished bronze. Ralph fancied that if he touched that swelling sleekness of water it would be hard and slippery to his hot fingers. But beyond the gate of danger the churning and frightened river spread into a hundred whirlpools among rocks half hidden in the foam.
As he bent over the paddle, bringing the canoe’s head sharply to the right to follow the fantastic jagged course which Lawrence was choosing, the rocks ashore caught the tail of his eye and he realized that the canoe was going with aeroplane speed into the maelstrom.
Suddenly they were in the calm waters beyond the rapids, and in relief Ralph sobbed above his lifted paddle, so that the girl looked back in wonder, and the Indian snickered. There was a sacred moment of security. But always Ralph knew that they were fleeing from the angry man who might be following them—angry and swift and menacing.
Ralph Prescott was perhaps the most conservative member of that extraordinarily conservative firm of New York lawyers, Beaseley, Prescott, Braun and Braun. He played law as he played chess. A squabble was as inconceivable to him as a fist-fight, and it was a shock to find himself twitchy, irritable, likely to quarrel with clients and waiters and taxi-drivers.
He muttered, “Overwork—must take it a little easy—too much strain in the hydro-electric negotiations—try a little golf.” But the little golf, or even the unprecedented dissipation of going to the “Follies” instead of staying home working over the documents with which his sober brief-case was always crammed, was insufficient to lull his jangling nerves, and night by night he awoke to obscure panics, lay rigid with black and anonymous apprehensions.
At forty Ralph Prescott was more than ever a bachelor. The explanation was a mother so much more serene and fine and instantly understanding than any girl he encountered that he had preferred her dear presence to insinuating romance. But she had been dead these two years, and where she had once coaxed him away from his desk at midnight for a chat and easy laughter and a glass of milk before she ordered him off to bed, he sought now to fill the vacuum of her absence by working till one—till two—till weary dawn.
A friendly, grave man was Ralph, quietly popular among his friends, the dozen lawyers, doctors, engineers, and brokers whom he had known in college and whom he met nightly at the Yale Club; a man slight and eyeglassed and perhaps a little naïve.
However sharp he was, and however formidably solid about following up a point of law, he was still as respectful toward all the Arts and all the Politenesses as he had been in college, when he had listened to Professor Phelps in literature classes and from afar, with a small flame of worship for sweetness and light, made his bow to Thoreau and Emerson and Ruskin. It was concentration, with a trick of being obligingly friendly to judges and juries, which had won his legal prestige, not that thrusting power to bully and bluff and dazzle which distinguishes more realistic attorneys.
On a May day in the nineteen-hundred-twenties Ralph Prescott perceived how badly his nerves were frayed.
He was driving, this Saturday afternoon, to the Buckingham Moors Country Club, beyond White Plains, for eighte
