"A hypodermic needle?" he suggested. She nodded. "That is why I became so sleepy. And your potion was put in the wine, which you say tasted so bad." Prime admitted the deduction without prejudice to his belief that Grider was the arch-plotter, saying: "Grider is quite capable of anything, if the notion appealed to him. And, of course, he must have had hired confederates; he couldn't manage it all alone." [Pg 29] "Still," she urged, "it seems to me that we ought to be trying to help ourselves in some way. It doesn't seem defensible just to sit here and wait, on the chance that your guess is going to prove true." [Pg 29] Prime laughed. "You are always and most eminently logical. Where shall we begin?" "At the geography end of it," she replied calmly. "How far could an aeroplane fly in a single night?" Prime took time to think about it. He had never had occasion to use a long aeroplane flight in any of his stories; hence the special information was lacking. But common sense and a few figures helped out—so many hours, so many miles an hour, total distance so much. "Two hundred miles, let us say, as an extreme limit," he estimated, and at this the young woman gave a faint little shriek. "Two hundred miles! Why, that is as far as from Cincinnati to Lake Erie! Surely we can't be that far from Quebec!" "I merely mentioned that distance as the limit. We are evidently somewhere deep in [Pg 30] the northern woods. I don't know much about the geography of this region—never having had to stage a story in it—but a lake of this size, with miles of marketable timber on its shores, argues one of two things: it is too far from civilization to have yet tempted the lumbermen, or else it has no outlet large enough to admit of logging operations. You may take your choice." [Pg 30] "But two hundred miles!" she gasped. "If some one doesn't come after us, we shall never get out alive!" "That is why I think we ought to wait," said Prime quietly. So they did wait throughout the entire forenoon, sitting for the most part under the shade of the shore trees, killing time and talking light-heartedly against the
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