Josephine Stonedid not look back after Acey Smith led her down the lakeshore from the spot where she had parted with Louis Hammond. She knew Hammond would neither attempt to follow them nor spy upon them from a distance. Perhaps too she was preoccupied with the tensity of new sensations she did not quite understand. Had she been inclined to mental analysis she might have contrasted the reactions upon herself the presence of the two men brought about; the one frank, buoyant, purposeful and full of the verve and enthusiasm of youth—the other in the prime of his vigour; masterful, grimly fascinating under his cloak of mystery and conscious power.
What discerning, womanly woman is not drawn irresistibly by the type of men who curb tremendous potentialities under a poise that outwardly bespeaks merely good form and the niceties of the occasion? It was not “side” with this man; it was patent he was what he was for a definite purpose. More, to the sensitive intuition of Josephine Stone there appealed from out of the deeps of the personality of Acey Smith a great latent tragedy—a something persistently repressed by that fatalistic mouth that could set so grim and straight—a something that smouldered at times in his brooding eyes and flickered ever so elusively over the face he had taught to be a cold, cruel mask.
If she did not analyse, she at least felt these things in her feminine way. It was this impression, perhaps, that impelled her to say as they strolled to the log seat by the whispering surf: “Sometimes, Mr. Smith, this place seems to me like an enchanted forest—like a dream inset in the prosaic course of everyday life.”
“Does it appeal to you that way, Miss Stone?” He led her to the log seat and dropped down near her. “Strange, isn’t it, how some life-incidents flicker by us with all the glamour of a dream—leaving us wondering, in a floundering sort of way, if it wasn’t a fleeting mirage, so to speak, from some other existence.”
“You express it so wonderfully! You think then that all of us have experienced previous existences on this or some other sphere?”
“Some of us—perhaps.”
“You have feltthathere then, the same as I?”
“I have.” Acey Smith lit a cigarette. “You may laugh at the conceit, but at times I could fancy the feel of a basket sword-hilt at my side, the rap-rap of its scabbard-end on my heels and even the jingle of spurs on my boots. Yet, what I believe—”
He broke off and laughed scornfully at his own confession. “What nonsense to be boring you with, Miss Stone!”
“But it’s not nonsense, and you’re not boring me. You must go on,” she commanded, “even if I have to first confess that I have heard the clanking of your knightly sword, the jingling of your spurs—yes, and even felt at my cheek for the beauty-patch I fancied was there.”
His glance met hers, swiftly. If she were merely acting she was intense about it.
“I was going to say that what I believe is that it is a fleeting glimpse of the ideal we experience at such times, and imagination does the rest,” he continued.“Most of us are composites of two or more personalities. Fate, or circumstances if you prefer, decrees which of those personalities shall flourish; the others, like the sucker-shoots of yonder mountain ash tree, aspire but never attain perfection. There is always the Man That Is and the Man That Might Have Been. Saint or sinner, philosopher or fool, there comes sooner or later a time when the Man That Might Have Been insists on life and triumph for his little day.”
“But doesn’t the choice of personality lie pretty much with the man himself?” she argued. “You know they say that every man is the architect of his own fortune.”
“Strong men are ever the playthings of Destiny,” he replied. “So-called masterful men stifle their true selves and accept the role that Fate has ordained alone shall carry them to their goal.”
“That’s cynicism.”
“Must the truth always be sugar-coated? It’s an impression.”
“You speak out of an experience?”
“More or less.” Frankly.
Josephine Stone plunged boldly. “Then, for instance,” she suggested, “the man they call Acey Smith might have been whom?”
“Quite another personality by quite another name.”
“You believe there is something in a name?”
“I do and I do not, Miss Cross-examiner,” he answered enigmatically. “Napoleon might have been born Dick Jones, but in such a case the world would have found another name to call him by.”
She laughed over the allusion. “But you are drifting away from the subject, Mr. Witness,” she reminded. “I asked you about Acey Smith’s Man That Might Have Been.”
“He was a dreamer of high-minded dreams and ascholar; the man Fate shaped and willed should survive was merely him they call Acey Smith the timber pirate.”
“But this Man That Might Have Been.” There was deep concern in her tones. “You could have made him, and you could yet—by the sheer force of your will—make him a reality.”
His black eyes were drawn to hers, and, momentarily, she thought she saw the soul of another man—another who was not Acey Smith. But the softened light in them as quickly changed to a hardened glint.
“No, no,” he said harshly, “that man can never be. I am fighting him off—have been fighting him since—” His gaze swerved from hers as his jaw clicked the balance: “—since you came. His advent now—would mean disaster. I found him too late.”
Anything she might have added was negatived by his changed attitude, a field of reserve, of isolation, he threw around himself at will. “With your permission,” he urged, “we will drop the personal topic with which I have been egotistically monopolising your time. You intimated at our last meeting that you had finally decided to tell me why it was so essential you should meet J.C.X.”
“Oh, yes,” she admitted. “I think I told you there was a very personal matter concerned outside of the unexplained reason for the head of the North Star Company asking me to come here. It was this: A man known as J.C.X. knew something of the affairs of my grandfather, Joseph Stone, a mining prospector, who lived and died in this north country somewhere.”
“Then you knew of the existence of J.C.X. before you received his letter?”
“Yes, through the rather vague statements about J.C.X., the North Star Company and my grandfather made in a field hospital during the great war by aCanadian named Captain Carlstone while in a delirium caused by shell-shock.”
“Yes?” If there was a shock of surprise in this disclosure, Acey Smith’s features did not register it.
“The rest was all conjecture,” Josephine Stone went on. “But let me first tell you the story of Captain Carlstone. When you have heard it you will be the better able to understand my curiosity in the matter.”
“It is not a long story,” she began. “The military career of Captain Carlstone was meteoric—he flashed into the thick of things from nobody knew where and disappeared in the fog of war as mysteriously.
“I was one of the first contingent of nurses who accompanied the Canadian forces to the front,” she continued. “I never had the privilege of meeting the wonderful captain, but everybody in the —th division heard of him and his dare-devil exploits. He was not only noted for his bravery but for an almost superhuman cunning and resourcefulness. The men fairly worshipped him. I nursed wounded soldiers who swore they would cheerfully walk into the mouth of hell behind Captain Carlstone and declared that to die fighting by the side of such a man would be the height of glory.
“With his superior officers, however, he was not so popular. They were jealous of the handsome, dare-devil captain, who seemed himself to devise obstacles against further promotion. At the battle of Vimy Ridge he won the Victoria Cross, and he might have had higher promotion as well but for a sarcastic remark made publicly that he valued the companionship of his boys more than any ‘dug-out office’ they could give him.
“Captain Carlstone was a mystery man whose previoushistory none knew beyond the facts that he enlisted in the West early in the war and won first a promotion from the ranks to lieutenant and then to captain on the field. He was very dark-complexioned—so dark it was generally conceded he had Indian blood in him or a foreign strain from some remote ancestor in Canada. Some were inclined to the belief that he was fighting under an assumed name.
“Captain Carlstone seemed to bear a charmed life. He was always where the fighting was heaviest and came out unscathed until his last memorable engagement, when, with a picked body of men, he captured a strategic position in a clump of woods the enemy was holding. He was to have had further honours for that, but they brought him from the wood in a state of coma induced by shell-shock.
“He was conveyed to a base hospital where he came out of the stupor a raving maniac. His complete recovery came with that remarkable suddenness that sometimes characterised such cases, but the morning following the day he became normal he was not in his cot. Not a clue to his whereabouts was ever afterwards discovered. He was one of the unsolved mysteries of the war.
“Now then, Mr. Smith, we come to the point where I became so personally interested in locating J.C.X.,” concluded Josephine Stone. “While in the base hospital Captain Carlstone was under the care of an old chum of mine, Sister Cummings. It was she who afterwards told me of the vivid story he related during his ravings of the death of Joseph Stone, my grandfather, on a northern trail years ago. Alternately, he talked of a mine and a will, most of it incoherent, but—”
Josephine Stone paused. Acey Smith was gazing fixedly beyond her into the thicket above, but at hercognisance of it the alertness in his features relaxed in a whimsical smile and his eyes came back to a level with hers.
“It seemed almost an unbelievable coincidence when I received the letter signed by J.C.X., asking me to come here to learn something of interest to myself,” continued the girl.
Again Acey Smith flashed an apprehensive glance at the woods above. “Come,” he urged, “we’ll go down to the open space on the beach.”
She had heard nothing and could discern no sign of life where his eyes had been focussed. Nevertheless, she accompanied him without question down the beach out of earshot of the woods.
He turned to her. “Your grandfather died when you were a child?” he asked.
“When I was two years of age, yes. He was by hobby a scientific man and a recluse, I believe, but he did considerable prospecting. My father was an only son, and, after the death of my grandmother, he insisted on father leaving the wilds. There followed a heated dispute which led my father to leave never to return. He seldom spoke of grandfather, and mother and I learned only the most fragmentary details of him and his life. Father died before I started to school and mother passed away a few years later, leaving me quite alone in the world, and had it not been for an invention of father’s, purchased on a royalty basis after his death by a manufacturing firm, I might also have been left quite penniless.”
“You never learned definitely just what happened your grandfather?”
“No. There were rumours reached us that he was killed by Indians in the bush and that rival prospectors had made away with him after he had discovered a goldmine. But none of these stories seemingly were ever confirmed.
“All my life I’ve wanted to learn about grandfather and what happened him,” she went on. “Though I had never known him it seemed as though he was very near to me—as if actually I had been in his dying thoughts. I had intended to explain all this to you that first night I went to your office, but—I was at first—afraid of you. Since then—”
“Yes?” he urged as she hesitated.
“Since I’ve felt instinctively you knew what I came to seek and you would find a way. I know now I could trust you.”
She looked up at him. His eyes did not meet hers and she was unprepared for the answer he gave her: “If you had asked sixty people, forty-nine who know me best would have told you you had better put your trust in Mephistopheles himself.”
She caught her breath. “But that—that is because they do not know you intimately.”
“It is because they know metoointimately—the reputation is not unmerited.”
There was a bitter indifference to his words that chilled her, a drooping sneer at his mouth and a cold gleam in his black eyes as he made frank, unboastful admission of iniquity. It seemed for a space as though the demon he had confessed looked out mockingly from the man at her.
“Yet you made no mistake,” he assured her almost immediately. “Your woman’s intuition told you aright; there is that I must assist you to learn of, even if—if I did not care.”
“But about Captain Carlstone,” she reminded him.“You have not told me whether he has any connection with the matter or not.”
“Captain Carlstone does not matter. He is gone—made away with himself somewhere overseas.”
“Killed himself?” she asked aghast.
Acey Smith gave vent to a soulless, soundless laugh. “Something like that,” he answered indifferently. “At any rate, he never came back to Canada. There were vital reasons why he dare not. But don’t waste pity on him; as I said, he doesn’t matter, and, lest you may have conceived otherwise, I may tell you there was never anything in common between Captain Carlstone and J.C.X. In fact, they were as unalike as it is possible for two individuals to be.”
His utter callousness bruised the sensitive girl—angered her so that she could have wished to have been a man to strike him where he stood.
“Be patient for a little while.” He intercepted the retort that trembled on her lips. “You shall know and you shall understand. You shall be the first person outside myself to meet face to face the mysterious J.C.X., whose power is greater than any other one individual in the Dominion of Canada, who makes and unmakes big businesses at his will, sways big men as puppets, uses political parties as pawns to his own advantage, advises and the Press thunders his words, and yet works as with an unseen hand. You shall be the first to meet J.C.X. and know definitely in whose presence you stand.”
“I don’t think I care to meet him—now,” coldly.
“But you wanted to know about your grandfather.”
“You mean he alone can tell me?”
“No, J.C.X. could tell you nothing of that. But it is through your coming meeting with him that you will learn all that you seek to know and more.”
“But why all this intense mystery about it?”Josephine Stone plucked up courage to demand. “I confess I am at a greater loss now than ever to know what all these complications mean—where they lead to.”
There came frank concern into his face. “I only wish it were in my power to tell you—now,” he said. “But it is out of my province to say more. In a week, or likely less, the appointed time will arrive.
“Meanwhile, I have to go east on urgent business,” he added. “I will return as quickly as possible, but before I go I am going to ask you if you will put yourself in my care without question as to the reasons.”
“You mean to leave here—with you?”
“Exactly. Oh, but you may bring your chaperon, Mrs. Johnson, with you. It will be all perfectly proper. Only, I must ask you to leave without notifying a soul, not even your Indian servants. There’s a reason.”
“A reason? Another unexplained reason?”
“No, I may tell you this time. I fear for your safety during the next few days while I am away.”
“But I am not afraid.”
“That’s because you do not sense your danger.”
“From what?”
“An enemy.”
“An enemy?” she echoed. “Who?”
“The one who despatched notes to yourself and young Hammond to bring about your first meeting here.”
“Come,” he urged before the exclamation of surprise died on her lips. “Say you will go to-night. I’ll come over in the motorboat this evening and we can make the arrangements. It is vital that you should leave here at once and without any one knowing or I would not ask it.”
“Without notifying my friends?”
She read from his keen answering glance that he knewshe was thinking of Hammond. “Without notifying any one,” he insisted.
“Then I refuse to go.”
“That is final?”
“It is, unless I can be shown a more coherent reason for going in such a manner.”
The worried look that had come into his face receded and he laughed a queer, bitter, little laugh. “Oh, well, if youwillhave it so, it is up to me to change my plans,” he said. “And that being so, I must bid you good-bye until I return from Montreal.
“Oh, by the way,” he added, “if you should hear men striking camp up the trail along the lakeshore this evening don’t be alarmed. It will be merely a squad of the mounted police who’ve come to patrol this section of the waterfront during the strike.”
“Strike?” she echoed perplexed.
He walked up the beach, drew his cached packsack from a clump of green stuff and returned. “Yes, we’re to have one of those modern luxuries in the camp within the next few days,” he answered.
He lifted his hat, whirled on a heel and was away.
In a maze of doubt as to whether her recent refusal to leave the island as he had requested were a wise decision, she watched Acey Smith go up and over the first hill of the lakeshore trail. When his figure had disappeared she was assailed by a sudden apprehension—an overwhelming apprehension—that she had made a grave mistake. There must have been deep, very deep reasons for his asking her to leave the island. No doubt she was imperilling not only her own safety but his plans as well.
On an impulse she sped forward after him. She felt that she could easily get within call of him before hereached the crown of the second hill. In her close-fitting garments she made fast time, but on the top of the first hill she paused all out of breath. The trail before her down through the valley and up the further rise was silent and empty.
At a tramping sound in the brush to her left she hesitated about proceeding. It might be a wandering bear or moose.
The bushes up the trail parted and a fearsome figure strode out—a figure as forbidding as one might well conceive an evil spirit to be. His face was almost black and on his cheek-bones stood out two livid red gashes. He wore no head-covering save a band of purple which held a single eagle’s feather in place in his lank, black hair. Round his neck were hung string upon string of gleaming white wolves’ teeth.
At the girl’s involuntary cry of dismay he whirled, the whites of his evil black eyes showing garishly in his satanic visage. It afterwards recurred to her that he had at first appeared quite as startled as she had been, but he almost immediately straightened, and, folding his arms on his chest, pronounced himself in deep, strangely-vibrating guttural tones.
“Ogima Bush,” he said, “big Medicine Man. Him no hurt white lady.Un-n-n-n—white lady pass.”
But Josephine Stone waited to have no further parley. She turned and fled on trembling limbs back toward the island. And, as she ran, there fell upon her ears a penetrating, wailing cry, long-drawn-out and blood-curdling in its mixture of mockery and despair—a cry that for subsequent reasons she was destined to remember all the days of her life.
Louis Hammondreturned to the camp that morning after he had parted with Josephine Stone down on the beach near Amethyst Island in a seventh heaven of ecstatic speculation. It was his first genuine love affair. The thrill of having held the svelte, firm form of that lovely creature yielding in the embrace of his arms was still upon him. He had discovered a new world—mating youth’s own wonder world, where the blue sky, the waving trees and the dancing water take on a new significance and seem to weave out of a sympathetic gladness the song of Eden’s first splendrous dawn. Ah, the magic and the poetry that come with the first sweep of Cupid’s wand in the early flush of manhood. . . . Youth that has yet to encounter it dreams not of the completeness of its power. . . . Middle life sighs for the dream that has vanished. . . . Age secretly revels in its memory as a miser gloats over his hoarded treasure. If, as the glum-faced realists tell us, it is all illusion—then, let Illusion reign!
“When all the world is young, lad,And every field is green;And every goose a swan, lad,And every lass a queen,Then hey for boot and horse, lad,And round the world away;Young blood must have its course, lad,And every dog his day.”
Already young Hammond was looking forward to their next meeting—the very next morning, in fact, he planned to again saunter down to Amethyst Island on a chance of gaining a few hours of her exquisite society. She—she must be his own completely.
But always our profoundest dreams are ephemeral when grim Reality stalks in the background. Later, the natural law of moods brought to Hammond the inevitable reaction. He was smitten with a sense of duty unperformed. He could not exactly define it, but he had a feeling of uselessness, a vague notion that he was drifting nowhere. What indeed had a man, situated as he was at present, to offer a girl of Josephine Stone’s evident refinement and high aspirations? So far as appearances were concerned he was nothing more than a vagrant biding his time on the pulp limits at the whim of a man who had dropped out of sight.
An inner voice demanded he should make a herculean effort to find his bearings at once. So far as he was concerned, things had drifted as long as he intended to allow them.
He must work out a plan of action—must find the answer to the conflicting incidents of the past few weeks and meanwhile secure real and useful employment. He had it! No doubt the officials in charge of the Kam City Company’s pulp mill would instal him in the position Norman T. Gildersleeve had promised him that night on the train. First, he must find a means of getting to the city. It should not be a very difficult feat to steal aboard one of the outgoing tugs. Yet, if he did succeed in doing that very thing, what might be the possibilities of his getting back to see Josephine Stone? What if she should stand in need of his help and protection?
Hammond was on the horns of a dilemma, with theproblem ever recurring to him: What was Josephine Stone doing here, and what could there be in common between her and the pulp camp superintendent?
The road to a mental solution of these questions proved as baffling as an attempt to find the reason for the numerous weird experiences he had gone through since the night he had made the deal with Norman T. Gildersleeve. All those circumstances, he conceived, had been too remarkable to be the result of mere accident. Human ingenuity was somewhere at work with its own ends in view, and, back of it all, Hammond was convinced, a sinister drama was being woven into the texture of affairs with a design of bringing some terrific climax about. All these apparent things must be the by-play of hidden plot and counter-plot.
However, what was the use of trying to analyse situations that seemed to lead nowhere? Hammond wanted action—and, he wasgoing to have it. . . . He would wait till to-morrow, see Josephine Stone in the morning and find out definitely if she felt quite sure of her own safety in this wild place. Then, if everything appealed to him as well, he would stow away on the tug for town in the afternoon. Once off the tug at Kam City he would be a free citizen and he could make a trip back to Amethyst Island at his pleasure in a motorboat.
But the way was made easier for Hammond to reach Kam City than he for the moment hoped, with subsequent events seemingly gauged for his further bewilderment.
Coming in from a stroll in the bush in the late afternoon, Hammond was considerably surprised to discover patrols of the Canadian Mounted Police pacing the waterfront. Being hungry, he went direct to the dining-camp,expecting to learn from Sandy Macdougal, the cook, just what new crisis had arisen necessitating the presence of the police.
But he had finished the meal before the head cook came striding in. “Say, Hammond,” he opened, “the Big Boss told me to tell you he wanted to see you at his office as soon as you came in. Must be something all-fired important, for he seemed to be fussy about it, which is odd for him.”
Hammond hurried over. The interview was short. The superintendent handed him an envelope bearing his name in firm spencerian handwriting. “It contains a personal pass on any of the North Star tugs for the season,” he announced. “You are at liberty now to use it at your pleasure.”
The younger man concealed his amazement in a quiet “Thank you.”
“Better take the first tug in the morning,” suggested Acey Smith. “There’s a possibility of the afternoon tugs being off the run.”
“Oh, well, the following day will do as well,” returned the elated Hammond. “My business in the city is not so pressing that a day’s delay will matter.”
The superintendent passed Hammond his cigarette case and lit a cigarette himself. “I’d take the early tug to-morrow if I were you,” he insisted quietly. “There’s no telling what may happen the tug service between here and the city after to-morrow.”
“You’re not thinking of laying up the boats?”
“No—notus.” Smith studied Hammond idly, a curious, not unfriendly frown puckering his brows as he added: “Playing Sir Galahad seems to impair a journalist’s nose for news, doesn’t it, Hammond?”
That shot went home under the skin, but before Hammond could frame a rejoinder Acey Smith spoke up again.“I was going to say,” he remarked, “that should the tugs not be running when you are ready to return from the city that pass will be good on any make-shift service the company inaugurates to take the place of the big boats. Incidentally, I am leaving myself to-morrow on a trip to Montreal, and I’ll not be returning to camp for several days or perhaps a week. For the meantime, I have instructed Mr. Mooney, the assistant superintendent, to take care of your wants while our guest.”
Hammond was somewhat nettled by all this new show of attention and hospitality. He felt like telling the pulp camp superintendent to go to the devil, but he said “Thanks” again instead.
“Oh, just a minute, Hammond!”
Hammond paused at the door as Acey Smith strode over and passed him a newspaper. “The morning edition of theStar,” he indicated. “There is an item on the front page that may interest you—considerably.”
The wispy, mocking light that came over Acey Smith’s face when he uttered that last word was lost on Hammond for the moment. He walked back to his quarters in a fighting mood, all the more poignant because he had had to suppress it. Smith seemed to take such a fiendish enjoyment out of making him feel like a child he was studying for the sheer fun of the thing. Too, Hammond’s professional pride had been stung by the other’s broad insinuation that he, for a newspaper man, was wofully asleep to what was going on around him. It had gone the deeper because it was coupled with that vague hint about his attentions to Josephine Stone—at least that was what Hammond had taken the reference to Sir Galahad to mean.
What was going on at the limits? Why were all these mounted police out here? Why did the workmen, muttering in groups, fall so silent when he came near?Undoubtedly, a crisis of some sort was near at hand and hehadmissed a big piece of news that was breaking right under his nose. He began to concede to himself that he was deserving of the keenest of Acey Smith’s sarcasm. He had needed something like that to bring him down out of the clouds.
At first he was for going down and striking up a conversation with some of the police. On second thought he didn’t—he knew from experience how absolutely close-mouthed Canadian mounted policemen were about their orders. There was little that Sandy Macdougal would not know; he’d ask Sandy first.
But Sandy hadn’t come over from the cook camp when Hammond entered their shack. He had built up the fire in the little heater and lit his pipe when he bethought him of theStarthat Acey Smith had passed him.
Under the wall lamp Hammond spread out the paper, then he jumped to his feet as his eyes were caught by a lower corner scare-line heading:—
POLICE LOOKING FOR YOUNG STRANGERSEEN WITH N. T. GILDERSLEEVE BEFOREMILLIONAIRE DISAPPEARED FROM TRAINUnknown Youth Travelling Alone Was in Pulp Magnate’s Stateroom, Coloured Porter Tells Authorities—Suspicion of Foul Play?Mysterious Note Delivered En Route
POLICE LOOKING FOR YOUNG STRANGERSEEN WITH N. T. GILDERSLEEVE BEFOREMILLIONAIRE DISAPPEARED FROM TRAIN
Unknown Youth Travelling Alone Was in Pulp Magnate’s Stateroom, Coloured Porter Tells Authorities—Suspicion of Foul Play?
Mysterious Note Delivered En Route
In the body of the article Hammond read a badly-garbled description of himself and an equally highly-elaborated story of his interview with Gildersleeve. The coloured porter’s powers of imagination were in excellent working order, for he told of a loud altercation going on inside the stateroom before he entered, and that bothmen were standing glaring at each other with drawn, white faces when he was admitted.
It was all very ridiculous to one on the inside as to what really had happened, but quite on a par with most of the wild raft of useless clues brought to the surface by the police dragnet in mystery cases. Hammond might have laughed outright but for another thought that occurred to him.
He was under suspicion of having something to do with Gildersleeve’s disappearance!
So this was why Acey Smith had so suddenly become liberal with a pass over on the tug! The minute Hammond touched foot on Kam City docks he was very liable to be arrested and thrown into jail on suspicion of being concerned in a plot to do away with Gildersleeve. He would afterwards have to go through one of those small town police “third degrees,” usually more brutal and stupid than they were effective.
Smith had known that before he made out the pass—then he had given him the paper with this news in it so that he’d see how dangerous it would be for him to attempt to visit Kam City just now.
It was a proof of the superintendent’s fiendish notion of what constituted a good joke—but no, that couldn’t be it. Smith had been too insistent on Hammond’s taking the early tug. Acey Smith was too keen a reader of character to doubt that he, Hammond, would face the music rather than skulk around the pulp camp a fugitive from justice. Smith had some other motive, thought Hammond—there was no doubt about that now. Despite his obvious iniquity, there was a strong element of Canadian sportsmanship in Acey Smith’s make-up, Hammond had seen proofs of that. More likely he took this off-hand method of warning Hammond what he’d be up against when he landed in Kam City. That was morelike Acey Smith whom most men feared, others hated and few could find it in their hearts to exactly detest. . . . More, if the superintendent had merely wanted to complicate matters for Hammond he would only have had to send word to Kam City that he, Hammond, was over at the limits, and the authorities would come after him. Piecing it all together, the young man now sensed that for some deeper reason the Big Boss of the timber limits was anxious to see him go over to Kam City.
But, be that as it might be, Hammond’s mind was fully made up. He was now more determined than ever to make the trip to Kam City on the morrow. He quite realised what an ugly position he might be placed in through the erratic evidence of the coloured porter, but he was chafing to have the whole thing over with. He could stand continued inaction no longer. If the police arrested him, well and good: he’d take a chance on the trend of events and his own evidence bringing the truth to the surface. True, his contract with Norman T. Gildersleeve called for his keeping secret the fact that he had been engaged by the millionaire to stay on the Nannabijou limits until he received other instructions, but Gildersleeve must truly have disappeared or he would take steps of some sort or other to prevent Hammond’s arrest on a false charge. He could find no conscientious reason why he should hold out longer.
He glanced at his watch. It was nearly ten o’clock. He decided not to wait up for Sandy Macdougal, for he would have to arise early to catch the morning tug. To-morrow surely would be an eventful day.
Hammond was partially awakened by the cook prowling around with his bottle and a metal cup. Hammonddeclined Sandy’s invitation to join him in a “night-cap” and turned over to go to sleep again.
“Heard the big news, Hammond?” the cook asked.
Hammond rolled over again under the blankets at that. “No, Sandy,” he replied. “What’s being pulled off on the limits anyway?”
Macdougal tossed down his “three fingers” and gazed meaningly at the rusty stove-pipe. “There’s going to be something drop around this layout before many days are over,” he said finally.
“Yes?” encouraged Hammond.
“You’ll keep anything I tell you under your hat?”
“Sure, if you say so.”
“Strike and blue hell to pay,” informed the cook solemnly. “Whole caboodle will throw down tools—tugmen, waterfront men, pole-cutters and all.”
“H’m, so that’s it—that’s why the mounted police are over here,” reflected Hammond. “What’s the grievance?”
“More pay and shorter hours. Ain’t that what they always say?”
“But I thought the North Star Company were always ready to consider the demands of the men?”
“Maybe they will this time,” replied Macdougal, “but I got a hunch they won’t. There’s something phony about this whole business. They’ve let a whole flock of bolsheviks and O.B.U. agitators into the camps and never even tried to stop them holdin’ meetings, and the foremen have been bullin’ the men the past few days just as if they wanted to egg them on. Besides I mistrust that faraway glint in Acey Smith’s wicked eyes these days. Whenever you see the Big Boss goin’ around like as if he was in a trance and he looks at you with that queer little devil-grin playin’ at the corners of his mouth there’s new hellery on foot, you can bank on that.”
“Then you think the North Star’s out to break the strike?”
“I don’t know,” Macdougal was rapidly divesting himself of mackinaw and shoepacks, “but I’ve a hunch Acey Smith has the dope from the higher-ups and that it ain’t for a settlement.”
Having so pronounced himself, the cook blew out the light and plunged into his bunk.
Hammond awoke to find the little shack flooded with daylight. That meant that it was late—much too late to catch the morning tug. He had neglected to tell Sandy Macdougal to call him, and he was not by nature an early riser.
Nevertheless, if he acknowledged the truth to himself, he was not as disappointed about it as he should have been under the circumstances. There would surely be another tug in to-day, he reflected—and the delay would give him an opportunity to slip over to Amethyst Island before he left.
After breakfast, he set out along the lakeshore trail in high spirits. At the bridge over the Nannabijou River he was brought up short by a mountie. “Let me see your pass,” requested the young man in uniform.
Hammond had to acknowledge that he hadn’t any, that he hadn’t known one was necessary.
“Sorry then,” politely informed the policeman, “but the waterfront beyond here is out of bounds for any one not holding a pass signed by Inspector Little and the camp superintendent. That’s orders.”
Considerably abashed, Hammond struck back for the camp. He would try Acey Smith for a waterfront pass. Likely, in view of the superintendent’s previous anxietyto have him leave on the early boat, he would be refused point-blank, but it was worth finding out.
He turned at a shrill tooting out beyond the field of boomed pulpwood. A tug was just coming in the gap. They must be running wild to-day—and perhaps this would be the last one in before the strike was called. He had better take it over to Kam City, he reflected.
The tug had docked when Hammond reached the camp’s “main street,” and he noted that along with a number of questionable-looking men in city garb the dark-eyed girl in the sable furs, known as Yvonne, descended the gang-plank. Acey Smith was not in his office nor anywhere about the docks.
Two members of the mounted force examined the passes of the passengers as they came off the dock. The men dispersed into the upper reaches of the camp, while the girl paused to talk to a tall, black-whiskered man in an over-long rusty black coat who went down to meet her.
Hammond was sure he saw first impatience then anger come into Yvonne’s dark face as the Rev. Nathan Stubbs conversed with her in guarded undertones. Suddenly she swept away from him with a stamp of her little foot and went direct to the office of Acey Smith, where she entered without rapping.
The tug took off little freight and took on less. Its whistle gave a sharp warning blast.
Hammond raced down to the dock. The deck-hands were actually pulling up the gang-plank and unsnubbing the hawsers.
He held out his pass for the mounties to see as he went by, conscious that some one was racing at his heels. A strong hand reached out and clutched at his shoulder, and he flung it off unceremoniously. The gang-plank was up, but he cleared the space between the edge of the dock and the tug’s low deck in a flying leap.
He turned to see the Rev. Nathan Stubbs being unceremoniously yanked back off the dock by policemen as he continued to gesticulate in a wild, appealing fashion at Hammond.
Asthe tug swung out with a great churning astern, Hammond caught the eye of the skipper looking out of the wheel-house above. Chuckling over the antics of the chagrined camp preacher, he jerked his head for Hammond to come up.
“Take a seat.” The genial-faced captain motioned Hammond to the cushioned bench at the back of the tiny wheel-house. “The sky-pilot seemed to be all fussed up about something, didn’t he?”
“Yes,” replied Hammond. “I’m at a loss to know what came over him all of a sudden. As a rule he never appeared to notice I existed around the camp.”
“Oh, I guess he’s harmless, from what I hear,” agreed the captain, “but you can never tell just what’s what about some of these queer birds they let hang around that camp. There’s that old Medicine Man, for instance, I wouldn’t trust my back to him two minutes in the bush.”
“Ogima Bush? You think he’s dangerous?”
The skipper yanked at the lever of the steam steering-gear and swung the tug due west outside the channel through the pulp booms. “There ain’t any bully in the camp will take chances on crossing him,” he said significantly.
“You’d think the superintendent would have him run off the limits.”
“He daren’t, even if he wanted to,” declared the captain. “It’s long odds that old crock is cahoots with the Big Boss. At least everybody’s got that notion.”
“Speak of the devil,” he exclaimed next minute, “there’s the Big Boss heading for camp now.”
Hammond leaped to his feet and looked where the captain was pointing. Sure enough he could discern the superintendent’s red racing motorboat tearing over the water from a point the other side of Amethyst Island, bow up in air with a crash of foam under its midships.
“Try the glasses,” suggested the captain. Hammond fitted them to his eyes and adjusted the lenses. Acey Smith, at the wheel, was the only occupant of the tiny cockpit.
“Smith talked of going over to Kam City this afternoon,” suggested Hammond.
“Yes, he told me yesterday he was in a hurry to get things cleaned up so he could get away in time,” replied the other. “He intended to catch the night train for Montreal.
“Suppose you know there’s trouble on among the tug-men?” he queried turning from the steering-lever a moment.
“Strike?”
“Yes, and if the tugmen go out it means the pole-cutters and the white boom-tenders at the limits will down tools in sympathy tying everything up as tight as a river-jam.”
“Likely Smith’s going to Montreal to talk it over with some of the heads of the company, eh?” Hammond was sparring for more information.
“I dunno.” There came a faraway look in the captain’s blue eyes. “Hon. J. J. Slack, of Kam City, is supposed to be top dog of this outfit, and then again some think he’s only a straw boss. But if you asked a lot ofpeople they’d tell you the real head push of this outfit hangs out in a place that’s a lot hotter than Montreal or Kam City.”
Hammond was scarcely paying any attention to the captain’s words. He had the glasses trained on Amethyst Island which they were now passing. The place had a deserted look. The doors of Josephine Stone’s cottage were closed and there was not a sign of life on the island. That seemed queer—very queer. Perhaps, he conjectured, she had gone over to their meeting-place on the beach and was expecting him to happen along.
But he swept the beach with the glasses for a glimpse of her in vain. Presently, two scarlet-coated policemen emerged from the bush on the mainland and walked up the rise to a bell tent that was pitched on the crown of the hill. There one apparently flung an order to his companion, and the latter set off at a loping run in the direction of the pulp camp.
A depressing presentiment swept over Hammond. He would have liked to have asked the captain to turn in and let him off at Amethyst Island, but he didn’t quite dare do that.
It was the captain who interrupted his reverie. “We were talking just now about that camp sky-pilot, the Rev. Nathan Stubbs,” he reminded Hammond. “I was saying that Smith lets Ogima Bush the Medicine Man have the run of the camps because he can use him for his own purposes. Now it’s different with that preacher fellow; it’s always been known that the Big Boss won’t order any kind of a Christian preacher out of camp so long as the preacher sticks to the gospel and his own particular line of trade.”
“Is that a fact?” This to Hammond was an entirelynew side light on the character of the pulp camp superintendent.
“True as your standing there,” emphasised the skipper. “Why, all of us boat captains have standing orders that any of them chaps with their collars buttoned behind is to travel free back and forth to the camps whether they have a pass or not. It’s the same in the camp; they ain’t charged anything for grub and bunk and everybody has orders to use them polite and decent. At the same time, the Big Boss lets the preachers see they’re to steer wide of him. He has a way of doing that, you know, and the wise ones know enough not to try any of their holy groaning on a hard-boiled egg like him.
“There’s been every known kind of soul-saving genius knocking around our camps in my time; Catholic priests, highfaluting English churchers, Methodist missionaries, Salvation Army drum-beaters and the like,” continued the captain. “But I only know of one preacher who tried mixing it with Acey Smith. He was a bush-camp evangelist they called Holy Henry that used to rant to the lumber-jacks and lead them in psalm-singing all the way from the Soo up to the Rainy and the Lake of the Woods. Holy Henry was a wizened up bit of a man with big, thick glasses and mild-looking blue eyes back of them. But, Lord, man, hadn’t he a temper when he got blazing away at the devil and all his works! He’d chew up half a dozen dictionaries getting high-brow words to lambast sin and back-sliding, and he’d mix ’em up with camp slang in a way that would get the boys whether they wanted to listen to him or not. He’d ’ve been a popular guy, that preacher, if he hadn’t been so death on all the little games of chance the lumber-jack has a weakness for. That kind of gave him a black eye all over the North.
“We were taking out timber in the Dog Bay countrywhen Holy Henry paid us his visit. The North Star camps were wide open in them days; nothing was barred but wild women and promiscuous booze-running. There was every known manner of winning or losing a wad from big wheels-of-fortune, chuck-a-luck, paddle-wheels and stud poker down to nigger craps. Nobody ever interfered so long as the men were on their jobs on time and there was no knife-sticking or gun-play. Why, the whole bunch used to gulp dinner like a lot of brush-wolves just so they’d have the biggest part of their noon-hour trying their chances for easy money. Some of the lucky ones cleaned up a pile of money and some that weren’t got cleaned out even to their whole season’s wages and their packsacks. Them was roaring days!
“When this here Holy Henry hits the camps everybody got to speculating just what end of the horn he’d come out at, and of course there were some long stakes put up right on that there question, but all the big odds was on Holy Henry breaking down on the job for quits inside of two weeks. I was in charge of a river gang in them days, and I remember having a nifty side-bet that he’d get so sick of trying to break up things he’d just slip away faking a bad cold or something of that sort.
“But what happened wasn’t what any of us had figured on. The first thing that fool preacher did was to go to the super’s. office and appeal to him to put the lid on. Acey Smith looks down at the little fellow with the thick glasses and the weak eyes with that sort of good-natured curiosity you see on a big St. Bernard dog when a poodle gets in his way. ‘This ain’t any Sunday school we’re running out here, Holy Henry,’ he says, ‘and saving souls isn’t exactly in my line; but if you can throw a scare of hell-fire into this outfit of blacklegs so that they’ll thumb hymn-books instead of poker decks, go to it. That’s your particular business and I won’t put any sticks in yourway.’ Then he turns away with that little demon-grin of his and goes back to his work.
“Some of us that had big bets on the preacher quitting early thought to hurry him up by getting him peeved. So when he came out all sort of wilted-like we says to him to get his goat: ‘What you going to do about it now, Holy Henry?’
“‘I am going to pray for Brother Smith,’ he surprises us by replying. ‘I know he’s going to be on the side of the Lord.’
“That made us roar so that half of the camp heard us. ‘Brother Smith,’ mind you, he called him. We never quite got over that, but none dared to twit the super. about it. He’s mighty touchy on some things, is Acey Smith.
“All went along pretty much as per usual till Sunday came. Sunday was the red-letter gambling day at the North Star camps because the boys had full time at it with no other worries. Some of ’em used to piece the bull cooks to bring their meals to them so they wouldn’t miss a deal.
“Holy Henry had announced a morning service in a shack that had been turned over to him for that purpose, but not a man-jack turned up to it but an old Injun halfwit who’d been roped in by the Salvation Army and a one-eyed Hunkie who’d got religion at one of the weekday meetings. Holy Henry kneels down with his two-men congregation and prays silently for a few minutes. Then he went forth ‘clothed in the wrath of the Lord’ as he called it.
“And believe me, boy,thatwas some wrath. Somewhere outside he gathered up a piece of a broken handspike, and brandishing it around his head, he lands into first one camp shack and then another. He couldn’t make any mistake picking them random that way; theywere all going full tilt. He’d burst through a door and land in like a little package of greased hurricane. Out would go his foot and over would go a table, chips, cards, money and all. Then he’d swing his club within an inch of the faces of the crowd. ‘Out of here, you bleary-eyed, low-lived, pigeon-toed, white-livered disciples of Baal!’ he’d yell. ‘Out, you sin-corroded, knock-kneed, flannel-mouthed desecrators of the Lord’s Day! Out, I say, for the wrath of God Almighty is upon you!’
“Say, you’d be surprised to see how quick he cleaned up the whole works. In about two minutes he’d smashed up about a thousand dollars’ worth of slot-machines and fortune-wheels with that hand-spike club of his. The crowd at first just stood around sort of paralysed and didn’t lift a finger to stop him. There was low growls, lots of curses, and threats of ganging him, but being that he was a preacher nobody seemed ready to start things.
“Some of the lads with level heads decided to go down and get the super. to interfere and decide what was to be done with the wild-eyed preacher. Smith was reading one of them high-brow books in his office when the delegation bursts in. He didn’t say a word, just got up, slips on his mackinaw and goes out to locate the cause of the disturbance.
“Holy Henry was smashing things about in the sixth shack on his list when the Big Boss poked his head in the door with the gang crowding up at his rear.
“‘What in hell does this mean?’ the super. raps out, spearing the preacher with them wicked, snapping black eyes of his. His face was like chalk from the cold anger he was holding back.
“Holy Henry was in the act of dumping a lot of poker chips and cards into the stove. The sweat was running down his face in little creeks and his thick glasses hadgot all steamed up, which didn’t matter because he was seeing all red up to that time. But the Big Boss’s words hit him like cold chunks of ice that had been shot into his system and the pep seemed to go out of him all at once. I’d seen bigger and stronger men than Holy Henry break down like that in front of Acey Smith, and I almost began to feel sorry for this trembling little bit of whiff of a fellow with that black devil of a man towering over him.
“‘It’s the Lord’s Day,’ he stammers. ‘I was just cleaning up these—these hell parlours.’
“‘Hell parlours—hell parlours,’ echoes the super. ‘Who in blue blazes gave you a license to wreck the camp? Tell me that!’
“The little fellow looked more sorrowful than ever and he says sort of quietlike: ‘I thought you were on our side, Brother Smith; I was doing this in the name of the Lord, Jesus Christ.’
“If you ever saw a change come over the face of a man it was that that came over the super’s. He drew back like as if something had hit him, and the palms of his hands went up to his face as though he was choking. Maybe you’ve seen him do that sometimes? It’s like as if a devil inside him was trying to jump out and was strangling him.
“But next minute he walks over to the preacher and takes him by the arm. ‘Finish your job, Holy Henry,’ he says, ‘and if any one so much as lifts a finger at you, well—’
“He didn’t finish, but turns and glowers at the gawping crowd like a lion. ‘Men,’ he orders, ‘the lid’s down tight on Sunday gambling in these camps. You get that straight!’
“He said it, and that meant it was law. And it’s been law in the North Star camps ever since.
“What became of Holy Henry? Now, I don’t know. Anyway, he was only a few days in the camp after that incident. At one of his meetings he made some fool remark about the Big Boss seeing a great light suddenly like the Bible says St. Paul did. That settled him for keeps.
“The next morning Acey Smith meets the preacher and stops him. ‘Holy Henry,’ he says, ‘you’ve shot your bolt—you’re through here.’
“‘But, Brother Smith,’ expostulates the little fellow, ‘I’ve just barely started my work in the Lord’s vineyard.’
“‘You beat it out on the next tug to some other vineyard—and don’t come back!’ cuts in the Big Boss, cold as ice. ‘And listen: I’m not brother to you nor to any other man. Furthermore, I ain’t any St. Paul seeing lights; I’m just a fighting he-man who doesn’t pray to God nor the Devil either. All I ask both of them to do is to give me a sporting chance to make good at my job.
“‘You’ve got me wrong about stopping that Sunday gambling stunt,’ he continues. ‘I did that partly because I can’t help being on the side of the man who’s got the guts to back up his convictions when the whole crowd is against him. But I put the lid down mostly because it struck me it would be good policy for the North Star to make its men take a rest on Sunday. You go and pack your turkey—the next tug leaves at noon.’”
The skipper paused when he had concluded his story. After a silent moment he turned to Hammond. “Now what do you think of that for a hard-hearted speech?” he asked.
“Just sounds like Acey Smith,” responded Hammond, “and I take it that what he told Holy Henry was just about the truth about himself.”
“Probably—probably,” reiterated the captain in anabsent sort of a way as he fixed his gaze on the city wharves they were nearing. “But at the same time, I dunno. There’s a strange streak in that same Acey Smith. There’s things he’s done and does, on the quiet, that makes us older heads with the company admire him in spite of ourselves. But you can never get to know the Big Boss, no matter how long you’re around where he is. Just when you think you know him is the time he’s liable to do or say something so sudden and unexpected it will make your blood run cold. It strikes me while he’s talking to you with his tongue his mind is always busy thinking and plotting something else—thinking up plans maybe a year ahead.”
“This coming strike will likely give him lots of scope for thinking,” observed Hammond dryly.
“Oh, he won’t have so much to do with settling or breaking the strike,” declared the captain. “Them orders will come to Slack and him from their higher-ups.”
The skipper pressed a signal to the engine-room to slow down. They were swinging in to the city wharf.
Hammond alighted on the docks of Kam City and walked the streets expecting at any moment a blue-coated policeman or a plain-clothes detective would step forward and take him into custody in connection with the Gildersleeve disappearance. But no such thing happened. The very boldness of his entry must have set the sleuths of the law off guard, for at no time did he even find himself under suspicious scrutiny.
One thing at first absorbed his thoughts to the exclusion of everything else. That was the uncertainty of what might have happened to Josephine Stone. Where could she have gone from the island? The appearanceof Acey Smith in the vicinity of the island alone in his motorboat made him the more uneasy. It all brought home to him a dark thought that he had all along been trying to fight off—that Josephine Stone some way or another must be entangled in the baffling mystery of the Nannabijou Limits. But, in spite of constantly rising perplexities, he refused to think of her in bitterness or that she had in any sense been consciously deceiving him. He would not believe that a woman such as she would give her lips to a man, as she had to him, either in spirit of coquetry or to further dark intrigue.
It was possible she had merely gone away in her motorboat for a trip along the lakeshore, or she might have come over to the city for the day. But there had been a deserted look about her cottage on the island that weighed in upon Hammond—made him feel that something else had happened. Anyway, he must hustle with the affairs he had come to the city to attend to, so that he could get back to the limits and find out for certain where she had gone.
Gold lettering on a window in the second storey of a business block across the street reminded him that he had mapped out a definite program for the day and that right here was where he must make his start. The sign marked the quarters of the American consul. There he would find the little grey man, Eulas Daly, the first on his mental list of interviews. He crossed the street and sought out the consul’s office.
A tall, slim, alert-looking young man rose from his desk and genially inquired of what service he could be.
Hammond passed him his card. “Might I see Mr. Daly?”
“Mr. Daly?” repeated the other with a puzzled air.
“Yes—Mr. Eulas Daly, American consul.”
“A mere error in names, Mr. Hammond. I am theAmerican consul in charge here, but my name is Frank W. Freeman.”
“Oh, I see,” surmised Hammond. “There has been a change—Mr. Daly has been recently transferred to another post?”
“Quite a year ago, my friend,” replied Mr. Freeman definitely. “Mr. Daly was transferred to the Buenos Aires office in October of last year and I have been in charge here since then. Perhaps there’s something I could do for you?”
“At that rate, no. Thank you,” acknowledged Hammond concealing as best he could his amazement and chagrin. “It was a personal matter between myself and Mr. Daly. I have been misinformed as to his location.”
Hoaxed!
Inured as Hammond was becoming to trickery and mystification, this latest revelation brought about a poignant disappointment. It seemed the more he probed the incidents following his contract with Norman T. Gildersleeve to go to the Nannabijou Limits the more complicated things became. Every attempt he had made to get at the bottom of things had resulted in fresh bewilderment until everything appeared like a bedevilled dream. But it was no dream. Cold conviction was upon him that it was quite the contrary—that it was a series of baffling incidents promoted for a dark purpose by a sinister agency behind the scenes somewhere.
According to this latest piece of information, the man giving his name as Eulas Daly, United States consul at Kam City, and who had brought about his meeting with Norman T. Gildersleeve, was travelling under false colours. If he were really a friend of Norman T. Gildersleeve there should have been no necessity for that. The obvious conclusion then was that he was a confederate of those who had lured Gildersleeve off the train. Nodoubt it was he who framed up the mysterious message that led the millionaire to leave the coach at Moose Horn Station, for Hammond now felt certain that the note delivered while he was in consultation with the president of the International Investment Corporation was a forgery, and that Gildersleeve had either been kidnapped or had met with foul play.
Responsibility to the man who had employed him for some secret purpose that was not yet obvious demanded immediate action on his part. It would be foolhardy, he conceded, to longer attempt to fathom the mystery alone or to conceal what he knew in connection with the affair. Before he reported to the police authorities, he felt it would be wisdom to consult the principals of the Kam City Pulp and Paper Mills, who, if anybody, should be closest in touch with any new developments in the Gildersleeve mystery.
He dropped into a hotel whence he telephoned the city offices of the paper company. He was told that Artemus Duff, president and general manager, was out at the works and might not be back all afternoon. Hammond decided to go out to the works, and, as they were located at the extreme easterly limits of the city, he walked down to Front Street, which ran along the harbour, to catch a street car. He was standing at a car stop when the face of a man at the wheel of a motor car that whizzed by seemed to him to be startlingly familiar.
The motor car stopped a block up at the corner above the short street leading from the city docks. A man got out, paused a second on the walk looking down the street, then disappeared into the building on the corner.
Hammond’s first breathless impression was confirmed. The little grey man who got out of the car was the man who had introduced himself on the train as Eulas Daly, American consul.
The young man lost no time in reaching the spot. The man who had got out of the car was not in the drug store on the corner, so he must have passed in the double doors just next it and gone up the stairs. Hammond took the steps three at a bound. The first floor up was entirely occupied by law offices. On the double glass doors he read the gilt-lettered legend:—
WINCH, STANTON & REIDBarristers, Solicitors,Etc.
WINCH, STANTON & REIDBarristers, Solicitors,Etc.
He decided to make a try for his man in there. At the rail just beyond the doors he was met by a young woman.
“It is very important that I meet the gentleman who just came in,” he announced to her.
“Mr. Winch?”
“Yes—Mr. Winch.”
She took his card, passed into one of the glass-partitioned private offices and returned after what to Hammond seemed an unjustifiable delay. “Mr. Winch will see you in ten minutes,” she said. “Just take a seat, please.”
Hammond was forced to cool his heels till the girl, after responding to an office ’phone call, indicated that Mr. Winch was ready to receive him.
Hammond at last had struck the right trail. The little grey man gazing up at him from across the desk in the private office was none other than the bogus Eulas Daly. But Winch did not look the least flustered; in fact, there was the barest trace of the geniality he had worn in the role of the American consul.
“Mr. Hammond,” he opened quietly, “I have a shrewd notion what questions you have in mind to demand of me. But, before we proceed with that, will you kindly tell me why you have violated your contract with Mr.Gildersleeve by leaving the Nannabijou Limits without notification?”
“Because I’m tired up with the whole business,” exploded the young man. “Because I’m not quite ass enough to stick out there on an assignment from a man who’s dropped out of sight. And, in the next instance, I want to know from you why you—”
“Just a moment, just a moment,” insisted Mr. Winch. “We’ll come to that presently. Did you know that your leaving the limits at this particular time may seriously jeopardise the plans Mr. Gildersleeve had in mind?”
“Mr. Gildersleeve has disappeared.”
“Even so. That, however, does not prevent his associates carrying on, does it? As I understood it, you agreed with Mr. Gildersleeve to remain at the limits in the capacity he sent you until you received word to return, and he emphasised the injunction that you were to remain no matter what apparently unusual things happened. Is that not a fact, Mr. Hammond?”
It was a fact—Hammond felt the full force of it now. For the moment he was not prepared with a reply. He was in grips with one of the most brilliant cross-examiners in the north country.
“But we will let that pass for the moment,” the lawyer proceeded. “You haven’t consulted any one else in the city about this matter?”
“No, but I was on my way to look up President Duff of Kam City Pulp and Paper Mills when I dropped in here.”
“You acted very wisely in coming here first,” commended Mr. Winch. “I would urge you not to consult Mr. Duff or any others about it, and, I might add, it is of as deep concern to you as it is to us that Mr. Gildersleeve’s intimate affairs in this matter should not become public under any consideration.”
“But you haven’t told me why, when you accosted me on the train, you found it necessary to impersonate an American consul who has long since left the city,” insisted the impetuous Hammond.
A wry smile broke faintly over the lawyer’s face. “Gildersleeve was to blame for that,” he replied. “He insisted, for some reason that was never quite clear to me, that I should not disclose my real identity to you. It may have been that, in case you did not feel inclined to consider the suggestion to meet him, he did not wish you to know his legal advisor was acting as go-between. The use of Eulas Daly’s name was almost accidental. An old card of his must have by some chance got into my case. It appealed to me that for the interim the role of Eulas Daly would do as well as any other. I did not expect to see you again until this business was over with.”
This explanation did not impress Hammond favourably, but it was evident, from the matter-of-fact manner in which he related the deception, that Winch cared little how he took it.