There was unwonted stir in the Montreal head offices of the Regal Bank of Canada. Rarely in the metropolitan headquarters of the Dominion’s greatest financial institution, where the comings and goings of important personages are almost hourly occurrences, did the entrance of a visitor draw more than a hurried glance from the workers behind the polished mahogany and lacquered brass. The man who had just come through the great double doors was no ordinary type.
He seemed like a being detached from his fellows; like them but not of them, indifferent, masterful. Tall and of superb build, his close-fitting dark clothes and light fedora accentuated the pallor of his coldly-chiselled aquiline features and the blackness of his extraordinary eyes. His every item of dress—his tie with the tiny, scintillating white diamond pin, his white cuffs just peeping from the sleeves, his shoes—had a distinctive correctness. But his carriage was of the easy, confident grace of one more used to the wide spaces of the North than the over-heated drawing-rooms of the East. He evidently scorned a walking-stick, for in his long, capable-looking hands he carried only his gloves and a black travelling-bag.
Young women clerks glanced up from their tasks to stare pensively at the stranger. Young men bit enviously at their nether lips as they mentally conceded thephysical perfection of the visitor. There were whisperedasides. It seemed he was not altogether unknown among the older members of the staff.
The newcomer went direct to the quarters of the bank’s president. In the outer office the president’s secretary rose deferentially and opened the door to the inner sanctum. “Sir David will see you at once, Mr. Smith,” he announced.
A lean grey man with alert grey eyes and a drooping grey moustache arose and proffered his hand across the glass-topped desk. “We received your wire and were expecting you, Mr. Smith.”
“I was glad to find you were not out of town, Sir David,” returned the other, “for the matter I wish to see you about is rather pressing and important.”
“When you favour us with one of your rare personal calls it usually is so,” smilingly reminded the banker.
“This time, nevertheless,” insisted Acey Smith, “it may prove more than an ordinary surprise for you.”
And an hour and a half later when Sir David Edwards-Jones, president of the Regal Bank of Canada, had gone over the papers and documents in the black grip with Acey Smith and their business interview was ended, the perplexity that sat upon his usually imperturbable features was proof of the other’s prediction.
“Your wishes shall be carried out to the letter, Mr. Smith,” he promised. “The legality of the transaction cannot be questioned. Your financial stewardship of the affairs of the other party has been scrupulously above any criticism and we nor any other concerned have any option but to be guided by your commands.
“I confess,” he added with a puzzled smile, “that the methods of your company have always baffled me; this time, however, I cannot for the life of me see what is behind the North Star’s strategy.”
“This time,” enlightened Acey Smith as he bade Sir David good-bye, “there is no strategy behind the North Star’s methods.”
Acey Smith had barely left the president’s office when a stout, florid-faced man who had been waiting outside was ushered in.
“By the way, Sir David,” he asked closing the door, “who is that extraordinary looking chap who just left this office?”
“Who is he?” echoed Sir David Edwards-Jones rather abstractedly. “He’s a lumberman from the Northwest. But, Dennison, he is also one of the most remarkable, most inscrutable men in the whole Dominion of Canada.”
Which statement, vague as it was, contained as much information as can usually be drawn from great bankers relative to their customers.
On the afternoon of the memorable Monday, October 16, one week previous to the date at which the Kam City Pulp and Paper Mills was under agreement with the government to be in full operation manufacturing newsprint from the pulpwood boomed at Nannabijou Limits or lose their cutting rights on the North Shore, Norman T. Gildersleeve, president of the International Investment Corporation, parent of the Kam City Company, was pacing the docks at the limits and cursing the haste that had brought him out to such a monotonous place a day before it was necessary.
The tugs which he had wired for from Duluth would not now likely reach the limits until the following day, and, with all the indications of rough weather that were apparent, they might be later still. As a matter of fact—and Gildersleeve was quite cognizant ofthat fact-the United States tugs dare not touch a pole in the booms without the North Star’s permission until such time as Ontario government authority intervened in the strike and approved of the use of the foreign tugs as an emergency. But Gildersleeve considered himself a master of the gambler’s game of bluff. He had taken every means of stimulating quick government action by means of what he called “hot grounders” over the wires to the premier and members of his cabinet in Toronto. The presence of the fleet of American tugs, ready to pitch into the work of transporting the poles, he calculated, would take the heart out of the North Star Company. If it didn’t—well, he’d have those tugs in readiness and he’d sue the North Star for the expense of bringing them over.
Whatever his reflections on the matter may have been on that windy afternoon, his pacing suddenly came to an abrupt stop as he caught, out of the corner of an eye, a dark object rising and falling in the seas to the west. He peered fixedly as it topped the next wave. Sure enough, it was a tug—but it was not coming from the direction of Duluth.
Others came running down to the docks from divers directions to gaze upon it with excited comment and conjecture. There had not been a tug at the dock in days; not since the strike had been called.
The great craft lifted valiantly against the flailing seas until its plume, its stack and the dark hulk of its high forward freeboard were plainly discernible. It whistled with what seemed a jubilant note before it rounded into the gap of the bay.
Gildersleeve started in pure amazement. On its smokestack and in the centre of the sinister little blue-black flag at its bow were the fiery-red, five-pointed stars that designated the North Star fleet.
“The strike is over!”
It went up a yell from the rabble on the docks. It was answered with a shout from the men crowded on the bow of the tug. Lumberjacks came pouring down from the camp and the woods everywhere. There was the electric tension in the air that obtains when man-packs sense that magic monster known as News.
The crowd yelled and the tug’s siren screamed.
“Hurr-r-rah for the Big Boss—he settled it!”
“Hurr-r-rah for A-c-e-y Smith!”
And with the slogan went up a shout that shook the woods. Bucksaw men, axe men and river men danced ridiculous capers on the landing, jostling against each other and firing their woollen caps high in air. It was an ovation such as the demagogue, Slack, would have pawned his soul for—a tribute from pent up spirits who, in their hearts of hearts, had steadfastly believed when the worst came to the worst the Big Boss would range himself on the side of his men. So much for what they call personal magnetism.
The excitement died down somewhat when it was discovered that the master of the Nannabijou camps was not on board. Had he been, his first utterance no doubt would have been to pass the honours for settling the strike to Hon. J. J. Slack, M.P., president of the North Star.
In the crowd leaving the tug’s gang-plank Gildersleeve glimpsed the short, corpulent figure of Artemus Duff, president of the Kam City Pulp and Paper Mills, hurrying toward him. Duff looked a bit mussed up from the trip over, but his round, fat face was beaming.
Duff came forward and grasped the extended hand of Gildersleeve. “Thought I’d run over and be first to break the good news to you, Norman,” he puffed. “The North Star gang had to come to their oats.”
“So I see,” observed Gildersleeve. “Did you get any of the inside particulars, Duff?”
“No, not a great deal. Slack made the announcement to the tugmen that the company would meet their demands if they would immediately return to their boats, and followed up with a windy speech about his own efforts in their behalf. Guess he received his orders from the big fellows that own him body and soul.”
“They saw at last that their cake was dough,” commented Gildersleeve quietly. “They could not have held out much longer with their obvious trickery, for to-morrow would have seen a fiat issued from the attorney-general’s department enjoining the North Star to make immediate settlement of the strike and delivery of the poles. Oh, by the way, Duff, did you think to wire Duluth cancelling the order for those tugs?”
“Winch looked after that,” informed the other.
“Good. I only hope the wire arrived before the fleet set out. Gad, Duff, this was a master stroke of ours,” he spoke up emphatically. “I’ve nailed the North Star’s hide on the door inside out. It’s the beginning of the end for that iniquitous gang of commercial cut-throats. Few people realise that the culmination of this strike and the subsequent delivery of those poles in the bay yonder writes the final chapter in dark history that goes back to the beginning of things on this North Shore. Once our mills at Kam City are in full operation, with sufficient poles piled in the yards to keep them running six months, we will have completed our covenant with thegovernment. Then watch me crush the North Star and all its brazen subsidiaries!”
Gildersleeve paused in his pacing, proffered Duff a cigar and lit one himself. He struck a Napoleonic attitude as he swept his arm from south to north. “All this North Shore and its great potential wealth will soon again be under my absolute domination,” he predicted. “With this limits and the mills we will soon reduce the North Star’s power and prestige to a point where they will be glad to surrender their lake fleet and equipment for their price as junk. Their costly mill without machinery will help to sink them and sink them fast. Nothing now can prevent our complete victory.”
Duff rolled his unlighted cigar to the other side of his mouth and chuckled effusively. “They let their men go out on strike just a few days too soon to catch us unawares,” he commented sagely.
“Their strike was a joke,” sneered the president of the International Investment Corporation. “There isn’t a doubt now that they precipitated it with a view to keeping every tug tied up until after our contract time for having the mills running. The rest of their plot was obvious: Once the government had nullified our coming rights on these limits the North Star would come into re-possession of them automatically. Then, with no raw product to draw from, we would have been forced to sell our mill equipment to them at their own price and our mill building would remain a vast white elephant. We slipped a big one over on them when I put through the deal that took away the machinery they had on order. That’s why they were so keen on getting us into a corner where we’d have to let them have that same machinery for a song. The North Star’s middle name is Revenge—and now they are going to get their bellyful of it.”
“And this strike was the trump card they kept hidden up their sleeve all summer,” amended Duff.
“Sure it was. But it was a mighty crude piece of work, and I wouldn’t be surprised if your oily friend, J. J. Slack, loses his high-salaried job over the head of it.” Gildersleeve smiled grimly at the prospect. “You see, the North Star evidently figured on a long-drawn arbitration that would keep the strike hanging fire until the time was up for delivery of the poles. They were depending on Slack’s prestige in politics being powerful enough to prevent the provincial authorities from forcing the issue. It was all a dismal failure, and I’d give much to see the Honourable Slack’s face one week from to-day when the Kam City Pulp and Paper Mills has its official opening with members of the provincial cabinet present as our official guests.”
A perplexed shadow crossed Duff’s face. “Come to think of it, Slack didn’t seem much upset about it this afternoon,” he suggested dubiously. “In fact, he really acted as though the North Star had gained a victory instead of us.”
“Slack’s shallow brain doesn’t fully comprehend what it all means,” waived Gildersleeve. “All he sees is the peanut politics—the prestige the settlement of the strike will give him with the labour vote. It is A. C. Smith, superintendent of these camps, and the only member of the North Star executive in personal touch with the outfit who finance the company, who will give him an uncomfortable hour over the clumsy failure that’s been made of this piece of trickery. Smith’s the slippery eel of this concern I intend to land in the net once we’ve turned the North Star inside out. Once we’ve got the upper hand on the North Shore we will wield the political whip with a commission of inquiry that will expose the North Star and force them to a show-down.”
“Be careful,” cautioned Duff looking furtively behind him along the dock. “One can’t tell around here—”
“Shucks, man, there’s nothing to fear now; I’ve trimmed the claws of the North Star and they’re powerless even if they did know the hand we’re about to play.” Gildersleeve lowered his voice: “Right now I’ve got a man ferreting out their secret layout up in the hills over there. But I’ll tell you about that after we go up to our shack. Come let’s go over and drop in on Inspector Little.”
Reference to the settlement of the strike, to the surprise of Gildersleeve and Duff, brought no elation into the face of the police inspector. He merely continued to drum lightly on the little table with a bit of amethyst rock he was using as a paper weight. When he spoke his brows were puckered and he kept his eyes centred on the table. “I’m not at all satisfied with things,” he complained. “We are out here to do our duty as we find it, but”—and he looked straight up into the eyes of Gildersleeve when he said it—“but I’ve a bit of a hunch that one or the other of the two companies interested in the operations on these limits is not playing square with us.”
Gildersleeve started. “Just what do you mean, Inspector?” he demanded.
“I mean that underhand work has been going on here since the day we arrived and that it could not continue as it has without the cognizance and backing of some one in authority.”
“It was at our instigation the police were brought out here,” insisted Gildersleeve. “It’s scarcely likely we would ask you to guard the property we are interested in and then set about deliberately double-crossing you.”
“No.” Colourlessly. “But you were not the first toask for police protection. A day before your request went in President Slack, of the North Star Company, wired to Ottawa for Mounted Police protection at the limits in case the strike materialised. Both companies seemed intensely anxious to have our assistance; that’s why subsequent events rather puzzle me.”
“What subsequent events in particular do you refer to, Inspector?”
“Well, to begin with there was the abduction of that young lady living on Amethyst Island, the arrest of the fake camp preacher, Nathan Stubbs, and the latter’s jumping his bail and disappearance. Now, some one with plenty of funds was interested enough to forfeit one thousand dollars in order to get Stubbs out of the clutches of the law. Mind you, I’m not saying it was either of the companies, but it was some party vitally interested in what is going on out here, and one or the other of the companies must know who.”
Duff shuffled and coughed and took a fresh tooth-hold on his mangled dead cigar. Gildersleeve’s face remained a complete mask. “I’m sure we haven’t the slightest idea,” he observed with guileless indifference.
“Some oneundoubtedly has,” emphasised the inspector. “Furthermore, Stubbs must be quite confident of his backing, else he wouldn’t have the nerve to return to the limits in broad daylight.”
Gildersleeve almost jumped to his feet at that. “Stubbs back here,” he cried. “Impossible!”
“He was seen less than an hour ago back in the hills by some of our men out looking for the missing girl.”
Gildersleeve gave the inspector a glance that questioned his sanity. It was Duff who spoke first. “Did they get him?” he breathed.
“No, he disappeared in the bush as silently and completely as a timber wolf.” The inspector bent his eyessearchingly on Gildersleeve. “He was playing theother rôlethis time.”
“The other rôle?” The puzzled look on Gildersleeve’s face looked almost genuine to the police officer.
“Yes, that of Ogima Bush, the Medicine Man—the same disguise he wore the morning he and his gang abducted Miss Stone.”
“That’s all wrong—all pure piffle!” exploded Gildersleeve.
“Why do you say that?” Quietly.
“Because—because, damn it, man, that camp preacher could never have played the role of the Medicine Man.”
“They are one and the same man.”
“They are not, I tell you!”
The police inspector leaned forward, his eyes fixing those of the financier like steely points of light. “If you can furnish proof of that statement, Mr. Gildersleeve,” he said at last, “it would be very useful information for the police.”
Gildersleeve tightened up in a hurry. “Oh, I have nothing in the way of proof,” he laughed easily. “It was merely a conviction.”
“There’s a vast difference,” coldly observed Inspector Little. “A vast difference, Mr. Gildersleeve. Nevertheless, your assertion provides the germ of a new theory.”
He did not add as the pulp mill men were leaving his tent that that same new theory presented a worse tangle than the old one.
“Stubbs the camp preacher had two enamelled patches covered with talc powder under his eyes; Ogima Bush the Medicine Man has two red gashes under his and this man Gildersleeve has two tiny white scars in the same places.” Those observations kept recurring stubbornly in the inspector’s mind. “I wonder,” he mused, “if this part of the North Shore isn’t really under a hoo-doo asthe Indians say it is—or, amIgetting old and losing my grip?”
Gildersleeve cautiously refrained from uttering what was on his mind as he and Duff wended their way up to their quarters in one of the smaller log shacks the former had rented during his stay on the limits.
At the door, Gildersleeve paused to scan the lake and the sky. “Gad, it looks as though we are in for some bad weather, Duff,” he observed ominously.
“You kin bank on that, Mister,” offered a grizzled lumberjack who stopped in passing. “Win’s been a-blowin’ outen one spot all day—an’ when the win’ don’t follow the sun round on of Lake Supe’ you kin look out fer high-jinks in the weather line afore monin’.”
Thesun went down that evening on a weird northern world. The wind, which had been pressing out of the east all day, had dropped as at some elemental sunset signal; but the great lake, lashed to fury, raced by windrow upon windrow of long, curling “shanty” waves—the terrible seas for which Superior in its wrath is peculiar. Three “mock suns” stood in vertical alignment above the declining orb of day, and the air was filled with a ghostly, brassy light that tinted the wild hills, the forests and the raging sea with its exotic saffron glow.
Nannabijou camp, aglare in the unreal light, its windows flashing like blood-red jewels, stood out against the setting of the sombre mountain ranges like a fantastic painting on the canvas of some mad master. Above the southeastern horizon hung a lowering blackness that presaged the hurricane to come, while up from a hundred lonely bays along the rocky North Shore the flailing waves sent up a thunderous, pounding roar.
From a plateau on Nannabijou Mountain above the beaver dam lake on Solomon Creek, a figure that seemed thegenius lociof the fearsome night looked out upon these things. His was a face of evil cunning, dusky almost to blackness except where two red gashes stood out under the black eyes—eyes which alone of all his sinister countenance seemed alive and human. He wore nocovering over his long straight black hair save a band of purple which held in place a single eagle’s feather at the back of his head. Round his neck were hung many strings of glistening wolves’ teeth.
Behind the Indian magician were ranged four headmen of the Objibiways, as motionless as he, faces to the setting sun.
For moments they stood thus like statues of bronze, until a lake gull, wheeling with a shrill scream inland, swooped close to their heads. The Medicine Man turned, his gaze sweeping Nannabijou Bay where the great booms of poles lay secure from the assaults of the seas, took in the waterfront where the patrols of police paced back and forward, and travelled to the blackness of the coming storm.
Suddenly he raised his arms aloft and his lips gave utterance to a strange, guttural incantation in which his companions joined—a lugubrious sing-song in the Objibiway tongue. It ended with a leaping, whirling sort of dance. The witch doctor flung out a hand and from it there flew a short cylindrical object that sang through the air like a spent bullet and dropped with a soft “plop” far out in the little lake.
In that cylinder was wrapped the Great Medicine of the North—a charm which once used, the pagan tribes believe, insures the success of any project no matter how beset with difficulties and dangers.
At a low grunting command from the Medicine Man the Indians turned and silently melted into the murk of the forest. And, as they did so, there swept up from the woods a long-drawn, frightful cry that carried far and wide above the surf roar from below.
It was not the call of a timber wolf nor of other beast of the wilderness. In its swiftly rising and fallingcadences it was half laughter, half wail; a curious and awesome blending of mockery and lamentations.
The rim of the setting sun flicked out in the gash of the western cloud-banks and starless night dropped over the troubled waters and the sighing woods.
The tempest broke over Nannabijou camp in shrieking fury between seven and eight o’clock out of a night of stygian blackness. It came a great gust that screamed and skirled overhead like legions of the damned on a terrestrial rampage. Tents of the Mounties along the waterfront were overthrown by the first blast and pressed flat as before the smash of a giant’s hand. Great trees were bent and twisted until they turned over at the roots or broke at the base like matches.
The rain was flung down with the wind in great drenching splashes that beat through crevices of the windows and doors of the camp buildings in hissing jets of spray. Every path and roadway into the hills was transformed into a miniature torrent racing down to the bay.
It was a night such as mocks the courage of the stouthearted and sends the wonder-fright of children into the beings of men. Every living thing in the camp scuttled to the most convenient shelter, except the patrolling policemen, who maintained their beats like fantastic wraiths of the storm the while their searchlights played feebly into the murk and downpour over the field of pulpwood booms in the bay.
Secure in a stout log cabin, Norman T. Gildersleeve and Artemus Duff sat by a roaring fire in a sheet-iron Queen heater. Duff, twisting his inevitable dead cigar from corner to corner of his mouth, was obviously trying to conceal the nervousness that was upon him. At eachsucceeding blast of the storm, which seemed to swoop down upon the cabin like a demon bent on pressing it into the face of the earth, and at the intermittent crash of falling timber, he would half start from his chair, his fat cheeks blanching with terror and his chubby knees quaking. Gildersleeve, whose early life had inured him to the savage moods of the North, sat silent, imperturbable, as though engrossed with some irrelevant problem.
Suddenly the millionaire, like one awaking from a doze, straightened in his chair and lit a fresh cigar. “Gad, what a night, Duff,” he mused. “What a hell of a night.” He glanced at his watch. “I wonder what in blazes has become of my man, Lynch?”
“If he’s up there—in this—” Duff waved excitedly in the direction of the hills. “If he’s up there—he’s likely got his—by now.”
“The confounded idiot!” stormed Gildersleeve with unfeeling heat. “He ought to have had sense enough to get out of the timber when he saw what was coming. Even a child would know enough to do that.”
“Maybe when he saw it coming he decided to stay in some safe place until it was over.”
“No—not Lynch. He’s scared plain stiff of the bush at night. For a detective who’s done dirty, risky jobs all over the country he’s the veriest coward in the woods after nightfall. He’d sneak into a king’s bed chamber and steal his private papers for a ten-dollar bill, but he wouldn’t go into the big timber after sun-down for a million.”
“Then—what do you think—could have happened to him?” Duff was glad of any diversion, gruesome or otherwise, that might take his thoughts off the raging of the storm outside.
“It’s hard to say, Duff.” Gildersleeve got up and paced the floor. “He must have met with some accident;twisted an ankle in the windfalls, fallen over a cliff, or else—well, it’s hard to say—”
He stopped in his tracks as a scraping thud resounded at the cabin door.
Duff lurched to his feet as the door sprang open and the bedraggled figure of a man thrust itself across the threshold accompanied by a welter of flying rain that spattered across the floor to the wall beyond.
“Lynch!” gasped Gildersleeve.
“That’s me—least—what’s left—of me,” asserted the newcomer between panting gasps as he crowded the door shut.
He was a wiry-looking little man with a face like a rat; beady eyes back of an insignificant nose, high upper lip and receding chin. He immediately proceeded to divest himself of his reefer and boots and stood up a-drip and steaming by the sheet-iron stove.
“That’s right, Lynch,” approved Gildersleeve, “let your clothes dry on you, and you won’t catch cold. Here, have a bolt of Scotch.” He poured out a stout bracer from a silver pocket-flask into a metal cup and handed it to Lynch who downed it neat at a gulp, his beady eyes glittering. “There,” said Gildersleeve, “that’ll make a new man of you, Lynch. How is it you didn’t strike out for camp before it got dark and the storm came up?”
“Got lost,” explained Lynch. “Didn’t notice it was getting late until it was near sun-down. Tried to make a short cut through the bush to the creek and lost my bearings in that rotten mess. Couldn’t see the sun or a blessed thing to guide me out. Struggled in all kinds of circles through windfalls breast-high and every time I’d stop for breath I’d hear sneaking sounds all round me like things watching for me to fall so they could jump me while I was down.
“Then—then—I heard a horrible yell. No, it wasn’ta yell either; it was like wailing and laughing all mixed up. It made my blood run cold. I can hear it yet.
“Ugh!” He shuddered. “I don’t know which was the worst—floundering round in the windfalls or coming down the trail in the hurricane with deadfalls smashing down in the wind everywhere. I nearly got mine with falling timber a dozen times, and every ten steps or so I’d go flying on my face in the muck. I wouldn’t go through it again for a hundred thousand.”
“But you’re safe—it’s all over now,” reminded Gildersleeve handing the detective a cigar. “The question is did you find out anything worth while?”
“I found out something that ought to be worth a whole lot.”
“Good!” urged Gildersleeve. “I told you there was a fifty-dollar bonus in it if you got a line on the North Star’s secret layout and their wireless plant up there. That promise holds.”
“I don’t know what’s up in that devilish place,” remarked Lynch, “but I did find out how they get in and out of the Cup of Nannabijou.”
“What!” Both Gildersleeve and Duff were tense. “It’s a creek-bed that dries up when you touch a button.”
His companions stared blankly as though he had suddenly gone crazy.
“S’help me,” insisted Lynch, “that’s just what it is. I found it out by pure accident. Was poking around in a sort of tunnel that opens out on the rapids of the creek when my foot caught in something, and, in trying to stop myself from falling, I swung up a hand against a piece of rock jutting from the wall. In my businessI keep my fingers as sensitive as a combination lock expert. I guess if it hadn’t been for that I wouldn’t have felt that little round hole in the rock. I got out my pocket-flash and examined it. It was only about the size of a nail, drilled into the rock about an inch and a half. I could see then that that knob of rock had been cleverly cemented into a hole in the wall. ‘A’ha,’ thinks I, ‘this is a spring that opens some secret entrance through the rock.’ I wasn’t at all expecting what it really turned out to be. So I gets a match, inserts it in the hole and presses down on it just to see what would happen.
“There was a flash like lightning, and a queer, soft sound like a gong came from up above somewhere. Then in a minute it seemed to me the creek rapids just down the tunnel got awful quiet.
“I went down to investigate, and sure enough there was no water running down, and if it hadn’t been for the wet at the bottom and sides of the channel I wouldn’t have believed there ever had been. I slipped back and pressed the match against the concealed button again. The bell rang and almost right away the water came roaring down like it was before. Now I think that was pretty good scouting for one day.”
“You didn’t try going up the creek bottom to see where it led to,” Gildersleeve pressed him.
“Not much. I up and beat it. Something mighty queer about it all that sort of got my goat, and besides I was scared that bell ringing would bring some one round that might use me rough. I didn’t know it had got so late until I was out in the daylight again.”
“So that’s it,” mused Gildersleeve, “that’s how they get up into the Cup. Well, to-morrow we’ll—” He strode over and stood staring at the circular draft-vent of the little stove.
What he might have said was left unfinished for therecame a great crash above the howlings of the storm that made the earth shudder. It was followed by a continuous pounding thunder that grew louder and louder as though the tops had slid from the mountains and were crashing down to the lake. Nearer and more formidable it grew, setting the building a-quiver at each succeeding smash until it seemed to sweep into and through the very heart of the camp.
The three men stood speechless and aghast, staring into each other’s terror-smitten countenances.
Gildersleeve was the first to move. With an inarticulate cry he flung open the door and leaped into the night.
Outside all was pandemonium. With the advent of the new terror the storm had subsided considerably, though rain was still pouring down. Men awakened from their sleep were rushing everywhere through the wet and darkness. There were hysterical shouts and coarse, ugly curses. In another moment scores of lanterns gleamed blearily in the murk and the search-lights of the police sent shafts of light playing up from the waterfront.
Twenty-five feet from the river Gildersleeve found the Mounties holding back the crowd with hoarse commands, their carbines held crosswise before them.
Conjecture ran rife. “Cloud-burst in the hills,” some one cried. And another: “Look, look, the Nannabijou River’s roarin’ full to the top of the banks!”
“The bridge is going!”
There came the wail of great timbers as they were twisted and torn from their places. As Gildersleeve’s eyes became more adjusted to the dim, uncertain light, he saw that the torrent rode almost to the brim of the high banks of the Nannabijou, fully thirty feet above thestream’s normal level. In mad succession on its crest swirled logs, stumps, whole trees and other debris from the hills.
It was a terrifying, majestic sight, this great river moving out like an all-conquering, irresistible host, and carrying captive the things that stood in the way of its might as it swept from the confining hills to the freedom of the lake.
From beyond the mouth of the river, above the din of the storm and the freshet in the hills came a sibilant hissing sound like that when waves break over jagged reefs, only this was intensified a hundred-fold.
Shafts of light from the search-lights were flung over the bay.
“The booms are going out!”
Gildersleeve stood fascinated, dumb before the inevitable. The gorged river flinging itself out into the bay swept over the field of pulpwood an ever-widening tidal wave; then the poles rose through the boiling flood, heaving flat for one instant and the next rolled forward in great jams that again held until the invading torrent, gathering head, swept them before it in tossing, grinding masses.
The unequal struggle lasted but a few brief seconds. Then when the connecting links of the boom timbers beyond gave way the whole field of pulpwood sprang forward with a mighty, grinding roar and crowded out of the bay into the raging lake beyond where wind and wave carried it off in howling triumph.
In less time than it takes to tell the magnificent field, comprising thousands of cords of wood ready for grinding, had vanished all but an insignificant remnant the backwash had flung up on the shores of the bay.
The torrent in the river was gradually subsiding now, but still the crowd hung about in the drenching rain.
“What do you think caused it!” some one who had just come up asked of a little knot near Gildersleeve.
“Cloud-burst in the hills most likely,” vouchsafed one of the group.
“Cloud-burst nothing,” derided another. “I could tell you just what happened: The beaver-dam in Solomon Creek has busted and let that lake of water behind it loose.”
“Anyway, it will make more work for the workers,” piped a loose-tongued disciple of Lenin. “We’ll be kept busy salvagin’ them poles up along the shore till the freeze-up comes and all next spring. The North Star won’t let all that good timber go to waste.”
“Salvage!”
The word rang in the brain of Norman T. Gildersleeve like a clang of doom. It meant—it meant that those poles could now never be recovered in time to start the Kam City Mills on the date set by the government.
The crowd was thinning out, but Gildersleeve, soaked to the skin, stood as one in a daze till a police officer came up.
“Costly night’s damage for the North Star Company, sir,” he remarked gravely.
Norman T. Gildersleeve made a strange noise in his throat but no more coherent answer as he stood staring into the blackness over the lake.
“But then they say that timber can be salvaged in due time,” suggested the friendly officer.
“Salvaged—in due time,” echoed the financier vacantly. Then to the policeman’s amazement he let loose a torrent of bitter curses and flung his arms about like a madman.
Back at the cabin Duff and Lynch ceased their chatter about the disaster at sight of Gildersleeve’s grim, ghastly face. In silence he made preparations to retire.
Just before he blew out the light, Lynch approached Gildersleeve’s bunk. “Will we be going up into the hills to look over that secret passageway in the morning?” he asked tactlessly.
“You can go where you damned well please—to hell and back, if you like,” came the snarling retort. “Any place will suit me to-morrow—any place outside this cursed country.”
But while Gildersleeve cursed the north country, as others who have failed to conquer its moods and its tremendous difficulties have cursed it, he sensed in this last disaster the hand of an agency that was not the elements—an inscrutable, sinister agency that had thwarted, blocked and bankrupted his projects on the North Shore for two decades—an agency that, however exotic the idea might seem, had in its destructive designs the coordination of the tempest.
As he tossed sleepless between the grey blankets his thoughts kept converging on something Lynch had given utterance to in the story of his flight down Nannabijou Mountain—something that faintly but insistently brought up black memories out of his early youth. He tried to think of other things, to laugh it away as a foolish bit of imagination. It was no use—the face of a youth rose before his tortured eyes, a face handsome and boyish, but very dark of skin. It was the eyes in that face—those terrible, great black eyes where he saw mirrored in turn entreaty, despair—then black, black hate.
“Alexander!”
Gildersleeve breathed it in wretched entreaty. Hishands involuntarily went upwards as he felt a stinging smash first under the right eye, next under the left. The points where the two tiny scars were stung like fire.
Then he heard. . . . Great God, he heard out in the night somewhere a cry that made his soul quake.
Gildersleeve sprang from his bunk. With hands that trembled he lit the lamp and shook Lynch into wakefulness.
“Lynch,” he demanded, “that cry you heard up in the hills when you were coming down—just what was it like?”
The detective sat up blinking. “I’m not likely ever to forget it, Mr. Gildersleeve,” he replied. “It was a howl that was half laughter, half wail—like the cry of a loon.”
Gildersleeve started back a-tremble. “And—and did you see anything, Lynch?”
“S’help me the only living thing I saw I didn’t want to tell you of before—you wouldn’t believe it. As heaven is my judge, the thing that gave that terrible crywas in the shape of a man.”
“That’s all I wanted to know, Lynch.”
Gildersleeve stumbled back to his bunk leaving the light burning. Between teeth that chattered he mumbled to himself:—
“The cry of a loon—from a man. At last—at last, I understand.”
Josephine Stonewas seated in the library of the chateau up in the Cup of Nannabijou after the zenith of the storm had passed that night. Earlier in the evening she and Mrs. Johnson with some apprehension had watched the storm coming up, but it broke with much less violence there than it did down on the waterfront, the high cliffs of the Cup effectually diverting the fury of the tempest, whose roar they could hear in the upper air while the rain came down in torrents. Mrs. Johnson, who was invariably up before the sun, retired early, but Miss Stone did not feel that she could compose herself for sleep. Since childhood high winds had always made her restless and nervous.
She had been sitting in her room reading a book she had brought up from the library. An hour had passed, when, above the lash of the driving rain, she was certain she heard the rumble of voices outside; then the opening and closing of a door in the building adjacent where the wireless station was located. Some of the Indians who looked after the place slept there, but she was sure they could not be up and about unless something unusual had happened. They invariably went to their slumbers and were not seen or heard from after sundown.
Josephine Stone got up and going to the window cautiously lifted a corner of the drawn blind. A light shone in the wireless building, but she could see nothing ofwhat was going on inside. The nervousness that was upon her precluded sleep and it was becoming too chilly to sit up in her room. She thought of going down to the library and building a wood fire in the huge fireplace. That would possibly cheer her up, she felt.
But when the fire was leaping high and crackling loudly she still felt the need of something to occupy her mind. There was an eerie, insistent personality to the library. Its high, small-paned French windows were heavily-curtained, and its furniture, of a substantial design several decades old, was upholstered in the same sombre brown tone that characterised the curtains and the great deep-piled rug that occupied the entire floor space. Curtained wall-shelves and ancient, glass-doored cases were crowded with leather-bound volumes of a heterogeneous variety as well as departmental government books in blue paper covers. There were several tiers of the classics, dog-eared and much thumb-worn, but the majority of the books were devoted to science, psychology, mineralogy and forestry. None of the books contained a name to designate to whom they belonged, though many of the older ones had fly-leaves torn from them that bespoke some one’s precaution against identification.
The girl, tiring of rummaging through the books, turned her attention to the square, black mahogany piano across one corner of the room, wondering vaguely what might be the history of this strange place, what story these walls might tell if they could speak. It was a quaint old instrument with a wonderfully mellow tone. Some cultured person must have at some time occupied this chateau, some one of a distinctly scientific turn, she reflected. Who were they and what had become of them? She shivered involuntarily. Was it fancy, or did she sense a silent, unseen presence in this room?
She ran her lithe fingers over the keys and struck upa popular air from memory. The music seemed to dissipate her oppression and lift the heavy melancholy of her surroundings.
The girl played on and on, until wearying of memory selections, she thought to look over a sheaf of music on the back of the instrument. During the pause she was sure she heard a light tapping at the door off the hall to her left.
She listened, at first quite startled; but when the tapping was repeated, something human and deferential in the summons reassured her.
Josephine Stone switched on the hall light, opened the door leading to the porch and drew back with a startled exclamation.
“Mr. Smith!”
But it was no longer fright that was upon her. Something was so daringly appropriate in his appearance, so grotesque on the part of the picturesque master of Nannabijou camps that she had to smile in spite of herself. She had never seen him thus garbed before; quite debonaire and at ease in a dark, tailored suit and the habiliments of a man of fashion—a handsome, compelling type, faultlessly groomed from his close-cropped, crisp black hair and clean-shaven face to the tips of his fine black shoes. Even his flicker of a smile, which usually had something grim and sinister in it, now radiated goodwill in its becoming elegance. Frank admiration shone in the lustre of his great black eyes.
He was bowing graciously, hat in hand. “I heard you playing,” he said, “and I could not resist the temptation of looking in a moment.”
She stood to one side holding the door for him. “Thenyou invited yourself over; I suppose I must let you come in.”
She knew it was not the proper thing at this hour, but then Josephine Stone was an unusual girl who had a ready confidence in herself. What she meant to do was to demand of him why she was being held a prisoner here—why she had been forcibly carried off from Amethyst Island by his band of Indians.
He accompanied her to the library. There she turned upon him, her whole demeanour intensely frigid. “Now then,” she demanded, “I want you to tell me what all this means! Why have I been brought to this place against my will by your gang of cut-throats?”
She had meant to be acid, but there was that in his bantering smile that disarmed her, made her impotent to find the words that would humiliate him.
“No—not to-night,” he declined. “It would take too long. To-morrow I will come to explain everything to you; then you may condemn me, excoriate me at your will. For these few rare moments to-night let us—just be friends.”
“You choose rather unconventional hours for your friendly calls, Mr. Smith.”
He laughed outright at the scornful thrust, a ringing, boyish laugh, totally unlike the sterner man she had known. “Perhaps you are right,” he conceded, “but beggars can’t be choosers, you know. I came in the first place because of the storm. I thought you might be nervous.”
“And you came to entertain.” Her glance travelled unconsciously to his clothing.
“I’m glad if I add to the gaiety of nations,” he offered whimsically, “but my other clothing got soaked in the downpour coming here and these city decorations were the only things I had by that were dry. Catering to awhim over the success of certain ventures, I put them on as a sort of celebration. Then I saw your light over here and heard you playing, and I thought I’d step over and see if everything was all right.”
“All dressed up and you simply had to have some place to go,” flashed Josephine Stone, but in a better nature that he made contagious.
“Likely that was it. Even in the bush people are vain once in awhile.”
“But since you came to entertain and not to explain, Mr. Smith, wouldn’t it have been really thoughtful to have brought along your Indian friend, Ogima Bush?”
“That might have proved quite difficult. Did you find Ogima entertaining?”
“In a Satanic way, yes. He has at least one virtue.”
“Yes?”
“Consistency. He has no fickle moods; he is always just what he is—a savage.”
That subtle thrust, she saw, went under the skin. “That’s because you don’t know Ogima,” he observed gravely. “He is faithful to his friends and he has the rare quality of being sincere. Yes, and he is consistent. With the exception of those artificial red gashes under his eyes, Ogima is one hundred per cent. what he appears to be.
“But come,” he urged with an apparent desire to change the subject, “aren’t you going to play for me?”
She shook her head. A spirit of contrariness prompted her to tantalise him, to make this audacious, dandified czar of the big timber feel ill at ease.
“I had taken it for grantedIwas to be entertained,” she insisted, smiling in spite of herself at the conceit of the tiny, scintillating white diamond in his tie.
But even in his present playful mood Acey Smith had his nimble wits with him. “To-morrow is yourbirthday,” he observed irrelevantly, his flashing black orbs resting on hers momentarily. “You will be twenty-one and have reached a woman’s estate.”
It was she who was caught perplexed. “How—how did you know that?” she cried.
“The proverbial little bird must have been tattling to me. At any rate, it just now struck me that this being the eve of so important an anniversary your slightest whim should be gratified.”
“Meaning what?” She was trying hard to feign indifference.
“That I must entertain you as you have insisted.”
She watched him stride across the room. She thought at first he was going to the piano; instead he leant over the back of the instrument and brought up a black case from which he extracted a violin and bow.
“Now, what shall it be?” he asked with the bow poised.
“Oh, something light and lively—a popular air.”
The shade of a frown flickered at his brows. “What I know is rather ancient; but it shall be as you command, Milady Caprice.”
He struck up a bit from an old comic opera. Josephine Stone sank to a seat. There she lost sense of the bizarre nature of this scene. This man was no mean amateur airing a mechanical talent. He executed no flourishes; his form scarcely swayed as the bow rode the responding strings like a thing possessed of life.
The girl sat enraptured till he had concluded two rollicking melodies.
“Oh, you wonderful man!” It came from her spontaneously as she clapped her little hands in sheer delight. “Where did you learn to play so exquisitely?”
“An old man who once lived here taught me the rudiments. The rest I picked up.”
“But it must have taken years of practice.”
“It has been my one genuine diversion. I often come here when the mood seizes me and play for a solid evening—but never before to a living audience.”
He was replacing bow and instrument in the case. “Oh, don’t do that,” she entreated. “Just one more selection anyway, please.”
Without show of diffidence he prepared to comply. “More light stuff?” he asked.
“No. Something serious—your own choice this time.”
It was “Unrequited Love,” from the opera Rigoletto, that he played, a rendition Josephine Stone was destined never to quite forget.
From the first tragic note the man before her seemed metamorphosed—seemed one with his exquisite violin; and, as the wailing, beseeching soul-cry of the rejected lover rose and fell, cried out in the volume of those notes the depths of its anguish, and tremulously swooned its everlasting despair, the player ceased for her to be Acey Smith, the piratical, sinister timber boss. He swayed before her fascinated gaze a beautiful disembodied spirit of melancholy calling to the subtlest deeps of her being. Once again, as on that memorable morning at the beach, the soul that looked out at her from those great, dark eyes was the soul of an untarnished boy—a soul brilliant and aspiring, no longer shackled to the clay of iniquity.
Unconscious she was that he drew nearer and nearer, a new light in his black, masterful eyes that was devouring, mesmeric. Unconscious she was in the spell of it that she had fluttered back on the divan—inert, a helpless thing, hopelessly enmeshed in the web of his romantic magnetism.
“Josephine!”
Bow and violin dropped heedlessly to the floor. He drew her hungrily to his arms, swept her from the divan,from her feet and up to him till her panting form was folded to his own.
“Josephine, Josephine, Josephine!”
His voice was low and hoarse with passion, his face close to hers.
Then: “Great God, what a cad I am!”
The spell upon her was broken. But before she could cry out he had released her, his form a-tremble and his hands cupping piteously to his mouth in that weird gesture she had once before witnessed.
She staggered back, white to the lips, her hands clenched at her breast. “You—you—!”
Her accusing tones fell on him like blows as he stood with bowed head. “It is true,” he acknowledged contritely. “I had forgotten a sacred trust—a trust I was unworthy of. But—but it shall not happen again.”
She was steadying her trembling limbs. “I—I shall always be afraid of you now.”
“Please do not say that,” he implored. “You will not have much longer to endure my company.”
At heart she was sorry for him already. Perhaps it was this physical trouble which seized him like the ague in moments of acute emotion that drew her woman’s sympathy; perhaps she conceded it was the situation, the tenseness brought about by acute artistic emotion that was largely to blame—though he had the bigness to offer no such excuses.
At any rate, she could not find it in her heart to condemn this proud, handsome man, who, though he held her here utterly in his power, was abjectly humbled before the flash of her scorn.
Still she said: “There is only one explanation that might restore my confidence, and that is a genuine one as to why you had me brought here, why you insist on detaining me here.”
He brightened. “To-morrow you shall have that explanation in full as I have promised you—after you have met J.C.X.”
“J.C.X.?” She smiled incredulously.
“Yes. Circumstances made it necessary for you to move from Amethyst Island until such time as I was at liberty to carry out that promise. You demurred about leaving, while I feared disastrous intervention during my enforced absence in the east; that is why you were brought here in haste without your consent—that and my inherent weakness for the dramatic.”
“Oh—at last a candid confession! Then let us get down to earth as quickly as possible. I am weary of playing Alice in Wonderland awaiting the production of your fabled monster. Mr. Smith, let me reciprocate in your candour. I have observed sufficient since I came to the Nannabijou Limits to convince me that there is only one head to the North Star Company, one man who rules and dictates here—and that man is yourself.”
“True, but I do so under a trusteeship for J.C.X.”
“You seem at least to have convinced yourself of his existence.”
“You think it all a fraud—a hoax?”
“I’m afraid so. Others you may have succeeded in deluding as to the existence of this imaginary creature behind whose personality you carry on your affairs, but I will not believe until I see. Furthermore, Idon’tbelieve you can produce him.”
“Then you shall see J.C.X.—to-night!”
He took her arm and led her across the room to a point near the entrance to the hall. There he gently swung her so that she faced the wall and he stood directly behind her.
“Look,” he indicated. “There you may see the J.C.X. for whom till to-night I have anonymously guided the affairs of the North Star.”
Josephine Stone drew back with a startled cry. She was staring into a wall mirrorat the reflection of herself.
“To-morrow,” she heard his voice as from afar off. “To-morrow, she who until now has been known as J.C.X., takes living control of the affairs of the North Star. To-morrow, on her twenty-first birthday, she must, as the lawful heir to this property, bear with me while I give an account of my stewardship.”
She heard, as in a dream, the hall door beyond closing softly. When she turned Acey Smith was gone. But out in the night somewhere there arose a tortured cry—a smothered cry that died out in the encompassing sweep of the storm.
Mad, she conjectured. . . . Yes, Acey Smith was a madman. Yet, her intuition told her, his was the madness of abnormal genius with a fixed purpose—always misunderstood—a desperate visionary with the imagination and power of will to make his mad dreams come true.
She—she “the lawful heir to this property!” Her grandfather had been previously referred to by Acey Smith. Could it be—?
But in her perplexed, unnerved state, Josephine Stone did the womanly thing. She went to her room and had a hearty cry.
Settingout on his aërial trip over the Cup of Nannabijou did not prove so simple a matter as Hammond had at first conceived it would be. In the first place, he had to get permission from the department at Ottawa before the authorities at the Kam City armouries would even allow him to try out the plane. Though he despatched Inspector Little’s wire immediately after his arrival, it was Monday afternoon before a reply was forthcoming.
The next delay was in getting the machine in shape for the trip. For want of expert attention, the motors and accessories were wofully out of tune, and before he felt satisfied that they were in anything like efficient shape it was too late to make the trip Monday. On the short trial flights he made the engine still showed a disposition to sulk, but by careful handling he managed to keep it alive while in the air.
He determined to fly over the Nannabijou Limits as early as possible Monday morning. Monday night the storm came up, one of the worst experienced in Kam City in years, and the shed out on the exhibition grounds in which he had temporarily housed the machine, was unroofed by the gale and minor damages done to the wings of the plane that it took a couple of hours to repair.
The morning, however, broke crisp and clear, an ideal day for flying and making observations. From KamCity to the Nannabijou Limits was a little better than twenty miles, and Hammond figured he could make it in about twenty-five to thirty minutes at the outside.
But again he had trouble in making a start. Three times he went up and had to come down again to make fresh adjustments. It was ten o’clock before he was definitely on his way across the arm of the lake with the craterlike top of Nannabijou Mountain as his objective.
Though the wind had dropped, the lake was still creased with angry waves. He crossed Superior’s upper arm without mishap. As he neared the limits, his first unusual discovery was the immense amount of pulpwood thrown up along the North Shore and on the islands that dotted it as far as the eye could see. There was only one place all those poles could come from, the airman conjectured as his machine roared onward through the bright, sunlit upper air.
His hunch was confirmed when he came opposite the limits and secured a full view of Nannabijou Bay, empty of almost every pulp-pole.
He dropped down for a closer look. The Mounties still patrolled the waterfront, but the camp was a scene of animated chaos. Gangs of men were at work repairing the roadways riven deep by the torrents of the night before while others were engaged in removing the fallen timber that blocked every thoroughfare. He noted that the bridge over the Nannabijou River was gone and the hills were made more desolate by fresh fields of tangled windfalls.
As he swooped, Hammond glimpsed Inspector Little signalling to him to proceed direct to the Cup and return. The young airman picked out a likely looking landing place back of the limits, then shot his machine upward. He followed the course of the Nannabijou tothe point where Solomon Creek made its confluence, when he swerved and followed the creek.
Below him now he could discern what had caused the flood that had swept down in the night and carried out the immense field of pulpwood boomed in the bay. The huge beaver-dam on the creek was gone, and where the lake had been, behind the dam, there remained only a slimy area of silt and mud. Thus it was brought home to him at a glance that the war between the rival lumber companies for the operating rights on the limits had been ended by the elements in favour of the North Star. . . The elements alone? He wondered. . . . Likely here was another mystery in the history of the North Star that would remain unsolved. Nobody had seemingly thought of the possibilities in case that lake of water behind the beaver-dam were set free.
Significant as all these things were, Hammond’s main interest was soon centred on the Cup of Nannabijou and its environs. As he glided over the draw in the cliffs along the creek trail to where it seemingly ended in the tunnel opening out over the rapids in the gorge he got a true perspective of the water-gate guarding the only entrance from the land side through the cliffs of the Cup. From his lofty point of observation he could note how the creek in the first place had cut a big oval-shaped “O” in the rock, leaving a high pinnacle in the centre.
But it was the man-made device for diverting the flow of water that most excited his curiosity. At the upper end, where the stream originally forked around the island of rock, was a contrivance like the walking-beam of an old-style steamship. From the ends of this beam, which sat in a steel pillar between the channels, connecting-rods reached down to sliding dams operating in slots cut in the sides of the channels. At the present moment, the dam on the western side was down, and the one on theeastern side up, thus forcing the whole volume of water from the overflow of the lake in the Cup down the latter channel, whose bed, when the dam on that side was closed forcing the water around the other way, formed a dry continuation of the creek trail to an upper tunnel leading through the cliffs and into the Cup of Nannabijou.
Chains extending from concealed mechanism below the walking-beam proved the dams to be operated by power. A tiny building, cleverly cached in a natural opening in the rocks at the west side, and from which copper wire was strung into the Cup, housed the hydro-electric plant where the current was generated. Hammond was scientific enough to conceive that the water-gate and the gong-signal near it were animated by a concealed magnet system at the simple pressing of an electric button somewhere.
As he swept into the Cup, Hammond’s discovery of the beautiful little mountain lake and the buildings above it, set off by their well-kept parklike surroundings, was even more of a revelation. From the plane it proved a wonderful picture—so wonderful that Hammond forgot he was in an area of danger until it recurred to him that here some place Josephine Stone was held captive.
But when he circled over the chateau and the wireless plant, he could discover no signs of life. He was certain if there were people about their attention would have long since been attracted by the roar of his engine. He decided to land and make an investigation in spite of the caution of Inspector Little that he should return to the camps after making observations from the air.
He slid down at a point in front of the bungalow.