“With the approach of the greatest crisis in the history of the North Star, another important matter claimed immediate attention. Your twenty-first birthday, Miss Stone, fell one week before cancellation of the North Star’s rights on the limits must be prevented. I’ll confess that when I sent you for in the name of ‘J.C.X.’ I saw an opportunity of thus mixing in a little more mystery to keep our rivals guessing just what we were about.
“By an odd coincidence, Norman T. Gildersleeve and your friend, Mr. Hammond, were bound for Kam City on the same train that brought you from the West. The North Star’s intelligence department had been keeping close tab on Gildersleeve. So far as I can gather, he must have gained some vague notion as to the truth of the North Star’s direction and control. He had been filling our camps with cheap private detectives of the transom and keyhole peeking type, some of whom were entertained to exciting adventures but gained no knowledge worth while. Gildersleeve was growing certain the North Star had some trump card to play, and he thought to take a leaf out of the North Star’s book of methods to get at the bottom of it and frustrate it. He concocted a wild scheme of appearing to disappear personally and gain admission to the limits in the disguise of a preacher. He was egotistic enough to believe that what his detectives had failed in he could accomplish himself.
“Our agents kept me apprised of his every move, even to his inveigling young Hammond to undertake a seemingly mysterious mission to the limits to divert attention from his own operations. In many respects it appealedto me as a nice bit of comedy, but Gildersleeve and Hammond were shadowed day and night; the former for obvious reasons and the latter to see that no harm befell him. Our newspapers meanwhile published all sorts of conflicting news stories of Gildersleeve’s disappearance; much to the discomfiture of Gildersleeve’s one confidante, a Kam City lawyer named Winch. Just by way of adding to the gaiety of nations, I wrote an editorial on the subject of aphasia, inferring that it was this trouble that had suddenly afflicted. Mr. Gildersleeve and had it published in our string of dailies.
“Gildersleeve might have been allowed to play out his little fiasco to his heart’s content for all the interference it would have proved to the North Star’s plans had he not been rash enough to think he could spirit you away from Amethyst Island right under our eyes. The plot was to get Hammond to cultivate your acquaintance and thus unwittingly lead you into the hands of a gang of low-brows who were to carry you off in a yacht and keep you on the lake until after the twenty-third of October.”
“But why should Mr. Gildersleeve have desired to carry me off?” cried Josephine Stone in perplexity.
“Because,” replied Acey Smith, “he believed you were in some way essential to the plans the North Star had on foot. His first and only attempt to seize you was staged in the woods that day you made the trip up to the cliffs with Louis Hammond. It was nipped in the bud, without either you or Hammond knowing about it, by the North Star’s faithful Indian trackers.
“There was no second attempt because I took no further chances. When I could not induce you to voluntarily leave the island at once, I had you carried off by Ogima Bush, the only man I could trust to handle sodelicate an undertaking. A ruse used simultaneously to implicate Gildersleeve in his disguise as the camp preacher worked so successfully that he was arrested by the Mounted Police, and his company had to forfeit a thousand dollars bail in order to get him out of jail and an extremely embarrassing situation.
“That was the beginning of the end. I went to Montreal while the Gildersleeve crowd were frantically concentrating their nimble brains to force a settlement of a strike among the North Star’s tugmen. In Montreal I made final arrangements for the transfer of the estate of Joseph Stone to his rightful heiress, Josephine Stone, after having had the loan of it for the nineteen years it was left in my trust.
“There were just two little details left for me to complete when I returned. The one was to give you an account of the manner in which I managed your property while it was held in trust and the other was to see that there were no poles for the Kam City Pulp and Paper Mills to grind on the twenty-third.
“Come look!”
He led her to the edge of the cliff, pointing to the empty bay in front of the camp below.
“Oh,” cried Josephine Stone, “the booms are gone. What became of them?”
“They went out last night in the freshet caused by the breaking of the beaver-dam in Solomon Creek during the storm.”
“But those poles,” questioned the girl, “weren’t they very valuable?”
“They had not yet been paid for by the Kam City Company and they were still the North Star’s property,” he told her. “And they can be salvaged—but by no effort could they be salvaged to start the Kam City Company’s mills on time, much less to keep them incontinuous supply all winter. They will be salvaged to be ground and manufactured into paper at the North Star’s own mills next year.”
“Still the storm last night was an accident. If it had not happened—”
“I did not say it was the storm,” he reminded her. “Just what made the beaver-dam go out will always remain a mystery. Ogima Bush the Medicine Man, who had led his Indians to believe the dam contained an evil spirit that was bringing misfortune to them, held some sort of a pagan incantation down there last night which might or might not explain a lot.”
“The Indians told Mrs. Johnson he was killed in the storm.”
“Who—Ogima? Not much. Ogima Bush has as many lives as a cat. But the chances are he’ll never be seen in this locality again.”
Josephine Stone turned to him. “But what about yourself?” she asked. “In your account of the North Star’s operations and the final disposition of the property you have not said one word as to the provisions made for the man who engineered it all.”
“Oh, that too has been taken care of,” he replied. “During my trusteeship of the estate I drew a salary quite commensurate with the services I rendered. I made a few investments also that are turning out well.”
“But your plans for the future?”
“I had not thought of that,” Acey Smith answered, his eyes fixing in that peculiar abstraction that made him an enigma among men. “Always I have had the gift of visualising the future; of seeing clearly what was ahead of me until now. But beyond what is now accomplished, beyond to-day, everything appears like a void—a nothingness. To put it that way, I feel like one who peruses the last chapters of an exciting tale and knows,though he has not yet seen the author’s finis, that the end is near.”
Something tragically prophetic in his tones, a detachedness of his manner and a realisation of his terrible loneliness of spirit smote Josephine Stone. Her lips trembled and her eyes filled.
“Come, come, little girl,” he chided banteringly, “you must not cry on this of all your birthdays.”
But she had turned from him. “I was thinking,” she murmured, “of Captain Alexander Carlstone, the Man That Might Have Been.”
Her shoulders were quivering. The man’s arms went out as though to sweep her exquisite little form to him, but by a tremendous effort of will he desisted and they dropped to his side. A paroxysm went through his frame and his hands went cupping to his mouth to muffle and strangle the cursed cry of the loon that was rising in his throat.
When she turned his face was the old grim, sinister mask. “Let’s go,” he urged almost gruffly. “I had planned to have you reach Amethyst Island early this afternoon and go over on a special tug to Kam City as soon as you could get ready. The Indians are waiting with a sedan in the bush just a few hundred yards below the water-gate.”
He paused suddenly in their progress toward the pathway leading down from the summit. “My pack-sack!” he exclaimed staring at the empty place where it had hung on the little jackpine.
He strode over to the rim of the cliff and looked down. “Might have had better sense than to have hung it there,” he ruminated. “Wind shook it loose and it has fallen down to the gully below. Oh, well, I’ll come back up for it after I see you down to the island. I’ll have to remember that.”
Josephine Stoneand Acey Smith descended the cliff and walked to the upper tunnel at the water-gate of the Cup of Nannabijou with scarcely a word uttered between them. There was a host of things she wanted to say to him and to ask him about, but his present mood entirely precluded it. It made her feel like a child and baffled her so that she was vexed at him and at herself.
In the tunnel he stopped to touch the secret button. As the gong sounded he looked up at it quickly.
“That’s odd,” he remarked, “that sort of prolonged twin-stroke. I never heard the bell ring just that way before.”
When the water in the channel had disappeared he helped her down the steps.
They had progressed about half way, to the point where the channel curved and the lower tunnel should next come into view on the left, when the deep, vibrating alarum of the water-gate gong sang out again.
At his startled gasp she turned and saw racing at them a great wall of foaming, raging water. Josephine Stone screamed out of very terror of it.
“Quick!” he cried as he drew her swiftly with him. “There is one way I may save you.”
She had a fleeting vision of a group of horror-stricken faces at the lower tunnel’s mouth, Hammond’s among them.
The tunnel and the flight of steps running up to it were but a few short paces away, but the raging, death-dealing torrent was foaming at their very heels and the tunnel’s mouth was high above their reach.
Acey Smith stopped one instant. The next he seized her below the knees.
“Stiffen out!” he commanded.
As the tide of water smote them she was conscious of being thrust upward by his powerful arms, of his fingers releasing themselves from her lower limbs and of her form being catapulted unerringly through space to the mouth of the tunnel and into the arms of Louis Hammond.
All went black for the briefest space. With a supreme effort of will she warded off the fainting spell.
She, with the others, was looking with horrified fascination into the channel where the water wall had swept on and ceased to flow. On the wet rock bottom lay Acey Smith, face up, where he had been flung by the torrent that was cut off too late.
His great proud form, which a moment ago had been flexing, powerful muscles, was ominously inert, and from a corner of his mouth trickled a crimson stream.
Willing arms carried him up the stone steps, through the tunnel and out into the open. There they laid him gently upon the sward.
The girl bent over him her hand feeling for his heartbeats as she tenderly wiped the blood-stains from his mouth and cheek, Hammond silently kneeling beside her.
At her touch Acey Smith’s eyes fluttered and there came a wan smile of recognition as he looked from the girl’s face to Hammond’s.
Tremblingly, he groped for a hand of each and brought them together over his breast.
“Tell Sandy Macdougal,” he whispered weakly, “tocome up and get my packsack. I could have wished—to have lived—to kiss the bride.”
The heart of Josephine Stone was too full for words. Silently, she stooped and pressed her warm lips to his chilling ones. With scarcely a tremor the light left his face and he was very still.
The spark that had been a man had fled.
Sandy Macdougal, who, by the way, afterwards discovered he was the main beneficiary in Acey Smith’s will, insisted on going up alone to recover the packsack of the Big Boss. What he found it to contain he told to no living being, but those contents threw a light on another weird phase of the protagonist soul of the Timber Pirate. In the pack, neatly parcelled, were: a suit of coloured blanket-cloth trimmed with buck-skin lacing, a pair of beaded shoe-packs, necklaces of wolves’ teeth, a wig of long, coarse black hair with a purple band around its crown holding a single eagle’s feather at the back, a bottle of stain that dyed the skin a copper hue, a stick of blood-red grease-paint and a solution for quickly washing the stain and the grease-paint from the face and hands.
Acey Smith who had been Alexander Carlstone was also Ogima Bush the Medicine Man!
They buried Acey Smith on the crown of one of his native hills where trails fork to the cardinal points of the compass into the wild scenic grandeur he loved and called his home. There the shore-wash of the great lake is within ear-shot on the one side, while to the other the fantastic Laurentian ranges forever lift their scarredand battered breasts to heaven as if in mute testimony to the travail of man below.
On the mound above his resting-place the Indians set up a great totem-pole bearing graven images and painted faces relating his merits and his deeds, and on it they gave place for an epitaph from the white workers of his camps and boats.
Because none knew of any faith he held to there was no religious ceremony; but a little later there came a strange company to pay last respects to one who had proved their friend in the hours of dire need. There were aged ones, lame men and blind men—and with them was a woman; she whose daughter was a Mary Magdalene and had been snatched from the burning by the strange, whimsical man that was gone. They brought with them a few cheap wreaths as tributes of their regard; and, noting the absence of Christian emblems, these simple people made of birch boughs a little white cross which they planted in the centre of the grave in soil hallowed by their tears.
The following year Mrs. Josephine Hammond, accompanied by her husband, paid a visit to the grave to give instructions for the placing of a more substantial and appropriate monument there to the memory of Captain Alexander Carlstone, V.C. They found that the wind and the sun had riven the great totem-pole, and the frost had heaved its base so that it fell to one side.
But the little white birch cross of Christ’s poor remained firm in its place, where, in the evening shadow, it gleamed steadfastly like the good that endures when might and genius have passed away.
THE END