The silence after quitting his machine seemed oppressive, and the place utterly deserted. He walked up on the verandah and rapped thrice on the chateau door. Receiving no answer, he tried the door. It was not locked, so he opened it and boldly entered. He was now determined to explore the building from top to bottom. The quaint, unusual appointments of the chateau at another time would have deeply interested him, but he felt he must work fast and be on the alert for surprise.
The rooms all bore the appearance of recent occupancy, but there were evidences that the house had been set in order before the departure of its people.
The sleeping chambers he examined last. All of these rooms had been swept, dusted and the beds made; but in one of them he picked up a fancy celluloid hair-comb. There was only one person on Nannabijou Limits to whom that could belong, and that was Josephine Stone.
The conviction brought home to Hammond from every quarter was that he had arrived too late. Josephine Stone’s captors must have carried her off to some other fastness. He thought of the building adjacent, but on going there he found the doors and windows securely locked. The blinds, however, were up, and he could get a clear view of all the rooms and the wireless plant inside. There was nothing else there beyond a number of empty bunks, a table and a few chairs.
It struck him that there was possibly another retreat hidden away in some other part of the Cup—perhaps up in the woods. He returned to the plane intending to make a thorough search of the area in the Cup from the air. But his engine was in a decidedly balky mood. He had a feeling it would fail him altogether, and, on an impulse of better judgment, he swung up and over the cliffs.
He had barely reached the confluence of Solomon Creek with Nannabijou River when the motor went dead.
Fortunately, by skillful manipulation of the planes, he was enabled to glide safely down over the timbered sides of the mountain to the cleared area just above Nannabijou camps.
His plane was soon surrounded by wondering groups of camp workers from among whom there strode a member of the mounted force. He leaned close as Hammond was getting out of the machine.
“Inspector Little would like you to go down to his quarters at once, Mr. Hammond,” he said. “I will see that your machine is taken care of.”
The inspector’s genial smile and hearty handshake did much to revive Hammond’s drooping spirits over his nonsuccess in finding trace of Miss Stone. “Mighty glad to see you back safe and sound, old man,” he offered. “Find any clues up there as to the whereabouts of the young lady?”
Briefly Hammond gave a verbal report of his discoveries, adding that he was convinced Josephine was still held prisoner somewhere up in the Cup.
The inspector sat for a few moments in a brown study. “H’mph, that’s interesting at any rate,” he finally spoke up. “Your findings seem to bear out what I have already learned from other quarters.”
“I’d like to return and finish the investigation as soon as I can get the old bus in working order,” suggested Hammond.
“No, I couldn’t approve of that,” decided the inspector. “With that balky machine it would be too risky, and besides, it might give warning to the gang we’re after ifthey did not succeed in capturing you or doing you actual bodily harm.”
“Then what do you propose to do?”
“To go up on foot with a half dozen picked members of our force just as soon as you’ve had a bite to eat and changed your flying togs. A private detective of Gildersleeve’s—Lynch his name is—has discovered how that water-gate up there is operated, and we’re taking him along to show us how to get in.”
“Is Gildersleeve here?”
“He was, but he left for town on the early tug this morning, though I have a hunch I should have put him in custody until this whole thing is cleared up.”
“You still suspect him of underhand work?”
“Just now I hardly know what to suspect. There seems to be some unholy mystery here that’s mighty difficult to get to the bottom of. Gildersleeve may be innocent of having anything to do with the abduction of Miss Stone, but I am becoming more and more certain that there is some part he played out here he’s anxious to conceal. I expect you noticed that the beaver-dam in Solomon Creek was gone and the head of water that came down last night forced out the booms of pulpwood in the bay?”
“Yes. I imagine Gildersleeve would be wild over that.”
“Wild is no name for it. Before he left this morning he spent most of the time cursing everything and everybody. I think the man was drunk. Anyway, he insists that the North Star people blew up the dam with dynamite while the storm was on. But we can’t take any action on mere conjectures. Even if the dam were blown up the freshet left no clues behind. Our men made a thorough investigation this morning and could find no proof that the dam did not give way through natural causes. Now Gildersleeve swears he’s going after theDominion government for damages because we did not have a patrol watching the dam. I suppose we might have taken that precaution, but no one thought of danger from that direction.”
“Without proof that the disaster occurred through preventable causes I don’t see how he can produce grounds for damages,” asserted Hammond.
“Nor I,” returned the inspector. “Furthermore, Gildersleeve has not from the first dealt on the square with us or taken us into his confidence. Off-hand, I’d say he appears to me like a man who’s been beaten to it at a game of double-cross where he was as deep-dyed as the other fellow and now he’s aching to take his spleen out on a third party.
“But come, Hammond,” urged the inspector, “you run along to the dining camp and have a snack of lunch, and as soon as you get your clothes changed we’ll make a start.”
Sandy Macdougal was glad to see Hammond again, but he appeared to be particularly out of sorts and uncommunicative this morning. It was only when Hammond was leaving the dining camp that he had anything in particular to say.
“It ain’t none of my business,” he told Hammond, “but if I was asked for any advice, I’d say keep away from that Cup. There ain’t anybody white ever went up there monkeyin’ around that something didn’t happen they were sorry for.”
The little expedition which set out for the mountain was composed of Inspector Little, five of his most experienced men, Lynch the private detective and Louis Hammond. Before they struck out Inspector Little insisted there was no necessity for the civilians in the partycarrying firearms and used this as an excuse for relieving Lynch of a murderous-looking revolver.
Lynch was loud in his protests that as a detective he should be allowed to carry the weapon, but it did not go with the inspector. “I am not carrying a gun myself,” he pointed out. “My men are armed and that is all that is necessary, for they are not liable to shoot unless it is a case of protecting our lives and their own.”
It was not only that he sought to guard against unnecessary bloodshed, but Inspector Little was not any too sure of his ground in entering the Cup of Nannabijou by means of force. The police held no warrant for the arrest of any one except Nathan Stubbs, the pseudo camp preacher, and the doughty inspector was far from convinced that Stubbs was up in the Cup. The only pretext on which he felt he could legally demand the privilege of entering the Cup with an armed force, in case resistance were offered, was the right to search for the missing girl, Josephine Stone.
On the other hand, his distrust of Gildersleeve was growing, along with a conviction that the mysterious happenings on Nannabijou Limits were far from being what they appeared to be on the surface. In this latter regard, he was determined not to be made the catspaw of Gildersleeve through any trickery on the part of his detective.
The journey up the mountain and along Solomon Creek trail was made in comparative silence, except for the volubility of Lynch who bored the patient inspector with wild theories as to what existed beyond the cliffs of Nannabijou.
When they reached the tunnel that opened out over the rapids of the creek, Lynch was all impatience to demonstrate his prowess in showing how the water-gate was operated. He reached up to the jutting bit of rock andfumbled for the tiny hole and inserted a match which he pressed.
There came instantly the mellow alarm of the bell above.
“Cripes, that’s sudden action for you,” he exclaimed. “I hardly pressed my finger on the match when the bell rang. It must be set on some sort of hair-trigger.”
Almost immediately the water in the channel dwindled and ceased to flow.
“That’s certainly a novel device,” declared the inspector as he stood with the others of the party staring at the stream-bed where the last trickle of water had vanished.
“Watch while I let it loose again,” cried Lynch. “Keep back, everybody, for she certainly comes down hell-bent when she’s opened.”
“Hold on! Don’t touch it!”
Inspector Little and Louis Hammond, certain they caught the sound of voices somewhere above, yelled it in unison.
But there was no stopping the irrepressible Lynch. The gong sounded again, followed by the roar of the released torrent.
From up the channel there came a man’s hoarse shout and the piercing scream of a woman.
“Shut off the water, you damned idiot!” shouted Inspector Little.
But Lynch, in the excitement, had completely lost his wits. He didn’t seem able to locate the button again.
The inspector sprang back and shoved the detective out of the way while he reached for the projecting match in the hole himself.
Louis Hammond, at the edge of the raging torrent, stood transfixed, terrified at what he saw being flung down toward him on the crest of the maddened tide.
Unusualcommotion below stairs awakened Josephine Stone at a very early hour the morning following the storm. She arose and opened the door to listen. Mrs. Johnson, fully dressed, came down the hall.
“Oh, are you getting up, Josephine?” she greeted. “We didn’t intend calling you for an hour or so.”
“It was the noise. What’s going on downstairs?”
“Didn’t you know? Why, I was wakened at an unearthly hour by your Indian maid, Mary. She’s back with us again. She said Mr. Smith told her you were leaving here to-day and it had been found necessary to make an early start. I saw Mr. Smith downstairs, and he said there was a boat waiting at the tunnel at the other end of the Cup to take us and our belongings back to Amethyst Island. I—I thought you knew all about it, Josephine?”
“Why, yes—I had forgotten. Mr. Smith called last night after you had gone to bed to notify me.”
“Did he tell you about that terrible-looking Indian chief?”
“Who—the Medicine Man? What has he done now?”
“He’s dead, poor man.”
“Dead?”
“Yes. Killed in the storm last night. Something terrible must have happened, for the Indians all looked sobroken up this morning that I asked Mary what was the matter with them. She said Ogima Bush, their great Medicine Man, was gone up to the sky and they’d never see him again. All I could get out of her was that he was ‘making some big medicine’ whatever that is, and he was carried away by the storm-devils. They’re so queer, those people, I never can quite understand them.”
“Poor Ogima,” breathed Josephine Stone. “I don’t think there was anything so terrible about him as he painted himself up to look. Sometimes there seemed to be something terribly tragic in those wicked eyes of his.”
“Come now, Josie,” admonished Mrs. Johnson, “don’t you go getting dressed. Mr. Smith said it would be all right if you were called an hour from now.”
But Miss Stone had no intention of going back to bed. She dressed and went downstairs. The Indians were busy getting baggage ready on the verandah for transportation down to the boat.
As breakfast wasn’t quite ready, Miss Stone strolled down to the lake. There she was a few minutes later joined by Acey Smith. He was garbed in his bush clothes and the personality of the man had undergone one of those undefinable changes so characteristic of him. Where he had been buoyant, care-free and boyish the night before he was now politely formal, inscrutable—a self-contained Big Boss of the timberlands.
“I was sorry to have had to decide on an early start without having let you know last night, Miss Stone,” he opened. “But about four o’clock this morning I was awakened by a wireless call from the city, notifying me that some busy-body was having an airman sent over the Cup to-day, so I decided, if possible, we’d leave the Cup before the air-scout arrived.”
“More mystery?” Miss Stone had not exactly meant to be sarcastic.
Acey Smith gave vent to a low, harsh laugh. “No, the mystery stuff, so far as you are concerned is over,” he assured her. “And that brings me to the point I came down here to speak to you about. This morning after breakfast, if you feel equal to it, I would like you to take a walk with me up to the summit of Lookout Cliff yonder.” He pointed to a castle-like formation in the wall of rock to the east.
“But I thought we were leaving here this morning?”
“We are. But while the Indians are taking Mrs. Johnson and your belongings around to Amethyst Island, I thought you might let me take you up there to enjoy the wonderful view it affords while I tell you the story of the North Star and how you came to be woven into its history.”
“Couldn’t I hear it down at the Island?”
“You could, but there is an appropriate reason why you should be shown that view on this, your twenty-first birthday.”
“Very well,” acceded the girl, “I’ll go.”
Josephine Stone and Acey Smith made their start for the summit of Lookout Cliff right after breakfast. The superintendent appeared with his inevitable packsack strapped on his back, and after giving final instructions to the Indians, motioned her to accompany him.
The walk up the gradual ascent through the woods to the foot of the cliff was refreshing and invigorating, but, after the custom on northern trails, neither spoke except when it was absolutely necessary. The man seemed deeply preoccupied and the girl made no attempt to draw him out of his reverie.
There were moments when to her Acey Smith seemedsublime—a sort of genie of this wild, wonderful country. She believed she liked him best in this mood. In his high boots, corduroys and stetson with its narrow limp brim slightly turned up off his forehead, he had the bearing and the mien of some fiercely handsome robber chieftain. His face, set like a mask, was never turned toward her; his eyes seemed always fixed on the trail above. She found herself walking in his wake, quite as naturally as the Indian woman trails after her brave in their journeys through the wild.
They paused for a few moments’ rest at the base of the cliff before starting the ascent of the winding pathway that led to the summit. Suddenly a rapidly-vibrating roaring sound broke in upon them from the upper air.
“The airplane has arrived,” commented Acey Smith, pointing to the machine swooping over the cliffs at the water-gate. “Just a little too late to find out anything worth while.”
“Who do you suppose it is?” asked the girl.
“It’s a government machine sent to locate you. I think likely it’s been put on the job at the request of your friend, Mr. Hammond.”
He watched her covertly as the colour came and went in her cheeks at the mention of Hammond’s name.
“Mr. Hammond!” she gasped. “Oh, then, we must go back and send word to him that I am safe and sound.”
“No, it will not be necessary,” he declared. “Mr. Hammond will be none the worse for a few hours’ suspense. You will meet him before the sun sets to-night, and you will then be the better able to explain everything.”
“Is he still down at the limits?”
“Yes, I think he’s back, though the last news I had of him he was in Kam City. He had a falling out withNorman T. Gildersleeve and quit the services of the International Investment outfit. I expect he discovered they weren’t altogether the innocent angels they pretended to be.” He paused a moment, then: “Hammond is what few men of ability are nowadays—clean-cut and honest to the core.”
The girl dropped her eyes to hide the gratitude that welled up in them. What had it cost Acey Smith to make that magnanimous statement? For she knew now that he knew what she could not give to him would be Hammond’s for the asking.
They watched the plane make a landing, saw the airman examine the grounds and buildings, then re-enter his machine and fly away over the cliffs.
“Evidently thought better of staying overlong in the Cup,” commented Acey Smith. “Oh, well, there was nothing for him to fear; my men have instructions to molest no one coming here from now on.”
“You mean that the Cup will no longer be a secret retreat?”
“That all depends; it is a matter now for some one else to decide,” he answered. “Let’s go on up to the top.”
The summit of Lookout Cliff offered a wonderful view on this clear day of the lake and the forests below. Nannabijou camp from there seemed a tiny gash in a world of wilderness; the river and Solomon Creek silver threads winding down to Superior. On the outer side the cliff descended, a sheer wall, five hundred feet to the woods on the side of the mountain, the elevation being one thousand seven hundred and fifty feet above sea-level. The cliff is known among sailormen of the Great Lakes as the highest piece of land on the North Shore.
“This pinnacle,” Acey Smith was saying, “was held sacred by the pagan Indians as the eerie of the Thunder Eagle, a demi-god supposed to rule the land and the water as far as his eyes could see.
“It therefore did not seem unfitting,” he continued quietly, “to bring you to this spot to declare you, as I do now, undisputed mistress of the North Shore.”
She looked at him thoroughly bewildered, for the moment unable to think what answer to make.
“I told you there would be no mystery after to-day,” he went on, “and what I am about to tell you is bald fact. To-day, on your twenty-first birthday, Miss Josephine Stone, you become heir to the estate of your grandfather, Joseph Stone, and that estate now includes all the holdings of the North Star Towing and Contracting Company and the controlling share in all its various subsidiaries. In compliance with the dying injunction of your grandfather, the ownership of those properties has been transferred to your name, where they were formerly held in trust by myself and the executives of the North Star for you under the pseudonym of ‘J.C.X.’”
“But I can’t understand all this,” she murmured in perplexity. “Grandfather, I always understood, was not very wealthy. He was merely a prospector and scientist.”
“True,” replied her companion, “and in what you do not understand lies the story—a story in which I’m afraid I will have to tell altogether too much about myself.”
“Pleasedotell me,” she urged. “I am sure I will be deeply interested in that very part of it.”
“Then let’s step over yonder where we will be sheltered from the breeze and still have the benefit of the sunshine.”
Acey Smith unslung his pack and hung it by one of the straps on the bough of a stunted jackpine whose roots somehow drew sustenance from a crevice near the edge of the cliff. He led the girl to a seat on a moss-covered ledge and himself sat down facing her.
The superintendent placed a cigarette in a holder and lit it.
“The story,” he opened, “should properly start with the advent of John Carlstone here half a century ago. ‘Black Jack’ Carlstone, as he was known, was an eastern Canadian, the second generation of the old pioneer school and a mixture of the romantic races that migrated to the Niagara Peninsula from the valley of the Mississippi in the States—English, Welsh, Dutch and Irish blood ran in his veins. He was a tall, powerfully-built, black-whiskered demon of a man, with a heart as great as his physical dimensions—a man who was known to recognise no such elements as difficulty or danger. He was a born trader, the particular type that made good and amassed fortunes in those tremendous days.
“John Carlstone located near a trading-post which then thrived on what is now the site of Kam City, and it was not long before he was identified with almost every undertaking in which there was money to be made, bartering with the Indians for furs, getting out timber and building wharfs and roads for the government. There were few white women in the North in those days, and John Carlstone took as his wife the daughter of an Indian chief who was headman of all the North Shore tribes, and, standing little on ceremony, was married under the pagan rites of the Indians.
“With the birth of his son there came two heavy blowsto John Carlstone. He lost his wife, and her child was cursed with an infirmity that came of a prenatal accident. In moments of stress or high nervous excitement, the boy would be overcome with a strange paroxysm and cry out with the weird, unearthly call of the northern loon. But this son, despite his infirmity and the fact that he inherited a skin the colour of his mother’s race, was the apple of John Carlstone’s eye. He named him Alexander, because, as he told the boy when he grew older, ‘Alexander was a conqueror, and you must conquer all this wild North Shore some day.’ It was a remark that afterwards rang in the consciousness of Alexander Carlstone with all the glamour of prophecy.
“Young Carlstone was from the first a dreamer of wild dreams of power—a boy apart and an albino among his playmates. Timid, studious and extremely sensitive in the beginning, the ridicule of his fellows begot the first bitterness that was later to engulf his whole better nature.
“The elder Carlstone’s wealth grew and grew. He became the owner of a modest fleet of lake boats and a string of inland trading-posts. Dissatisfied with the progress he was making in the crude pioneer school, Carlstone sent his son east to be educated at a private college, where the lad, under a sympathetic teacher, went far and quickly in his studies. He grew to know that he had inherited his father’s initiative and force of character along with an abnormal gift for grasping and visualising situations that baffled the analyses of others. The father planned to make a great merchant or business man of him; the son dreamed of becoming a star on the stage. Young Alexander Carlstone knew that the fire that burned in his veins was the fire of a born protagonist. But he hid this ambition from his father and even his teacher; he felt he must first overcome the affliction that had clung to him since birth.
“While his son was away at school the elder Carlstone married again, this time to the widow of Captain Norman Gildersleeve, who had been master of one of Carlstone’s boats. She was a designing, unscrupulous woman, and she brought with her a son, some years older than Carlstone’s, who inherited all his mother’s malicious and covetous nature. But with John Carlstone’s undying affection for his son, the influence of the Gildersleeves might not have cut much figure in the latter’s life had it not been for a whim of Fate and the Law—the damnable travesty on Justice that men call the Law.”
“Young Carlstone had completed what would be the equivalent of a modern public and high school education when one day there came the most unfortunate moment of his life with tidings of the death of his father, the one true friend who believed in him and would have sacrificed all for him right or wrong. The elder Carlstone was drowned out of a canoe during a storm on one of the inland lakes; the wilderness from which he had won affluence and wealth swallowed him.
“That was the crucial turning-point in the life of young Alexander Carlstone, the end of the dramatic career which he had dreamed of—the last chapter in the life of the Man That Might Have Been.
“Owing to the lack of telegraph service across Canada at that time, the news of his father’s passing was almost a week in reaching the young man. The latter was out of funds and none had been sent him. His big-hearted teacher, touched by the anguished grief of his pupil, advanced the cost of his transportation home, though young Carlstone read in his moist old eyes a something that was prescient of worse woes to come.
“Alexander Carlstone arrived at Kam City to find the doors of his father’s house closed against him. Norman T. Gildersleeve, son of the woman who was John Carlstone’s second wife, came out and ordered him off the premises. An altercation followed, in the heat of which Gildersleeve cried:—
“‘Get out of here, you tramp; get out or I’ll send for the provincial police to throw you out! You have no claim here—you are nameless.’
“A presentiment of just what his dark words meant staggered Carlstone for the moment. ‘Say that again!’ he defied.
“‘I’ll say it,’ mocked the other. ‘You are a nobody, and in the eyes of the Law you are not John Carlstone’s heir. Your mother was merely his squaw mistress.’
“At that taunt, young Carlstone saw all red. He bore down upon Gildersleeve with the fury of a savage and struck as his fighting father would have struck. Gildersleeve went over before a terrific blow that laid his cheek open below the right eye. When he struggled to his feet he was knocked down again with a similar smash under the left optic. As he lay upon the ground, his face covered with blood, Carlstone stood over him uttering the terrible cry that since infancy had afflicted him in moments of high excitement.
“In his blind fury, young Carlstone might have finished for good the usurper of his birthrights had it not been that passersby intervened. As it was, he left two scars upon the face of Norman T. Gildersleeve that he was to carry all his life.”
Josephine Stone shuddered. It was not altogether at the recital of the details of the fight, but at remembrance of those very scars beneath the eyes of the man she had seen with Louis Hammond that night on thetranscontinental train. She did not interrupt, however, as Acey Smith proceeded:
“Alexander Carlstone was placed under arrest and tried before the district magistrate on a charge of felonious assault with intent to kill. The district attorney was a fair man, and in view of the provocation, reduced the charge to common assault and battery. The magistrate, a born snob and the voluntary creature of the now powerful Gildersleeve family, imposed a fine of fifty dollars, in default of which young Carlstone was to spend six months in jail.
“Staunch old friends of John Carlstone came to the rescue of his unfortunate son. They engaged a lawyer to defend him, and when he was sentenced, they supplied his fine that he might not have to bear the further ignominy of spending a term in jail. They even went further and started to raise a fund to defray the legal expenses of a fight for his rights in the courts.
“But it turned out that what Norman T. Gildersleeve had said was based on the Law—the Law which was made to crush the souls of the unfortunate and to protect the smug hypocrites who revere it and Gold as their established gods. John Carlstone’s first marriage to an Indian chief’s daughter, under the red man’s rites, was not recognised by Church or State; the son therefore was nameless and had no rights under the Constitution. The further fact that John Carlstone had neglected to make a will left the younger Carlstone’s case hopeless.
“Alexander Carlstone fled from the haunts of civilisation, filled with a consuming bitterness of spirit, an atheist so far as garbled Justice and revamped Christianity were concerned and nursing an undying hatred for the usurper, Norman T. Gildersleeve.
“In his soul had been sown the self-same germs that have bred history’s bloodiest revolutions.”
“Joseph Stone, your grandfather, was one of those vitally interested in the fate of young Carlstone,” continued Acey Smith. “The old scientist and prospector had been a personal cronie of John Carlstone; in fact, the latter had been of financial assistance to him in some of his early ventures. But in his eerie out here in the Cup of Nannabijou, where he lived to himself, Joseph Stone did not learn of his friend’s death and the disappearance of his son until he made one of his periodical visits to the city for supplies. The old man was deeply grieved and made diligent inquiry for the whereabouts of Alexander Carlstone, but the young man had then been away several weeks and none knew whither he had gone.
“Joseph Stone was himself a heart-hungry old man, his own only son having left him during an altercation in which the younger Stone had insisted on their leaving the wilderness for the western prairies where he saw a more prosperous future for both. The upshot of it all was that the son left for the West, swearing that he would never darken his father’s door again. And he never did.
“It must be stated that your grandfather, though a learned and open-hearted man, was extremely eccentric in some respects. He had invested almost all of his modest fortune in equipping a laboratory in this farawayfastness. He managed somehow to eke out a living by engaging in trapping in the cold months and occasionally doing exploring and investigating work in the then little known interior for the government. His passion, however, was for scientific research, and his one ruling hobby was to discover the answer to the riddle of pigmentation whereby the colour is transmitted to the bodies and faces of the dark-skinned races of men. His theory was that black, red, brown and yellow men were so because of the prevalence of a tiny germ secreted in the intricacies of the cuticle, and that this germ while alive resisted the bleaching effects of the actinic rays of the sun’s light. He not only pursued his research in this matter to a successful conclusion, but actually produced a formula for a solution, which, when applied to the skin, killed the active colour germs, so that only a few moments of exposure to the sunlight, after treatment, would turn dark men or red men white. Fortunately or unfortunately, as the case may have been, his secret died with him.
“It was through the pursuit of these experiments and an Indian witch-doctor, who was none other than our friend, Ogima Bush, that Joseph Stone quite unexpectededly came in contact with the lost Alexander Carlstone. The medicine men among the tribes and some of the more exalted chiefs were the only Indians that would dare enter the sacred Cup of Nannabijou to visit the white magician as they called him. Ogima the crafty was a frequent caller. Joseph Stone cultivated him because the Indian witch-doctor was something of an uncanny chemist himself in a primitive way, though there are secrets among the medicine men of the pagan tribes that it is better for the white man’s morals and peace of mind that he should never dabble in.
“It so happened that when Joseph Stone had completed his formula for bleaching the skin that he wantedto experiment on Ogima, but to his intense surprise the Medicine Man became very indignant at the suggestion. Why should he or any of his people wish to be white? Wasn’t the red man of more noble lineage and the very colour of his skin emblematic of the superior favours the sun-god had conferred upon him? Any such trifling, he declared, would bring a curse upon his people, and he would see that they had none of it.
“The Medicine Man’s word was law among the Indians, and Joseph Stone was in despair of finding a living subject for experimentation until, one day, Ogima, after a long smoke by the fireplace in the cabin, made the announcement that he had discovered a young man among the bands who should have been born white, and if Stone wished to try his witchcraft on this young man, Ogima would send him to him.
“The scientist was perplexed at the Indian’s sudden change of front. He suspected some extraordinary favour would be extracted in return; but Ogima’s only pronouncement was that once he was changed to white the young man in question must remain so and must no longer call himself an Indian. He left abruptly with a promise that he would go immediately in search of the subject. In three mornings he predicted the young man would be waiting in the tunnel below the water-gate which was then operated by hand on a given signal from below.
“On the third morning what was Joseph Stone’s amazement and delight to discover that the young man sent him by Ogima Bush was none other than Alexander Carlstone, son of his deceased benefactor. Carlstone subsequently told him that since he had left Kam City he had been living among the Indians of his mother’s tribe, and on account of her lineage he had been created a chief or headman of the band. But these honours hadbrought no joys; supreme discontent had gnawed at him always. The red man’s ways, he found, were not his ways, and he wanted to be away doing more useful things; to have his white man’s sagacity and ambition pitted against problems and difficulties life among those primitive people did not offer. He had come to regard himself with supreme self-pity as neither a white man nor a savage; as an outcast from the former and a lonely, discontented demi-god among the latter.
“I will not burden you with a detailed account of what followed, Miss Stone,” Acey Smith went on. “The experiment was gone on with at once, but by degrees, Carlstone first submitting his hands and face to the solution. When it was over and he surveyed himself in a glass he could scarcely believe it was himself that was reflected there, the metamorphosis was so great. Thus transformed, and wearing white man’s apparel, young Carlstone went back among the Indians, pretending to be a trapper lost in the woods. His real identity was suspected by none of the tribe.
“The realisation of what this change might mean inspired Alexander Carlstone with the first hazy elements of what afterwards became a daring scheme. He was filled with a savage rejoicing that came not entirely from vanity over his white skin, but from the knowledge that this transformation would make him unrecognisable as Alexander Carlstone, the outcast of civilisation. At the bottom of it all, though he himself did not fully realise it at the time, was a restless ambition, a consuming desire for power and the opportunity to exert that power to avenge his wrongs.”
“I once contended with you,” continued the man to whom Josephine Stone listened as one in a dream, “thatthere is in all of us at least two personalities—the Man That Is and the Man That Might Have Been. The Man That Is is the man begot of environment and circumstances; the Man That Might Have Been is the ideal we cherished in hopeful youth. For it is circumstance that fashions our careers for us, no matter how cozy-corner philosophers may argue to the contrary, just as the hills and harder rock formations divert the courses of streams in their search for yonder lake and the ultimate sea. Oftentimes, an even-flowing, placid stream is thus suddenly transformed into a turbulent rapids, dealing destruction to all that enters the path of its fury. The analogy holds good with humankind.
“In this case, Alexander Carlstone, who had dreamed of becoming a famous actor in the world of the mimic drama, became Acey Smith the Timber Pirate, a protagonist in a drama of real life, always with a grim climax of revenge in view. As I see it now, I have always been acting a self-proscribed part, putting into it the same intensity I might have otherwise concentrated on the theatrical stage. Acey Smith is the man that was made by circumstances—the Man That Is. For, as you have no doubt surmised, Miss Stone, I was first Alexander Carlstone and afterwards Acey Smith.
“But all this is digression. I did not at once set out to accomplish the ambition that burned within me. Instead, I dreamed and planned and plotted while I studied in the library of Joseph Stone. Dimly, I believe, there was always a plan of action somewhere hidden in my back mind, but the road to its interpretation was continuous, concentrated mental drudgery. The element of accident has done more to solve men’s problems than so-called inspirations; it remained for subsequent circumstances to point the way to my goal for me.
“Joseph Stone told me of a simple tablet, that,dissolved in the mouth, would prevent the loon-cry that rose in my throat in moments of excitement, a remedy which I have since always kept by me. Meanwhile, in the rôle of a white trapper, I made frequent trips to Kam City, which had by then grown to the status of quite a thriving northern town, with a lake port whose future was unquestioned. It was to be the gateway between the East and the wheat-producing West just then opening up in full earnest. In bitterness I saw the opportunity and wealth that might have been mine; in double bitterness I discovered that the usurper, Gildersleeve, had become the leading man of the place and owned and controlled nearly all the important commercial undertakings in the town. One day I passed him on the street and was thrilled that he did not recognise me. I had no inclination to set upon him. My own calmness under the circumstances amazed me. I could wait, something within me seemed to whisper; my time would come.
“Joseph Stone was biding his time about giving his discovery to the world. I was living proof of its efficiency, but there was one other thing he wished for before he set out to make all the races of the world white, and that was independent financial means. For the accomplishment of this dream he depended on a rumour that came to him of indications of a rich gold mine far in the interior.
“It was in the late autumn of my twentieth year that Joseph Stone and I set out to locate the gold vein that he believed existed far up the Nannabijou River. We took no guides and travelled light, for to both of us the wilderness was an open book. To be brief, after a month of the pack-trail and patient prospecting, we did discover the gold vein, which gave indications far beyond the expectations of either.
“But winter came down with the sudden intensity which is often its wont in the North. We were awakened one night by the cold and the howling of a raging blizzard. We decided to set out on the return journey at once, particularly on account of a shortage of vegetables and flour.
“As the rivers and lakes were frozen over, we had to abandon our canoe, and, as we had brought no snowshoes with us, the going through the fine, loose snow was exceedingly hard on the old man. Joseph Stone, I could see, was gradually breaking down under the hardships of the gruelling journey and the assaults of the cold. A cough he had developed and the deepening shadows under his eyes were symptoms of the dreaded grippe. Day by day his inertia increased until he finally pitched over and begged me to let him go to his last sleep in the snow while I pushed on.
“I was carrying him on my back rolled up in blankets when I fortunately came upon a band of roving Indians, from whom I borrowed a string of dogs, a sled and a pair of snowshoes. Thus equipped, after I had gone back up the trail and secured the provisions and equipment we had cached when Stone broke down, I bundled the sick man up on the sled and made haste to reach the cabin in the Cup.
“Joseph Stone breathed his last one night on the trail within a day’s journey of home. Just before he died he cried out:—
“‘You won’t forget, the mine goes to—’
“Then his voice failed him, but what I caught when I bent near was a whispered, ‘to J— C— when twenty-one.’
“With his last breath he called upon the spirit of my father, ‘Black Jack’ Carlstone, to witness the injunction he had made to me.
“It was in my subsequent reflections standing there in the trail by the dead man that a mad inspiration as to the course of my future operations came to me in a flash. From Joseph Stone I had previously learned the story of his son’s leaving him in white anger years before. The father had never forgiven what he deemed ingratitude, and he apparently never heard from the younger Stone again until his widow wrote of his death and the subsequent birth of a daughter, who had been named in her grandfather’s honour, Josephine Stone. Joseph Stone never answered that letter, but he cherished the picture of the baby the mother had sent with it, and, as he always referred to the child as ‘Josie,’ there was never any doubt that his whispered ‘J— C—’ was meant to be Josie.
“It was like the eccentric old scientist to thus give out his last orders. His oral will that the property was not to go to his grand-daughter until she was twenty-one might ordinarily have presented legal difficulties; but to me that injunction presented the opportunity that comes to a man but once in a lifetime, if it comes at all.”
“I went back to civilisation as ‘A. C. Smith,’ using my actual initials as a prefix to a pseudonym I felt would stir up the least curiosity. Part of my plan of future operations was to keep my own personality as much in the background as possible. I also devised the pseudonym, ‘J.C.X.,’ to represent Josephine Stone until she became of age and heiress to the estate, but to have a legal significance as a trust account in the bank it had to be made ‘J. C. Eckes.’ It was in favour of J.C.X. that I filed the claim on the gold mine property, giving it out that I was acting for this other party who wished to beidentified as little as possible with the transactions and had left me the authority to take care of them. The drafting up of a fictitious written agreement to this effect caused me no qualms of conscience, for I had long since lost any reverence I might have held for legal technicalities.
“The following summer the mining claim was sold for thirty-five thousand dollars. It was more than it subsequently proved to be worth, for the vein was only a shallow out-cropping. But fortune was already playing into my hands, for Norman T. Gildersleeve, who was one of the heaviest shareholders in the company that bought it, lost a lot of money developing it. Through the mine, unexpectedly, I had dealt him his first blow.
“That thirty-five thousand dollars brought the North Star Towing and Contracting Company into existence as a one-tug-and-barge concern. As Acey Smith, a man from nowhere, I became its skipper and general outdoors executive, but its actual ownership in the name of J.C.X. was known only to its bankers. The general public believed it was backed by a syndicate of eastern capitalists, a delusion I took every means to foster.
“The North Star prospered from the start. From then on its progress was like that of a thing of destiny. Gildersleeve, who, with his associates, had until now almost a complete monopoly of marine work, at first paid little attention to the insignificant North Star. He was then more concerned with city real estate and western land ventures. It was not until it was announced that a leading Kam City citizen, holding the patronage from Ottawa, had been appointed president of the North Star that he became at all alarmed. What he did not fully realise was that this political trickster and professional lobbyist had been bought body and soul for the use of his name and his influence at the capital. He was merely a dummy president, as all the presidents of the NorthStar since have been, with no more real executive authority than the man in the moon.”
“Gildersleeve woke up too late. His first cold realisation that he had a dangerous rival came when the North Star secured a huge government contract for harbour dredging and improvements, for which an appropriation of two million dollars had been placed in the parliamentary estimates. With the money credit established by the acquisition of this contract, the North Star was enabled to invest in a formidable fleet of tugs and the most modern dredging equipment.
“There was no stopping now—the North Star’s only salvation lay in continuous expansion to the last shred of money credit and the gobbling up of every worthwhile contract. High capitalisation and enormous daily overhead had to be met with tremendous production and what the newspapers call profiteering on a large scale. There is an advanced stage of development of a commercial enterprise when its directing head must chloroform his conscience. The North Star had reached that stage. It was a case of destroying or being destroyed. The war between the North Star and the Gildersleeve interests was on in deadly earnest, and I saw to it that the North Star was continuously the aggressor.
“Gildersleeve was no fool as a business man, and under his smug cloak of respectability he knew no scruples save where the law might halt him. But, as his potential destroyer, I had made a thorough, patient study of his weaknesses rather than his strength. He had so long been used to easy, safe stages of progress that he had lost the initiative of a plunger. He considered too long and was over-cautious; while Gildersleeve washolding long-winded conferences with his associates and executives, the North Star was striking hard where it was least expected to strike.
“Through a thoroughly organised private intelligence department, I knew the Gildersleeve plans before they were put into operation. The North Star too held conferences; but they were merely ‘blinds,’ the plans of the company being devised by none but myself, and none knew what they were until orders went out to the president over the signature of ‘J.C.X.’
“I picked my men for their ability to carry out instructions quickly and thoroughly. I had no need for generals or advisors; except that their recommendations regarding campaign plans gave me an idea what other people, including our competitors, would be liable to conceive we were about to do. If such recommendations tallied with the plans already formulated, I promptly discarded the latter and set about devising entirely different methods. The North Star never did the obvious thing, and the element of surprise invariably helped carry the day.
“The North Star took a controlling interest in powerful newspapers it could use, and it used their news columns and editorials in a subtle manner that never gave them the appearance of mere organs. To be a power in the land and so many stuffed clubs to drive the politicians to do the North Star’s bidding, they had to be papers of the people and with the people.
“The general conception that a mysterious outside personality directed the affairs of the North Star had become a fixed make-believe with myself. I actually used to come here to the cabin in the Cup to ‘consult’ the fictitious J.C.X., playing upon the violin the music that wasen rapportwith my mood. And with the music would come flashes of inspiration from what I held tomyself was the unseen agency of J.C.X. It was whimsical, childish, if you like, but one must so pamper the sub-conscious if he would have it function.
“The North Star’s great smash was the capture of the government ice-breaking contracts for spring and fall, which the Gildersleeve interests held until we had J. J. Slack elected to the Commons, elevated to the cabinet and made him our president.
“The North Star gave Gildersleeve no quarter. A series of other swiftly-succeeding coups broke the back of Gildersleeve’s control on the upper Lakes. Soon his boats were lying idle at their docks, and when in a tight year they were offered for sale at what would be little better than their value as junk, the North Star secretly financed other small companies to buy up the best of them, in order to make sure there would not even be crumbs left for its rival.
“The North Star had gained undisputed monopoly of the Upper Lakes, and it now turned its attention to inland activities, seeking where it could strike Gildersleeve most vitally. It became a byword that the unknown clique who guided the North Star could make and break other men and businesses at its pleasure. Politicians and the so-called rulers of the land came seeking the North Star ready to do its pleasure. It seems to be a fact that the mob respect and fear only that which remains a profound mystery to them. The unsolved riddle of the North Star’s ownership and direction inspired a morale among its executives and workers that familiarity with the master mind of the enterprise would have negatived. Its operations and swift expansion to the exclusion of others came to be looked upon with a sort of numbed fatalism by its rivals and enemies. It seemed to appropriate with ease what it willed on land and water; but none knew the continuous drudgery of one man’simagination to bring about those very things. And the North Star fostered and preserved an element of colour that distinguished it from the drab grind of most big business undertakings—it was picturesque as well as successful.
“Before the year 1914, when the Great War broke out, the North Star had driven Norman T. Gildersleeve from every holding he had originally usurped in the estate of John Carlstone, and from other enterprises he held stock in in Canada. He fled to the States, a bankrupt.
“I have given you a cold-blooded story of how the North Star succeeded. Its operations were on a plane with those of nearly every big enterprise in Canada to-day. Big business is war, always war—smash or be smashed. But the North Star hid behind no smug cloak of hypocrisy; it gave no quarter and it asked for none. On the other hand, the North Star lived up to its contracts to the letter; it never swindled a legitimate customer nor took advantage of a weak or struggling competitor. Its sole prey was the Gildersleeve interests and those who stood in the way of its becoming great and powerful.”
“And now I must go back to a detail that I would much rather not have to touch upon,” said Acey Smith. “But in this account of my stewardship, I promised you I should leave no mystery unexplained, and had not this little matter been attended to I would feel I had been remiss in my duty.
“Some time after the North Star enterprise had been successfully placed on its feet I had a trusted agent locate the whereabouts of Josephine Stone and her mother. He brought back a report that they were livingin Calgary, and that the death of the heiress’ father had left them poorly provided for. Joseph Stone’s eccentric will left no alternative in the matter of supplying funds direct from the earnings of his estate to her until she had reached her twenty-first birthday.
“How to supply you with an annuity that would provide for your livelihood and education without leaving it open to discovery where the money came from was one of the most perplexing problems of all I set out to solve. The discovery that your father had been manager of a wholesale produce concern in Edmonton before his health broke down and that he had invented a secret method for preserving eggs for indefinite periods without the use of salt finally gave me an idea. A man was sent to make your mother an offer for the recipe. Fortunately, she had preserved the formula, and she seemed only too delighted to dispose of it to the Kam City Cold Storage Company at a royalty of three thousand dollars a year. It was as much as I dared make the royalty lest—”
Josephine Stone gave a little gasp at thus suddenly learning the real source of the income she and her mother had enjoyed. “And we had thought that all came of father’s genius!”
“But wait,” interposed Acey Smith. “Your father’s invention earned fifty times what the royalty cost each year. The Kam City Cold Storage Company is one of the flourishing subsidiaries of the North Star, and your father’s recipe for storing eggs is used in it to-day. It was the recipe which actually contributed most to its success.”
Josephine Stonesat a rapt listener to this, the first relation of the inner story of the North Star Towing and Contracting Company’s operations. She had only grasped in a dazed way the tremendous significance it had to her personally. The magnetic nearness of the master mind that had created and developed the huge enterprise and its subsidiaries single-handed diverted her thoughts for the time being from her own personal interest in the matter. Here close to her was that rare type, a man of dreams with the will and initiative to weave reality from the gossamer skeins of his picturesque imagination—a genius and a man of purpose.
The thought that struck her was: What must this man have gone through in all those years! He had not referred to that. His stress had been on the might and achievements of the North Star. But the North Star was Acey Smith; a man’s greatest achievements in life are no more than the expression and embodiment of the hidden emotions that rule his being. These things must have come, not alone from the desire for revenge on his usurper, but from the irresistible urge of a great protagonist soul for self-expression—the consciousness of power—the restless fire that consumes a conqueror. What might this man not have been under other circumstances?
She glanced shyly at his face as he proceeded in low, musical tones with the tale. The bitter, sinister lineswere gone from it now, and in their place there sat the tragedy of it all; the lonely years he struggled and fought and pitted himself against the giants of his time—anonymously, because of his terrible affliction, that loon-cry, and the calamitous circumstances of his birth. About those unhappy features, she intuitively knew, he was extremely sensitive—secret sorrows that until now had been sealed books. He had dared have no sympathetic confidante and no solace in his periods of relaxation but the voice of his violin up in the solitary confines of this Cup of Nannabijou. Now—now she understood that terrible heart-hunger that had wailed to her on the notes of the number he played last night.
But there was that yet that she had not learned.
“When war broke out and Canada offered her all in the cause of civilisation,” he was saying, “I experienced the thrill that gripped the manhood of British nations round the world. I wanted to get in on a bit of the fighting, and I wanted to fight under my father’s name. I found a way.
“Instructions went out to the executives of the North Star that the directing heads of the company were called away temporarily on war duty, and Hon. J. J. Slack was put in absolute charge in the interim. A. C. Smith, superintendent, it was announced, was being despatched on confidential business and would be absent from his duties for an indefinite period, his chief assistant taking care of his work in the meantime. This all looked plausible enough because two of the North Star’s most powerful tugs had been sent overseas when the first call for boats of their type went out.
“Before I enlisted I left a sealed envelope containing explicit instructions as to the disposition of the affairs of the North Star, in case I did not return, with Sir David Edwards-Jones, president of the Regal Bank ofCanada, a man I had grown to estimate as the soul of thoroughness and honour. Those instructions were to be returned to me with the seals unbroken if I did come back. Then one night, unnoticed, I took a midnight train for the West.
“I stained my skin the copper tint it had been before old Joseph Stone bleached it with his formula, and in Vancouver enlisted as Private Alexander Carlstone. None that knew me as Acey Smith knew my name, number or battalion except Yvonne Kovenay, a rather wonderful young woman who was head of the North Star’s intelligence department. I confided that much to her, under pledges of strictest secrecy, in order that I might be kept in touch with the affairs of the North Star while I was at the front.
“From what you told me that day on Amethyst Island, Miss Stone, I gather that you have heard most there was to know about the record of Alexander Carlstone with the Canadian army; except that the story as it was passed on by others gives me much more credit for deeds of valour than is coming to me. How I slipped away unnoticed from the base hospital and reverted to the role of Acey Smith is a little story in itself, but we have no time for those details now. The fighting was almost over and I wanted to get back to Canada as quickly as possible, lest in the process of demobilisation my identity should be learned.
“Incidentally, news had come to me that Gildersleeve was organising a new company to enter into competition with the North Star’s pulpwood activities along the North Shore.”
“Before the war, the North Star had succeeded in acquiring all the larger and more valuable timberconcessions on the upper reaches of Lake Superior, with the exception of the block known as the Nannabijou Limits. This vast area of pulpwood was considered the most desirable of all, and the cutting rights there meant the domination of the pulp and paper industry in Northern Ontario.
“The government had withheld the Nannabijou Limits from being thrown on the market in deference to a pledge made to the people by a former premier that it would never be leased until the company tendering for it erected a mill at Kam City capable of manufacturing into paper every stick of wood taken from it.
“The North Star until then had been an exporter, sending most of its pulpwood to mills in eastern Canada in which it held stock and to customers in United States. I had early conceived that to make the North Star hold its place it must by one means or another acquire the Nannabijou Limits. Before the war, plans were all completed for the building of a pulp and paper mill at Kam City to comply with the government stipulation. The outbreak of hostilities, however, brought about such chaos in the business world that the project had to be abandoned.
“My absence at the war and the consequent inactivity of the North Star in the matter of expansion had given Gildersleeve the opportunity he had been quietly watching for. When I returned I discovered that he was organising international capital on a large scale with the express purpose of securing the rights on the Nannabijou. If he succeeded I knew too well what it meant, and that would be the ultimate elimination of the North Star as a factor on the upper lakes.
“The North Star immediately purchased a site for a plant in Kam City, let a contract for the erection of a pulp and paper mill building and placed an order for thenecessary machinery and equipment. With these proofs of our good intentions we went to the provincial government and put in our application for cutting rights on the Nannabijou. The Kam City Pulp and Paper Company, subsidiary of the International Investment Corporation, of which Gildersleeve had been made president, simultaneously made a bid for the limits. They too bought a site in Kam City and made preparations for the erection of a mill.
“As an established Canadian company employing hundreds of workmen the year round, not to mention the lever we had in political affairs, the advantage, at the start, was with us; but parliament, as is the wont of parliaments, haggled over the matter for many weary months. Finally, they awarded the lease to the North Star, on a year to year basis, with a particular stipulation that our mills be grinding wood from the Nannabijou Limits at full capacity on October twenty-third of this year. That would give us plenty of leeway, for we expected to commence the installation of our machinery in June.
“Strange as it appeared at the time, the Kam City Pulp and Paper Company continued their building operations with no apparent prospect of limits to draw a raw supply from. I suspected Gildersleeve had a card up his sleeve, but was at a loss to determine what trickery he planned until the announcement reached us that the company in the States which was building the North Star’s pulp and paper manufacturing machinery had gone into liquidation and could not make delivery.
“This was indeed a calamity, for the construction of certain of the machines used in paper-making cannot be completed in less than twenty-seven months’ time. Nowhere else could we secure equipment anywhere within the time limit set by the government. The full meaningof the coup that had been put over the North Star by its unscrupulous rival was realised when we learned that the failure of the pulp and paper machinery manufacturers with whom the North Star had its order was brought about by money-market manipulators in Gildersleeve’s syndicate. By this underhand method the Kam City Pulp and Paper Mills had actually gained possession of the plant the North Star had on order.
“The North Star was faced with cancellation of its rights on the limits and possible financial difficulties through the immense amount of money it had invested in a mill that would now be a white elephant on its hands. The Kam City Pulp and Paper Company lost no time in drawing the attention of the government to the fact that the North Star was installing no machinery to grind the pulp poles it was booming at the limits; and further that we had no machinery nor any prospect of securing any. The Kam City Company applied for an order to restrain the North Star from further cutting operations and again applied for the lease under the former terms of offer.
“The order of restraint was not issued, but the government, after investigation, issued a fiat that in case the Kam City Company were in a position to manufacture paper to the full capacity demanded in the North Star’s agreement, and the North Star were not in that position, the rights of the North Star on the Nannabijou Limits were to be cancelled and turned over to the Kam City Company on October twenty-third. Furthermore, the fiat ordained that the North Star could continue cutting and booming poles at the limits until that date, if it so desired; but it must make delivery of all poles cut in time and in sufficient quantities to start the Kam City Company’s mills on contract time, and to keep themrunning full capacity until the opening of navigation the following year.
“To their own surprise, as well as that of every one else who had been following the news, the North Star’s legal representatives appearing before the legislature received definite orders not to apply for an extension of time in the matter of the North Star’s agreement, nor to attempt to protest the Kam City Company’s right to the lease. They were instructed instead to concentrate their efforts for the inclusion of a clause in the government’s agreement with the Kam City Company specifying that, should the latter company fail to make good to the letter in their contract by the date named, from any cause whatsoever, the order giving them access to the limits should be cancelled and the North Star should remain in peaceful possession with the privilege of acquiring and installing the necessary machinery at its mills as expeditiously as might be within the bounds of reason.
“That famous ‘Act of God’ clause, as it has since been nicknamed, was fought out for days on the floor of the House; but the North Star finally won, its representatives stressing the fact that the North Star had been arbitrarily dealt with by the government because it had been debarred from fulfilling its agreement through circumstances over which it had no control, and, what was fair for an established company already in possession, should be fair enough for an outside company which was seeking to take its right away from it. The law-makers at Toronto were sportsmen enough to see the point, though they could not possibly see how we could benefit from it.
“The public was quite as much at sea, and it was freely conceded that the directing heads of the North Star were madmen, though people who knew the North Starintimately were contented to wait and see what came out of it all.”