Later that same afternoon a messenger boy entered Slack’s private office and delivered to him a sealed yellow envelope. It contained a marconigram in code, which, after some moments of patient study, Slack deciphered as follows:
Be prepared sensational news. Authorise papers print verbatim all despatches signed Musson. Keep strict watchout and wire explicit details regarding all strangers seeking to get to limits.(Sgd.) “J.C.X.”
Be prepared sensational news. Authorise papers print verbatim all despatches signed Musson. Keep strict watchout and wire explicit details regarding all strangers seeking to get to limits.
(Sgd.) “J.C.X.”
Slack’s fat hands trembled. His face became red and white by turns like one who has been discovered in a grievous blunder. He jabbed excitedly at a push-button to the side of his desk.
A lean, bespectacled man with a foxlike face responded from the outer office. “You wanted me, Mr. Slack?”
“Yes, Jackson, send a man to the docks right away,” cried Slack. “Tell him to look up a fellow named Hammond who has a pass out on the tug and bring him back here to me. Tell him to tell Hammond there’s been an oversight and I want to see him right away.”
The fox-faced man craned his neck at the south window of the office. “The tug’s gone, Mr. Slack,” he announced. “She’s a mile out in the lake now.”
Whereat Jackson discreetly withdrew while the Hon. J. J. Slack, M.P., made the air sing with dark, unparliamentary curses.
WhenAcey Smith returned to his office after seeing Hammond to his sleeping quarters the night the latter arrived at the Nannabijou Limits, he sat long by his desk in strange cogitation, his eyes narrowed to brooding slits, his mouth drawn over his even white teeth until it became a long cruel hairline in a face that no longer masked its ruthless craftiness. Acey Smith believed the faculties became most acute after midnight. Most of the problems that arose in the province of his activities were solved in the dead hours of the night. And when a light burned late in Acey Smith’s office—well, there were sometimes orders to execute that proved an unlovely surprise for one or more persons of consequence on the morrow.
Of all the executives of the North Star Towing and Contracting Company and its subsidiaries Acey Smith was the deepest enigma; a man who lived for the most part to himself, kept no counsel with his fellows. Of his antecedents there was little known. He had risen from the obscurity of dear knows where to the post of superintendent for the North Star Company; in fact had been its chief out-of-doors executive since its inception as a one-tug-and-barge salvaging and towing concern. He had seen it rise to a position dominating the marine business of the upper lakes and spread out commercial branches into the lumber limits, the furterritories, urban manufacturing and even the grain belts of the prairie west. The North Star became the mightiest commercial octopus of the North and the Northwest, but Acey Smith never moved beyond the post of superintendent for the parent company and general over-man of the subsidiaries.
Why this was so not even his brother executives of the North Star enterprises could understand. That he “held cards” with the executives of the company was current belief. Some declared he was more in their confidence than the president, Hon. J. J. Slack himself. Deeper ones sensed some secret personal barrier that precluded his promotion.
In truth, there were times when Acey Smith cursed bitterly a creature that had put a curse upon him through his mother—startled her before he was born with a black curse that stuck.
The Latin races in the cutting gangs steadfastly held Acey Smith was in league with the Evil One, a superstition which gained weight from a tale of old-timers of how he had once broken a Finnish bully of the camps with his bare hands. Smith had gone out to reprimand the Finn for causing a disturbance, whereat the latter made use of a name that is a fighting-word wherever men revere the honour of their parents.
The superintendent’s form leaped out of his mackinaw like the unsheathing of a rapier. The giant rushed him with a roar; flailed at him with his great ape-like arms, intending first to knock him to the ground and then stamp and lacerate him with his caulked boots, after a refined custom of victors in back-country encounters of those days.
Instead, the great Finn halted abruptly a few feet from Acey Smith with a queer sound that was half sob, half moan.
The Boss’s arms had shot out like flickers of light to the throat and face of the other, and what happened after that would pale the story of the cruellest one-sided prizefight on record. They carried the Finn away a bleeding, quivering mass with a head that wabbled weirdly on a swollen, distorted neck.
It was the Finn’s last fight. Just what happened he never told, and at mention of it he would jabber incoherent things through teeth that chattered like those of one in the grip of the ague. When he recovered sufficiently to get upon his feet, he left camp at a limping run and was never seen in those precincts again.
It was the look upon Acey Smith’s face on that occasion that left an indelible impress upon the memory of witnesses—a light of incarnate fury and hate that sat there while he pummelled the other into a pulp. None had ever seen such a baneful gleam on the face of a man, and among those hard-bitten, devil-may-care lumber-jacks there was none who wished to ever look upon its like again.
What the witnesses to that fight had seen in Acey Smith’s face was a something that was always there, subdued almost beyond detection in his normal moments, but ever leaping in flickers to his features when powerful impulses were upon him—an all-crushing, sinister thing that seemed to be crying out from within him: “Destroy! Destroy! Destroy!”
That was what Louis Hammond had seen, momentarily, when Acey Smith had gripped his wrist at the door. It had brought upon Hammond an unknown fear that it took all his strength of will to hide.
But now, in the privacy of his midnight meditations, conflicting emotions were mirrored in the countenance of the master of the Nannabijou camps. As he sat pondering by his desk the remnants of that evil light leapedalternately to his eyes only to dissipate in a softer glow that seemed to signal the triumph of some better element of his nature.
Two problems assailed Acey Smith—one the hidden reason for sending Louis Hammond to the limits and the other the haunting eyes of a beautiful woman whose visit to his office earlier in the evening had brought a magical surprise.
It was not that either of their visits was unexpected. He had been apprised of their coming through the North Star’s own channels of information. “As for Hammond,” he finally deduced, “he’s merely a stool-pigeon—nothing more. But for what purpose? There’s what must be found out right away.”
He picked up Slack’s letter of introduction. It was a somewhat different epistle from what he had inferred it was to Hammond:—
Dear A.C.S.—The bearer, one Louis Hammond, has evidently got something on the Big Quarry, who wants us to keep him hidden on the limits at a good salary. It might be a good idea to hang onto him and draw him out. What he knows might be of value to us.J. J.Slack
Dear A.C.S.—The bearer, one Louis Hammond, has evidently got something on the Big Quarry, who wants us to keep him hidden on the limits at a good salary. It might be a good idea to hang onto him and draw him out. What he knows might be of value to us.
J. J.Slack
Acey Smith tore the letter into tiny shreds and dropped them into the stove. “Slack,” he passed judgment, “has about as much real thinking matter above his eyebrows as a yellow chipmunk.”
Hammond and Slack were soon out of Acey Smith’s thoughts. He paced the floor in slow, thoughtful strides, every now and then pausing to gaze at a certain point near the door. An onlooker would have been amazed at the metamorphosis that had come over the man. The harsh lines had receded from his face and a somethingcame in their place that in another might have been taken for the light of a tender sentiment.
Memory of a gentle presence gripped him, gripped him with the thrill of a golden song and an abandonment to its witchery that was a back-cry from a youth this man of iron had never lived in its fullness.
In his mental eye he could see her standing as she had stood in his doorway, hesitant and waiting for him who was for the moment held too spell-bound to speak. God, what eyes! They had seemed to play into the very soul of him as shafts of the morning sun golden and gladden the dourest recesses of the wilderness hills. This was no toy of a girl, merely pretty and pleasing to the eye. She was a beautiful woman in all the wonderfully potential things that simple phrase conjures in the fancy of a man who has seen the world and what tawdry stuff lies behind much of its glint and glitter. He was totally unprepared for such a discovery; he had never thought of things turning out so. He had listened to her voice as one listens to melody whose reminiscent notes carry him back into a nebula of forgotten things, faint and elusive, yet hauntingly familiar. Yet Acey Smith had never set eyes on this woman before.
She had introduced herself as Miss Josephine Stone, of Calgary, Alta., who had taken up temporary residence on Amethyst Island, a picturesque reef formerly used as a summer resort and situated about a mile and a half northwest of the docks of the Nannabijou Limits. She had come there from the West, accompanied by a woman companion, Mrs. Johnson, in compliance with a letter she had received from Mr. J. C. Eckes, of the North Star Towing and Contracting Company, who had intimated that information of vital interest to her could only be communicated to her sometime within the next few weeks, and, to accommodate her and any companions andservants she thought necessary to bring with her, a cottage had been prepared for her occupancy on Amethyst Island. A cheque, drawn on the North Star Company, to cover her expenses, had been enclosed with the letter, which enjoined her to the strictest secrecy, but she was directed to call upon Mr. A. C. Smith, superintendent at the limits, at her earliest convenience after she got settled on Amethyst Island. Mr. Smith would see to her welfare till such time as it was possible for her to be put in possession of the information referred to.
“It is all so mysterious,” she concluded. “It is more like something you would read about in a book.”
“But it is all very real, I assure you, Miss Stone,” replied Acey Smith. “Won’t you be seated?”
“Oh, I’m afraid I cannot remain long. Mrs. Johnson came over with me from the island and I left her waiting in the motorboat at the dock.”
“You find things comfortable and congenial at the island?”
“Very. I think it is such a delightful spot. Just like a holiday for me, and I can get over and back to the city so conveniently in the motorboat provided.”
“You would not be averse to remaining there for say, three to four weeks, if necessary?”
“Oh.” She had not, evidently, been prepared for such a request. “In the meantime, am I to know what this is all about, Mr. Smith?”
“I am very sorry I am not in a position to fully explain to you what must seem like a very queer proceeding,” he answered, “and I can only ask you to be content to await developments.”
“But Mr. Eckes—when am I to meet him?”
“J.C.X.?” Acey Smith pronounced it short and in a cautious whisper.
“Yes.”
“That would be out of the question.”
“But I understood I was to meet him here.”
“You have misinterpreted the letter, Miss Stone. Nowhere does it refer to such a meeting.”
The girl bit her nether lip. Her eyes flashed dangerously. “If that’s the answer,” she said coldly, “we may as well end this farce at once. I will return to Calgary to-morrow.”
Genuine alarm came into Acey Smith’s face. “But, Miss Stone,” he cried, “you don’t know how much it is in your own interests that you stay—how greatly you would jeopardise matters by leaving!”
“That is just it—I don’t know! I feel I have a right to know if I am to be asked to remain.”
There could be no mistaking the determination in her voice and manner. Plainly she was poignantly disappointed. The superintendent gazed fixedly into space for a silent period. “Give me time,” he requested. “Give me time to find out what I may tell you. Will you do that?”
“To-morrow?”
“To-morrow morning, if you say so.”
“Shall I call here?”
“No. I will go to the island—with your permission.”
“Thank you, Mr. Smith. I will look for you at 10.30.”
He accompanied her, hat in hand, to the door. She softly declined his offer of escort to the dock, a declination that left no hurt. She was a Western girl with a Western girl’s notions of independence in such matters.
Acey Smith had reluctantly applied himself to another pressing matter with thoughts of her forcing themselves uppermost. Then Hammond had come. Hammond—oh, well, he wanted to forget Hammond and those other things for just now.
In spite of the predicament the girl’s ultimatum had apparently placed him in, Acey Smith had pleasure inanticipating the keeping of that appointment at Amethyst Island on the following day. Before retiring he took from a wardrobe in his private quarters a neatly pressed dark suit of tailor-made clothes and laid it out in his room with fine shoes and immaculate white linen.
Awakening the following morning he sat up in bed, and, gazing at the city garments, laughed a harsh, soulless laugh.
“Fool,” he syllabled grimly. “Fool—double-fool!” He garbed himself in his bush clothes and placed the fine raiment back in the wardrobe.
An hour later that morning, in the cook’s quarters, Louis Hammond came out of a dreamless sleep and for some moments sat blinkingly trying to adjust himself to his new surroundings. He wasn’t so sure now he was going to like his new job or its environment. Used to an active routine, he would many times rather have had some set schedule of duties to perform than be left to find his own means of occupying his time. There was something highly unsatisfactory about the whole thing, and had it not been for the element of mystery that challenged his patience, he would have felt like dropping the assignment and leaving by the first tug for the city.
As if it were an echo of his thoughts, there came the shrill tooting of the incoming morning tug down by the dock. Hammond rolled out of his bunk and ran to the four-paned window of the cabin. The tug had already been docked and snubbed with the despatch characteristic of upper lakes sailormen. The crew, hustling off supplies, paused while a single passenger, a young woman wearing sable furs and a large picture hat, landed. Something familiar about her caused Hammond to watchby the window while she came leisurely up the camp road.
He started back with a suppressed exclamation as her features became discernible. It was the face of the dark-eyed woman he had seen get off the train at Moose Horn Station in the wake of Norman T. Gildersleeve.
She turned and walked into the office of the superintendent without rapping on the door.
“All our trails seem to lead to Acey Smith’s layout,” grimly ruminated Hammond as he turned from the window.
Breakfast, however, was uppermost in Hammond’s mind at the moment, and, hastily donning his clothes, he hurried over to the dining camp just across the road from his sleeping quarters. He expected a sharp reprimand for being late, but he was met by a genial-faced, auburn-haired young man who introduced himself as his shack-mate, Sandy Macdougal, head cook.
“There’s orders from the Big Boss you’re to feed when you like and sleep as long as you want,” he said smilingly as he indicated a place at one of the long plank tables set out with accurately aligned rows of graniteware dishes and great graniteware bowls of white sugar.
One of Macdougal’s bull cooks brought in oatmeal porridge, a platter heaped high with bacon and eggs, toast, a jug of Snowshoe syrup and a big graniteware pot of steaming coffee. Hammond had the diner to himself. He never remembered an occasion in his life when he felt so hungry or a meal appealed to him as so inviting. There is something in the tang of the open-air North that puts a real edge on one’s appetite, and there are no workers so insistent about the skill of the men who cook meals for them as lumber-jacks.
Macdougal returned from the kitchen a few moments later, and, lighting a cigarette, sat down on the plank bench near Hammond with back and elbows on thetable. “I saw your duds when I tumbled out this morning,” he remarked, “but I suspected you were some friend of the boss’s who’d come late in the night and I didn’t wake you—Well, for the love of Mike, look who’s here!”
Hammond whirled.
At the door of the diner stood a weird figure. His face was swarthy, almost black, with livid red scars on the cheek-bones below each eye. Straight black hair, coarse as a horse’s mane, fell in glossy strands to his shoulders from his uncovered head, where a single eagle’s feather was fastened at the back with a band of purple bound round the temples and the brow. He wore a much-beaded, close-fitting costume of brightly-coloured blanket-cloth, shoepack moccasins and string upon string of glistening white wolves’ teeth around his neck.
His was a face of deep sagacity, features aquiline and regular as a white man’s but possessing that solemn majesty of the headmen of Northern tribes. It was made the more forbidding by the self-inflicted wounds in the cheeks, and the whites of his eyes showed garishly as he leisurely surveyed the room.
“Ogima Bush,” he announced in a deep voice that commanded respect in spite of his bizarre appearance. “Ogima Bush look to find Big Boss.”
“Mr. Smith?” It was Macdougal who spoke.
“Un-n-n-n—Smid. Maybe you know where me find?”
“Gone,” informed Macdougal, throwing out his arms expressively. “Gone away out on lake early. Maybe not be back for long time.”
The Indian grunted. “Maybe you tell him Big Boss Ogima Bush come to see him? Tell him big Medicine Man.”
“All right,” assented Macdougal.
The Indian turned and strode out, but not before he fixed Hammond for one fleeting instant with an uncannyflash from his fierce black eyes, a glint in them that seemed to pierce the young man through and through.
“Some motion picture get-up that,” Hammond observed when the door closed behind him. “An Indian chief, I suppose?”
“No, worse than that,” sniffed the cook. “He’s what they call a medicine man; even the whites out here step out of the trail to let that bird pass. Besides, one’s got to be civil to them red-skinned loafers,” he explained, “because the super. is in some way cahoots with them and their pagan deviltry. Some say he’s really one of them only he happened to be born white.”
Hammond had to laugh over the other’s rueful seriousness. “But is Smith really out?” he questioned. “I saw a lady come off the tug this morning and go into his office.”
“A pretty little devil with dark eyes and a flashy set of furs?”
Hammond nodded.
“That’s Yvonne,” said Sandy the Cook. “Yes, and maybe she wasn’t rearin’ mad when she found the Big Boss was out. She’s got to go back on the tug this morning, and nobody here, not even Mooney, the assistant super., knows where Smith’s gone or when he’ll be back.”
Breakfast finished, Hammond lit his pipe and strolled out intending to look up the camp store and secure the bush clothing Acey Smith had the night before advised him to rig out in. At the door his attention was attracted to the dock by the tooting of the tug now making ready to pull out. Two figures stood in earnest conversation at the foot of the tug’s tiny gangway. The one was the girl in the sable furs and picture hat and the other was a tall, black-bearded man in a rusty black suit, the coat of which was over-long and square cut at the bottom.
“Now I wonder what Yvonne is chinnin’ to that old goof about?” speculated the cook at Hammond’s shoulder. “He’s another character that just bumped into camp a day or so ago.”
“Looks like some sort of a preacher,” hazarded Hammond.
“That’s what he calls himself—Rev. Nathan Stubbs,” replied Sandy. “He holds psalm-singing sessions nights and Sundays, but he’s never around camp through the day when the Big Boss is here. The Big Boss gave Mooney orders to keep him out of his sight because he always made him feel like committin’ murder. Smith’s funny that way; some people he takes a violent dislike to right away.”
One of the tug’s men plucked at the girl’s sleeve and motioned her to hurry up the gangway. The Rev. Nathan Stubbs lifted his hat and shook hands with her when they parted.
“That’s funny—damn funny.” There was perplexity in Macdougal’s undertone observation. “I can’t understand Yvonne making up to the likes of him.”
“Does sheoftencome out here?” Hammond asked it with an incautious inflection. He sensed that when it was too late.
The other eyed him queerly, almost suspiciously. “Now maybe that isn’t any of my business to be gassin’ about,” the cook declared. “But you don’t look like a snoop, and I don’t know anything that’s worth quizzin’ me for at that. I’ll advise you this much, mate: Don’t be surprised at anything you see or hear out here, and if you know what’s good for you you won’t go pryin’ into what you don’t understand. It’s a queer layout this, a mighty queer layout—and Acey Smith, the Big Boss, is the queerest thing in it.”
Viewedfrom the deck of a great lakes steamer travelling the commercial lane that runs less than two miles south of it, Amethyst Island is but a black speck among a hundred other foam-rimmed islets that dot Superior’s rugged north shore, an infinitesimal bit of rock and dry land before a frowning background of deep-riven hills, where range upon range breasts out from Nannabijou Point and disappears into the purple of the northern horizon. Time and evolution work few changes on those hills of desolation which rear their black, fantastic peaks above hostile, spruce-bearded flanks like age-chained monsters scorning in lofty nudity the might of man to efface or reclaim their barrenness. Everywhere they whisper of dark potentialities; of secret places where awful stillness reigns, of skulking grey wolves and gleaming white bones.
To the right of the clifflike point and seemingly rising just back of the skirting woods opposite Amethyst Island is the Cup of Nannabijou, a castlelike circle of black cliffs, whose base is really a stiff walk from the shoreline. It is territory to this day shunned by wandering Indian tribes, believed to be the prison in which Nannabijou, the Indian demi-god, attempted to wall up Animikee, the Thunder Devil; and this belief is strengthened in poor Lo’s mind by the magnetic flashes which play up from the hills on nights preceding electrical storms.Along a depression at the base of the cliffs flows Solomon Creek on its way to join the mighty, amber-coloured Nannabijou River before the latter empties into the bay. Solomon Creek tumbles out in a foaming white cascade from a great fissure in the cliffs, being the outlet for a limpid mountain lake confined by the walls of the Cup, a gleaming pool of gold by day and a mystic black mirror of the stars by night. In the rocks the Indians see the images of the men and beasts of their pagan worship; from a distance out on the lake the whole resembles the form of a recumbent giant lying on his back on the face of the waters.
But Amethyst Island itself, on closer inspection, proves of happier mien than its forbidding surroundings and of dimensions somewhat more significant than one would guess from the steamboat routes. Its area would equal half a city block and its shoreline is groved by patches of picturesque birch gleaming white among the mountain ash and spruce, while here and there a lofty, isolated white pine rears its whispering crest above the lower foliage with an air of patriarchal guardianship. A half dozen log cabins of substantial size and dove-tailed construction stand in the cleared centre, relics of a bygone silver mining boom, later renovated by wealthy city families into summer resort cottages.
In the most easterly of these cottages, Josephine Stone, of Calgary, had taken up her temporary residence. On this particular morning, which had broken in crisp autumnal loveliness, she had been astir from an early hour, and with her Indian maid and her companion, Mrs. Johnson, had set in order the appointments of the little front room with exacting care. No detail had been overlooked to make the best of such furnishings as the building boasted; even the blinds Miss Stone had herself accurately adjusted so that the softest light illumined theroom. In the broad fireplace, built of native amethyst-encrusted boulders, a birch fire crackled in subdued cheeriness. On the table which centred the room stood a vase of fresh-gathered ferns, a bit of dull green colour that toned with the dignified quiet all about.
But Josephine Stone needed no artificial setting. A dream of fresh young womanly loveliness she was; a gentle presence that would brighten and glorify the most monotonous surroundings. Men wherever she had appeared had been swayed by this girl’s rare beauty, by the charm of her voice and her every gesture.
She had long since learned her power over men; this morning she was minded to test it impelled as she was by that resistless motive that has been called a woman’s curiosity—the motive that first brought mortal man to grief.
She moved about the room as one who is suppressing by will the tensest inward anxiety. Her Indian woman dismissed, she had tried to interest herself in a book, but her gaze most of the time was centred through the eastern window on a jutting point of the lake’s shoreline.
Josephine Stone dropped the book and caught at her breath. Round the point there suddenly flashed the slender red hull of a racing motor boat, bow reared in air above a creamy wavelet that widened V-like in its wake. The boat swept down the shoreline and the muffled staccato of its engines ceased abruptly as it dived from view under the shrubbery that fringed the island.
The girl watched with bated breath. From an opening in the shrubbery there almost immediately burst into view the figure of a man who seemed the incarnation of this wild place. Spare was he, but of height, build andmovement that bespoke physical strength of lightninglike potentialities. The exotic pallor of his masterful face accentuated the blackness of his alert, flashing eyes.
The Indian man-of-all-work, splitting firewood to the side of the cottage, looked up, gasped and scuttled from view. His wolf-dog sank back on his haunches, tilted his grey snout in air and sent forth a long, dolorous howl that brought mocking echoes from the cliffs of the mainland.
The visitor, quite unconcerned by the seeming panic his appearance provoked, strode easily to the front door.
Josephine Stone rose all a-tremble. A fear unaccountable had suddenly swept over her, but when she opened the door for him there was no longer outward trace of it.
“Oh, Mr. Smith,” she voiced, “I know I have put you to a lot of trouble to come over here this morning. It is really too good of you simply to accommodate a stranger.”
“I will not have you mention it, Miss Stone,” he waived with a courtly smile. “It is I rather who should offer apologies.”
“You?”
“I’m late. Delayed by the discovery of a defective boom on my way here. Had to go back and notify one of the boom-tenders.”
“You have heavy responsibilities.”
There was the faintest of inflections on the last word. It brought a momentary gleam of hard alertness to the face of Acey Smith. But he as quickly hid it in a light laugh. “It all came about through my weakness for travelling by water,” he went on. “You see, there is a shorter cut by the land trail here, though I would have had to signal for one of your boats to get over to the island.”
“Won’t you be seated?” She indicated the easy chairby the window and herself sank gracefully to the nearby couch.
“Mr. Smith,” she opened in a nervous confusion that brought the faintest of pink to her delicate throat and cheeks, “I fear I am asking of you too great a favour—that I am about to request too much.”
“If you had not asked me to come here and offer what little service I may,” he replied, “I would consider I had been robbed of one of the most wonderful opportunities of my lifetime.”
“But have you considered the full nature of my request?”
The spell of those wonder eyes under the high-arched brows was upon him. “Name it,” he urged. “I must obey.”
“You must not compromise yourself before you know it all.”
“I have already compromised myself. I have promised to do anything within my power.”
She stirred on the couch, came ever so little nearer to him. “I have feared my request might be an impossible one.”
“An impossible one?”
“Yes—yet—I had hoped almost that you might—”
“Please,” he encouraged. “Tell me what it is.”
“I want to meet theman you call J.C.X.”
Had she plunged ice-cold water upon him the effect on Acey Smith could not have been more startling. His face went ashen at the name, his long hands gripping convulsively at the arms of the chair. He glanced apprehensively about the room, even behind him, then sprang bolt upright.
“J.C.X.” He breathed it hoarsely. “There are no others within hearing?”
“Not a soul.” It was she who was calmer now. Shetoo had risen, was standing with a thrilling nearness to him, so close as to be within the province of his arms had he obeyed an almost irresistible impulse that was upon him to sweep her to him. She looked up at him, a steadiness in the appeal of her eyes.
Under the sway of those eyes decision within him wavered. When he spoke it was in a tone of solemn pronouncement: “Miss Stone, youhaveasked of me whatshould beimpossible.”
“Butyoucan make it a possibility?”
“The ultimate decision lies with—J.C.X.” Again that furtive glance about the room as he pronounced the name in a whispered undertone. “It were better—perhaps—that you should not meet J.C.X.”
“Is he so terrible?”
“No, it is not that. If I could in some way act as intermediary, for instance?”
But the girl was in no wise willing to let slip by her hard-won concession. “It would not do,” she negatived. “I am sorry, for I know I could trust you as such, but I feel it is imperative that I should meet J.C.X. personally if that which I was sent for is to be properly explained.”
His eyes searched her face. “What do you know of J.C.X.?” he asked.
“Nothing—positively nothing. Oh, I wish I could explain. I hate being mysterious, but for the present I must ask you to accept my statement that it appeals to me as vital to meet him. Can you accept such a statement?”
Under stress of her anxiety she had unconsciously placed an ivory-white little hand upon his sleeve. He thrilled at the pressure.
“I can and do accept it,” he returned. “What is more, when the time is opportune, you shall meet the one youdesire to. But you must be patient; for a little while there will be obstacles which are insurmountable.”
“Oh, how can I thank you, Mr. Smith?” Impulsively she seized his hand in both her own, artlessly as a child might do it.
Not even saint might have resisted that delicate, desirable presence so near. Acey Smith was far from saint. His long, powerful hands closed over hers, a devil of gleaming black triumph leaping to the eyes that feasted on her face.
But even as she drew away, trembling like a captured bird, he released her abruptly. His head shot forward and he whirled with his back toward her, his hands cupping at his face in the convulsive fashion of one who is strangling.
She was standing mute in stupefied fright when he faced her again, quite his former self, a trace of a shamed smile on his lips. “I am sorry,” he offered in a contrite tone.
“It was perhaps my fault—” She started to say that before its significance struck her.
“It was not!” he declared. “I had forgotten for the moment that—that I am merely a means to an end. It will not happen again.”
The girl did her best to hide her mystification. Before he left Acey Smith informed her the tugs plying daily between the pulp camp and the city were at her service. He had made arrangements not only for her passage back and forth, but for the carrying of such supplies out as she needed from time to time. This would be much more satisfactory than depending on the motor-boat, he told her, as from now on the weather on the northern reaches of Superior was not dependable.
As for the unexplained purpose for which she had been brought to the island, he hoped she would betolerant of a delay in bringing things about that would not only take time but patience and foresight on the part of others. He did not mention J.C.X. again nor the meeting he had promised to arrange for Miss Stone. But intuitively the latter knew two things; the one was that he would be as good as his word and the other that he almost dreaded mention of J.C.X.
Besides, Josephine Stone was but two generations removed from Canadian pioneer stock, and, like the women of her race, was not prone to question the moods and whimsicalities of men of the forests.
When Acey Smith left Amethyst Island he did not immediately head back for the pulp camp, but crossed over to the mainland opposite, where he beached the bow of his long, slender racer at the foot of a narrow trail that wound up into the densely wooded hills. Snubbing the boat to the shrubbery, he struck off up the trail and was gone for almost an hour.
Shortly after his form had been swallowed up in the bush, there appeared at the foot of the trail a tall, dark-bearded man in the garb of a preacher. He peered at the island from the screen of the bush, and there, concealed from view, squatted in the foliage with eyes upon the cottage, silent, immovable as a statue.
Josephine Stone came out upon the cottage steps and opened a book in her lap. If the figure in the woods noticed her he gave no sign.
After a long interval there came from out of the depths of the forest, far away, a low reverberating intonation as of some deep soft gong being struck. A few moments elapsed and the mellow note again swooned mystically over the wastes.
The faintest traces of a smile broke over the face of the man hidden in the bushes as the girl on the steps started to her feet and looked about her in bewilderment. She picked up her book and disappeared into the cottage.
Twice again with a short interval between there came a gonglike alarm from far up in the silent wastes. The black-bearded man rose at the sound of the last stroke of the gong. With patient caution he drew from the shrubbery a cached canoe, launched it and with silent strokes skimmed westward along the shoreline.
Twenty minutes later Acey Smith came striding down the trail, carrying on his back a partially filled woodsman’s packsack. At the foot of the trail he paused as though reading some sign in the sands of the beach. He swung the packsack from his shoulders into the cockpit of the boat, pushed off the craft and headed it toward the pulp camp docks.
There was a scowl on his face as black as a thunder cloud.
Asthe days went by Louis Hammond familiarised himself with the pulp camp and its environs. He had plenty of time on his hands, for, as Acey Smith had predicted, there was little else for him to do except “take in the scenery.”
He gained a liberal education in the garnering of the raw product for the paper-making industry. The Nannabijou Limits, he learned, comprised an enormous block of wilderness territory some ninety square miles in extent, most of which, outside of the great muskegs and mountain lakes, was covered with forests of spruce, balsam and birch, representing billions of money when transformed into the white paper on which many of the great and lesser newspapers and magazines of the United States as well as Canada would be printed.
The limits stretched east down the North Shore from the foot of the Nannabijou range far beyond a point of vision and extended due north inland a good fifty or sixty miles. They were bisected by the mighty Nannabijou River, which emptied into the bay at the western fringe of the camp between deep, precipitous banks. It was this stream that made the Nannabijou Limits so desirable, because it made transportation of the cut poles by water possible from the furthest inland reaches of the territory. Armies of men were engaged in cutting, buck-sawing and decking poles into the river, there being camp after camp, some of them larger than that at thewaterfront, for a good twenty miles up the stream. Men and teams were constantly employed hauling supplies back to them. Yet it was said that this season’s cut would scarcely make a scratch on the gigantic Nannabijou forests.
From the mouth of the Nannabijou the cut and barked poles poured into the bay in a wide, glistening white ribbon day and night, continually expanding the tremendous booms, where Hammond was told there was already nearly a million dollars’ worth of pulpwood. Later on, power-driven mechanical loaders on scows would transfer the poles from the booms to the holds of huge pulp-pole carriers, and in these they would be towed by tugs to the mill yards in Kam City.
A large portion of the wood must be delivered that very fall so that the Kam City Pulp and Paper Company could have their mills in operation on contract time in October. Otherwise, the latter company would forfeit their hard-won rights on the limits; and by the terms of the final fiat of the Ontario government the North Star Towing and Contracting Company, at present operating the limits, were bound to deliver the wood in sufficient quantities to keep the Kam City Company’s mills running all winter.
It was a stupendous undertaking—the most colossal in the history of paper-making. And woven into this was the intense rivalry of the two powerful paper companies concerned, a tension of bitter hatred that was the more ominous because surface indications told nothing of what the inevitable climax might be.
Hammond gained much of his information about the limits from his shack-mate, Sandy Macdougal, the cook,who in the evening over a bottle of rye whiskey became quite loquacious. It was through Macdougal he learned of the presence of the girl with the high-arched eyebrows on Amethyst Island, a bit of information that brought about a secret determination to somehow or other come in contact with her, much as the mere idea of again meeting her face to face perturbed him.
Of Acey Smith he saw little, caught only occasional glimpses of him now and then as he went in and out of his office. No one seemed to know where he kept himself a large part of the time. Actual operation of the camps and dealings with the men were carried on almost entirely by the assistant superintendent, a rawboned, hatchet-faced young man named Mooney, who was as uncommunicative as a slab of trap rock.
Ogima Bush, the Indian medicine man, seemed to have the freedom of the camp, to which he paid frequent visits, mixing with the workers of his own race of whom there were several hundred employed in breaking up jams in the river and tending the booms in the bay. They were what was known as the “white water” men because of their hazardous work in the foaming rapids.
Rev. Nathan Stubbs, the camp preacher, journeyed back and forth from one camp to the other. He did not sleep in any of the camps but repaired each night to some isolated shack he had fixed up for himself somewhere in the fastnesses of Nannabijou Mountain. He seemed to purposely avoid Hammond, as he did most of the executives of the limits, and a feature that struck the young man as rather odd was that he never saw Ogima Bush or the Rev. Nathan Stubbs and Acey Smith together or even in the camp at the one time, though the Medicine Man frequently inquired as to the superintendent’s whereabouts and on such occasions immediately struck off as though he had an appointment with himsome-where. It was plain that Acey Smith looked upon the preacher as a pest and insisted on him making himself scarce when he was about camp; as for the Medicine Man, there seemed to be some understanding between him and the superintendent whereby the former was quite confident of his status and privileges anywhere on the limits.
There was something queer—so queer as to be absolutely uncanny—about this gigantic pulp camp. Hammond could see that every intelligent worker in it sensed this, but nobody understood it or could tangibly grasp a glimmer of what it was. The morale among the cutting gangs, teamsters and boom workers could scarcely be improved upon. Men who shirked their work lost the regard of their fellows and either soon learned to put their best into their efforts or left camp. The North Star Company held the reputation of paying and feeding their employés better than any other outfit in the north country. There were camp hospitals with camp doctors and competent men nurses; it was even said that no man was docked for lost time while he was really sick. Incidentally, there were no evidences of iron discipline or slave-driving methods. But everywhere among the men and their petty executives there was an undercurrent of something akin to superstitious awe of the company and those who directed its affairs.
Acey Smith himself seemed to be obsessed with this same haunting apprehension. When he issued orders he did so more like one who is interpreting definite commands from elsewhere. As Sandy Macdougal analysed it to Hammond after his own peculiar fashion, “one felt as though the whole show was being run bysome one or something that didn’t cast a shadow.”
His enforced idleness brought a notion to the young ex-newspaper man that he could improve his time by writing, even if it were only a diary of his experiences. He felt he must have something to occupy his time besides roaming over the tote roads and riding around in the fussy little gasoline tugs of the boom-tenders, so, early one morning he presented himself at Acey Smith’s office and boldly asked if he might have some loose writing paper. Acey Smith quite readily complied with his wishes, going to the rear of his office and bringing to Hammond several pads of blank sheets.
“I had been expecting you to come around for this,” he said, the ghost of an exultant flicker playing at the corners of his mouth. “The ruling hobby will force itself to the surface sooner or later, won’t it, Mr. Hammond?”
“Meaning just what?”
“Just this: Set a man at doing nothing long enough and habit will drive him back to the haunts of his old rut—especially if that rut is writing for publication.”
Hammond illy-suppressed a start at this broad hint at knowledge of his identity. “I have no designs for writing anything for publication, if that’s what you’re driving at,” he, however, came back frankly.
“I have not the remotest notion that you will,” Acey Smith assured him with a tinge of sarcasm in his tones. “In fact, I am quite confident that for the present you won’t reach a publisher.”
He stared strangely at Hammond for a silent second, his black eyes glazing in a weird fixidity. Hammond was conscious Acey Smith was speaking now more as one trying to interpret a whim of the back mind: “Now, if I were a novelist, which I am not, and in the mood, likewise absent, I might make myself the author of thequeerest tale ever written. It’s a pity the world gets most of its literature second-hand and consequently garbled; the man who lives things doesn’t write, and the man who writes never seems able to live the things he writes about.
“Real writers then must be men born twice who never touched pen to paper till their second existence, don’t you think so, Mr. Hammond?”
“I have never considered it from that angle,” replied the younger man. “Thank you for the paper, Mr. Smith.”
“Think it over,” urged Acey Smith enigmatically as he whirled on a heel and returned to his desk.
Hammond went away inwardly as chagrined as a disguised man who has had his wig and false beard suddenly whisked from his head and face. His attempt to conceal his identity from Acey Smith surely had been a ridiculous farce. Perhaps the pulp camp superintendent knew more than he did himself about what purpose lay behind his being sent to the limits.
The situation was a humiliating one, Hammond bitterly conceded as he sat alone in the cabin he shared with the cook. It would be bad enough to be found out and know what one was found out for, but it was infinitely more exasperating to feel that he was a marked man without knowing the exact nature of the predicament he had allowed himself to be dropped into. Acey Smith had a manner of making Hammond feel like a mere outsider every time they came in contact, and the latter, completely in the dark as to the objects of his own mission, was as impotent to meet and parry the other’s stinging thrusts as a man who fences with a blindfold on. Smith did not exactly despise him; he had reason to believe that. It was Smith’s lightly-concealed exultation over knowledge of his helplessness that galled him so.
Hammond longed to meet the other on fair ground—in a battle of wits or fists, he was not particular which, so long as he could exact satisfaction for his hurt pride. But this fighting in the dark was a hopeless business, and he was becoming weary of it.
Yet—what did Smith know? Whatdidhe know?
With this conjecture came an inspiration that brought Hammond a newer and a brighter viewpoint. When he more calmly mulled the situation over in the seclusion of his quarters, it struck him Acey Smith was merely guessing. He had not definitely referred to him as an ex-newspaper man, but had merely insinuated he knew him to be a writer. This was a thing one so shrewd of observation as the pulp camp master might easily surmise when Hammond asked for writing paper. That subsequent drifting of his onto the status of fiction writers was a cast for information, his reference to the genius of writing men an obvious attempt at flattery—and the hook was baited with a hint that he himself had a life-story that would be worth while getting hold of.
The whole thing seemed so clear now that Hammond accused himself of stupidity in not seeing through it before. Hammond’s plan therefore would be to follow the plane of the least resistance and let Smith go on thinking what he pleased. Even better still, why not approach Smith for that “queerest tale” he had referred to and make a play to his vanity? No doubt egotism was Acey Smith’s most vulnerable point and theopen sesameto his confidence, as Hammond in his journalistic experience had found it to be with most despotic executives, high or low.
But no, that would not do. There was one thing in the way still. If he only knew what he was here for he could act. As things stood, he feared to take the initiative lest he blunder into something that would upset the plan Norman T. Gildersleeve had in mind that night onthe train when he had engaged Hammond at a thousand dollars a month to stay at the pulp camp till he received further orders. No matter how he theorised and tried to prop it up with possible purposes, it appealed more and more to him as a crazy assignment. Bagsful of mail was brought over daily on the tugs, and, so far as Hammond could see, the mail was delivered direct and with considerable despatch all over the camps. It should therefore be an easy matter for Gildersleeve to write him, if it were only a few lines, to let him know whether or not things were progressing as they should. Why didn’t Gildersleeve communicate with him?
The plump figure and ruddy visage of Sandy Macdougal appeared momentarily at the cabin doorway and he flung a bundle of newspapers across at Hammond. “The Big Boss left them at the breakfast table this morning and said you might like to see them,” he explained. “I guess he’s beat it for somewhere for the day, for I saw him leave with his pack on his back just a minute or two after you left his office. Come over to the beanery for a chat when you’re through reading up the news.”
The head cook turned and departed for his realm of bake ovens and enamelled pots and pans.
That was Acey Smith’s humiliating system all over again, ruminated Hammond. Smith had eaten that very morning just two seats away from Hammond with the newspapers spread on the table before him. When he had finished breakfast, he folded them up and sat smoking until Hammond left the diner. Why did he wait till Hammond went out and then tell the cook to give him the papers? It was a by-word around the camps that Acey Smith never did anything out of the ordinarywithout a definite object in view. He was evidently baiting Hammond for a purpose.
Nevertheless, Hammond gathered up the newspapers gratefully. They were the first of recent date he had seen since coming to the pulp camp. The light in the cabin was none too bright, so Hammond took the papers outside and seated himself on a rustic bench back of the cabin.
The outer paper in the bundle was the Kam CityStarof the previous morning, but Hammond, his eyes starting from their sockets, scarcely noted the dateline in the shock that went home from the three-column heading that fairly shouted at him in black-faced gothic from the upper left-hand corner of the front page:—
MAN RESEMBLING NORMAN T. GILDERSLEEVE
REPORTED SEEN NEAR PRINCE ALBERT, SASK.
MAY BE MISSING PULP AND PAPER MAGNATE
In fevered haste, Hammond skipped over the subheadings to the despatch below them date-lined from Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, with date of the day previous:—
To-day, lumbermen coming in from the woods north of here told of the arrival in the McKenzie camps of a middle-aged stranger strongly resembling the descriptions sent broadcast of the missing Norman T. Gildersleeve, of New York, head of the International Investments Corporation, whose disappearance from a transcontinental train bound east from Winnipeg, on the night of September 23, caused a sensation in financial circles in Canada and the United States.Strength is lent the theory that the man is Norman T. Gildersleeve by the statement of the lumbermen that the stranger seemed to be afflicted with loss of memory. He told the superintendent of the camps that he had seemed to come out of a state of trance after leaving a train at the terminus of the bush railway and had no idea who he was or where he came from. He put up for the night at the lumber camp, but the nextmorning disappeared as mysteriously as he had arrived.Mr. Gildersleeve, it will be remembered, first dropped out of sight while on a train bound from Winnipeg, Man., to Kam City, Ont. His intended visit to the latter place, it is understood, was in connection with the construction of the Kam City Pulp and Paper Mills plant, a Canadian subsidiary of the International Investments Corporation, now being erected at the lakeport town.Since Mr. Gildersleeve’s disappearance the police of the Dominion have been vainly scouring the country for trace of him. The news from the McKenzie Camps to-day will no doubt provide a fresh trail, though how Mr. Gildersleeve could travel back west almost a thousand miles without being identified by some one, particularly trainmen, is beyond the comprehension of authorities here.
To-day, lumbermen coming in from the woods north of here told of the arrival in the McKenzie camps of a middle-aged stranger strongly resembling the descriptions sent broadcast of the missing Norman T. Gildersleeve, of New York, head of the International Investments Corporation, whose disappearance from a transcontinental train bound east from Winnipeg, on the night of September 23, caused a sensation in financial circles in Canada and the United States.
Strength is lent the theory that the man is Norman T. Gildersleeve by the statement of the lumbermen that the stranger seemed to be afflicted with loss of memory. He told the superintendent of the camps that he had seemed to come out of a state of trance after leaving a train at the terminus of the bush railway and had no idea who he was or where he came from. He put up for the night at the lumber camp, but the nextmorning disappeared as mysteriously as he had arrived.
Mr. Gildersleeve, it will be remembered, first dropped out of sight while on a train bound from Winnipeg, Man., to Kam City, Ont. His intended visit to the latter place, it is understood, was in connection with the construction of the Kam City Pulp and Paper Mills plant, a Canadian subsidiary of the International Investments Corporation, now being erected at the lakeport town.
Since Mr. Gildersleeve’s disappearance the police of the Dominion have been vainly scouring the country for trace of him. The news from the McKenzie Camps to-day will no doubt provide a fresh trail, though how Mr. Gildersleeve could travel back west almost a thousand miles without being identified by some one, particularly trainmen, is beyond the comprehension of authorities here.
There followed a grist of newspaper theories in which Hammond was not particularly interested. He scanned thoroughly the newspaper and two others in the bundle, but found no other items throwing further light on the mystery. An editorial in the edition he had first read caught his eye. It dealt with the odd circumstances of Norman T. Gildersleeve’s disappearance and was headed:—
APHASIA, OR LOSS OF IDENTITY
Aphasia—aphasia—where had Hammond recently heard or read that word? Then with an electric start he remembered that disconcerting first question Acey Smith had flung at him the night he arrived at the pulp camp: “What do you know about aphasia?”
A coincidence it must have been, he reflected on calmer deduction. Acey Smith, out here at the pulp limits, twenty miles from the nearest outpost of civilisation, could then have no knowledge of Gildersleeve’s disappearance several hundred miles west of the port of Kam City.
And yet—yet the Girl with the High-ArchedEye-brows had just been in to see Smith previous to Hammond’s visit. She had been in the same coach of the transcontinental when Gildersleeve had left the train at Moose Horn Station and failed to return—and her nervous perturbation on two occasions when she had caught sight of Hammond had been marked.
Great heavens, it could not be that she—this beautiful creature he had dreamed about, whose wondrous blue eyes haunted his waking hours—that she knew and had carried the news to Acey Smith! Hammond tried to banish the thought as a low, unfounded suspicion. It was merely a sinister muddle of events, he told himself, into which she, more so than himself, had been innocently drawn. That was it—certainly that was it.
He leaped to his feet and turned at a raucous, croaking sound behind him.
A hoarse, half-angry, half-startled exclamation came through his teeth as his gaze fell upon the gloomy, spectrelike figure of Ogima Bush the Medicine Man standing between two birch trees directly behind his seat. The Indian was as immovable, as untouched in face by any human emotion as if he had always stood there a carved figure in wood. The scars on his cheek-bones gleamed in fresh and horrid scarlet lividity, and his eyes with their garish white setting glowed like embers of hate in a gargoyle of unspeakable wickedness.
“What do you want?” demanded Hammond sharply.
“Un-n-n-n ugh.” The Medicine Man’s eyes centred on Hammond much as they might have had he been a passing wesse-ke-jak while he gutturalled it. “Ogima Bush takes what he wants.Kaw-gaygo esca-boba?”
He turned leisurely, chuckling queerly in his throat as he uttered the question in Objibiwa.
Then he strode off into the bush quite unconcerned as to what answer Hammond might make.
“OldLeather Face seems to be peeved about it, doesn’t he?”
It was Sandy Macdougal who spoke. He had returned from the cook-house unnoticed by Hammond and had evidently been an amused spectator while the dialogue was going on between Hammond and Ogima Bush.
“Did you get what he croaked at you, Hammond?” he asked.
“I caught something about him ‘taking what he wanted’ or words to that effect.”
“He said: ‘Ogima takes what he wants,’ and then he asked, ‘Kaw-gaygo esca-boba?’ That’s Indian for ‘Have you got nothing?’ Sounds foolish, but when an Indian asks it the way he did—that way, look out! He’s either looking for whiskey or trouble.”
“Well, he’s rapping at the door of the goat’s house for wool this time,” laughed Hammond. “I haven’t seen anything that looked like good whiskey in a blue moon, and, as for trouble, I can usually locate plenty of it without seeking it from a red-skin.”
“Speakin’ of whiskey,” Sandy’s eyes crinkled, “how’d you like a little nip right now?”
“A drink?”
“Sure. You’re lookin’ sort of all bowled over about something, and a little snort will brace you up. Come on in the shack.”
Inside the cabin Macdougal closed the door and hooked it on the inside. He lifted some loose flooring in the corner and brought up a black bottle. “You needn’t be afraid of it,” he assured Hammond as he poured him a draught in a metal cup. “This is sealed rye goods I got on a doctor’s prescription. But I got to keep it dark because there’s two things the Big Boss is death on any of us totin’ around camp; the one is six-guns and the other is whiskey. . . . Here’s how!”
Macdougal guzzled a generous cupful straight. Hammond perforce had to take his neat too.
The cook made to fill the two cups again.
“No, thanks,” declined Hammond. “I don’t indulge as a general thing, but I’ll admit that’s fairly smooth stuff.”
Sandy tossed off another stiff one. Then he sat down smacking his lips as though it agreed with him immensely. “You never met that copper-faced old rat before you came out here?” he asked presently.
“Who—Ogima Bush? No, I never before set eyes on him until that morning he wandered in while I was at breakfast.”
“H’m—h’m—well!” Macdougal studied his cup reflectively one minute. “You know, I thought at first maybe you and him might be cahoots on something. One don’t know who’s who out in this queer dump. But I’ve sized you up as a decent head, no matter what your business might be, and you takin’ a nip with me now and then has raised you a bit more in my notions of you.”
“Good heavens,” smiled Hammond, “you surely didn’t think I was in league with that near-agent of Satan?”
“I ain’t sayin’ I was sure of anything,” cut back Macdougal slightly irritated. “Only, I had one of my flash hunches that first morning he dropped into the diner that there was something between him and you. It was theway he looked at you, I guess. Since then, I’ve been figurin’ out it’s all on his side and maybe you don’t know anything about it.
“However,” he followed up deliberately, “what I been debatin’ in my own mind the past day or so was about tellin’ you something for your own good.”
Macdougal appeared to be in the throes of that mental debate as he sat with eyes glued on his empty cup. He seemed to arrive at two decisions suddenly. The first was to have another tidy drink.
“Great hootch that.” He grimaced gratefully. “Now, look here, Hammond, it’s this: That old, red-skinned side-wheeler don’t mean you no good, and, if you’ll take it from me, I think he’s figurin’ on how much of a boost it’d take to shoot you over one of them steep cliffs back in the bush if you happened to be near the edge.
“Now wait—I ain’t given to guessin’ nor romancin’ either. I got a sharp eye that sees more’n most people gives it credit for. Every time you ain’t lookin’ that Indian is a-watchin’ you out of the corners of his wicked old lids in a queer, creepy way, just like a weasel watches a chipmunk he’s figurin’ on for breakfast. Besides, sometimes you go out in the bush and he slips out a little later in the same direction. At first I tells myself: ‘The two of them has a date on to meet out there on some scheme they’re hatchin’ up—maybe bootleggin’.’ But I hunched it later there was nothin’ to that. He’s layin’ for you for some reason I don’t know anything about; that’s what I wanted to tell you.”
Hammond lit a cigarette to cover up any concern he might have felt. “That’s certainly interesting to me, Sandy,” he acknowledged, “and it’s deucedly good of you—”
“Nothin’ of the kind!” interposed the other. “And that ain’t all.Acey Smith’s got another Indian trailin’ you.”
“Trailing me? The deuce you say!”
“I said it.”
“But what makes you think Acey Smith’s got anything to do with it?”
Macdougal shrugged. “Who else?” he asked. More whiskey than was discreet had loosened up his tongue. “Who else do you think? Who else but Acey Smith keeps every straw-boss in the camp jumpy all the time just so they won’t get too busy comparin’ notes and find out what’s what? That man’s a devil, and there ain’t two ways about that.
“I got next to this stunt through an accident,” the cook went on. “Was over hidin’ in some green stuff on the side of the Second Hill the other morning figurin’ on snipin’ a couple of partridge when I sees you go by on the tote road. Then I see a long, skinny-lookin’ Indian slippin’ through the brush close to my hide after you. A couple of minutes more and along comes old Leather Face, the Medicine Man, as pompous as you please, but it ain’t long before I discovers that his nibs is a-watchin’ both of you, though he makes a big face of bein’ unconcerned and about his own business. Now, what do you think of that layout, son?”
Hammond was thoughtful. If he were to admit the truth his breath was literally taken away by the revelation. “Smith must attach a lot of importance to me to hire two of them to watch me,” was what he said.
“I ain’t so surebothof them is hired to watch you,” observed his friend. “Medicine men are too stuck on themselves to do shadowin’ jobs. They go after bigger stuff. Smith uses them to put the fear of the Lord into the Indian workers when he needs them. That’s one ofthe reasons why he lets old fakirs like Bush loaf around the camp and do what they please. No Indian gives any back talk about what the Medicine Man says or does, because they think he can make aWindigoany time he feels like it to bring them bad luck.”
“Well, then, Sandy,” urged Hammond, “what’s your theory? I’ll admit it’s got me beaten.”
“I got it figured out as one of two things,” replied the cook. “Either you’re hired by outside parties to get something on Smith or the North Star he’s afraid you’ll find out, and he’s havin’ you shadowed—or else, well, don’t take offence if I say it plain that this looks to me more like it: you’ve been sent out here by some of the higher-ups for him to take care of you and he has that Indian guy watchin’ to see that nothin’ happens to you.”
“Good heavens,” Hammond expostulated, “I’m not a child or a green-horn in the woods that I can’t look after myself. Smith knows that. No, no, Sandy, you’re away out on your theories this time.”
“Am I now?” ruffled the cook. “Let me tell you Smith knows too that you ain’t any smarter than some of the other fellows who paid for their smartness by cashin’ in to some kind of a lurkin’ death out there in the sticks that comes down on a man without any warnin’ and lets him into Kingdom Come without even a yelp bein’ heard from him.”
Hammond was convinced the liquor in Sandy was doing the talking now. But he tactfully asked: “Ever know of anything like that happening to any one, or is it just some of that camp gossip about spooks over on the mountain?”
“Camp gossip and spooks me eye!” derided the other. “Ain’t there been men disappeared around here just as if they was swallowed up bones and all by something roamin’ round the hills? Yes, I know what you’re goin’to say next about accidents happenin’, and all that sort of thing. ‘Course there’s muck-holes in the muskegs that they might have walked into or been pushed into and never be seen again. But nobody here thinks that’s just what happened. No, sir, you couldn’t tell them that. There ain’t an Indian will go up in them hills west of here after sundown for life nor money, and whites that are wise won’t do it neither.
“Listen. This much I know from what I saw myself. Last summer there was a pale-faced city gink come out here on a loafin’ holiday. He came pretty much like you did and nobody knew anything about him unless it was the super., who keeps what he knows to himself. This lad put in his time makin’ pictures on pieces of card-board on a frame of sticks he took around with him. The Big Boss warned him and everybody else warned him if he left the camps not to wander off the tote roads, and to keep away from the hill they call the Cup of Nannabijou. But it didn’t do any good.
“One morning they finds his hat floatin’ in the lake back of the beaver dam on Solomon Creek. That’s the creek that runs down the hill into the river and has the rapids in it. They never found anything else, not a hair or a bit of the hide of him. D’you get that?”
“Likely slipped and fell into the rapids,” suggested Hammond.
“That’s what one of them coroner’s juries would say,” agreed the cook, “but you couldn’t make any old timers out here believe it. Besides, his picture-drawing outfit was found a couple of hundred yards away from the creek all set up the way he’d been workin’ on it when he got his. The Indians always said there was one of their ancient devils lived up in The Cup on the hill, and the rest of us is prepared to believe there’s something uncanny there it ain’t good business to monkey with.”
Macdougal fished out his watch. “Cripes,” he exclaimed, “it’s eleven and I should’ve been back at the cook-house half an hour ago.”
He put his bottle back under the boards after a final rejuvenator. At the door of the cabin he paused unsteadily as though gripped by an after-thought. “Anyway, Hammond, I’d pack a gun if I was you,” he advised. “If you ain’t got a gat. of your own, there’s an army six-gun and some shells to fit it in that pack of mine on the wall, and you’re welcome to the loan of it.”