So Hammond feigned as great an indifference as he asked: “Then you really did the preliminary work at Mr. Gildersleeve’s instance?”
Winch plainly did not relish being kept in the position of the cross-examined. “Yes,” he replied with a shrug. “Gildersleeve had selected you as a likely man for the job during the day while you were sitting talking to a companion next table to him in the dining car. He asked me to feel you out about it, and, at the moment you dropped into the smoker that evening, I was just about to set out in search for you.”
“One more question, Mr. Winch,” pursued Hammond. “You spoke a few moments ago about his associates‘carrying on’ while Mr. Gildersleeve is absent. Am I to take it from that heisstill alive?”
“We are certain of nothing,” answered the other, “but we have hopes for the best. It is not a point over which you need waste worry; the plans for his enterprises will be carried on as before.”
“Then there is nothing I could do that would assist in clearing up the mystery of Mr. Gildersleeve’s disappearance?” insisted Hammond.
“No—not a thing. Your plan is to return to the Nannabijou Limits this afternoon as quietly as possible,” suggested the legal man. “There you had best resume your former rôle until such time as you are communicated with.”
“That sounds very well,” impatiently commented Hammond, “but, in the event of Mr. Gildersleeve having disappeared permanently, I might remain there for a very long time without any particular purpose being served.”
“In such a case I will personally take the responsibility of instructing you when to return,” assured Winch. “Furthermore, I will take it upon myself to guarantee that you are paid for your services according to the verbal contract between yourself and Mr. Gildersleeve.”
Hammond hesitated a moment. He was thinking about Josephine Stone and the possibilities of being near her again; otherwise he would not have entertained any proposal to return to the limits under the circumstances.
Before he could reply, however, there came sounds of a loud commotion from somewhere on the streets outside; jeers, the shrill cries of young boys and the rush of many feet.
Winch rose from his desk and hurried to the window. As he looked out his face went grey with alarm and his lips moved in a single gasp:—
“Hell!”
Hammond was at his side in a trice. The window overlooked the short street leading up from the city dock, where, in a surging crowd of men and street urchins, two red-coated policemen of the Canadian mounted force were escorting up the street a tall, black-whiskered man in dark baggy clothes.
“Some one has made a tremendous blunder!”
Winch thus spoke his thoughts with a solemnity that betrayed his inward agitation. At that instant the man between the two mounties looked up toward Winch’s window and gave utterance to a loud fierce yell.
Hammond gave a gasp of surprise.
The prisoner was the Rev. Nathan Stubbs, camp preacher at Nannabijou Limits.
Onthe day that Louis Hammond left the Nannabijou Limits for Kam City, Acey Smith and one other were astir long before the young newspaper man had opened an eye in his comfortable bunk. Acey Smith, as was his usual custom, shaved before the large mirror opposite the eastern window of his bedroom, his thoughts busy with a problem that had been agitating him since his visit to Amethyst Island the day before.
It was while completing the last few deft touches to his toilet that the Big Boss of the Nannabijou Limits caught momentarily a reflection in the glass of a face and figure moving past the window back of him.
As if the fleeting reflection in the glass had brought him an inspiration, he paused in wiping the talc powder from his chin. Then he smote the little table below with a clenched fist such a blow that the articles thereon went tottering.
He whirled and turned his attention to a packsack into which he hastily stowed a number of wrapped packages, strapped the flap of the pack and slipped his arms through the shoulder pieces. He took a swift survey of surroundings from the windows, then stepping outside sauntered down to the bell tent on the water-front occupied by Inspector Little of the Mounted Police.
He was with the inspector perhaps twenty minutes, when he accompanied the latter to the dining camp.They had breakfast and returned to the dock, whence the superintendent soon shot out in his red racing boat which tore its way out of sight on the rolling expanse of Superior.
The tug bearing Hammond to Kam City was well out on the lake when Acey Smith returned. He tied the red racer up in its berth on the limits docks and immediately made his way to his office. The enthusiasm that had sat upon his face when he had departed earlier in the day was gone. In its place was a tired, worried look.
As he entered the office, a handsome, dark-eyed young woman seated by a window dropped a book to her lap and looked up.
“Waiting long, Yvonne?”
The inquiry was casual but kindly. He whipped open a drawer of his desk, filled a silver cigarette case from a large tin box. Then he fitted a cigarette in an amber holder and lighted it.
“Just since the tug came in.” There was a suggestion of pique in the girl’s tones that went unnoticed. Her gaze followed his every movement with fascinated intensity. But when he looked her way her eyes fell quickly.
Followed a long pause. Acey Smith stood looking out a window, half turned to her, the while he drew hungrily at the cigarette, his eyes in an abstracted stare.
“Has something happened? Is—is anything wrong?”
He turned at the deep anxiety in Yvonne’s tones. “No, nothing wrong, Yvonne—I’m just a bit spent. It’s been a trying morning.”
He tossed the cigarette stub into the stove and drawing a long, sealed manilla envelope from a pocket handed it to her. “Yvonne,” he said, “I want you to go over toKam City with me in the racer this afternoon. When we land you are to go to J. J. Slack’s office and deliver this letter from J.C.X. to him. If he asks any questions, tell him the wireless broke down and it was impossible to get in touch with him.”
“Aren’t you going to see Mr. Slack yourself?”
“Likely, but say nothing to him about it. I am leaving for Montreal to-night.”
“For Montreal?” She bit her nether lip in the nervous effort it cost her to follow up: “Alone?”
“Yes, alone. Why do you ask, Yvonne?”
She toyed with the letter he had handed her, her eyes averted. “Alexander,”—she pronounced the name softly and with a great diffidence—“who is the girl living on Amethyst Island?”
Acey Smith smiled good-naturedly. “Miss Stone, you mean? She’ll be leaving here shortly.”
“For where?”
He shrugged. “That—depends on circumstances.”
“Did you know her before she came out here?”
“Never saw her before. But why all this catechism, Yvonne?”
Yvonne Kovenay arose. She threw out her hands in an odd gesture. “I want to ask you, Alexander, do you think I work for you as I do for the money you pay me alone?”
His face became suddenly serious. “Why no, Yvonne, such service as yours could not be bought with a monthly cheque. Love of one’s work alone could inspire it.”
The girl winced as if she had been struck. “Love of my work?” she cried. “Great God, did you think it was love of my work?”
Acey Smith receded a step as she came forward, a magnificent little creature under stress of her emotions; her bosom heaving, her long lashes dank and her great dark eyes brilliant with the tears that forced themselves.
“Alexander, it has all been for—forlove of you!”
She flung herself upon him, her soft arms about his neck, her dusky head with its masses of ebony hair upon his breast.
“Yes, yes,” she cried in sobbing abandon, “a thousand times yes—for you, my Alexander, king of all men, the strongest of the strong!” The tiger soul of her cried out for its chosen mate: “All other men are dwarfs beside you; you crush them with your very smile. Who is there among them all can stand before your might? How could woman help loving you as I do?
“Oh, I have tried hard not to do this! I tried to be patient in the hope that some day you would—would understand. Then, then, she came—that girl on Amethyst Island with her mincing ways and her haughty airs—to ensnare you. I have been mad, mad, mad, at thought of your going to her. Then—then it came to me that I—I was only—your woman spy.”
Gently, he endeavoured to release himself. “Not my woman spy,” he corrected her. “Remember you came to me and I employed you on behalf of the North Star Company—for J.C.X.”
“For the North Star—for J.C.X.!” She echoed it derisively. “What is the North Star to me? Do you think I would work as I have done; run risks of reputation, even life itself at times, for this J.C.X., a man I have never seen?”
“But haven’t we treated you fairly?” he argued. “Isn’t your salary next only to that of the president himself?Hasn’t the North Star done everything within reason to reward you and show its appreciation of your services? What—what more is it you could ask, girl?”
“You—your love!”
She whispered it softly with a quick intaking of breath, her eyes opening momentarily in a quick, melting flash under his.
Acey Smith pushed her from him impatiently, almost roughly. His face became cold and hard, unutterably cruel for an instant. Then that wisp of a devil-sneer flickered on his handsome, ruthless features.
“My love!” And he laughed a laugh that was not pleasant to hear. “What foolishness put it into your head that I could love, Yvonne?”
His scorning tones bit the woman to the quick. Her dark eyes flashed dangerously. “It was her! It was her!” she flamed at him. “That baby-faced thing down on Amethyst Island. I thought until she came you were what you seemed to be—a beautiful, pale devil. And as a devil I worshipped you, silently and in secret, fondly believing I nor any other woman could claim you. I thought you were more than human—a being of destiny to whom all passions and weaknesses were scornful trivialities. Then—then she came—and I saw the change in you.
“Listen,” she cried, her face chalk-white from the pent-up emotions surging within her. “Alexander, the thing which that thought awakens within me I tell you makes me mad—mad! You may never be mine, but younever,nevershall be hers.I will kill—”
“Don’t say that!”
There came a terrible look into the face of Acey Smith that sent her staggering back in deadly affright. Only by a supreme effort did the man appear to get a grip on himself.
But in another instant he was calm and smiling. “Poor, little Yvonne, my poor, little, faithful Yvonne,” he soothed. “Child, you are just a bit over-strung; you have been working too hard lately. To-night you are going up to Winnipeg, to your father, on a month’s vacation, and I am going to pick out a little present for you when we get over to the city—something by which in after days you may remember one who was not what he should have been, but who thought much of you. Let us forget this little incident for the present. We have work in hand to-day, you and I—big work—and you are going to Kam City with me now to deliver that letter, like a good little girl, aren’t you?”
Like a child that has been chastised, then petted, she warmed under the light caress of his hand, the deep, musical persuasive qualities of his voice and the tremendous, irresistible magnetism of the man.
She looked up at him as of old, tried to meet those soul-searching black eyes with their wicked masterfulness, wavered and nodded acquiescence.
“I knew you would, Yvonne. This,” he announced, “will be the beginning of the North Star’s greatest coup—and its last.”
“Its last?” She echoed it apprehensively.
He did not answer, but sprang to the window, a light of sinister amusement breaking over his face. “Look, Yvonne,” he called. “Come and see what is happening to your preacher friend.”
Down by the docks two mounted policemen were half leading, half dragging the handcuffed Rev. Nathan Stubbs into the police motorboat.
The girl gasped. “Why do you say my friend?” she asked, a quaver in her voice.
“He pretended to be your friend, and you told him what you should not have told him.”
“Then you knew?” Her face was scarlet.
“I knew all. The North Star always knows.”
“It was because—because I was crazy with jealousy,” she pleaded. “It was on account of that Stone girl, and I thought he could tell me who she was and why you went to see her. I did not tell him all—not your great secret.”
“My great secret?”
“Yes—that you are not Acey Smith in reality.”
He laughed indulgently. “It would not matter now even if you had, Yvonne,” he discounted, “because you nor any other could have told him who Acey Smith really is.
“Only one man knew that secret—and he is dead.”
Artemus Duff, president and general manager of the Kam City Pulp and Paper Mills, paid his promised visit to the office of Hon. J. J. Slack, M.P., president of the North Star Towing and Contracting Company, about the same hour that Hammond went up to see Martin Winch, K.C..
The interview in most respects was inconsequential. As might be surmised, Slack’s quest was for any chance bit of information regarding the rival paper company’s plans that it might be to his advantage to know. His shrewd after-deductions were that Duff was not in the confidence of his own associates.
Duff, on the other hand, left the office of the wily politician no wiser than when he entered, but considerably reassured regarding the delivery of raw material to the mills from the Nannabijou Limits. Slack had a bland, big way of discussing a thing that put others off their guard.
“There are enough poles boomed in Nannabijou Bay to keep your mill running the better part of the coming year,” he told Duff.
“So our inspectors report,” agreed the other.
“The poles being there, we are bound to deliver them on time,” reminded Slack.
“But the contract time for the opening of our mill is drawing near,” complained the Kam City Company’spresident, “and delivery hasn’t even been started. Even the absence of Norman Gildersleeve wouldn’t bother me so much if it were under way.”
“There is little for you to lose sleep over on that point, Mr. Duff,” Slack assured him. “Once our present dredging contracts are completed, which I expect will be in a few days’ time, our full complement of tugs, carriers and loading scows will be on the job. Only an act of Providence could prevent the delivery of those poles on contract time.”
“An act of Providence—only an act of Providence?” Duff repeated as he prepared to depart. Just what did Slack mean by dragging that reference in? However, he had tittered it quite casually, Duff remembered, and probably it had no special significance.
Slackhaduttered it casually; but at that moment, even the president of the North Star Towing and Contracting Company had no idea of the real cards to be played.
Something of a revelation came to him that very afternoon.
Shortly after the departure of Artemus Duff, a dark, striking-looking young woman was ushered into Slack’s private office. She closed the door cautiously behind her.
“Well, well, if it isn’t Yvonne,” greeted Slack. “I thought you were on business west of here.”
“I was, J.J.,” she replied as familiarly. “But I hurried back yesterday. I have just come over from the limits to deliver this special message to you.”
She tossed a sealed official envelope on the desk.
Slack tore open the envelope, and, as he studied the contents, a worried frown gathered on his brow. “Won’t you be seated a moment, Miss Kovenay?” he requested absently.
Slack worked with a pencil on a pad of paper deciphering the letter, which, as was usual with orders from the same source, was in the North Star’s private code. It contained bald instructions, skeletonised of every spare word:—
Instruct North Star newspapers, east and west, drop conjectures re disappearance Gildersleeve. Print nil unless actually found dead or alive; then only barest details on inside pages, without display headings.Put on double or triple shift, if necessary, on wireless ready any moment for emergency calls from limits station. File for wireless every day weather probabilities for east and west and full predictions Coster’s Weather Bureau soon as same come in.IMPORTANT. Make no promises re Tugmen’s Union demand for increases and shorter hours, unless advised. Have papers print articles calculated to foment general seamen’s strike on our own and other great lakes vessels. Hire more socialist agitators to help stir up discontent. Strike MUST materialise before day that dredging contracts are completed.Sending A. C. Smith to Montreal, special business. If time, his instructions are to call on you before leaving to confer on matters above mentioned.(Sgd.)J. C. X.
Instruct North Star newspapers, east and west, drop conjectures re disappearance Gildersleeve. Print nil unless actually found dead or alive; then only barest details on inside pages, without display headings.
Put on double or triple shift, if necessary, on wireless ready any moment for emergency calls from limits station. File for wireless every day weather probabilities for east and west and full predictions Coster’s Weather Bureau soon as same come in.
IMPORTANT. Make no promises re Tugmen’s Union demand for increases and shorter hours, unless advised. Have papers print articles calculated to foment general seamen’s strike on our own and other great lakes vessels. Hire more socialist agitators to help stir up discontent. Strike MUST materialise before day that dredging contracts are completed.
Sending A. C. Smith to Montreal, special business. If time, his instructions are to call on you before leaving to confer on matters above mentioned.
(Sgd.)J. C. X.
It literally took the breath out of Slack.
That second last paragraph regarding the tugmen’s strike smote him like a club. The carrying out of these instructions, he felt, meant personal calamity for him—his political doom.
With cold sweat breaking at his temples he looked up to meet the questioning stare of Yvonne Kovenay’s dark eyes.
“You know who this is from?” He asked it absently like one who scarcely expects a reply.
“Yes,” she answered. Then leaning forward over the desk she said it in a whisper scarcely more than audible: “It is from J.C.X.”
“Yvonne, tell me, haveyouever met him?”
“No!” There was a suppressed shudder in the emphasis. “I hope I never do meet him. If I did—” Her voice trailed off to incoherency.
Hon. J. J. Slack shrugged his heavy shoulders. “Oh, I know what you think, Yvonne. Iknowwhat you think—it’s what they all think.” But Slack’s indifferent shrug merely disguised the goose-flesh shiver that ran through his own frame.
“Was there anything else, Yvonne?”
“Yes—a personal favour.” She pulled nervously at the fingers of her gloves. “Tell me, what is that girl doing out at Amethyst Island?”
“Good heavens, how should I know? Is there a girl stopping at Amethyst Island?”
“You didn’t know she was there?”
“It’s all news to me, Yvonne. Doesn’t Acey Smith know?”
“She—she seems to be a friend of his.” The woman’s voice bore traces of deep agitation. “He spends a lot of time in her company.”
Yvonne Kovenay had risen. She bade Slack a hurried good-day and whisked out of his office.
Slack, staring speculatively at the door through which she had vanished, muttered to himself: “So Acey Smith has a flame, and that Kovenay girl he employs as head of his intelligence bureau is wild with jealousy. H’m, there’s real breakers ahead for Smith, or I miss my guess—and, if there’s a nasty fuss at this particular time I can see where I get a crisp order from J.C.X. to forthwith dispense with the services of a certain crafty superintendent. I can see that.”
But it was not possible pitfalls for Acey Smith which weighed heavily on the self-centred J. J. Slack—it was the nightmare of the coming strike of North Shore seamen that hung like a black cloud over him—the strikethat he would have to precipitate and take the blame for. Until now he had understood the company’s stand-pat attitude was meant to be a temporary bluff only, and that the grievances of the men would be met before the strike actually came off. The orders he had just received dissipated all such fond illusions. His part in it would validate the total labour vote in his constituency. Good heavens, it meant ruin—complete ruin!
For a long period Slack paced the floor of his office. Futilely he tried to devise a way out. Five-thirty passed and the clerks in the outer office departed. Still he walked the floor. Yes—there was one way open. He would fight—bluff it through against this insane policy. Suddenly he came to a mental decision. He flung himself into his swivel chair and buried his face in his hands.
“I won’t do it! I won’t do it!” he spat out savagely. “I’ll see J.C.X. in hell first!”
“Why—in hell?”
At the mocking tones Slack looked up and into a face whose black, commanding eyes rivetted his very soul; whose straight, firm-set mouth was drawn to a hair-line in its wisp of a smile.
“Acey Smith!”
The visitor ignored the startled salutation. “I’m not so sure,” he ruminated, “that if you did meet J.C.X. in the regions you mentioned that you would not change your mind.”
“But Smith, you are aware of the instructions forwarded to me to-day?”
“I have a pretty fair idea of the gist of those instructions.”
“Don’t you think J.C.X. could be prevailed upon to modify them?”
“Modify them? In what way?”
“With regard to precipitating a strike of the tugmen. Such a move would be folly—downright folly.”
“I am certain no such modification could be obtained,” declared Acey Smith. “You know quite as well as I that an order from J.C.X. is a command, and—well, you know what has happened to those that have failed in carrying on for the North Star.”
“But the North Star has never had a strike in its history. It has been known for its fair and generous treatment of its men,” argued Slack. “Its policy has always been to pay employés the highest wages and a bonus.”
“Correct. But for this once J.C.X. has seen fit to change the policy of the North Star, with the North Star’s own particular ends in view.”
“It spells disaster.”
“For whom?”
“For the North Star Company—for all of us. Why—”
“That’s not the point that’s worrying you, Mr. Slack!”
The challenge came swift and sharp like the crack of a whip. Though nominally his subordinate, there were crises in the history of the North Star Company when Slack had to mentally acknowledge a master in Acey Smith’s presence. That was perhaps because he knew Smith in some way held the confidence of the directing mind of the firm, and—there was another reason that was not as tangible.
A wan remnant of what was meant to be a patient smile broke over the politician’s fat face. “We’ll be absolutely candid then,” he agreed. “There’s a Dominion election coming—the House may go to the country at any time. Smith, this proposed strike, with us refusing a settlement, would alienate every solitary labour vote in the North. Why, man, I couldn’t run against a yellow dog and win; it would ruin my political future.”
Acey Smith approached the other deliberately. He leaned forward until the tips of his inordinately long, tapering white fingers supported him on the edge of the desk.
“Slack,” he pronounced with cold insolence, “you have no political future.”
“One moment!” He raised a detaining hand, as Slack, ashen to the throat, opened his mouth in a sort of sickly gasp. “I am merely uttering the judgment of J.C.X., whose spokesman I am for the time being. Your future, as mine, belongs utterly to the North Star. The day you took over the president’s desk you became a pawn, body and soul. You knew that; it was put coldly to you. You accepted in the knowledge that the decisions of the anonymous head of the North Star Towing and Contracting Company must be absolute law, to be obeyed without equivocation of any kind.
“Slack, the North Star made you; picked you up when you were a hand-to-mouth, soap-box demagogue with about as much chance of carving a name in Canadian politics as a celluloid beetle has of cruising the drought-belts of hell. You were a brief-hunting, small-town lawyer in those days, dependent on the political crumbs the big fellows brushed off the table. If it hadn’t been for a mean portion of party patronage you would have had to tackle honest toil or starve.
“Let me refresh your mind on what happened. You got into the political game in a small way. The North Star backed you with its money, its influence and its strategy. You won out against a stronger man—a victory that surprised no one more than yourself.
“You had the front, were a hail fellow and well met. The North Star needed a man of that very type with theopen sesameto inner political circles. In a single day it elevated you from hopeless penury and insignificance tothe highest office in its gift as nominal head of the North Star and its coterie of subsidiary companies. You were made the master of millions, with precedence over many of us who had served the company faithfully since its earliest beginnings. What did you promise in return for all these things?
“Come here!”
Acey Smith, a strange, smouldering glow in his coal-black eyes that held the trembling Slack transfixed, took the other by the arm and led him to the south side of the office, to a window that overlooked the city, its smoked-smudged waterfront, the great lake and the rugged sweep of the North Shore.
“Don’t you remember, John J.?” Acey Smith’s voice was low and vibrant. “It was on this very hill, on the very site of this office, that I stood with my arm linked in yours as I stand now. You confessed to me your ruling passion was for power. You intimated you would sell your very soul to be great, to be mighty.
“I, as the representative of the powerful J.C.X., came to offer you the thing you craved most. I asked you to look to the South, to the East and to the West. As far as you could see and beyond would be your absolute domain. The North Star was prepared to make you ruler of the whole North Shore and the Upper Lakes, and a mighty force in the woods beyond and across the prairie West. You were to have power of a kind—a figurehead ’tis true—but executive power patently greater than any other one individual in this whole Dominion of Canada—and that was what your heart yearned for.
“There was a price named for this prize—you remember? It was your unquestioning obedience at all times to the will of J.C.X. None was to know whence your instructions came. This was all laid down very definitelyto you—and, you accepted gladly, without reservation.”
Slack stood dumb, his gaze averted from the accusing blaze of the other man’s. His relentless inquisitor went on:
“I need not here dilate on how the North Star has lived up to its covenant with you. Your family’s social prominence here and at the Capital, the political honours that have been showered upon you all attest the might that was loaned you. The North Star has demanded only service in return and cared not whether it had your gratitude or not.
“Think you, Slack, that the power that made you a leader among men has not the will to cast you down again into the depths from which you came—that the unseen arm that reached out and lifted you to wealth and affluence has not the strength to unmake you and brush you from its path into the discard?
“Listen.” The voice beside Slack was terrible in its cold intensity. “The zero hour in the history of the North Star is about to strike. Strong men alone can guide its destinies through that critical hour; the North Star will brook no vacillating weakling at its helm when it heads out into the teeth of the tempest.
“I am authorised to bring you this message:The fiat of J.C.X. is that you accept his recent instructions and carry them out to the letter or immediately vacate the presidency of the North Star.”
All the smug self-confidence had gone out of Slack, leaving him a towering mass of perspiring flabbiness. But there was a mulish streak in him that prevailed in the face of his trepidation.
He started to hark back to his primal grievance. “If it wasn’t for this strike—”
“Forget the strike!” cut in Acey Smith. “The strike of the tugmen is a side-issue that will be forgotten long before a general election can be got under way. It will last only so long as it serves the ends of the North Star—a couple of weeks at the very most. But it must last until word comes from J.C.X. to settle it. The men will then be reinstated on their own terms with full back pay for the time they have been idle. The North Star wants no hardship to come to its men out of this incident. And, if the Hon. J. J. Slack, M.P., is then still president of the company, he shall have the full credit for making the magnanimous settlement.”
Slack’s face brightened. “I begin to see the light,” he acknowledged.
“And the object?”
“Yes. This strike will preclude delivery of the poles at Nannabijou Bay to the Kam City Company’s mills in time for them to live up to their agreement with the government.”
“And they’d thus automatically forfeit their rights on the Nannabijou Limits,” added Acey Smith, but the queer, half-pitying ghost of a smile that flickered at the corners of his mouth escaped the politician.
“I see, I see,” reiterated Slack, “and, by virtue of that rider in the government contract, the limits would be returned to us on the terms of our old tender with an extension of time for the completion of our mill. Great Scott, that would mean too that the Kam City people would have a useless mill on their hands they’d be forced to turn over to the North Star at its own price. That’s strategy for you, with a vengeance!”
“Good!” Acey Smith’s approval came with a sardonic chuckle. “It is to be hoped the International InvestmentCorporation and the Kam City Pulp and Paper Mills Company make the same wild deductions that you do, Slack.”
Slack blanched under the rebuff. “Why, what do you mean?” he cried.
“Just this,” replied the other. “Do you think the North Star would allow this tremendous issue to depend on such an obvious and clumsy piece of trickery? Why, man, the Kam City Company would have legal redress whereby they could force us to settle the strike and live up to our delivery contract in less than a week’s time.”
“Then what on earth is the object of the strike?”
“It’s a blind—to hide the real coup.”
“And the real coup?”
“One individual could answer that question—J.C.X.”
Slack was silent a moment, then he blurted rather than asked: “Tell me as man to man, Smith, are you J.C.X.?”
“I have wondered that you did not ask me that before,” returned the superintendent quietly. “I can inform you, as man to man,I am not J.C.X.
“But come, Mr. Slack,” he urged next moment. “We’re wasting time, and I have yet some things to attend to before I catch the train east. What answer do I send from you to J.C.X. regarding those last instructions?”
“Tell him they will be carried out to the letter,” admonished the president.
Acey Smith extended his hand. “I congratulate you, J. J.,” he offered.
“Hold on, Smith,” called Slack as the other turned to leave. “Wait till I get my coat and hat, and I’ll be with you.”
He went to a locker for the articles of wear. “We’ll slip over to the club and have dinner together,” he suggested. “You’ll have lots of time to—”
There was an eerie emptiness to the ring of his voice in the room. He whirled with the sentence uncompleted.
Acey Smith was gone.
Slack shrugged uncomfortably. “Vanished,” he muttered. “I can almost fancy a faint smell of brimstone fumes hangs about the place.”
“Don’tgo away for a moment, Mr. Hammond.” Hammond watching the police with Rev. Nathan Stubbs as their captive disappeared up street, turned to see Martin Winch, the lawyer, hurry to his desk telephone.
“One—O—Two—Seven, North,” he called. “Bairdwell and Simms?—Could I speak to Mr. Simms?— Hello, Simms, Martin Winch of Winch, Stanton and Reid speaking— Simms, would you care to handle a police court case for us?— Yes, right away, if we can arrange the preliminary hearing for this afternoon— It’s a client of ours, Rev. Nathan Stubbs— Some trivial charge, yes— What we want is to get bail arranged, but there are reasons why we can’t very well be identified with the case just for the present— Will explain all that when I see you— Could you slip over to the district police court right now— Hold things until I get there with the bondsmen— That’s very decent of you, Simms, thank you.”
“We’re bound for the police station,” Winch explained as he hustled Hammond down the stairs to the street and into his car at the curb. “It might be essential to have you there, but whatever occurs keep a still mouth unless I tell you. Simms will do all the talking that is necessary.”
On the way Winch stopped opposite the entrance to abusiness block, and, leaving Hammond in the car, hustled upstairs. Presently, he returned with two other men who jumped into the rear seat of the car and Winch started the machine without taking time to introduce them to Hammond.
Winch led the way into the district magistrate’s office, where Rev. Nathan Stubbs was already arraigned before the magistrate. The two mounted police were swearing out papers for his incarceration on a nominal charge of vagrancy. Winch motioned Hammond to a seat in the rear of the auditorium and sat down beside him, while the two strangers, whom Hammond surmised were the bondsmen, went on up and inside the rail, where they were met by a sleek-looking young man, who, he knew, must be Simms. The prisoner straightened and a distinct look of relief came over his face.
It was all very formal, very monotonous, as preliminary hearings usually are. There was very little talking, and most of it in an undertone that didn’t carry to the point where Hammond and Winch were sitting. The most audible sound was the scratching of the magistrate’s pen. Finally it ceased, bail was put up and the magistrate announced the case adjourned until the following morning.
Winch asked Hammond to wait a moment and went forward and joined the group around the accused, now temporarily a free man on one thousand dollars security put up by the two strangers. Hammond was convinced Winch supplied the collateral.
The magistrate arose from his desk, and with customary abruptness the courtroom cleared. Winch, Simms, Rev. Nathan Stubbs and the two bondsmen left the building through a side door. Hammond found himself alone.
He was about to go in search of Winch when the latter appeared at the public entrance. “I beg your pardon,Mr. Hammond,” he apologised. “In my haste to get this beastly matter straightened out I had forgotten about you for the moment. As it happened, we did not need you, and I have to leave you to your own resources for a little while.
“Could you come up to my office, say in an hour?” Winch looked at his watch. “It’s almost five now. Come up at six. You can’t get back to the limits now until to-morrow morning at the earliest, and it is extremely important I should have a talk with you before you go.”
The arrangement did not appeal as any too attractive to the young man, particularly in view of what happened at his afternoon interview with the lawyer, but he promised to abide by it.
At the appointed time Hammond went up to the legal offices of Winch, Stanton and Reid. An impatient-looking young male clerk was standing by the outer rail with hat and coat on ready to leave. The balance of the office staff had departed.
“Mr. Winch is engaged just now,” said the clerk, “but he left word for you to wait here. He will call you when he is ready.” Having delivered his message, the youth pushed through the double doors and ran downstairs three steps at a time.
Hammond swore under his breath. He hadn’t bothered about his evening meal, thinking the session with Winch would be of short duration, and he was tired and hungry.
He could distinguish the rumble of low-pitched voices in Winch’s private office, but could catch no word of what was said. Five minutes dragged by—ten—twenty—thirty. At a quarter to seven Hammond was furious enough to jump up and leave without giving any notice.
The door of Winch’s office opened, and, Winch, poking his head out, called: “Come in, Mr. Hammond.”
Hammond crossed the threshold and drew back in amazement. Standing by Winch’s desk was a tall man, iron-grey of hair with a keen face and deepset, piercing dark eyes.
It was Norman T. Gildersleeve!
“How do you do, Mr. Hammond?” Mr. Gildersleeve greeted the young man quietly, extending his hand. “You weren’t quite prepared to meet me here?”
“Scarcely, Mr. Gildersleeve, but”—Hammond was regaining his composure—“I’ve become quite used to running into the unexpected since I parted with you on the night of September the twenty-third.”
Gildersleeve smiled. “Quite so, quite so,” he agreed. “However, we’ve decided to acquaint you with some of the missing details that have been baffling you, Mr. Hammond, though I must confess that there are a few things that we would like to know more about ourselves. Later on—”
“Yes, at the club, after dinner,” briskly cut in Martin Winch. “You and Mr. Hammond can get together in a side room and thresh the whole thing out. We’d better hurry over if we don’t wish to be locked out of the café.”
They departed in Winch’s car. At the City Club, Norman T. Gildersleeve’s appearance created no sudden sensation among the scattered few that were present. Apparently, the New York capitalist was not readily recognised, though his picture had appeared many times in the papers since his disappearance. Hon. J. J. Slack, M.P., who was a late arrival, alone picked him out. Slack came striding over to the table where Gildersleeve, Winch and Hammond sat awaiting their order.
“As I live,” he cried, “if it isn’t Norman Gildersleeve in the flesh!”
“Hush,” admonished Gildersleeve in an undertone as the other gripped his hand. “I am anxious for this matter to slip over with as little notoriety as possible.”
“But you’ve already got all the notoriety that’s coming to you,” laughed Slack. “The papers have been full of nothing else since you dropped out of sight. Where on earth have you been?”
Gildersleeve shrugged. “Oh, just on a little private hunting trip above Moose Horn,” he replied. “I needed a rest and thought I’d take it in on my way here.”
Slack’s brows went up ever so slightly. “Bag any big fellows?”
He asked it innocently enough, but Hammond thought he caught the faintest of sarcastic inflexions.
Gildersleeve ignored the question. “Now that I’m back,” he remarked, “I’m anxious to see the pulp and paper mill get under way in time. By the way, Slack, how is the North Star getting on with the poles?”
“Swimmingly, swimmingly,” repeated the politician. “Nannabijou Bay is jammed almost to the last inch with timber. Away over the contract cut, I believe.”
“That’s fine. How about delivery?”
“Starts next week, soon as we get the last of our dredging contracts off our hands,” replied Slack. “We’ll have our whole fleet of equipment on the job.”
“Then there’s nothing in this talk that is going around of a strike among your tugmen?”
“Absolutely nothing,” emphatically assured Slack. “The North Star never had a strike in its history. The men tried to put up a bluff of going out, at the instigation of a nest of agitators, but they’ll never go out—they know better than to try any of that stuff on us. See you later, Gildersleeve.”
Gildersleeve’s eyes trailed after Slack’s retreatingfigure in a fixed, hard glitter. “When Ananias quit the job, he never dreamed he would have so illustrious a successor,” he commented grimly. “Slack’s one grand qualification for the presidency of the North Star is his magnificent ability as an unmitigated liar.”
The meal progressed in comparative silence. It was after they had retired to the privacy of a side room that Hammond, prompted by curiosity he had until now curbed, asked casually: “By the way, Mr. Winch, what became of the camp preacher you bailed out this afternoon—the Rev. Nathan Stubbs?”
Winch looked at Gildersleeve and they both smiled cynically. “He has disappeared—vanished in thin air, as you might say,” enlightened Winch.
“And left you in the air with bail?”
“It was cheap to lose him at any price,” spoke up Gildersleeve with a frown. “He was through with his job—and damned good riddance!”
Hammond began to see the drift of things. “So the preacher was a detective in your employ?” he surmised.
“Exactly—and you were sent out there as a foil to keep them guessing,” replied Gildersleeve. “He went in the disguise of preacher because it was the easiest rôle to get away with without suspicion, every sort of preacher being allowed the run of the camps on account of some eccentric whim of the superintendent.”
“And your disappearance was—also a blind?”
“You’ve got the idea. I told Slack just now I was on a hunting trip, which was true—except that I was hunting inside information, not moose. To make absolutely sure of no leaks, Winch here was the only one inthe plot with me. The arrest of the bogus preacher might have been a costly blunder if we hadn’t got him out before his identity was discovered.”
“How did they get the charge of vagrancy against him?”
“The Lord only knows. Smith and the gang of crooks who use him as a crafty, unscrupulous tool in their nefarious enterprises seem to have even the police of the country in their power. At any rate, Stubbs was arrested on a nominal charge of vagrancy, but ostensibly for some unnamed crime he was supposed to have committed on the limits.
“Now, Mr. Hammond,” continued the head of the International Investment Corporation, “I think I’d better be a little more explicit about matters before I come to a new proposal I have to make to you. You are fairly well acquainted with the facts in connection with the previous struggle with the Kam City Pulp and Paper Mills Company, of which my corporation is the parent, and the North Star Towing and Contracting Company, are you not?—how we succeeded in getting the rights on the limits this October, pending the opening of our mill?”
Hammond nodded. “One way and another I have picked up a fairly good notion of the situation,” he affirmed.
“What you may not know,” continued the other, “is that a former Canadian company, of which I was the head, was behind many of the rival enterprises which tried to fight the North Star in this country, and failed. In fact, we, the pioneers in development work on the North Shore, were actually driven out by the North Star, whose crafty, underhand methods and strange power over the ruling authorities in government circles made it impossible to meet them in a fair fight. I was a heavy loser through those ventures, and, I may tell you thatmillions are at stake in this present undertaking projected to break the backbone of the slimy North Star outfit.
“But we got the edge on them this time from the start—and we intend to keep it. Nevertheless, I had no illusions as to the intentions of the North Star since the screws were put down tight on them by the new provincial government. I knew if there were a loop-hole through which they could slip to prevent delivery of poles to our mill in time to allow of operation on the date fixed in our agreement with the government that they would take full advantage of it.
“Early last June I placed several secret agents in one guise and another in the North Star’s camps, keeping close tab on operations and sending in regular reports. They could discover no grounds for suspecting trickery, however, except that the superintendent, A. C. Smith, was inaccessible and his comings and goings in the camp were as mysterious as the man himself.
“Then one day, toward the latter end of the summer, all our secret agents, who had secured positions as clerks, cookees and lumberjacks, were summarily dismissed and given twenty-four hours to get off the limits—all with the exception of an expert ex-secret service man from Chicago, Arnold by name, who kept his place in the camp as a consumptive landscape artist. Arnold made the discovery that there was some secret rendezvous up in the hill known as the Cup of Nannabijou, to which he was convinced Acey Smith repaired, though he was never able to trace him there. He further had a theory that the unknown powers behind the North Star were kept in touch with affairs through a wireless plant secreted in the Cup.
“That was the last report we received from Arnold. News afterward appeared in the papers that Arnold’s hat had been found floating in a creek up on the hill, andit was surmised that he had fallen into the rapids of the creek and was dashed to death.
“Arnold, however, eventually turned up, alive, in Chicago, and later came to my office in New York. The truth of the matter was he had been waylaid on the banks of the creek, overpowered and drugged while he was endeavouring to find the entrance to the Cup. He recovered consciousness in the room of a waterfront hotel in this city, where he found on the dresser a parcel and a bulky envelope. The parcel contained the loose cash he had in his pockets when attacked, his watch, fountain pen and a new hat similar to the one that fell off his head into the creek during his struggle with unknown assailants. In the envelope were all the pencilled notes he had made and secreted under the floor of his shack, and under the envelope he found a railway time-table with the connections between Kam City and Chicago under-scored. Arnold was quite fed up with the way they did things in Canada, and he took the obvious hint.
“All this made it the more imperative that I place some one on the limits who could get to the bottom of what coup the North Star was planning. I decided to come North myself to keep in close touch. In order to put our rivals and their spies off the scent and lend them a false notion of security, I planned to suddenly disappear off the train before it reached Kam City. Winch was not to discover this until the following morning and then see that my remarkable disappearance was given the widest possible publicity in the newspapers.
“It was while on the way to Kam City that I was impressed with the advantages of having a foil for the camp preacher in his work—some one whose entrance into the camps at about the same time as himself would arouse Acey Smith’s curiosity and suspicion and keep him for a time off the right track. I talked the planover with Winch, and the result was we engaged you.
“Now there was no absolute certainty that Slack would take any cognizance of my request to find you a job on the limits, and possibly less that Acey Smith would take you on, even if he did, but I built on their curiosity being so aroused that they would employ you just to get at the bottom of what you were sent there for. Your entire ignorance of any definite object on the limits would, I conjectured, further baffle Smith. In the meantime, while his suspicions were focussed on you, Stubbs was to get in his good work. The result up to the time of your leaving the limits and Stubbs’ arrest was eminently satisfactory.”
“You think my leaving precipitated Stubbs into trouble then?” asked Hammond.
“No, I wouldn’t say that,” replied Gildersleeve. “Stubbs at the last minute tried to prevent your getting on the tug before it left, but that wasn’t what was at the bottom of his arrest. However, you both did well to stay out there as long as you did. We discovered the North Star’s plot to prevent delivery of the poles in time to frustrate it, we hope.”
“The strike?”
“You’ve guessed it. And the strike, as you have likely further surmised, has been cunningly engineered by the North Star principals themselves, though, mind you, that would be a difficult thing to prove and a dangerous statement to make publicly.”
“But,” contended Hammond, “the North Star must have known that, under the existing circumstances, you could bring government pressure to bear to force them to settle the strike and deliver the poles as per the contract.”
“True, but therein lay the very advantage of our knowledge in advance they were bringing this strike on,”explained the other. “We have thus been enabled to get in private touch with the attorney-general, as well as the minister of forests and mines, so that the minute the strike breaks a fiat will come through ordering the North Star to submit their strike to a swift arbitration. We did not suppose the North Star was relying on the strike alone to tie up delivery, but took it as a means to another end, which, undoubtedly was to have the plants in their various tugs blown up and disabled. The blame would be laid at the door of extremists among the strikers and they would thus be so crippled they could not move a pole from the limits to get our mills running on time.
“But we took care of that part of it,” continued Gildersleeve. “We got the mounted police on the job of watching not only the booms at the limits, but the North Star’s waterfront property in this city as well. Incidentally, to make doubly sure of not being trapped, we wired Duluth to have tugs and equipment ready to send over to us on a moment’s notice.”
“You knew that Acey Smith is leaving for Montreal to-night?” asked Hammond.
“We did,” said Gildersleeve. “The superintendent took care to have that generally noised about; there’s even an item in both local papers to-night about his trip. It has never been Acey Smith’s habit to advertise his personal movements, so we can discount that as another ‘red herring’ drawn over the trail. Just the same we have two detectives shadowing the pulp camp superintendent’s movements.”
Hammond had to smile over the idea. “Might as well send two men to shadow a timber wolf,” he observed ironically.
“Or the Devil himself,” agreed Gildersleeve. “However, I don’t think there’s much to worry about in thatdirection. Now we’ve come to a matter that I would like to talk over with you privately, Mr. Hammond—if Mr. Winch doesn’t mind.”
“Not the least,” said Winch. “If you think you’ll not be over-long I’ll wait for you in the rotunda, Norman.”
“We’ll not be long, Martin,” he was assured by Gildersleeve.
“There are two loose ends out at those camps I want to have cleared up right away,” briskly opened Gildersleeve when the door closed behind Winch. “The one is what the North Star has hidden up in the Cup of Nannabijou, and the other is the purpose of that girl staying out on Amethyst Island.”
Hammond started. “You mean Miss Stone?”
“Yes. The fact that you got on intimate terms with her should be a very valuable asset to us. I suppose you’ve guessed that Stubbs was the one who so cleverly brought about your meeting with her?”
“No, I had not guessed it.”
“H’m—well! Let’s get to the point, Mr. Hammond: What all did you find out from her?”
“Please be a little more explicit, Mr. Gildersleeve: Just what are you driving at?”
“I’m sorry. I may not have made myself quite clear. Just what is her little part in the mystery out at the limits?”
Hammond suppressed his irritation. “Miss Stone has absolutely no connection with the North Star’s intrigues; of that I am certain,” he replied emphatically. “She is as much mystified, I am sure, by the strange occurrences at the limits as we have been.”
“She hypnotised you into believing that?” There was a politely shaded sneer in Gildersleeve’s tone. “Nowsee here, Hammond, you must remember we are dealing with the cleverest coterie of arch crooks on the American continent. There is nothing in the finer arts of intrigue and blackmail they have not practised in the past to gain their ends. They have never had equals for cunning and resourcefulness.
“Such precedent alone,” he pointed out, “should warn us that that girl with her pretty face has been introduced at this particular juncture with a purpose, if I hadn’t deeper reasons for conviction in the matter. My proposal therefore is that you go back to the limits, further cultivate the acquaintance of Miss Stone and find out as quickly as possible for your own benefit as well as ours all you can about her in that direction.”
Hammond had risen. “I think we may as well break off all our connection right now, Mr. Gildersleeve,” he said coldly. “I am going back to the limits, but this time let it be understood I’m going on my own.”
Gildersleeve at a glance took in the determination written in the young man’s face. “I see—I see,” he muttered significantly. “Well, in that case, Mr. Hammond—can we expect you to respect our previous confidences?”
“So far as it may be honourable and lawful to do so, yes.”
Somehow Hammond sensed that reply rankled Gildersleeve, but the latter responded, almost suavely: “Very well then, call around at Winch’s office in the morning and there’ll be a cheque waiting you to cover payment for your services according to our contract. Goodnight!”
He held the door for Hammond to pass out.
Strangeevents took place on the Nannabijou Limits during the morning of the day Hammond left by tug for Kam City.
Josephine Stone arose early after a restless night of nervous dread of she knew not what. There had been disturbing incidents that had contributed to her trepidation. When she had returned to the island after her fright at encountering the Indian wizard, Ogima Bush, on the trail, she found Mrs. Johnson, her companion, was absent. Inquiry of her Indian woman-of-all-work, brought out fragmentary information that Mrs. Johnson had left shortly after Miss Stone and Hammond had set out on their trip up Nannabijou Hill.
“Two men come in boat,” said the girl, “and big lady go way with them.”
“But, Mary,” insisted Miss Stone, “didn’t she leave any message—didn’t she tell you any words to tell me?”
“Maybe tell Mary—don’t know. They talk fast. Walk fast. Go way fast—in put-put boat. Maybe go some place big lady know, for she laugh and look—glad. Mary think she say she not come back for long time.”
“Which way did the boat go?”
The Indian girl swung her arm to the west. “Maybe go to city, don’t know.”
Mrs. Johnson must have been sent for hurriedly. Mostlikely she had received an urgent message from her home in Calgary. Something sudden must have happened, but Josephine Stone could not imagine the considerate Mrs. Johnson leaving without an explanation. She again frantically searched every possible place in the cottage for sign of a note that she might have left behind. There was none.
The messengers in the boat must have brought a telegram from Calgary to her. Perhaps, in her excitement, she had forgotten to leave a message of explanation. But just what sort of news Mrs. Johnson could have received that would make her laugh and “look glad,” as the Indian girl had said, was more than she could imagine.
“Mary,” Miss Stone demanded, “did you see the men give Mrs. Johnson a piece of paper to read before she left?”
“Maybe give piece of paper. Mary don’t know.”
It was utterly no use. The girl could tell her nothing, and her brother Henry, who looked after the boats and cut the wood when he was not engaged in the glorious Indian pursuit of doing nothing, was even more stoically stupid.
After a night of fitful rest, when she had tried to compose her mind that everything would turn out all right, she rose with an ominous presentiment. Even after she had had breakfast and had gone out for a short stroll around the island, the glory of the autumn morning did not tend to dissipate her depression.
As she was nearing the cottage door on her return, the white glare of a large, bell-shaped military tent struck on the clearing of a hill some distance south on the lake-shore caught her attention. Soon picturesque figures appeared about the tent—stalwart-looking chaps in scarlet tunics, stiff-brimmed stetsons and dark trouserswith wide gold braid stripes. She instantly recognised them as Canadian mounted police and remembered that Acey Smith had said the day previous that an outpost of the mounties would possibly be stationed somewhere near Amethyst Island.
The young policemen were busying themselves about a small camp-fire, evidently preparing an outdoor breakfast, their gay chatter and outbursts of laughter ringing strangely clear on the limpid morning air. . . . Then from out of the woods there came a single soft stroke of the gong of Nannabijou.
The figures round the camp-fire stood one moment in silent mystification; then, as if they had simultaneously made the discovery, their gaze was turned on the figure of Josephine Stone. One of the men focussed a field-glass upon her, and the girl, embarrassed by the attention she was provoking, moved back into the shelter of the trees.
She could not bear to return to the interior of the cottage. An overpowering sense of an intangible something out there in the woods had taken such a hold on her she quaked at times as with the cold. It was as if unseen eyes watched her every movement from the fastnesses; as though a designing, hating presence prowled out there, always watching—waiting. She could not entirely account for the sensation. So far, she had never been afraid, alone as she and Mrs. Johnson had been so far as white company was concerned. Partly, of course, it came of her fright at the unexpected meeting with Ogima Bush on the trail, the unexplained departure of Mrs. Johnson and the urgent demand of Acey Smith that she leave the island, because of an unnamed danger, until the appointed time for meeting J.C.X.
J.C.X.!
The very name now seemed to fill her with dread. Previously she had pictured a dashing czar of the bush camps, handsome as he was poetic by nature. At one time she had even suspected that J.C.X. was none other than Acey Smith himself. Now she knew that could not be the fact; she knew now that the timber boss of the Nannabijou Limits, iron man though he was in other respects, bent abjectly to the sinister influence and will of some powerful factor he lived in constant dread of and dare not explain. The remorse that had been in his tones when yesterday he had spoken of “the Man That Might Have Been” had uttered volumes as to the mental and spiritual shackles he had allowed to be placed upon his better self. Why had he so contemptuously referred to the tragic ending of the career of Captain Carlstone? Had the gallant soldier also been vassal to the grim J.C.X. and killed himself to escape his despair?
She now heartily wished she had never come to Amethyst Island—that she had not pressed on Acey Smith to bring about a meeting with J.C.X. If J.C.X. were a presentable human being of sane and upright character, why was it not possible for Acey Smith to induce him to come to meet her, instead of asking her, an unprotected stranger, to journey she knew not where to gain the information referred to in his letter? True, she trusted Acey Smith so far as her personal safety was concerned; her woman’s intuition told her that, away from the weird outside influence that seemed to dominate him body and soul, he possessed the born instincts of a gentleman—but, under its sway, it was problematical what he might not be capable of doing.
That was one of the reasons she had refused to leave the island for an undesignated destination without notifying any one—the other was Louis Hammond. Louis Hammond would surely come to-day—when she sosorely needed him. Instinctively her eyes searched the lakeshore trail in search of a youthful, buoyant figure.