This etext was transcribed by Les Bowler

[ ]

THE
TIMBER PIRATE

BY
CHARLES CHRISTOPHER JENKINS

McCLELLAND AND STEWART
PUBLISHERS : : TORONTO

COPYRIGHT, 1922,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

THE TIMBER PIRATE. II

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO
MY WIFE

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

Night’s sable curtain was soon to fall on the short-lived drama of a Winter day in the Laurentians. The departing sub-arctic sun, in its last pale glory, sent up from the omnipresent whiteness myriads of glistening beams that stabbed the eyes like leaping darts of fire. Of sounds there was oppressive absence. Not even a vagrant breeze sighed in the tree-tops; but at irregular intervals the intense stillness was smitten by the lugubrious “Spon-n-n-n-g!” of some aged tree splitting open to the heart where freezing moisture expanded in its crevices. All life and warmth seemed utterly exterminated in the pre-twilight calm save for the distant Monarch of Day slowly receding from his stark white world of desolation.

Yet even in these desolate wastes Man moved and had his being; for on the trail that wound down from the heights to the northwest there was the ribbonlike tracing of a dog sled and beside it the oval imprints of snowshoes. At a small cleared area in the scrub timber, just above where the trail dipped into a mighty, spruce-bearded ravine, the sled marks and the snowshoe patterns ceased.

On this spot, by a camp fire in the snow, hunched an elderly white man wrapped to his throat in blankets, beard and eyebrows thickly frosted from the vapour of his breath. His face, the wasted face of one who had endured intense physical suffering, was bereft of tangible expression; his eyes fixed dully on the slow-leaping, soundless flames from which there ascended into the zero-freighted air a wispy, hairlike strand of smoke. Roundabout him were scattered canvas packsacks, rolls of bright coloured woollen blankets, fire-blackened pots and pans, two light chopping axes and a short-barrelled repeating rifle. Nearby, on the trail, a spent and footsore string of sled dogs lay flattened in the snow. Noses stretched to the fire, eyes closed and limbs inert, they might be mistaken for dead and frozen things but for the occasional faint heave of their flanks as their trained lungs drew sparingly of the biting ozone.

Of a sudden the deathlike calm was shattered by the whining crack of a high-power rifle. Closer by there was a swish and flap of clumsy wings, and a dowdy, slate-coloured wesse-ke-jak circled the camp uttering dismal cries of “Meat—meat—meat!”

Every canine head came to life with a start. The figure in the blankets winced as though struck from behind by an unseen icy fist, doubling forward in a racking fit of coughing that reverberated through the solitudes in listless, unsympathetic echoes. The man desisted with a choking gasp, his frame shaking in a palsy. Weakly he slumped back against a nearby packsack, hands clutching at his heart.

“Laddie,” he called in a voice that was pitifully faint, “Laddie—oh, Laddie!”

His arms sagged and went limp by his sides, his breath coming and going in the swift, sibilant gasps of a life flickering out from exhaustion.

A wolf-dog in the sled pack pricked up his pointed ears, and, straining away from his fellows, sniffed weirdly in the direction of the stricken man. The treacherous huskie leaped savagely against his restraining harness, a low, ominous growl issuing from the ugly curve of his long, trembling jaws. A woolly black-and-tan of the faithful Collie strain gave a snarl of warning; then, with bristles rising on his thick, powerful neck, leaped at the throat of the traitor. That was the signal for a general release of pentup canine irritation. In a trice the whole sled pack was engaged in a furious free-for-all of flying fur and white-flashing fangs.

“Lie down!”

The command came low, deep and vibrant with a faint click of teeth. In electric unison the pack flattened, cowering silent in their places—all but the loyal Collie, which turned with slow-wagging tail and crouching rump to express its fealty as the scrub of the trail parted and a tall youth of spare but powerful build strode into the camp with the carcass of a young buck deer on his shoulder.

The newcomer flung the deer and his rifle to the snow and rushed to the side of the dying man, applying a pocket flask to his lips while he raised him on an arm with the tenderness of a woman. But the elder one was sinking fast—was beyond human aid.

For a few moments he rallied. “Laddie—thank God—you came,” he murmured weakly. “It is the end—the end of the trail—for me. There is so much—so much left undone, Laddie—so much wrong—an erring old man should undo—but you—you, Alexander, my boy—you won’t forget—the mine—the gold mine—goes to—”

The young man bent close to catch the whispered name.

Suddenly the invalid straightened as though galvanised in a last brief lease of life, eyes fixed on some vision above and beyond his companion.

“Black Jack! Black Jack Carlstone!” He cried it as one who cries from the wells of the heart. “Black Jack, my one true friend—you—you will see that the boy—you will see that he carries out my will—”

His torso sagged and his head dropped limply on his chest before he finished.

With reverent touch the young man closed the tired old eyes, while his own welled up and there was a suggestion of a stifled sob in his throat. Mutely for some moments he remained on one knee in the snow, stoically still, looking into the face of the dead man as though questioning the cruel vagaries of Fate.

But as quickly his expression changed. Presently, when he arose and strode over to the fire, a hard, uncanny light flickered over his face—a face whose intense pallor accentuated the blackness of his extraordinary eyes. Framed in the close-fitting muskrat cap, it was a face that bespoke undeveloped power, strikingly handsome in its mephistophelian mould and portending a sagacity beyond its years.

He stood with arms outstretched to the setting sun, for the moment transformed to a pagan chieftain, and from his lips there issued the single word, “Kee-am!” which in the Indian means: “Nothing matters!”

“The gold mine goes to—” Slowly he repeated the dead man’s injunction. The lids of his black eyes narrowed until they became slits of flame and the lines of his mouth set close-pressed and cruel.

But when he turned and addressed the corpse his features relaxed and his voice was gutturally soft and musical: “It shall be as you willed, my kindest friend—but, for the present, the mine is lent to me.”

The sun, now a great, boiling globe under a fanlike glaze of scarlet, eased down upon the bleak western ranges, bordering their purple-shrouded crests with a narrow edging of brightest gold; hesitated one brief second in fiery farewell, then plunged behind the ragged rim of the northern world. Night swept with swift stealth across the wilderness, transforming it to a realm of spectrelike shadows.

A solemn hush, like a requiem of Nature for the day that was dead, fell over the forests.

The lone figure by the camp fire bent forward strangely as though gripped by an inward paroxysm.

As he did so, the deeps of the woods vibrated with a long-drawn, unearthly cry that echoed and re-echoed its fearsome notes far in the hills. It had seemed to rise from nowhere, a howl neither human nor bestial, but a demoniac blending of both; half anguished wail, half mocking laughter.

No prowling timber wolf broke the succeeding silence with an answering call. Even the wolf-dog in the sled pack cowered deeper in his snowy bed in whimpering fear.

CHAPTER I
ACEY SMITH

I

Louis Hammond, picking his way in the rapidly-failing twilight, dodged a pot-hole in the pulp camp’s “main street,” looked up at the unexpected sound of a woman’s voice, and, misplacing a foot, went sprawling into another. He arose bespattered and with ice-cold ooze seeping to his ankles over the tops of his city shoes.

The young man barely checked the exclamation more forceful than polite that rose to his tongue when a lithe, girlish form, close-wrapped to the throat in a light fall coat, stepped out to the road from the shadowy verandah of the building that had been pointed out to him as the office of the superintendent.

A big man in a reefer and high boots laced to the knees followed, but before he gained her side, the woman turned.

“No, I thank you,” Hammond heard her decline in a bright voice. “It is only a step down to the dock.”

The man bowed deferentially, lifted his narrow-brimmed stetson with a courtliness oddly at variance with his rough garb, followed her with his eyes for a moment, then wheeled and returned to the building.

On the Nannabijou Limits, in the farthest reaches of Lake Superior’s wild North Shore, was about the last place on earth Hammond expected to encounter a white woman, especially one whose voice and every movement betokened long association in refined environment. Her verve and grace were the more apparent to him as she came tripping sure-footedly down through the half-light toward the water-front.

She passed him on the other side of the road, and just then the door of a camp to his right was flung open emitting a widening flood of yellow lamplight that threw them both in relief.

Hammond caught a fleeting glimpse of an oval little face, fascinating in its contour; of a daintily-moulded mouth and chin and fine, high-arched eyebrows traced as with the delicate brush of an artist. He looked into great darkened blue eyes that held startled recognition; saw her lips open in a suppressed gasp, then she hurried on as though fearful he might accost her.

The time, the place and the extremely odd circumstances under which he had last felt the magnetic sway of those eyes beneath the unforgettable brows recurred to him as, with wildly-beating pulse, he stood wiping the mud from his hands and clothes with his pocket-handkerchief.

After her figure merged into the gloom down by the dock he waited, despite the chill that was searching at his damp ankles. Soon he heard subdued voices and the preliminary cough of a marine engine being started. Followed the even chug-chug of the motor’s exhaust and a moving finger of light from a small marine searchlight swept out and felt its way through the channel in the immense field of pulpwood booms that all but filled Nannabijou Bay. Out beyond, the boat headed due west.

Who was the girl, and by what odd coincidence did she reappear in this ungodly place? He wondered. But in the maze of other inexplicable circumstances that had surrounded him since the night of the twenty-third of September when he had accepted his present strange mission, he gave up trying to guess the answer. The damp, oppressive gloom of a Northern Ontario pulp camp after sundown is not contributive to romancing and Hammond had pressing business in hand.

He crossed the road and knocked at the door of the superintendent’s office.

II

“Come in!”

The command came clear and loud with an odd vibrating quality in its not inhospitable note.

The room which Hammond entered, an office in the fore of the superintendent’s living and sleeping quarters, presented a scene of orderly confusion. Its desks were littered with newspapers, magazines and typewritten flimsies, and on its wall shelves sprawled reference books, encyclopedias, dictionaries and thumb-worn volumes of the classics.

The place struck Hammond as not being unlike the work-rooms of free-lance writing men he had known. But the one occupant, a tall, magnificently set-up figure of a man, was obviously not of the type that put their dreams on paper, but live them.

He barely glanced up when Hammond entered.

The visitor, awaiting recognition, was struck by the conscious power and subtle craftiness that lurked in the pale, exotic features of the other. Stratagem, deep and super-capable, might be read in the eyes, black as night, over which the lids compressed ever so faintly now in a dreamy, faraway gaze. Wide, coldly-moulded temples, under close-cropped, crisp black hair, surmounted a face not to be put out of memory once even casually visualised, and the whole bespoke a mind that, one sensed, worked a dual lightning shift, analysing and sifting its impressions ever in advance of action and word. The lower features narrowed symmetrically to the alert, square-set chin; spare beneath the rounded prominence of the cheek-bones, with a sensitive mouth that could compress thin-lipped with a flicker in its half-smile that was cruel as sin.

The superintendent arose and walked slowly over to a desk and tossed down the limp-covered encyclopedia volume he had been perusing, then he turned and studied Hammond queerly, quite as one might study an inanimate object while in the depths of a mental problem, only this man’s eyes held a ghostly, diabolical light.

“Mr. Hammond, what do you know about aphasia?” was his startling first question.

“Not a great deal,” replied Hammond seeking to retain an unsurprised outwardness. “Refers to loss of identity or something of that sort. That encyclopedia ought to—”

“That being so,” cut in the other, seeming to return to actual surroundings, “will you please be seated and tell me what’s on your mind. Smoke?”

Hammond lifted a cigarette from the other’s case. “You are Mr. A. C. Smith, the superintendent?”

“Acey Smith will do out here.”

“As you seem to already know, my name is Hammond. I came looking for a job.”

“A job?” He swept Hammond’s raiment with his scornful eyes. “What’s so suddenly gone wrong with the world of white collars and derby hats?”

“I brought this letter of introduction from Hon. J. J. Slack, M.P.”

“Well.” Acey Smith grunted amusedly, tore open the envelope and merely glanced at the contents. He turned to Hammond with a trace of a sneer playing about his mouth. “Indicates I’m not to bother trying to find out what you’re wanted for and to slap you on the pay-roll at a hundred a month and found.”

Hammond stifled indignant surprise. “I suppose you have something I can do?”

“Do?” There was something like a hiss in Acey Smith’s half-laugh. “Take in the scenery, I’d suggest. There’s a devil of a lot of it going to waste hereabouts.”

“There’s a mistake somewhere, Mr. Smith. I didn’t come out here to loaf, but to tackle a job and earn the money.”

The other smiled in better-natured scorn. “Say, Hammond,” he derided, “what are you trying to put over on a poor, benighted bush superintendent? You know as well as the scribe angel knows that Old Man J.J. isn’t forking you out the North Star’s good money for what you’re going to do, but for what you’ve done.”

Hammond, remembering a warning, became cautious. “Nevertheless,” he persisted, “I would at least like to make a show of earning the money.”

“That’s better,” approved Acey Smith. “Tell me what you did for a living before J.J. tucked you out here.”

Again Hammond felt the need of being guarded before those black, soul-searching eyes. “Lawyer,” he prevaricated.

“Full-fledged?”

“No, student.”

“H’m, hard-boiled is the only kind I could use. Oh, well, if you find it hard to keep your mind occupied you might camouflage as an extra check with the pole-counting squad. But your principal business, young man, will be doing as you damned well please, except when you get explicit orders to do otherwise.

“By the way,” in a more friendly tone, “how was J.J. looking when you last saw him?”

“Pretty fit, though he seemed worried.”

“Politics is a hell of a game, isn’t it?” pronounced Acey Smith. “But you had better be turning in; you look mussed up and tired. You bunk with the head cook in the little shack next door up. First thing in the morning slip over to the camp store and get a bush outfit. Those parlour duds of yours are high-sign invitations to the ‘flu,’ and we don’t encourage funerals.”

Hammond thanked him, said good-night and turned to leave the room. His hand was on the door-latch when Acey Smith seemed to glide through the air to his side. He felt his wrist seized in a grip of steel.

“Spy!”

It came a hissing accusation that sent Hammond’s hot blood to his head. He flung the other free of him. “No, damn you,” he answered fiercely, “and I’m not a timber wolf either!”

He could not have explained what inspired him to say that, but at the words, Acey Smith cowered back as one might from the clinging clout of a logging whip. Hammond did not know that a man’s face could at one moment hold so much of evil as leaped at him from Smith’s. His head jerked back and the eyes that darted fire at Hammond were no longer the eyes of a human being. The taut lips bared back from the even white teeth in a hateful snarl; then Acey Smith’s hands went up to his face convulsively, the palms cupping his lower features.

He whirled on a heel like an Objibway in a war dance. Next instant when he faced Hammond he was laughing quietly. “We’ll drop the play-acting,” he said, “and I’ll take you up and introduce you to your shack-mate, Sandy Macdougal, the cook.”

“You are sure I am not a spy?”

“I am satisfied you are not what I feared for your own welfare you might have been. Let’s go.”

But the cook had turned in and was snoring raucously when they reached his quarters, a substantial log shack that stood directly opposite the huge dining-camp. Four bunks were built into the further wall of the one-room interior, each equipped with a mattress and any amount of dark-grey blankets. The place was dimly illuminated by a sullen fire that gave out fitful, subdued cracklings in the little sheet-iron heater banked for the night with green wood.

Acey Smith lighted a wall lamp. Only one of the bunks was occupied, so Acey Smith directed Hammond to the other lower, bade him good-night and left abruptly.

III

The young man did not immediately retire in spite of his fatigue. Instead, he sat down by the stove, lit his pipe and tried mentally to propound something tangible out of the hodge-podge of mystery that had surrounded him since the night of September the twenty-third when he had allowed himself to be pitch-forked into a commission without definite instructions as to how he was to act or whom he was to accept as friends or enemies. Surely the whole world had not gone mad since that hour; there must be a sane method in the whole thing somewhere, but try as he could, cudgel his imagination as he might, he could build up no theory that was at all satisfying.

Then, after he retired, came memory of the fearsome visage of Acey Smith when he had flung him off over there at the door of his office. That was no “play-acting” as Smith had tried to pass it off. For the moment the man had been in deadly earnest, Hammond was sure of that.

But a pair of great startled, blue eyes under fine, high-arched eyebrows, came to drive all other haunts of the night away. Those eyes seemed to speak at him out of the shadows, and the fear in them took him back again to the night of the twenty-third when Fate had literally seized him by the scruff of the neck, yanked him out of a commonplace groove in life and tossed him into a vortex of baffling intrigue and mystery.

CHAPTER II
A STRANGE PACT ON A TRAIN

I

On the night of September twenty-third, Louis Hammond had been train-bound from Saskatoon east.

The transcontinental on which he was travelling had long since passed the Saskatchewan and Manitoba boundaries and was thundering over the muskegs and through the rock-cuts in the great wilderness of the Ontario divide. While the porter was making up his berth, Hammond sought the smoker, but it happened that a garrulous traveller was there holding forth on how the league of nations should have disposed of things to bring about eternal peace, and the young man fled as he might have from the deadly presence of smallpox.

He passed on to the next coach, a compartment and parlour car. The little smoker there promised peace and quiet. In it there sat alone a spare grey little man with a cadaverous face, who looked up from the book in his lap and gazed interestedly at Hammond. The latter lit his pipe and taking a seat in the opposite corner beside the window peered into the moon-bathed night and out over the shadowy wastes to the ragged ranges, where fitful wisps of ground aurora seemed to race with the train like wild ghouls of the night startled from their eeries by this mad, man-made thing tearing through the solitudes.

“Wild country, isn’t it?”

The voice of the little grey man startled Hammond from his reverie. “It is, magnificently so,” he replied. “There is something in its very hostile majesty that fascinates me immensely.”

“Yes? Easterner, I suppose?”

“Not exactly.” Hammond laughed. The other’s geniality drew him out of his mood. “You see, I’ve been a westerner too, and right here I feel sort of neutral.”

The little grey man laughed with him, a low, sociable cackle. “Still,” he pursued, “I’d wager you’re not a travelling man.”

“No,” a bit wearily. “Newspaper man—ex-newspaper man, I hope.”

The announcement seemed to agitate the little man more than such a commonplace announcement should. He was silent a moment while he brought forth a silver card-case. He lifted a bit of pasteboard from it, scrutinised it through his glasses, hesitated as though about to replace it in the card-case, then quite deliberately passed it to Hammond, who took it in at a glance:—

Hammond drew out one of his own cards from a vest-pocket and reciprocated. The other still seemed needlessly perturbed. He spoke up at last as though it had cost him some effort to select a tactful opening: “And so you’ve quit the fourth estate, Mr. Hammond?”

“I intend to; that is, if I can otherwise earn a decent livelihood. I’ve had five years of the living-ghost world and I want to get clear of its grind and live things for awhile.”

“So—that is it? Quite natural too.” Mr. Daly seemed to be feeling his way, syllable by syllable. “Do you know, it is almost providential that you should have come in here at this moment, Mr. Hammond.”

“Yes?”

“It’s this way—you see: I just a few moments ago left a party who is privately seeking the services of a man of your particular type—and he wants him right away.”

“A newspaper publisher?” wryly.

“No—no, not a publisher. By George, I’ll bring him here to meet you. What do you say?”

“Hold on,” exclaimed Hammond detaining him. “What is the job and who is the man?”

“Your first question I cannot answer, because I do not definitely know myself,” replied the American consul. “But you have just hinted to me that you would like to play a part in big things, and if there’s one man on the continent who holds that opportunity for you in the hollow of his hand it is Norman T. Gildersleeve.”

The little grey man stood in the green-curtained entrance of the smoker, an expectant twinkle in his grey eyes. “What do you say?” he reiterated.

“Go ahead,” agreed Hammond. “There can be no harm in meeting him anyway.”

After Eulas Daly had gone, Hammond kept turning the name over and over in his mind: Gildersleeve—Norman T. Gildersleeve? Where had he read or heard that name before? Somehow it seemed connected with big business and stock market reports. Ten to one he was looking for a private secretary, a biographer or a publicity agent. Well, any one of those things wouldn’t be so bad, and it would be a change from the exacting grind of the daily newspaper where one was always behind the scenes of big things in process, but never, never quite a part of them. Hammond was twenty-five, the age of limitless discontent, alone in the world and intensely ambitious.

But he was far from guessing the extraordinary nature of the proposition that was about to be put up to him.

II

“Mr. Gildersleeve wishes to see you alone in his stateroom.”

Hammond noted that much of the previous enthusiasm had gone from the little consul’s manner. His tone now was businesslike, matter-of-fact. No doubt, conjectured Hammond, he had hoped to be a party to the interview he had been instrumental in bringing about.

At the door of Gildersleeve’s stateroom, Hammond shook the hand of Eulas Daly with a word of thanks for the interest he had volunteered in the matter. “I’ll see you later and tell you all about it,” he said, a promise, which, for unexpected reasons, he never kept.

Hammond found Gildersleeve with a litter of papers and documents scattered about him and more protruding from the open jaws of a travelling-bag. He was the cut of a typical captain of big business; middle-aged, iron-grey, with a keen, cold face and the drift of a busy career stamped all over his personality. Two tiny spots, livid white, one below either eye, lent rather a sinister tone to his face, especially when his brilliant dark eyes, set too close to the hawklike nose, were looking straight at you. At first glance, those two marks appeared to be birth-marks, but closer scrutiny disclosed them to be scars.

He did not offer his hand at first; just favoured the younger man with a glance that was as swift as it was penetrating, then turned the document on the little leaf-table before him face down and motioned his visitor to a seat. When he spoke, Hammond felt an electric urge to be brief and to the point.

“Mr. Daly has told me what he knows of you,” he opened. “Now, will you kindly oblige me with such detail as you think important about yourself and your capabilities?”

Hammond’s training had disciplined him in the terse use of language. He told it all in less than ten minutes’ time.

Gildersleeve appraised him keenly, interestedly. “Good,” he approved. “You’ll no doubt do, provided you care to accept what I have to offer you. In any case, can I expect you to regard this interview as strictly confidential?”

“You can,” replied Hammond simply. “As you no doubt know, such a promise from a newspaperman is regarded as sacred.”

“Then we’ll get down to business. Would you, for instance, be prepared to undertake an assignment, entailing little effort beyond strict caution and secrecy, without being too inquisitive as to what its objects were?”

“That would depend on a number of things,” cautiously suggested the younger man. “It would have to be distinctly understood it was clean and above-board.”

“The moral side of it need not for a moment worry you,” smiled Gildersleeve. “You will be asked to do nothing that would conflict with your standards of honour, however strict they may be. In fact, in this particular case, it would be best for you to avoid even the appearance of trickery.”

“If I knew more about the nature of the job, Mr. Gildersleeve, I could better judge my capabilities of taking hold.”

“Your newspaper training in mixing with men, combined with a close-mouthed attitude will carry you through,” assured the other. “I’m not saying there will be no risks, but such risks will be largely contingent upon your own shrewd behaviour.”

Gildersleeve gazed at the window for a silent moment, then continued: “The proposition in brief is this: You are to secure for yourself a position of a clerical nature; say pole-counter, time-keeper or office-assistant, with the North Star Towing and Contracting Company, out at their camps on the Nannabijou pulpwood limits, located about twenty miles south-east of the Port of Kam City, on the North Shore of Lake Superior. You are to hold whatever job you select till I communicate with you, and, while you are engaged at it you are to forget that you have been a newspaper man, maintaining absolute silence to all concerned as to your past and as to why I sent you out there. On these two points, I’d like to repeat with emphasis, you must be particularly cautious.

“Now, as to remuneration: You will be paid by me personally on the completion of the contract at the rate of one thousand dollars a month for such time as you put in in addition to such salary as you draw for your work from the company operating the limits. Afterwards, if you point up to my expectations, I’ll be in a position to offer you a berth that will perhaps be more congenial and unclouded by the mystery that must for the time being surround this one.

“What do you think about it, Mr. Hammond?”

Hammond was for the moment lost for an answer. This high-salaried offer, though it distinctly appealed to his adventuring spirit, took him off his feet and the concealed object of his mission at the pulpwood limits made him hesitate.

“I am not expected to spy on any one?” he insisted.

“I have assured you there will be nothing underhand about it,” Gildersleeve reminded him.

“There is, however, a possibility I might not succeed in securing a position with the contracting company.”

“There is such a possibility—a remote one, but the way will be made easy for you. At Kam City you will make personal application to Hon. J. J. Slack, M.P., president of the North Star Towing and Contracting Company, presenting to him a letter of introduction I will furnish you with.”

The train slowed down to a grinding stop at a small flag station. It was but a moment till it was in motion again.

“I’ll take it,” decided Hammond.

Before Gildersleeve could reply there came a light, insistent tapping at the door of the stateroom. A coloured porter entered, bearing a sealed envelope, passed it to Gildersleeve with a flash of very white teeth and retired.

Gildersleeve ripped the message from the envelope, glanced at its contents and pushed the button at his elbow. “Porter,” he requested when the latter re-appeared, “how long does the train stop at Moose Horn Station?”

“Twenty minutes, sah. We take on watah there, sah.”

“Very well, porter,” acknowledged Gildersleeve, passing the black man a tip.

He reached for pen and railway stationery, and while he wrote hurriedly said: “This note to J. J. Slack will act as the open sesame to the job, Mr. Hammond. You may read it before I seal it.”

Hammond took the proffered sheet and read:—

En Route to Kam City, Sept. 23.

Hon. J. J. Slack, M.P.,
Pres. North Star Co.,
Kam City, Ontario.

My dear Slack:—Am under immediate necessity of finding a berth out in the woods for the bearer, Louis Hammond. Put him on at a clerical job, not too arduous, at a good salary and charge the latter up to my account. Please do so as quietly as possible, as it is highly essential that my connection in this matter should remain absolutely confidential. Yours very truly,

Norman T. Gildersleeve.

“Now, Mr. Hammond,” Gildersleeve went on as he sealed and addressed the envelope, “we’ll consider the matter closed for the present. Sorry for the terrific rush, but there is an emergent matter that presses for my immediate attention.”

He arose and grasped the young man’s hand. That strong grip was reassuring, but it did not altogether dissipate a presentiment growing on Hammond that he had let himself in for something that was even more potential in its possibilities than it looked to be on the surface. There was no more to be said, however, unless he changed his mind and threw up the whole thing. He had not the slightest desire to do that.

III

Outside the stateroom door, Hammond stopped dead in his tracks. He was looking into a woman’s face that was startlingly, unreally beautiful.

She had risen from among the chairs in the drawing-room of the coach, a dazzling apparition with great wonder eyes under finely-pencilled, high-arched brows. For the moment he was conscious he was staring stupidly, unable to help himself; then her dark-fringed eyelids dropped and the faintest traces of a vagrant smile lit up her divinely-moulded features.

Hammond swung hastily down the aisle. Quite in a whirl he pitched into the smoker. The train slowed down under a sudden shuddering of air-brakes.

He looked out the window. A sign-board on the tiny frame building beyond the equally diminutive platform told him it was Moose Horn Station.

A stateroom door opened somewhere and he heard a passenger hurry along the aisle, out of the coach and down the train steps. Next instant he saw Norman T. Gildersleeve, the man he had just been talking to, appear on the station platform, wearing a light overcoat and carrying a small black bag. Gildersleeve looked swiftly about the area where the dull station lamp-light and the glow from the car windows fell, then hurried around the side of the station building and disappeared in the shadows.

He had barely gone when another form seemed to rise out of the shadows near the train somewhere, a tall, graceful figure of a woman in sable furs and wearing a large picture hat. As if Hammond’s stare had attracted her, she turned and glanced for a fleeting instant at the car window. Hers was a savage, dark beauty with eyes so intense they glowed like luminous discs of blackness in the shadowy light.

The woman went rapidly to the station, passed in the door, remained a moment, re-appeared and returned down the platform to the train.

Hammond strode out to the vestibuled platform of the coach. He watched the station area closely for Norman T. Gildersleeve’s return. But Gildersleeve did not come back.

The engine’s bell sounded.

Hammond thought of his berth, but some movement within drew his gaze through the glass door of the compartment coach. The door of Gildersleeve’s stateroom was open, and the little grey man, Eulas Daly, passed in, closing the door behind him. Hammond was sure Gildersleeve was not with him and that he could not have preceded him.

The young man was about to leave when a silent form emerged from the shadow near the coach door. It was the wonderful girl he had seen in the drawing-room, but there was great perplexity in her face now. The train was rapidly accumulating the even roar of its maximum speed.

The girl looked back and her eyes met Hammond’s beyond the glass of the platform door. Her hand went to her lips as though to stifle a cry that trembled there. The fright registered upon her face went to him like the stab of a knife. Plainly, he was the cause of that fright. Mystified, and somehow deeply hurt, he drew back into the shadows and she fled like one fearing for her life.

With confusion still upon him, Hammond hurried to his berth in the pullman.

CHAPTER III
“HONOUR SINKS WHERE COMMERCE LONG PREVAILS”

I

Next morning the events of the previous evening all seemed to Hammond like a hazy dream. Only the sealed letter from Gildersleeve to Hon. J. J. Slack, M.P., president of the North Star Towing and Contracting Company, smacked of tangibility, for he saw nothing further of Gildersleeve, the girl with the high-arched eyebrows or even the U.S. consul, Eulas Daly. His sense of good form prevented him from prowling back through the compartment coach, and he was really pressed for time to dress and breakfast before the train pulled into Kam City.

His first experience was a disappointment. At the head office of the North Star Company he was informed that Hon. J. J. Slack was away at the Dominion capital on business, but would possibly be back before noon of the following day. He had therefore a wait of two days in the lakeport city.

Hammond improved his time by paying a visit to the sites of two enormous pulp and paper mills under course of construction near the water front. There was a curious rivalry of big interests told of there. The young man was the more interested on learning that one of these plants, the Kam City Pulp and Paper mill, was to derive its supply of pulp poles almost exclusively from the Nannabijou Limits, the largest in all the North, a government block on which the Kam City Company had secured conditional rights to the timber that very summer after a long legal battle with competitors and the signing of a hard and fast agreement with the Ontario government that their mill must be running to full capacity, manufacturing paper from wood cut on the Nannabijou Limits by October the twenty-third of that very year. In case they were not in a position to do so from any cause whatsoever they stood to lose all rights to the timber.

The stories which Hammond gained from various sources regarding this situation were conflicting and at best rather incoherent. Out of it all he gathered that it was the result of a war between two highly capitalised organisations to gain the supremacy. It seemed that originally both the North Star Company and the Kam City Company were applicants for the cutting rights on the Nannabijou, and because a pledge had been made by the government during an election campaign that not one pole might be cut and carried away from the limits unless it were manufactured into paper in Kam City, both companies, to prove their good faith, had purchased sites in Kam City and had started the building of their mills before their applications went in. The North Star Company was finally awarded the rights to the limits on an explicit agreement that they were to have their mill in full operation the following October. There was an additional stipulation that in order to renew their yearly rights on October the twenty-third they must commence the installation of their machinery by June the first. This latter clause, it was said, was added because of the North Star’s reputation for trickery, the government being determined that whoever cut the poles on the Nannabijou must be making paper from them on the specified date, October the twenty-third.

The North Star had immediately commenced cutting operations on the limits. The construction of their mill too was rushed, but June rolled around without them having received any machinery to install in it. On the other hand, the Kam City Company, who had gone on with their mill just the same as if they held the contract, were getting their machinery on the ground and had actually commenced the installation of some of it. The Kam City Company immediately made a second application for the cutting rights on the limits, claiming that the North Star Company had forfeited theirs through non-performance of contract. Then there ensued a battle royal in the courts and before the legislature.

There were weeks of lobbying, during which Slack, the president of the North Star, and a bevy of lawyers representing that company endeavoured to hold the cutting rights and gain an extension of time till the North Star completed their mill, making the claim, which may or may not have been true, that they could not secure delivery of the paper-making machinery on order on account of the steel famine which then existed. But the provincial government obstinately stood out for the terms of the agreement. Slack was seeking to bring higher political pressure to bear from Ottawa when the Kam City Company’s application was granted, their cutting rights to obtain from the date the North Star’s expired, October twenty-third, conditional that their mill should be in full operation on that date. In order that they might have wood to grind, an additional fiat was issued constraining the North Star to make delivery of their cut on the limits to the mill of the Kam City Company, at a price to be fixed by a commission, in sufficient time for the latter to commence operations, and in sufficient quantities to keep the said mills running during the subsequent winter months. On the twenty-third, the North Star were to surrender the limits to the Kam City organisation.

Then a strange thing happened. The North Star Company suddenly changed their tactics, bowed to the decree of the government and withdrew all their suits in the courts of law. Almost simultaneously, a number of members, who were known to be under the thumb of the North Star, brought down a rider to be inserted in the agreement with the Kam City Company to the effect that if the latter company, for any cause whatsoever, failed to have their mill in full operation by October the twenty-third and every prospect of continuous operation from then on, their rights should be cancelled and the same rights revert to the original holders, the North Star Company, the latter in such a case to get an extension of time for the installation of their machinery at their mill.

The Kam City Company’s lawyers made a brilliant battle for relief from this rider, which, they pointed out, would nullify their hard-won rights in case of unforeseen exigencies or accident. The North Star’s representatives pointed out that the North Star Company had had their rights cancelled on this very basis, and what had been considered fair treatment of one company should be fair to another. The government, tired of haggling and secretly fearing to further antagonise the powerful North Star Company, made the rider law which the Kam City Company must agree to live up to.

Thus was brought about the curious situation wherein the North Star Company, with a mill of their own practically completed except for the installation of machinery, were forced to cut and deliver wood from the Nannabijou for their rival. On the other hand, the Kam City Company had also to accept this system for the time being whether they liked it or not. It was obvious that they did so because they could not help themselves; they had to have millions of poles ready for immediate delivery at their city docks in time to live up to their agreement, and the North Star Company owned all the available tugs and machinery so necessary to rush the poles to the mill site.

For once it was believed that a coup had been put over on the wily North Star Company, but they took their medicine without murmur, and not only went on with the cutting and booming of poles at the limits as before, but rushed the completion of their huge pulp mill building. People wondered what they hoped to do with it, because the Nannabijou Limits now secured by the Kam City Company would give the latter the full advantage in paper-making competition, not only because they were by far the largest limits in the North, but because they were drained by the mighty Nannabijou River and its tributaries, simplifying the matter of transporting the poles to the lake-front from far inland. It was true that three other limits on the North Shore were controlled by companies believed to be subsidiaries of the North Star, but they were infinitely small in area compared with the Nannabijou forests.

At any rate, the two big pulp and paper mills were on their way and Kam City was getting the benefit of construction work that would total somewhere in the neighbourhood of six or seven million dollars, and the public, as usual, was mostly concerned with the wealth immediately in sight.

II

Hammond incidentally gathered from what he heard here and there that Hon. J. J. Slack, M.P., president of the North Star Company, was a big man in Kam City, but he also discovered a general impression abroad that he was really a figure-head—that his every move in the commercial world was dictated by a power behind, mysterious as it was ingenious and powerful. Even the policies which he espoused in the House of Commons were attributed to master minds somewhere back of the scenes. No one had ever been able to place a finger on the source of his inspiration, but wiseacre socialist leaders maintained it was that much-abused, vague quantity known as “the big interests,” and the mob were contented to accept it as a good enough theory.

Hon. J. J. Slack, M.P., who held a place in the cabinet at Ottawa without portfolio, it seemed, was a tricky politician, a hail fellow and well met—and nothing more. Before his election to the Commons he was a struggling barrister whose battle for a mere existence was a case of Greek meet Greek; afterwards, he suddenly blossomed forth as president of the North Star Towing and Contracting Company, which those on the inside claimed was the parent of some twenty-seven flourishing subsidiary enterprises, including a fleet of grain-carrying freighters on the upper lakes, a grain storage trust operating elevators half way across the continent, a fur-trading company that had gradually dominated the adjacent districts to the exclusion of all rivals and a string of powerful newspapers in various cities and towns all the way from the head of the great lakes to the Pacific coast.

The North Star Towing and Contracting Company and its leading subsidiaries had at one time and another been accused of the boldest commercial piracies, gigantic briberies and glaring steals. If there was a big campaign “barrel” in evidence during an election it was usually set down as North Star money—and always, it seemed, the men the North Star backed had the most votes when the ballot counting was over. But never did the North Star Company or its satellites appear in the courts of law as defendants or face a commission of inquiry. There were settlements of a quiet nature—if there had to be. They wielded a long arm of retribution when their self-appropriated privileges were interfered with—wielded it with such cunning and far-reaching effect that even powerful rival corporations and high government officials learned, not without cost to themselves at times, it was the better part of wisdom not to stand in their way.

Whose money financed this sinister business only the company’s bankers knew, and what they knew they did not tell. The business seemed in some mysterious manner to run itself—so successfully that it reached out and dominated what it pleased, with an uncanny penchant for stamping out rivals and smashing all opposition in its path. Its progress and expansion had a certainty and a swiftness of a thing on the tables of destiny. Its sub-managers were all reputed to be clever rogues, deliberately chosen because past performances had given proof that a working conscience was the least of their moral burdens. Strange to say, none of them had even been known to double-cross the North Star subsidiary for which he worked. Perhaps this, in a sense, was due to a knowledge that nowhere else could they secure positions so lucrative or power of a kind such as they wielded under Slack. But more likely there was a deeper reason; a sense of an unseen guiding mind whom none could name but all felt—a power in the background that could make and unmake, could create and destroy at its pleasure.

Slack’s sudden ascension to command of all the varied industries dominated by the North Star interests was at first lightly taken. Merely a figurehead president appointed for political strategy, every one said. All of which feazed the Hon. J. J. Slack not the least. He went smilingly on his way accumulating millions, quite contented to be under-rated in the matter of personal ability. The executives of the North Star and its subsidiaries soon learned in a quiet but effective manner that Slack’s word was law; that, wherever his counsels might come from, he was at all times clothed with absolute executive authority.

The thing that puzzled the gossiping public was why the North Star Company had been so willing to cut and deliver the poles from the Nannabijou Limits for their hated rival, the Kam City Pulp and Paper Mills. With an almost exclusive monopoly on towing and loading equipment, they could have been almost certain of tying up delivery to the Kam City Company for an indefinite period by simply ceasing operations on the Nannabijou till long-drawn-out action in the courts forced them to abide by what was in a legal sense unprecedented action on the part of the government. Instead, the North Star carried on their cutting and booming as before. By many this was looked on as portentous; the North Star’s quiet submission was too obvious to be natural and without deeper designs, as was also the fact that, though they had not even yet received their machinery, they were going on with the completion of their pulp and paper mill building. But more ominous than any was the editorial silence of the North Star newspapers on this particular question. From the day that the North Star changed its tactics before the government, the newspapers currently believed to be under control of the North Star never again so much as mentioned the matter of the cutting rights on the Nannabijou Limits.

Goose-bone prophets foresaw the utter elimination of the North Star coming. It was a situation analogous to that of a great general ordering his heaviest guns to cease firing and retire at a time when petty strategists conceive that victory could be gained only by continued attack.

III

Hammond saw plainly enough now that through his deal on the train with Norman T. Gildersleeve he had tumbled in a small way into the vortex of big things, and he had a notion that for the next few weeks at least he was not going to suffer from monotony. Gildersleeeve must be in some manner financially interested, but no one with whom Hammond came in contact could throw any light on that phase of the situation. A man named Duff, of Toronto, they said, was president of the Kam City Pulp and Paper Mills, backed by international capital in which American financial interests held control. A man named Norman T. Gildersleeve had at one time been a big factor in the North, but he had long since been driven out of business in Canada by the irrepressible North Star. No, it couldn’t be he—he had surely had enough of “bucking” the North Star.

Hammond was bound to find out, if he could do so without arousing suspicion as to his interest in the matter. Perhaps Slack would drop some hint of Gildersleeve’s identity when he saw him.

But Slack did no such thing. Hammond was among the first to interview the politician on his return from Ottawa.

Hon. J. J. Slack, M.P., was a big man physically, handsome in a plump, comfortable way, urbane and pleasing of address—almost oily. His face registered acute surprise as he sat across the desk from Hammond in his private office reading Gildersleeve’s brief letter of introduction. He actually seemed to be trying to conceal great perturbation, but he made no comment, and to Hammond’s adroitly thrown out feelers for information regarding Gildersleeve he made guarded, unsatisfying replies. All of which is second-nature with a seasoned politician.

He did not call a stenographer, but scrawled out something on a letterhead and sealed it in an official envelope. Then he wrote a couple of words across the face of a card he took from a drawer of his desk and handed both to his visitor.

“I am delighted to comply with Mr. Gildersleeve’s request,” he observed. “In the envelope is a letter of introduction to Mr. A. C. Smith, superintendent for the North Star Company at the Nannabijou Limits, Mr. Hammond. The card is a pass which will take care of your transportation out on any of the tugs leaving our local docks this afternoon.”

He was pleasant and smiling about it, but his abrupt rising from his seat intimated that the interview was at an end. Hammond thanked him for his courtesy and hurried to the dock.

IV

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.”

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.

CHAPTER IV
“A STOIC OF THE WOODS—A MAN WITHOUT A TEAR”

I

When Acey 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 fur territories, 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 leaped alternately 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

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.”

II

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 something came 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 and servants 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 in anticipating 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.

III

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 watch by 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 the table. “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 uncanny flash 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 she often come 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.”

CHAPTER V
THE WAY OF A WOMAN

I

Viewed from 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 the room. 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.