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.”