This etext was transcribed by Les Bowler
[Picture: Book cover]
THE
TIMBER PIRATE
BY
CHARLES CHRISTOPHER JENKINS
* * * * *
McCLELLAND AND STEWART
PUBLISHERS : : TORONTO
* * * * *
COPYRIGHT, 1922,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
[Picture: Decorative graphic]
* * * * *
THE TIMBER PIRATE. II
* * * * *
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
* * * * *
TO
MY WIFE
* * * * *
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
PROLOGUE 11
I ACEY SMITH 16
II A STRANGE PACT ON A TRAIN 23
III “HONOUR SINKS WHERE COMMERCE LONG PREVAILS” 33
IV “A STOIC OF THE WOODS—A MAN WITHOUT A TEAR” 44
V THE WAY OF A WOMAN 56
VI A MILLIONAIRE VANISHES 65
VII THE HILL OF LURKING DEATH 76
VIII A MASTER MIND 87
IX THE WONDER GIRL 99
X THE WHITE MONSTER OF NANNABIJOU 109
XI CAPTAIN CARLSTONE, V.C. 119
XII “WHEN ALL THE WORLD IS YOUNG, LAD!” 131
XIII “THEM WAS ROARING DAYS!” 143
XIV “A BEAUTIFUL, PALE DEVIL” 161
XV THE FIAT OF J.C.X. 168
XVI A HOAX THAT PROVED A BOOMERANG 180
XVII OGIMA BUSH 193
XVIII IN THE CUP! 204
XIX “DEVIL HE MAY BE—BUT A MAN!” 212
XX PREPARING TO BEARD THE LION 223
XXI A VIPER BITES AT A FILE 234
XXII THE NIGHT OF THE TEMPEST 246
XXIII J.C.X! 258
XXIV IN WHICH A FOOL EXPERIMENTS 268
XXV “THE MAN THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN” 278
XXVI “THE MAN THAT WAS” 289
XXVII AT THE MEETING OF THE TRAILS 303
XXVIII THE JUDGMENT OF THE LOWLY 315
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.