“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.”