THE WONDER GIRL
I
THE first of the two surprises Louis Hammond experienced that evening he
returned from the woods intending to take the tug to Kam City to
interview Eulas Daly was that he was as good as marooned on the
Nannabijou Limits. He sought out Mooney, the assistant superintendent,
mentioning that he would like to secure a pass over to the city and back.
Mooney issued most of the passes to the men travelling back and forward.
The assistant superintendent grinned wryly and shook his head. “You will
have to see the Big Boss about it,” he said and resumed his cursory
inspection of pole counters’ returns.
This was exceedingly aggravating, for the tug was almost ready to pull
out and Acey Smith was not to be found. He did not show up at his office
till long after the tug had gone out. Hammond followed him in,
determined to secure a pass for the morning boat.
“I’d like to run over to the city on the tug in the morning,” he
announced. “Mooney told me I’d have to see you about getting a pass.”
“I am very sorry to deny you your little holiday,” returned the other,
“but for the present I can do no more for you than Mooney.”
“Then you are virtually making a prisoner of me?”
“I wouldn’t say that; you voluntarily made a prisoner of yourself,”
reminded the superintendent. “You brought me a letter from J. J. Slack,
president of the North Star Company, instructing me to keep you hidden
here—at least that is what I gathered from its contents—and until I
receive other instructions I must abide by that request.”
Acey Smith spoke quietly, without trace of malice. The usual half-sneer
on his lips was lacking. Hammond could not safely justify a denial that
he was the protégé of Slack; his promise to Gildersleeve precluded that.
There was nothing he could say.
The pulp camp superintendent seemed anxious to pass over the embarrassing
situation, for he said almost immediately: “It’s a pity we have to work
at cross-purposes, Hammond. Believe me, I hate to deny you such a small
favour as a pass over to the city—but that, just now, is not exactly a
possibility.”
“Thank you, Mr. Smith.” Hammond turned on a heel and strode out.
Acey Smith’s new mood baffled him. Undoubtedly, he reflected as he
strolled down to the river before returning to his quarters, the
superintendent was the creature of Slack or others of the company over
him, but Gildersleeve must have realised this sort of thing would happen
when he placed him on the limits through the agency of Slack. Was it all
a sham of some sort—or was Gildersleeve actually in the first stages of
madness when he concocted this seemingly crazy plan for Hammond to play
the part of a fugitive from justice on the limits? Meanwhile, if
Gildersleeve did not sooner or later turn up in his right mind where
would it all end?
He must get to Kam City, even if he had to hide on one of the tugs, he
decided. There would be little use in keeping up the present farce if
Gildersleeve were unable to fulfill the part he planned, and, in the face
of the fact that no trace of him had yet been discovered, that seemed
unlikely. There could be nothing wrong in disregarding an agreement with
a man who was no longer able to carry out his side of the contract, and
Eulas Daly, the United States consul, who had brought him into contact
with Gildersleeve, should be able to let in a little light on the
mystery. Then, if there appeared to be any use in so doing, he hoped he
would be able to get back on one of the tugs without getting into undue
complications and resume his old rôle at the limits.
II
“Sh-h-hish!”
Hammond’s cogitation was startlingly interrupted by the faintly spoken
warning as a figure leaned forward from the shadow of a clump of willows
and seizing his nearest hand squeezed something small and square into the
palm of it. “Don’t look—walk on—some one might see,” came a low, hoarse
whisper, then the other seemed to melt into the darkness.
Hammond took the cue from the unknown messenger and pursued his way to
his quarters with an assumption of unconcern that he by no means
possessed. The suddenness of it had considerably startled him. Sandy
Macdougal was not yet in when Hammond arrived, and the latter, sitting
close to the wall where his actions could not be observed from the
outside through the window, examined the folded bit of paper which the
stranger had pressed into his hand. It bore no address on the outside,
and the faint scrawl in backhand on the inner side was unfamiliar:—
The young lady stopping on Amethyst Island, west of the camp, may need
a friend. Why not stroll out that way to-morrow morning?
That was all. What the devil did it all mean?
The young lady referred to could be none other than the Girl with the
High-arched Eyebrows— Hammond’s fingers gripping the note trembled. He
had several times started out for the vicinity of Amethyst Island, and
each time at thought of actually meeting her turned back. Now—now, armed
with this note, there would be a legitimate excuse—
At the sound of foot-steps outside he hurriedly folded the note and
secreted it in an inner pocket.
Sandy Macdougal plunged in and tossed a newspaper to Hammond. “One of
the scalers brought it in when he came over on the government launch
to-night,” he exclaimed. “See, this paper says that millionaire chap,
Gildersleeve, that disappeared off a train has been seen in Montreal.
Guess the gink must’ve been celebrating with a crock of bootleg hootch
and passed his station, eh?”
Hammond hastily read the headlines and the story which told of a man of
Norman T. Gildersleeve’s appearance being seen boarding a train west at
the Windsor street station, Montreal. That was about all there was to
it. He tossed the paper down in disgust. As an ex-newspaper man he
could thoroughly appreciate the avidity with which correspondents and
telegraph editors seize upon every tittle of rumour while a big unsolved
mystery grips the public’s mind.
“Sandy,” he said, speaking his thoughts, “I’m beginning to think there’s
something in all that you were telling me this morning.”
The cook paused in the act of lighting his pipe. “Any thing happened to
make you believe that?” he asked casually.
“No,” replied Hammond, “but I have had proof that I am being shadowed
around here, though by whom I haven’t a faint idea.”
Macdougal with ready generosity produced the revolver and a box of
cartridges. “You’d better pack these,” he advised.
But Hammond had all a journalist’s contempt for firearms. “Thanks,
Sandy,” he declined. “I’d rather win through without it. I haven’t
carried a gun since—”
“You left the army,” supplied the cook when Hammond paused cautiously.
“I knew you’d been over there too. Why don’t you wear your service
button on the outside of your coat same as I do? The Big Boss, for all
he don’t let on, has got a weakness for returned men.”
“I’m sleepy, let’s turn in,” said Hammond.
He wasn’t really sleepy, but he wanted a chance to think quietly. The
truth of the matter was the young man viewed that note that had been
poked into his hand with considerable suspicion. He did not know whether
to conceive that the intent was to lead him into some sort of a trap or
make a laughing-stock of him. In any case, he was going to see the
matter through.
Next morning he dressed with more than usual care, and when he had
breakfasted sauntered out one of the inland tote roads. Out of sight of
the camp, he cut down through the solid woods until he reached the
lake-shore trail, where he crossed the Nannabijou River by way of the
wooden suspension bridge built there by the Indian workers.
It was a laughing autumn morning, crisp, with that mellow sunlit
stillness that prevails during the period in the latter part of September
and the earlier weeks in October before the first great “blow” comes
hurtling down along Superior’s north shore oft-times taking its grisly
toll of men and boats. There was an invigorating tang of spruce in the
air, and the mighty lake to Hammond’s left lay like a great shimmering
sea of glass. Afar out on it grain carriers rode lazily, trailing their
long, black plumes north and south. In the brush to either side of the
trail partridge strutted noisily or drummed up into the peaks of the
evergreens. In the soft blue of the skies and the thin haze of the
horizons hung that infinite serenity of mid-autumn in the majestic North.
Hammond forgot about the ruses he had planned to discover if he were
shadowed. The very gladness of Nature round and about him made him
whistle and sing like a boy, for all that a certain shy nervousness was
upon him. Such a morning breeds recklessness in vigorous youth—a quest
for Adventure and Old Romance.
He topped a long slope, from which the trail dipped gradually to the very
edge of the lake at the foot of a wide ravine gashed up the side of the
mountain to his right to the plateau below the forbidding black granite
battlements of the Cup of Nannabijou. Almost on his immediate left lay
the tiny Island of Amethyst with its soft wooded groves and grotesque,
old-fashioned bungalows.
Hammond’s eyes swept from the island to the shoreline opposite—then he
stopped dead in his tracks with a sharp intaking of breath.
Seated upon a fallen tree-trunk near the water’s edge where her canoe was
drawn up, with the lake and the dense foliage above and around her for a
background, was a young woman whose charm of face and figure held him for
the moment in spellbound admiration.
It was the Girl with the High-arched Eyebrows; she whom he had now twice
met under unusual circumstances, once in the parlour car of a
transcontinental train and again just below the doorway of Acey Smith’s
office at the pulp camp. She was obviously waiting for some one.
So—so—could it have been that she had actually sent for him?
She was looking straight at him, expectancy, wonder in her great blue
eyes. With an effort he regained part of his composure and plunged
precipitously down the trail against a wild impulse to turn on his heel
and flee.
Somehow, he finally stood before her with bared head and wildly-beating
pulse.
“I—I came in response to your note.” He did not stammer it so awkwardly
as he feared he would.
“My note?” The finely-pencilled brows were elevated in bewitching
perplexity. “_My_ note?”
“Yes—the note you—I have it here somewhere.” Hammond at first searched
vainly through his pockets for the tiny bit of paper. He felt he was
somehow making a confounded ass of himself.
“But I—I wrote you no note. There must be some mistake.” There was the
faintest trace of amused curiosity in her tones.
Hammond suddenly felt like one who drops from the clouds into a pit of
gloom. Either he had been humbugged or he had accosted the wrong woman.
III
At last his fingers encountered the little folded square. He opened it
out and passed it to her. “You see it was unsigned,” he explained. “I
was not in a position to know who it was from—”
He was cut short by a soft peal of silvery laughter. “Some one with an
odd sense of humour is behind this,” she said passing the note back to
him. “But the joke is on both of us.”
“On both of us?”
“Yes. Last night I too found a note pushed under the door of my cottage.
It stated that a young man who was stopping at the pulp camp would like
to meet me here this morning, and that if I honoured the appointment it
might be to our mutual interest. So you see I obeyed the mysterious
summons.”
“The notes then were most likely written by the same party.”
“Most likely. Mine was in a faint, back-hand scrawl.”
“Some outside party,” he suggested, “must have been seriously interested
in our becoming acquainted.”
“One would fancy so.” There came a mischievous light into her blue eyes.
“But we are not yet acquainted, are we, Mr. —?”
“Hammond—Louis Hammond,” he supplied.
“Mr. Hammond, I am pleased to meet you.” She rose and extended her
little hand. “I am Miss Josephine Stone—or, perhaps you already knew?”
“No—but I confess I have been curious to know, ever since that night our
eyes met on the train, or do you remember that?”
“Oh, yes—I do. You must have thought my actions strange that night. But
there were so many odd things happened in that coach during the space of
a few minutes I had become quite perplexed.”
“That brings us to a point where you might do me a great service, Miss
Stone,” Hammond suggested eagerly. “Have you any idea what happened Mr.
Gildersleeve?”
“Mr. Gildersleeve?” There was blank perplexity in her face.
“Then, you do not know him?”
“No, I do not remember ever having met a man of that name.”
Hammond was dumfounded. “Pardon me, then,” he offered. “I had thought
you were a relative—or his secretary.”
“Was he one of the men you were talking to on the coach?”
“Yes. Mr. Gildersleeve, so the papers say, disappeared after leaving the
train at Moose Horn Station that night.”
“Oh—I remember reading something about that in some of the papers brought
over to the island. Was he the tall, stern-faced man who left his
stateroom and got off at a little station shortly after you left him?”
“That was Mr. Gildersleeve.”
“I thought there was something mysterious about it all,” she said
seriously. “I had been travelling with a friend, Mrs. Johnson, from
Calgary. From Winnipeg east we were occupying a section in one of the
other coaches, but I had gone back to the parlour car alone to read for
awhile before I went to bed. Shortly afterwards, a dark,
striking-looking woman came in and took a chair near me. We were alone
at the time and I noticed she seemed to be keeping a keen watch on the
stateroom of the man you say was Mr. Gildersleeve. First, there was a
little grey-haired man went in.”
“That was Eulas Daly, an American consul,” explained Hammond.
“After he came out you later came up from the forward part of the coach
and entered Mr. Gildersleeve’s stateroom,” continued Miss Stone. “When
the door closed behind you, the dark woman leaned over and asked: ‘Do you
know that man?’ I replied that I did not. Then she said: ‘His
appearance fits the description of a notorious western bandit. I am one
of the number of detectives who are shadowing him, so please don’t tell
anybody what you see me doing.’
“Before I could recover from my surprise she tip-toed to the stateroom
and stood with her back to it and her hands behind her. At first I
thought she was simply waiting for you to come out. But when some little
time later the porter came up the aisle she hastily withdrew her hands
and I saw she had been holding against the door’s key-hole a small black
boxlike instrument.”
“A dictaphone!” Hammond gasped.
“That’s what I took it to be. She kept it hidden from the porter and
walked forward and out of the coach. When you came out of Mr.
Gildersleeve’s room I wanted to tell you about the woman’s strange
actions, but you took one startled look at me and fled.”
“Thus confirming the allegation that I was a highwayman,” Hammond
laughed.
“I did not know what to think,” asserted Miss Stone. “After Mr.
Gildersleeve left the train I saw you come out of the smoker and walk out
to the platform. I summoned all my courage and followed as far as the
platform door. It was some time before I succeeded in catching your eye.
Then when I did I lost my nerve and ran away without warning you.”
“And you would have warned me—even when there was a possibility that I
was a real desperado?”
Her eyes dropped before his ardent ones. “Sometimes,” she replied
deliberately, “one’s sympathies _will_ go out to—a desperado.”
For the moment Hammond almost wished himself a highwayman, but whatever
his reply might have been it was stilled on his lips.
From out of the heart of the hills came a melodious, gong-like alarum,
softly reverberating like the tone when exquisite cut-glass is struck.
The man looked at the girl. In her eyes he read as great bewilderment as
his own.