THE WHITE MONSTER OF NANNABIJOU
I
AGAIN, after a short interval, the strange gong sounded while the pair
stood speechless at the water’s edge. There was something terrifying in
its low note as it vibrated out of the early morning stillness of the
wilderness. It had seemed to cry out a protest against intrusion in some
fastness sanctuary—a warning of ominous things.
“Now where do you suppose that bell is located?” Hammond was first to
speak.
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Josephine Stone answered. He could see
she was suppressing apprehension under her light laughter. “I have heard
it before, and it has startled—puzzled me.”
“Perhaps there is an Indian mission of some sort back in those hills,” he
suggested, though it struck him it sounded more like a huge gong than a
church bell.
The girl shook her head dubiously. “I don’t believe there’s a soul
living up there,” she asserted. “Back of here is all barren lands.”
“But there seems to be a well worn trail running up from here,” Hammond
indicated. “Have you ever explored it?”
“No, but I’ve wanted to just to find out where that bell is. Mrs.
Johnson is afraid we’d get lost in the bush and wouldn’t consent to going
unless one of our Indians went with us. The Indians get excited even at
mention of it; they say they are afraid of an evil spirit that has its
abode in those cliffs they call the Cup of Nannabijou. I’d never have
the courage to go alone.”
To Hammond there came a thrilling possibility. “Would you care to go up
there—with me?”
She looked out over the expanse of lake anxiously and glanced at her
wrist-watch. “No, not to-day. I find I must be returning to the
island.” Then as she rose she looked up at him with a smile that
dissipated his twinge of disappointment; “But you will come again, Mr.
Hammond? Perhaps some morning we can arrange it.”
II
Hammond did come again—almost every morning when the weather was clear.
They spent most of the time in her launch or one of the canoes, trolling
for lake trout and coasters or exploring the many fantastic inlets along
the North Shore. On some occasions Mrs. Johnson, Miss Stone’s companion,
accompanied them, but most of the time they went alone, the elder woman
not caring for the water. Of her past or her reason for staying at
Amethyst Island at this season of the year the girl never spoke. Twice
Hammond mentioned Acey Smith, the superintendent of the pulp camps, and
of the latter’s strange behaviour, but each time Miss Stone adroitly
changed the subject. But these aspects did not weigh heavily upon Louis
Hammond; he was too happy in her company. What he most dreaded was an
announcement that she would be leaving.
In the thrall of his new adventure he ceased to worry over the mystery of
his mission to the limits or as to what had become of Norman T.
Gildersleeve. Of Acey Smith he saw as little as possible. If Smith
objected to his visits to Josephine Stone at the island he said no word
about it; but once when Hammond was striking off along the lakeshore
trail he turned to glimpse the Big Boss of the Nannabijou camps staring
after him, a black scowl on his face that spoke volumes.
There came the morning when they were to make the ascent to the Cup of
Nannabijou. He found her waiting for him by the fallen tree-trunk
attired in a blue riding coat, fawn riding bloomers and high, laced tan
walking boots, a costume that set off to advantage the indescribable
charm of her.
She greeted him with a quaint shyness. “They told me it would be
impossible to get through the woods in skirts,” she said.
“Why of course it would.” His frank, boyish admiration was reassuring.
“I should have told you that myself.”
For all her fragile, girlish form he found her agile and strong as a
young deer, and in her close-fitting costume and firm-soled walking boots
she seemed quite as tireless as he. They spoke but little, for the
ascent was fairly steep, and a few hundred yards from the lake-shore it
became almost precipitous in places. At times the trail went up
anglewise in a series of steps across the face of cliffs; then for a
space they would travel over gentle slopes of heavily wooded territory.
Always she kept to his side with a companionable nearness that made him
utterly forget the toil of the climb. Over the very steep places she
accepted his arm.
The trail took them to the summit of a bald hump of ages-old lava rock
shaped like the top of a huge beehive. From there the view in the
crystal northern sunlight was magnificent. Before them stretched the
valley of Solomon Creek, and along the base of the cliffs a translucent
ribbon of mist disclosed the tortuous course of the stream down to where
the vapour expanded into a great spade-shaped cloud above the lake formed
by a beaver-dam near the creek’s confluence with the Nannabijou River.
Close-packed along the leaden thread of the stream the evergreen forests
stood like spell-struck hosts in a mystic communion of silence. Beyond
the creek the frowning black cliffs of the Cup of Nannabijou rose into
dizzy space like impregnable walls and battlements of a giant’s castle.
Nowhere in the semicircle of those cliffs could Hammond discern sign of a
draw or even a path that a goat could climb.
The pair traversed the valley and crossed the creek over a bridge built
of unbarked cedar logs. At the base of the cliffs the trail turned
sharply to the left and followed the course of the creek upwards for
about an eighth of a mile. There it again swung through the thick-grown
green stuff, this time to the right, disclosing a hidden draw in the
cliffs. They could no longer see the creek, but they could hear its
murmur somewhere to their left.
Suddenly out of the sunlit upper air there came a sullen rumble of
thunder that died away in the most sinister of echoes. The girl clutched
Hammond’s arm. “I am really getting frightened,” she whispered.
“Oh, that’s only an echo of sound waves caught from dear knows where in
this chasm,” he assured her. “This no doubt is the entrance to the Cup.”
They pushed on, up and up. Though fairly steep the trail was well-worn
and clean-going. Soon they found themselves out of the woods but shut in
by high rock walls. The aisle through the living rock finally ended
abruptly, but to their left yawned the opening of a man-high tunnel along
which the trail apparently continued. From out of this came the low
thunder of waterfalls and the swishing purl and splash of rapids.
Then, above them this time it seemed, they heard the melodious alarum of
the mysterious gong. The rumble of rapids grew fainter and fainter and
finally almost died away.
“Do you think we should go on?” the girl asked anxiously.
“Let’s go to the edge of the creek anyway,” he suggested. “It must be at
the other end of this tunnel.”
Josephine Stone looked up the towering black walls that hemmed them in
like a prison. “It makes one think,” she said, “that there might be
something in the Indian superstition that an awful spirit presides in
these cliffs.”
“Nothing to that,” laughed Hammond, “but the fruit of poor Lo’s untutored
mind and his over-active imagination.”
But this carefree young man little dreamed of the grim guardian of the
way to the Cup which kept inviolable the secrets beyond the cliffs—a
white monster, which, once unleashed, could not be recalled by its
masters till it had wreaked its will to destroy.
They were both soon to learn something of it in a manner most startling.
III
The tunnel, as Hammond had conceived, was short. Its sepulchral gloom
ended on open air at the very edge of what seemed to have been the bed of
a mountain torrent, and, though only the tiniest of streams trickled down
the centre of it, its sides were glistening with moisture as though swept
very recently by rushing waters. On the further side rose an unbroken
wall of rock.
“Oh, please don’t venture any further, Mr. Hammond,” pleaded Josephine
Stone tremulously.
“Not to-day,” agreed Hammond, “but I just want to drop down and have a
look up this stream-bed. Unless I miss my guess it is the pass that
leads into the Cup.”
Suiting action to his words, he let himself down to the first of a series
of natural stone steps on the side of the stream-bed.
His foot no sooner touched the step than the tunnel back of them was
flooded with a wicked green flash, blinding in its intensity.
Simultaneously, from above, in the towering cliffs of Nannabijou came a
single reverberating, gonglike note. Followed a low, vibrating rumble
which merged into a thunderous roaring and crashing increasing every
second in volume as if the whole mountainside were tumbling down upon
them.
Hammond felt the girl grip convulsively at his coat sleeve as she cried
out. He drew back into the tunnel.
There was a hiss and whine of flying rock particles; then a raging,
white-foaming flood, filling the stream-bed almost to its brim, swept by
like a monster thing of life. The empty, silent channel was transformed
in the twinkling of an eye into a mountain torrent, absolutely
impassable, ready to hurl to death any living thing in its path.
The way to the Cup of Nannabijou had been effectually sealed.
“Come,” cried the girl, “let us leave this terrible place.”
Hammond sprang to her side and they hurried out through the tunnel and
down through the pass in the rock to the trail in the woods. Not until
they had crossed the bridge over the creek did Josephine Stone pause to
speak. Her face was pale and Hammond noted with alarm she was all
a-tremble.
“Oh, that rushing water!” She gasped. “The lightning—and that man!”
“Man?”
“Yes. You didn’t see him. But I did—his face at the other end of the
tunnel—in the lightning flash.”
“What did he look like? Where did he go?”
“He was an Indian—he seemed to fade out of sight like a spirit.”
There flashed on Hammond memory of what Sandy Macdougal had told him
about an Indian shadowing him, but he said lightly: “Likely some idle
Indian following us out of curiosity.”
Josephine Stone shook her head. “There is something wicked and
mysterious about the Cup of Nannabijou,” she contended. “They say men
have gone up there and never been seen again. I should not have let you
attempt to get down into that stream-bed.”
“I might have had a narrow squeak if I had attempted it a minute or so
sooner,” he reflected. Then: “By the way, if I may ask, how long do you
expect to remain at Amethyst Island?”
“That I can hardly say—it all depends.” She hesitated. “It may be a
couple of weeks and it may be more, but I hope to get away before the
bitter weather sets in.”
Her face had suddenly become grave. He could sense that allusion to her
business in this wild part of Canada, whatever it might be, distressed
her, so he dropped the subject for less personal matters.
When they finally came out upon the lakeshore at the foot of the trail
the girl stayed him with a hand upon his arm. “This is where we must
part to-day,” she said looking anxiously along the beach.
He did not question her evident haste to leave him. “When may I come
again?” he asked.
“Any time.” Softly. “To-morrow, if it’s nice.”
She was standing with her little white hand extended. He looked down
into those wondrous blue orbs with their warm light—and was lost. His
right hand closed over her fingers and his left went about her little
shoulders and swept her to him.
“Josephine!”
She gasped frightenedly, suppressing a startled cry. “Not yet—not here,”
she pleaded.
“That was unfair of me,” he started to say, but he did not release her.
“I—”
“Not if you—you hurry.” The significance of her low whisper was
tantalising.
His arms closed her to him. This time her face rose to his, the long,
silky lashes drooping under those divinely arched brows. His lips found
the warm, velvety caress of hers. He felt her tremble like a prisoned
bird in his arms.
There came to them the sound of footfalls and a rasping of steel
boot-hobs on the rock up the trail. The girl pressed him from her, wide,
genuine alarm in her eyes. “You must go—quickly,” she urged.
“Then until we meet again—Josephine—good-bye,” he whispered.
“Good-bye—Louis.”
He flung off along the lakeshore trail. But at a sound he stopped in the
screen of evergreens.
The low-hanging branches of the balsams parted at the mouth of the other
trail and a great figure of a man, immaculate, faultless in his tartan
mackinaw, corduroy riding breeches and knee-high white elk bush boots,
stepped out upon the sands of the beach.
The newcomer doffed his soft narrow-brimmed stetson hat with the grace
and courtliness of a knight of old. Acey Smith!
The deviltry that invariably lurked about the lumber-man’s pale, handsome
face was masked in the blandest of smiles.
“Good-morning, Miss Stone.” His greeting had a low, rich quality of
music in it that bespoke the cultured gentleman Hammond conceived him not
to be. The magical effect of his presence on the young woman gave
Hammond his first poignant twinge of jealousy.
“I hope I did not keep you waiting long,” she offered, going forward to
meet him. “I was away for a long walk this morning.”
“Up the hill?”
She nodded.
His face grew grave. “I thought I told you you must not go up the hill
alone,” he chided. “It’s dangerous country.”
“Oh, but I wasn’t alone.” She paused, but his face gave no inkling of
surprise. “Only I over-stayed my time and I was afraid I kept you
waiting.”
“I wasn’t in the least inconvenienced,” he replied. “Shall we go down to
your favourite seat now?”
She tripped to his side and they sauntered along the beach toward
Amethyst Island.
It was quite beneath Louis Hammond to play the part of eavesdropper,
though a curiosity akin to jealousy as to what the Big Boss of the
Nannabijou Camps and Josephine Stone could have in common was fairly
burning him up. He swung resolutely away in the opposite direction—for
the camp.
His thoughts were in a mighty whirl. But withal they were pleasant
thoughts—deliriously pleasant.
He had held in his arms Josephine Stone, she whom he had dreamed of so
long as the Girl with the High-arched Eyebrows—had kissed her—yes, had
been kissed by her in return. Hammond was astounded over his own
enterprise as a lover.
When such a woman suffered a man to kiss her on the mouth, he swore to
himself, she must—must hold him in a regard higher than any other man.
It therefore did not matter about Acey Smith.
Such a woman he could trust!
But had Hammond been a witness to what took place on the beach after he
left he assuredly would not have been so easy of mind. He might have
been turned white-hot with jealousy.
Or, being the sound philosopher that he was, in spite of his youth, he
might have reasoned that under stress of certain circumstances the best
of women will do strange things.