A HOAX THAT PROVED A BOOMERANG
I
“DON’T go away for a moment, Mr. Hammond.” Hammond watching the police
with Rev. Nathan Stubbs as their captive disappeared up street, turned to
see Martin Winch, the lawyer, hurry to his desk telephone.
“One—O—Two—Seven, North,” he called. “Bairdwell and Simms?—Could I speak
to Mr. Simms?— Hello, Simms, Martin Winch of Winch, Stanton and Reid
speaking— Simms, would you care to handle a police court case for us?—
Yes, right away, if we can arrange the preliminary hearing for this
afternoon— It’s a client of ours, Rev. Nathan Stubbs— Some trivial
charge, yes— What we want is to get bail arranged, but there are reasons
why we can’t very well be identified with the case just for the present—
Will explain all that when I see you— Could you slip over to the
district police court right now— Hold things until I get there with the
bondsmen— That’s very decent of you, Simms, thank you.”
“We’re bound for the police station,” Winch explained as he hustled
Hammond down the stairs to the street and into his car at the curb. “It
might be essential to have you there, but whatever occurs keep a still
mouth unless I tell you. Simms will do all the talking that is
necessary.”
On the way Winch stopped opposite the entrance to a business block, and,
leaving Hammond in the car, hustled upstairs. Presently, he returned
with two other men who jumped into the rear seat of the car and Winch
started the machine without taking time to introduce them to Hammond.
Winch led the way into the district magistrate’s office, where Rev.
Nathan Stubbs was already arraigned before the magistrate. The two
mounted police were swearing out papers for his incarceration on a
nominal charge of vagrancy. Winch motioned Hammond to a seat in the rear
of the auditorium and sat down beside him, while the two strangers, whom
Hammond surmised were the bondsmen, went on up and inside the rail, where
they were met by a sleek-looking young man, who, he knew, must be Simms.
The prisoner straightened and a distinct look of relief came over his
face.
It was all very formal, very monotonous, as preliminary hearings usually
are. There was very little talking, and most of it in an undertone that
didn’t carry to the point where Hammond and Winch were sitting. The most
audible sound was the scratching of the magistrate’s pen. Finally it
ceased, bail was put up and the magistrate announced the case adjourned
until the following morning.
Winch asked Hammond to wait a moment and went forward and joined the
group around the accused, now temporarily a free man on one thousand
dollars security put up by the two strangers. Hammond was convinced
Winch supplied the collateral.
The magistrate arose from his desk, and with customary abruptness the
courtroom cleared. Winch, Simms, Rev. Nathan Stubbs and the two bondsmen
left the building through a side door. Hammond found himself alone.
He was about to go in search of Winch when the latter appeared at the
public entrance. “I beg your pardon, Mr. Hammond,” he apologised. “In
my haste to get this beastly matter straightened out I had forgotten
about you for the moment. As it happened, we did not need you, and I
have to leave you to your own resources for a little while.
“Could you come up to my office, say in an hour?” Winch looked at his
watch. “It’s almost five now. Come up at six. You can’t get back to
the limits now until to-morrow morning at the earliest, and it is
extremely important I should have a talk with you before you go.”
The arrangement did not appeal as any too attractive to the young man,
particularly in view of what happened at his afternoon interview with the
lawyer, but he promised to abide by it.
II
At the appointed time Hammond went up to the legal offices of Winch,
Stanton and Reid. An impatient-looking young male clerk was standing by
the outer rail with hat and coat on ready to leave. The balance of the
office staff had departed.
“Mr. Winch is engaged just now,” said the clerk, “but he left word for
you to wait here. He will call you when he is ready.” Having delivered
his message, the youth pushed through the double doors and ran downstairs
three steps at a time.
Hammond swore under his breath. He hadn’t bothered about his evening
meal, thinking the session with Winch would be of short duration, and he
was tired and hungry.
He could distinguish the rumble of low-pitched voices in Winch’s private
office, but could catch no word of what was said. Five minutes dragged
by—ten—twenty—thirty. At a quarter to seven Hammond was furious enough
to jump up and leave without giving any notice.
The door of Winch’s office opened, and, Winch, poking his head out,
called: “Come in, Mr. Hammond.”
Hammond crossed the threshold and drew back in amazement. Standing by
Winch’s desk was a tall man, iron-grey of hair with a keen face and
deepset, piercing dark eyes.
_It was Norman T. Gildersleeve_!
“How do you do, Mr. Hammond?” Mr. Gildersleeve greeted the young man
quietly, extending his hand. “You weren’t quite prepared to meet me
here?”
“Scarcely, Mr. Gildersleeve, but”—Hammond was regaining his
composure—“I’ve become quite used to running into the unexpected since I
parted with you on the night of September the twenty-third.”
Gildersleeve smiled. “Quite so, quite so,” he agreed. “However, we’ve
decided to acquaint you with some of the missing details that have been
baffling you, Mr. Hammond, though I must confess that there are a few
things that we would like to know more about ourselves. Later on—”
“Yes, at the club, after dinner,” briskly cut in Martin Winch. “You and
Mr. Hammond can get together in a side room and thresh the whole thing
out. We’d better hurry over if we don’t wish to be locked out of the
café.”
They departed in Winch’s car. At the City Club, Norman T. Gildersleeve’s
appearance created no sudden sensation among the scattered few that were
present. Apparently, the New York capitalist was not readily recognised,
though his picture had appeared many times in the papers since his
disappearance. Hon. J. J. Slack, M.P., who was a late arrival, alone
picked him out. Slack came striding over to the table where
Gildersleeve, Winch and Hammond sat awaiting their order.
“As I live,” he cried, “if it isn’t Norman Gildersleeve in the flesh!”
“Hush,” admonished Gildersleeve in an undertone as the other gripped his
hand. “I am anxious for this matter to slip over with as little
notoriety as possible.”
“But you’ve already got all the notoriety that’s coming to you,” laughed
Slack. “The papers have been full of nothing else since you dropped out
of sight. Where on earth have you been?”
Gildersleeve shrugged. “Oh, just on a little private hunting trip above
Moose Horn,” he replied. “I needed a rest and thought I’d take it in on
my way here.”
Slack’s brows went up ever so slightly. “Bag any big fellows?”
He asked it innocently enough, but Hammond thought he caught the faintest
of sarcastic inflexions.
Gildersleeve ignored the question. “Now that I’m back,” he remarked,
“I’m anxious to see the pulp and paper mill get under way in time. By
the way, Slack, how is the North Star getting on with the poles?”
“Swimmingly, swimmingly,” repeated the politician. “Nannabijou Bay is
jammed almost to the last inch with timber. Away over the contract cut,
I believe.”
“That’s fine. How about delivery?”
“Starts next week, soon as we get the last of our dredging contracts off
our hands,” replied Slack. “We’ll have our whole fleet of equipment on
the job.”
“Then there’s nothing in this talk that is going around of a strike among
your tugmen?”
“Absolutely nothing,” emphatically assured Slack. “The North Star never
had a strike in its history. The men tried to put up a bluff of going
out, at the instigation of a nest of agitators, but they’ll never go
out—they know better than to try any of that stuff on us. See you later,
Gildersleeve.”
Gildersleeve’s eyes trailed after Slack’s retreating figure in a fixed,
hard glitter. “When Ananias quit the job, he never dreamed he would have
so illustrious a successor,” he commented grimly. “Slack’s one grand
qualification for the presidency of the North Star is his magnificent
ability as an unmitigated liar.”
The meal progressed in comparative silence. It was after they had
retired to the privacy of a side room that Hammond, prompted by curiosity
he had until now curbed, asked casually: “By the way, Mr. Winch, what
became of the camp preacher you bailed out this afternoon—the Rev. Nathan
Stubbs?”
Winch looked at Gildersleeve and they both smiled cynically. “He has
disappeared—vanished in thin air, as you might say,” enlightened Winch.
“And left you in the air with bail?”
“It was cheap to lose him at any price,” spoke up Gildersleeve with a
frown. “He was through with his job—and damned good riddance!”
III
Hammond began to see the drift of things. “So the preacher was a
detective in your employ?” he surmised.
“Exactly—and you were sent out there as a foil to keep them guessing,”
replied Gildersleeve. “He went in the disguise of preacher because it
was the easiest rôle to get away with without suspicion, every sort of
preacher being allowed the run of the camps on account of some eccentric
whim of the superintendent.”
“And your disappearance was—also a blind?”
“You’ve got the idea. I told Slack just now I was on a hunting trip,
which was true—except that I was hunting inside information, not moose.
To make absolutely sure of no leaks, Winch here was the only one in the
plot with me. The arrest of the bogus preacher might have been a costly
blunder if we hadn’t got him out before his identity was discovered.”
“How did they get the charge of vagrancy against him?”
“The Lord only knows. Smith and the gang of crooks who use him as a
crafty, unscrupulous tool in their nefarious enterprises seem to have
even the police of the country in their power. At any rate, Stubbs was
arrested on a nominal charge of vagrancy, but ostensibly for some unnamed
crime he was supposed to have committed on the limits.
“Now, Mr. Hammond,” continued the head of the International Investment
Corporation, “I think I’d better be a little more explicit about matters
before I come to a new proposal I have to make to you. You are fairly
well acquainted with the facts in connection with the previous struggle
with the Kam City Pulp and Paper Mills Company, of which my corporation
is the parent, and the North Star Towing and Contracting Company, are you
not?—how we succeeded in getting the rights on the limits this October,
pending the opening of our mill?”
Hammond nodded. “One way and another I have picked up a fairly good
notion of the situation,” he affirmed.
“What you may not know,” continued the other, “is that a former Canadian
company, of which I was the head, was behind many of the rival
enterprises which tried to fight the North Star in this country, and
failed. In fact, we, the pioneers in development work on the North
Shore, were actually driven out by the North Star, whose crafty,
underhand methods and strange power over the ruling authorities in
government circles made it impossible to meet them in a fair fight. I
was a heavy loser through those ventures, and, I may tell you that
millions are at stake in this present undertaking projected to break the
backbone of the slimy North Star outfit.
“But we got the edge on them this time from the start—and we intend to
keep it. Nevertheless, I had no illusions as to the intentions of the
North Star since the screws were put down tight on them by the new
provincial government. I knew if there were a loop-hole through which
they could slip to prevent delivery of poles to our mill in time to allow
of operation on the date fixed in our agreement with the government that
they would take full advantage of it.
“Early last June I placed several secret agents in one guise and another
in the North Star’s camps, keeping close tab on operations and sending in
regular reports. They could discover no grounds for suspecting trickery,
however, except that the superintendent, A. C. Smith, was inaccessible
and his comings and goings in the camp were as mysterious as the man
himself.
“Then one day, toward the latter end of the summer, all our secret
agents, who had secured positions as clerks, cookees and lumberjacks,
were summarily dismissed and given twenty-four hours to get off the
limits—all with the exception of an expert ex-secret service man from
Chicago, Arnold by name, who kept his place in the camp as a consumptive
landscape artist. Arnold made the discovery that there was some secret
rendezvous up in the hill known as the Cup of Nannabijou, to which he was
convinced Acey Smith repaired, though he was never able to trace him
there. He further had a theory that the unknown powers behind the North
Star were kept in touch with affairs through a wireless plant secreted in
the Cup.
“That was the last report we received from Arnold. News afterward
appeared in the papers that Arnold’s hat had been found floating in a
creek up on the hill, and it was surmised that he had fallen into the
rapids of the creek and was dashed to death.
“Arnold, however, eventually turned up, alive, in Chicago, and later came
to my office in New York. The truth of the matter was he had been
waylaid on the banks of the creek, overpowered and drugged while he was
endeavouring to find the entrance to the Cup. He recovered consciousness
in the room of a waterfront hotel in this city, where he found on the
dresser a parcel and a bulky envelope. The parcel contained the loose
cash he had in his pockets when attacked, his watch, fountain pen and a
new hat similar to the one that fell off his head into the creek during
his struggle with unknown assailants. In the envelope were all the
pencilled notes he had made and secreted under the floor of his shack,
and under the envelope he found a railway time-table with the connections
between Kam City and Chicago under-scored. Arnold was quite fed up with
the way they did things in Canada, and he took the obvious hint.
“All this made it the more imperative that I place some one on the limits
who could get to the bottom of what coup the North Star was planning. I
decided to come North myself to keep in close touch. In order to put our
rivals and their spies off the scent and lend them a false notion of
security, I planned to suddenly disappear off the train before it reached
Kam City. Winch was not to discover this until the following morning and
then see that my remarkable disappearance was given the widest possible
publicity in the newspapers.
“It was while on the way to Kam City that I was impressed with the
advantages of having a foil for the camp preacher in his work—some one
whose entrance into the camps at about the same time as himself would
arouse Acey Smith’s curiosity and suspicion and keep him for a time off
the right track. I talked the plan over with Winch, and the result was
we engaged you.
“Now there was no absolute certainty that Slack would take any cognizance
of my request to find you a job on the limits, and possibly less that
Acey Smith would take you on, even if he did, but I built on their
curiosity being so aroused that they would employ you just to get at the
bottom of what you were sent there for. Your entire ignorance of any
definite object on the limits would, I conjectured, further baffle Smith.
In the meantime, while his suspicions were focussed on you, Stubbs was to
get in his good work. The result up to the time of your leaving the
limits and Stubbs’ arrest was eminently satisfactory.”
“You think my leaving precipitated Stubbs into trouble then?” asked
Hammond.
“No, I wouldn’t say that,” replied Gildersleeve. “Stubbs at the last
minute tried to prevent your getting on the tug before it left, but that
wasn’t what was at the bottom of his arrest. However, you both did well
to stay out there as long as you did. We discovered the North Star’s
plot to prevent delivery of the poles in time to frustrate it, we hope.”
“The strike?”
“You’ve guessed it. And the strike, as you have likely further surmised,
has been cunningly engineered by the North Star principals themselves,
though, mind you, that would be a difficult thing to prove and a
dangerous statement to make publicly.”
“But,” contended Hammond, “the North Star must have known that, under the
existing circumstances, you could bring government pressure to bear to
force them to settle the strike and deliver the poles as per the
contract.”
“True, but therein lay the very advantage of our knowledge in advance
they were bringing this strike on,” explained the other. “We have thus
been enabled to get in private touch with the attorney-general, as well
as the minister of forests and mines, so that the minute the strike
breaks a fiat will come through ordering the North Star to submit their
strike to a swift arbitration. We did not suppose the North Star was
relying on the strike alone to tie up delivery, but took it as a means to
another end, which, undoubtedly was to have the plants in their various
tugs blown up and disabled. The blame would be laid at the door of
extremists among the strikers and they would thus be so crippled they
could not move a pole from the limits to get our mills running on time.
“But we took care of that part of it,” continued Gildersleeve. “We got
the mounted police on the job of watching not only the booms at the
limits, but the North Star’s waterfront property in this city as well.
Incidentally, to make doubly sure of not being trapped, we wired Duluth
to have tugs and equipment ready to send over to us on a moment’s
notice.”
“You knew that Acey Smith is leaving for Montreal to-night?” asked
Hammond.
“We did,” said Gildersleeve. “The superintendent took care to have that
generally noised about; there’s even an item in both local papers
to-night about his trip. It has never been Acey Smith’s habit to
advertise his personal movements, so we can discount that as another ‘red
herring’ drawn over the trail. Just the same we have two detectives
shadowing the pulp camp superintendent’s movements.”
Hammond had to smile over the idea. “Might as well send two men to
shadow a timber wolf,” he observed ironically.
“Or the Devil himself,” agreed Gildersleeve. “However, I don’t think
there’s much to worry about in that direction. Now we’ve come to a
matter that I would like to talk over with you privately, Mr. Hammond—if
Mr. Winch doesn’t mind.”
“Not the least,” said Winch. “If you think you’ll not be over-long I’ll
wait for you in the rotunda, Norman.”
“We’ll not be long, Martin,” he was assured by Gildersleeve.
IV
“There are two loose ends out at those camps I want to have cleared up
right away,” briskly opened Gildersleeve when the door closed behind
Winch. “The one is what the North Star has hidden up in the Cup of
Nannabijou, and the other is the purpose of that girl staying out on
Amethyst Island.”
Hammond started. “You mean Miss Stone?”
“Yes. The fact that you got on intimate terms with her should be a very
valuable asset to us. I suppose you’ve guessed that Stubbs was the one
who so cleverly brought about your meeting with her?”
“No, I had not guessed it.”
“H’m—well! Let’s get to the point, Mr. Hammond: What all did you find
out from her?”
“Please be a little more explicit, Mr. Gildersleeve: Just what are you
driving at?”
“I’m sorry. I may not have made myself quite clear. Just what is her
little part in the mystery out at the limits?”
Hammond suppressed his irritation. “Miss Stone has absolutely no
connection with the North Star’s intrigues; of that I am certain,” he
replied emphatically. “She is as much mystified, I am sure, by the
strange occurrences at the limits as we have been.”
“She hypnotised you into believing that?” There was a politely shaded
sneer in Gildersleeve’s tone. “Now see here, Hammond, you must remember
we are dealing with the cleverest coterie of arch crooks on the American
continent. There is nothing in the finer arts of intrigue and blackmail
they have not practised in the past to gain their ends. They have never
had equals for cunning and resourcefulness.
“Such precedent alone,” he pointed out, “should warn us that that girl
with her pretty face has been introduced at this particular juncture with
a purpose, if I hadn’t deeper reasons for conviction in the matter. My
proposal therefore is that you go back to the limits, further cultivate
the acquaintance of Miss Stone and find out as quickly as possible for
your own benefit as well as ours all you can about her in that
direction.”
Hammond had risen. “I think we may as well break off all our connection
right now, Mr. Gildersleeve,” he said coldly. “I am going back to the
limits, but this time let it be understood I’m going on my own.”
Gildersleeve at a glance took in the determination written in the young
man’s face. “I see—I see,” he muttered significantly. “Well, in that
case, Mr. Hammond—can we expect you to respect our previous confidences?”
“So far as it may be honourable and lawful to do so, yes.”
Somehow Hammond sensed that reply rankled Gildersleeve, but the latter
responded, almost suavely: “Very well then, call around at Winch’s office
in the morning and there’ll be a cheque waiting you to cover payment for
your services according to our contract. Goodnight!”
He held the door for Hammond to pass out.