“DEVIL HE MAY BE-BUT A MAN!”
I
WHEN Louis Hammond went away from the City Club after his conference with
Norman T. Gildersleeve he was convinced of two things. The one was that
Gildersleeve had not told him the entire truth. There had been a
furtiveness about the demeanour of Gildersleeve that irritated Hammond:
furthermore, there had been the acknowledged duplicity of Winch in
passing himself off as a United States consul, not to mention
Gildersleeve’s veiled insinuations as to Josephine Stone’s connection
with the North Star. To Hammond’s way of thinking, these and other
elements of Gildersleeve’s methods did not “hang” very well. The other
conviction was that the North Star people had been cognizant of
Gildersleeve’s plans from the very first. There was now no doubt, in
view of what had happened, that Acey Smith, the pulp camp superintendent,
suspected, or perhaps knew definitely, from the night he landed that he,
Hammond, was identified with Gildersleeve and had been sent out to the
limits for the purpose of aiding in balking the North Star’s plans. That
being so, either Acey Smith had his own hidden objects in view in
allowing Hammond the freedom of the camp, or else—well, Hammond rather
scouted the idea that the Argus-eyed master of the Nannabijou Limits
considered him a nonentity in this conflict of wits who wasn’t worth
troubling his head about. It couldn’t be that, he surmised, because
Smith was not the type to overlook any possibilities of interference with
his plans. The deeper motive that he might have had in view eluded
Hammond’s shrewdest deductions. Out in the woods Acey Smith was playing
at his own game, and more experienced men than Hammond had failed to
fathom him. Even those most closely associated with him admitted they
never intimately understood this most inaccessible man of moods.
Anyway, Hammond felt immensely relieved to be free of all responsibility
to either of the contending companies, and, having cashed Norman T.
Gildersleeve’s cheque in payment for his services next day, he began
planning a certain little affair of his own.
He was unable to get passage out to the limits until noon, and the trip
was made on a cranky, wheezing little gasolene tug manned by
inexperienced seamen.
The tugmen’s strike was on. Not only had all the North Star seamen left
their boats, but they had taken out with them the crews of all the other
towing and salvaging companies between the Soo and the Head of the Lakes.
It was rumoured that the strike would next extend to the grain carriers
and the passenger and freight boats plying up and down the Great Lakes.
The lumberjacks’ unions, however, had not yet called their sympathetic
strike. At the Nannabijou Limits Hammond found things much the same as
when he had left, except that there seemed to be a large number of
strange men prowling around the camp, who, though they wore bush garb,
were patently not North Star men. At regular intervals, along the
waterfront and the roads leading up into the woods, armed members of the
Canadian Mounted Police were stationed, obviously for the protection of
property in case violence followed.
The lumberjacks were plainly in a sullen mood, especially the foreigners,
on whom the presence of the uniformed representatives of Canadian law and
order produced an ugly irritation. But, under the iron rule of Acey
Smith, weapons of any sort beyond the axes which the men used in their
work were strictly forbidden, so that an armed outbreak was out of the
question.
Hammond himself, on landing and producing his pass of identification, was
requested to step over to a little group of police, where his pockets
were lightly tapped to detect the possible presence of concealed weapons.
“Sorry to put you to this bother, sir,” smiled the officer in charge.
“Just a matter of form, you know. Connected with the North Star Company,
I suppose?”
“No,” replied the young man. “I am here on private business of my own,
but I expect to be in camp for a short time.”
The officer gave him a sharp look as though committing his face to
memory. He seemed about to ask another question, but instead nodded
politely to signify the interview was over.
II
Sandy Macdougal was enjoying his afternoon nod when Hammond dropped in at
their bunkhouse, but immediately after the latter’s entry the cook rolled
out of the blankets in his sock-feet. “Cripes, didn’t I lock that door?”
he gasped as he sat blinking at the newcomer. “Huh, guess I’m gettin’
nerves, but the goings on here lately is enough to make a man _loco_.”
“Why—what’s up now, Sandy?” laughed Hammond.
“Place is alive with cut-throats,” declared the other. “Fellow has to
sleep with one eye open to watch that one of ’em don’t come in to bean
him for his wad.”
“Yes, I saw a lot of strangers about the camp,” observed Hammond. “Who
are they anyway?”
“Gang of low-brow detectives and strike-breakers brought in from Winnipeg
and Duluth on a towed barge early this morning. They’re the scum of
creation, and the way they gave orders to my boys when they came in for
eats—well, when Acey Smith comes back he’ll have another strike on his
hands. My outfit didn’t hire on here to be bossed around by no
second-class bums like them.”
“So the North Star’s putting up a bluff of breaking the strike?”
“North Star nothin’!” derided Sandy. “If it was I wouldn’t feel so
cussed mean toward them. This gang’s been put in here by the other
company—the Kam City Pulp and Paper Mill crowd—to take hold of the camp
work if the North Star’s pole-cutters and boom-tenders go out in sympathy
with the tugmen. Mooney put me wise, and you bet we make ’em whack up
for every meal they get here at rates just the same as if they was
stoppin’ at the Royal Aleck in Winnipeg.”
Hammond whistled. “So that’s the idea, eh?” He had to concede to
himself that Gildersleeve must have acted with considerable despatch. No
doubt he intended to use these men for waterfront land work when he got
his tugs over from Duluth to convey the poles to Kam City.
“Oh, they ain’t goin’ to come very much, at that,” insisted Macdougal.
“Any old time this strike is settled it will be settled by the North Star
itself—and it won’t be settled till then, not if they bring all the
strikebreakers and mounties between here and hell’s gangway to the camp.”
“So you think the North Star has the upper hand in this deal, Sandy?”
Macdougal fished out his black bottle and insisted on Hammond having a
“nip” with him. “If they ain’t got the upper hand right now,” he
replied, “they will have it when the shuffle’s over. There ain’t any
outsider can come in here and put it over Acey Smith. . . . And believe
me, whatever is his game, I’m one who wants to see the Big Boss win.
Here’s to him!”
The deep underlying note in Sandy’s tones made Hammond gaze at him
fixedly. “You used to say, Sandy, that he was the king of crooks,” he
reminded. “You used to say, in fact, that Acey Smith was a devil in
human form.”
“Crook he may be and devil too,” conceded the other. “But I’m with him
because—” and Sandy smote a nearby bench with his fist,—“because he’s a
man! He’s one of them kind of men that if the whole world was jumpin’ at
his throat he’d put his back again’ a rock and fight it out without
askin’ help or sob-stuff from any of ’em. And he’d go down grinnin’ that
little devil-grin o’ his and tellin’ them all to go to hell and be damned
to them—that’s the kind of a man the Big Boss is!”
Hammond did not smile at this unexpected outburst of hero-worship. The
little Scotch-Canadian was so emotionally intense about it.
“Listen, Hammond,” he was saying. “The Big Boss likely is as black a
rascal as they say he is, and that’s a whole lot; but he never fights the
weak or the poor. Ain’t I seen what he’s done unbeknownst to most for
unfortunates in this camp? Ain’t I been in the city when I seen him stop
on the street to help a blind bum over a dangerous crossin’ when
everybody else was hustlin’ by and lookin’ the other way so they wouldn’t
see their duty? Don’t I know that in the hard times six years ago it was
this same Acey Smith who bought up a row of shacks in the coal docks
district where the landlords was dumpin’ whole families out because they
had nothin’ to pay them with, and don’t I know that none of them has ever
paid since when they was hard up? I know because it was one of my side
jobs to look after them houses and see that the taxes was paid.
“Yes, and I could tell you lots of other things about the Big Boss that
would be just as hard to believe,” the cook went on. “Suppose you never
heard about the case of that Frompton girl?”
Other matters were uppermost in Hammond’s mind, but he knew there was no
stopping Sandy when the talking mood was on him, so he said
good-naturedly: “No, Sandy, tell us the story.”
III
“That all happened in the days before the war when the Big Boss was
feelin’ a lot more cocky than he seems to be nowadays,” began the cook.
“This Frompton girl, who was a waitress in one of the city eatin’ houses,
was something of a good looker, but it seems that down east she’d had a
nasty bit of past, mostly some low skunk’s fault who deceived her and
skipped out leavin’ her to face it alone. After her baby, maybe lucky
for its poor little self, died, her and her mother came up to Kam City
where nobody knew them. But scandal like that, especially if it’s about
a woman, will travel. One night a young blood, a son of one of the
wealthy ginks in the town, being a little worse of bootleg, tried to get
fresh with her, and the hot-tempered little thing hauls off and biffs him
in the face. The poor prune wasn’t man enough to take his medicine, but
bawls her out with some dirty remark about what she’d been in the town
she’d come from. I guess she got seein’ red over that, for she picked up
a catsup bottle and bashed him on the head with it. The rich man’s son
came near kickin’ the bucket from that clout, and, as it was, he was a
month or so in the hospital before they were sure he’d pull through.
They didn’t pull the girl up for attackin’ him, because his family didn’t
want the notoriety; but she was held in jail on a charge of disorderly
conduct till they’d see what would happen to him. Then, if he lived,
they intended to bring her before the magistrate and get her packed off
to a reformatory as an example of what happens to bad girls who beat up
rich men’s sons.
“Well, I happened to know some of the crowd that was mixed up in the
rumpus and had been followin’ the case. One night when the Big Boss was
in the dinin’ camp havin’ supper I threw down the paper and started to
cuss.’
“He looks over at me and asks: ‘Why all the sweet language, Macdougal?’
“I starts in and tells him all about the case and how I thought the world
was all wrong that nobody would lift a finger to help out a poor, fallen
woman like this one. He listened with a lot more interest than you can
generally get out of him, and I wound up by sayin’, ‘Cripes, what’s all
the preachers for that they don’t start in scorin’ the guilty parties
instead of standin’ by while everybody pans the girl?’
“‘The preachers ain’t to blame, Sandy,’ he comes back. ‘Most of the
preachers go as far as they dare in settin’ the world right, and every
once in awhile you read about some of the darin’ ones being bumped out of
their pulpits for speakin’ their minds.’ Then his face gets chalk-white
like you see it when he’s mad. ‘It’s this system they call Society needs
fixin’, Sandy,’ he sneers. ‘Society that just wants to use the law and
the preachers to keep its chosen crowd out of jail in this world and out
of hell in the next.’
“Think of him, the king of the big timber crooks, a-talkin’ this way.
But that was just like him—always contrary to everybody else.
“‘Macdougal,’ says he suddenly, ‘don’t you wish you was a great lawyer?’
“‘Why?’ I asks.
“‘Because,’ says he, ‘you could defend this girl before the court and
maybe cheat the thing they call the Law.’
“‘I never thought of that,’ I replied, but I could see there was
something comin’.
“That little devil-grin flickers around the Big Boss’s poker face that’s
always there when he’s plannin’ hellery. ‘We ain’t lawyers, Macdougal,’
he states, ‘but I know where the money can be found to hire the best
sob-stirrin’ lawyer in Kam City, and if he gets her clear there’ll be a
bonus of a couple of hundred in it for him.’
“I knew what that meant. I had wished myself into the job of hirin’ the
lawyer and seein’ that he got the money on the quiet. Acey Smith
outlines how I am to go about the deal and says: ‘If the lawyer gets her
off, we’ll see if we can’t get a job for her.’
“To make a long story short we got Jacobs, the best lawyer on them sort
of cases in Kam City, and he puts up such a talk for her, a-quotin’
Scripture and so on, that he had everybody in the courtroom except the
district crown attorney wipin’ the corners of their eyes. He winds up by
statin’ there was a party who was prepared to start her off fresh on a
decent job. The old magistrate was so taken with Jacob’s speil he said
he thought she hadn’t had a chance, and, after a lecture to her on the
straight and narrow path, he lets her off without even the suspended
sentence the crown attorney tried to horn in with as a last resort.
“It was Jacobs turned the girl and her mother loose on me when they
insisted on thanking the man who’d put up the money to defend her, and in
a weak moment, bein’ kind of flustered, I promised to take them to him.
I’ll never forget what happened when I took them out to the old camp
layout on the tug. As I said, the girl was rather a good-lookin’ kid and
she hadn’t commenced to get that hard jib women who go under seem to take
on. She seemed still kind of dazed over it all when I walked her and her
mother into the superintendent’s office. ‘There’s the man,’ says I
before I had yet thought just what I was doing. ‘There’s the man you can
thank for savin’ you from the clink.’
“The Big Boss he scowls at me as black as thunder and I knew I’d put my
foot in it for fair, but the girl breaks down and falls at his feet,
a-sobbin’ that she wasn’t worth savin’. In sort of hysterics she was.
For once the Big Boss seemed like he didn’t know what to do. He looked
around wild-eyed as though he’d like to beat it out the door. But he
couldn’t, because in her little cryin’ fit she’d taken a strangle hold on
his boots. So he lifts her up and chucks her into her mother’s arms.
“‘Get up, girl,’ he cries kind of hoarse and bashful-like. ‘I ain’t your
judge, and if you’ve done any wrong I don’t know anything about it and
don’t want to. The North Star’s goin’ to offer you a job, and Macdougal
here has the lookin’ after of that. Go straight, girl,’ he adds, fixin’
her with them flashin’ coal-black eyes of his, ‘and if any one throws
this thing up at you again let us know about it and there’ll be little
old hell to pay!’
“Then he packs us back on the next tug with orders where she was to look
for the job. It wasn’t in a North Star office, but one of the other
factories in town that people say is run with North Star money.
“But don’t you think there wasn’t a curtain-call for me when I got back
to camp for givin’ away to the girl and her mother as to the man whackin’
up for her lawyer. The Big Boss nearly fired me.
“‘You don’t know me, Macdougal,’ he grits. ‘I ain’t a movin’ picture
hero such as you seem to think. Didn’t I tell you we were in on this
thing just for the fun of cheatin’ the law? Besides, it wasn’t my money
but the North Star’s that paid for her lawyer, and it was the North
Star’s influence that got her that job, just the same as the North Star
has rescued other people from the clutches of the law that it knew it
could use. That girl’s one of us now and she’d go through hell-fire in
the company’s interests if she was asked to. If you wasn’t blind you’d
have seen that from the first. Beat it to your beanery and don’t let me
ever hear you mention a word about this again.’
“Aye, he’s a queer, queer man, is Acey Smith,” concluded the cook.
“Sometimes it seems to me something is eatin’ the heart out of
him—something burnin’ inside him and fillin’ him up with hellery.
Sometimes I think he’s a good man with a devil in him that won’t give him
no rest.”
The cook’s story, like others he had heard, impressed Hammond even if it
did increase the enigma that hung about the personality of the timber
boss. “It is certain he has some fixed method in all this madness of
his,” Hammond mused as much to himself as to his companion. “One object
undoubtedly is to keep every one guessing what his real motives are. He
has to keep himself pretty much a mystery in order to carry out the
orders of his bosses.”
“Oh, but he ain’t carryin’ out their crooked work just for the money
there’s in it,” spoke up Macdougal. “There’s something deeper’n that.
I’ve been a-studyin’ the man too close and too long to believe that.
It’s something inside the man himself that makes him carry on as he
does.”
“I’ll quite agree with you there,” responded Hammond. “You call it a
devil while I would call it an obsession of mind or a ruling mania: all
of which are pretty much the one and the same thing, except that our
forefathers called it a devil and let it go at that. If one could only
get the key to that obsession they’d soon be able to clear up the whole
mystery of this camp.”
“Aye, Hammond, if you _could_ get the key,” observed the cook, “but Acey
Smith is canny enough to keep that key locked up in a dark place that
nobody knows but him.”