“THE MAN THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN”
I
UNUSUAL commotion below stairs awakened Josephine Stone at a very early
hour the morning following the storm. She arose and opened the door to
listen. Mrs. Johnson, fully dressed, came down the hall.
“Oh, are you getting up, Josephine?” she greeted. “We didn’t intend
calling you for an hour or so.”
“It was the noise. What’s going on downstairs?”
“Didn’t you know? Why, I was wakened at an unearthly hour by your Indian
maid, Mary. She’s back with us again. She said Mr. Smith told her you
were leaving here to-day and it had been found necessary to make an early
start. I saw Mr. Smith downstairs, and he said there was a boat waiting
at the tunnel at the other end of the Cup to take us and our belongings
back to Amethyst Island. I—I thought you knew all about it, Josephine?”
“Why, yes—I had forgotten. Mr. Smith called last night after you had
gone to bed to notify me.”
“Did he tell you about that terrible-looking Indian chief?”
“Who—the Medicine Man? What has he done now?”
“He’s dead, poor man.”
“Dead?”
“Yes. Killed in the storm last night. Something terrible must have
happened, for the Indians all looked so broken up this morning that I
asked Mary what was the matter with them. She said Ogima Bush, their
great Medicine Man, was gone up to the sky and they’d never see him
again. All I could get out of her was that he was ‘making some big
medicine’ whatever that is, and he was carried away by the storm-devils.
They’re so queer, those people, I never can quite understand them.”
“Poor Ogima,” breathed Josephine Stone. “I don’t think there was
anything so terrible about him as he painted himself up to look.
Sometimes there seemed to be something terribly tragic in those wicked
eyes of his.”
“Come now, Josie,” admonished Mrs. Johnson, “don’t you go getting
dressed. Mr. Smith said it would be all right if you were called an hour
from now.”
But Miss Stone had no intention of going back to bed. She dressed and
went downstairs. The Indians were busy getting baggage ready on the
verandah for transportation down to the boat.
As breakfast wasn’t quite ready, Miss Stone strolled down to the lake.
There she was a few minutes later joined by Acey Smith. He was garbed in
his bush clothes and the personality of the man had undergone one of
those undefinable changes so characteristic of him. Where he had been
buoyant, care-free and boyish the night before he was now politely
formal, inscrutable—a self-contained Big Boss of the timberlands.
“I was sorry to have had to decide on an early start without having let
you know last night, Miss Stone,” he opened. “But about four o’clock
this morning I was awakened by a wireless call from the city, notifying
me that some busy-body was having an airman sent over the Cup to-day, so
I decided, if possible, we’d leave the Cup before the air-scout arrived.”
“More mystery?” Miss Stone had not exactly meant to be sarcastic.
Acey Smith gave vent to a low, harsh laugh. “No, the mystery stuff, so
far as you are concerned is over,” he assured her. “And that brings me
to the point I came down here to speak to you about. This morning after
breakfast, if you feel equal to it, I would like you to take a walk with
me up to the summit of Lookout Cliff yonder.” He pointed to a
castle-like formation in the wall of rock to the east.
“But I thought we were leaving here this morning?”
“We are. But while the Indians are taking Mrs. Johnson and your
belongings around to Amethyst Island, I thought you might let me take you
up there to enjoy the wonderful view it affords while I tell you the
story of the North Star and how you came to be woven into its history.”
“Couldn’t I hear it down at the Island?”
“You could, but there is an appropriate reason why you should be shown
that view on this, your twenty-first birthday.”
“Very well,” acceded the girl, “I’ll go.”
II
Josephine Stone and Acey Smith made their start for the summit of Lookout
Cliff right after breakfast. The superintendent appeared with his
inevitable packsack strapped on his back, and after giving final
instructions to the Indians, motioned her to accompany him.
The walk up the gradual ascent through the woods to the foot of the cliff
was refreshing and invigorating, but, after the custom on northern
trails, neither spoke except when it was absolutely necessary. The man
seemed deeply preoccupied and the girl made no attempt to draw him out of
his reverie.
There were moments when to her Acey Smith seemed sublime—a sort of genie
of this wild, wonderful country. She believed she liked him best in this
mood. In his high boots, corduroys and stetson with its narrow limp brim
slightly turned up off his forehead, he had the bearing and the mien of
some fiercely handsome robber chieftain. His face, set like a mask, was
never turned toward her; his eyes seemed always fixed on the trail above.
She found herself walking in his wake, quite as naturally as the Indian
woman trails after her brave in their journeys through the wild.
They paused for a few moments’ rest at the base of the cliff before
starting the ascent of the winding pathway that led to the summit.
Suddenly a rapidly-vibrating roaring sound broke in upon them from the
upper air.
“The airplane has arrived,” commented Acey Smith, pointing to the machine
swooping over the cliffs at the water-gate. “Just a little too late to
find out anything worth while.”
“Who do you suppose it is?” asked the girl.
“It’s a government machine sent to locate you. I think likely it’s been
put on the job at the request of your friend, Mr. Hammond.”
He watched her covertly as the colour came and went in her cheeks at the
mention of Hammond’s name.
“Mr. Hammond!” she gasped. “Oh, then, we must go back and send word to
him that I am safe and sound.”
“No, it will not be necessary,” he declared. “Mr. Hammond will be none
the worse for a few hours’ suspense. You will meet him before the sun
sets to-night, and you will then be the better able to explain
everything.”
“Is he still down at the limits?”
“Yes, I think he’s back, though the last news I had of him he was in Kam
City. He had a falling out with Norman T. Gildersleeve and quit the
services of the International Investment outfit. I expect he discovered
they weren’t altogether the innocent angels they pretended to be.” He
paused a moment, then: “Hammond is what few men of ability are
nowadays—clean-cut and honest to the core.”
The girl dropped her eyes to hide the gratitude that welled up in them.
What had it cost Acey Smith to make that magnanimous statement? For she
knew now that he knew what she could not give to him would be Hammond’s
for the asking.
They watched the plane make a landing, saw the airman examine the grounds
and buildings, then re-enter his machine and fly away over the cliffs.
“Evidently thought better of staying overlong in the Cup,” commented Acey
Smith. “Oh, well, there was nothing for him to fear; my men have
instructions to molest no one coming here from now on.”
“You mean that the Cup will no longer be a secret retreat?”
“That all depends; it is a matter now for some one else to decide,” he
answered. “Let’s go on up to the top.”
III
The summit of Lookout Cliff offered a wonderful view on this clear day of
the lake and the forests below. Nannabijou camp from there seemed a tiny
gash in a world of wilderness; the river and Solomon Creek silver threads
winding down to Superior. On the outer side the cliff descended, a sheer
wall, five hundred feet to the woods on the side of the mountain, the
elevation being one thousand seven hundred and fifty feet above
sea-level. The cliff is known among sailormen of the Great Lakes as the
highest piece of land on the North Shore.
“This pinnacle,” Acey Smith was saying, “was held sacred by the pagan
Indians as the eerie of the Thunder Eagle, a demi-god supposed to rule
the land and the water as far as his eyes could see.
“It therefore did not seem unfitting,” he continued quietly, “to bring
you to this spot to declare you, as I do now, undisputed mistress of the
North Shore.”
She looked at him thoroughly bewildered, for the moment unable to think
what answer to make.
“I told you there would be no mystery after to-day,” he went on, “and
what I am about to tell you is bald fact. To-day, on your twenty-first
birthday, Miss Josephine Stone, you become heir to the estate of your
grandfather, Joseph Stone, and that estate now includes all the holdings
of the North Star Towing and Contracting Company and the controlling
share in all its various subsidiaries. In compliance with the dying
injunction of your grandfather, the ownership of those properties has
been transferred to your name, where they were formerly held in trust by
myself and the executives of the North Star for you under the pseudonym
of ‘J.C.X.’”
“But I can’t understand all this,” she murmured in perplexity.
“Grandfather, I always understood, was not very wealthy. He was merely a
prospector and scientist.”
“True,” replied her companion, “and in what you do not understand lies
the story—a story in which I’m afraid I will have to tell altogether too
much about myself.”
“Please _do_ tell me,” she urged. “I am sure I will be deeply interested
in that very part of it.”
“Then let’s step over yonder where we will be sheltered from the breeze
and still have the benefit of the sunshine.”
Acey Smith unslung his pack and hung it by one of the straps on the bough
of a stunted jackpine whose roots somehow drew sustenance from a crevice
near the edge of the cliff. He led the girl to a seat on a moss-covered
ledge and himself sat down facing her.
IV
The superintendent placed a cigarette in a holder and lit it.
“The story,” he opened, “should properly start with the advent of John
Carlstone here half a century ago. ‘Black Jack’ Carlstone, as he was
known, was an eastern Canadian, the second generation of the old pioneer
school and a mixture of the romantic races that migrated to the Niagara
Peninsula from the valley of the Mississippi in the States—English,
Welsh, Dutch and Irish blood ran in his veins. He was a tall,
powerfully-built, black-whiskered demon of a man, with a heart as great
as his physical dimensions—a man who was known to recognise no such
elements as difficulty or danger. He was a born trader, the particular
type that made good and amassed fortunes in those tremendous days.
“John Carlstone located near a trading-post which then thrived on what is
now the site of Kam City, and it was not long before he was identified
with almost every undertaking in which there was money to be made,
bartering with the Indians for furs, getting out timber and building
wharfs and roads for the government. There were few white women in the
North in those days, and John Carlstone took as his wife the daughter of
an Indian chief who was headman of all the North Shore tribes, and,
standing little on ceremony, was married under the pagan rites of the
Indians.
“With the birth of his son there came two heavy blows to John Carlstone.
He lost his wife, and her child was cursed with an infirmity that came of
a prenatal accident. In moments of stress or high nervous excitement,
the boy would be overcome with a strange paroxysm and cry out with the
weird, unearthly call of the northern loon. But this son, despite his
infirmity and the fact that he inherited a skin the colour of his
mother’s race, was the apple of John Carlstone’s eye. He named him
Alexander, because, as he told the boy when he grew older, ‘Alexander was
a conqueror, and you must conquer all this wild North Shore some day.’
It was a remark that afterwards rang in the consciousness of Alexander
Carlstone with all the glamour of prophecy.
“Young Carlstone was from the first a dreamer of wild dreams of power—a
boy apart and an albino among his playmates. Timid, studious and
extremely sensitive in the beginning, the ridicule of his fellows begot
the first bitterness that was later to engulf his whole better nature.
“The elder Carlstone’s wealth grew and grew. He became the owner of a
modest fleet of lake boats and a string of inland trading-posts.
Dissatisfied with the progress he was making in the crude pioneer school,
Carlstone sent his son east to be educated at a private college, where
the lad, under a sympathetic teacher, went far and quickly in his
studies. He grew to know that he had inherited his father’s initiative
and force of character along with an abnormal gift for grasping and
visualising situations that baffled the analyses of others. The father
planned to make a great merchant or business man of him; the son dreamed
of becoming a star on the stage. Young Alexander Carlstone knew that the
fire that burned in his veins was the fire of a born protagonist. But he
hid this ambition from his father and even his teacher; he felt he must
first overcome the affliction that had clung to him since birth.
“While his son was away at school the elder Carlstone married again, this
time to the widow of Captain Norman Gildersleeve, who had been master of
one of Carlstone’s boats. She was a designing, unscrupulous woman, and
she brought with her a son, some years older than Carlstone’s, who
inherited all his mother’s malicious and covetous nature. But with John
Carlstone’s undying affection for his son, the influence of the
Gildersleeves might not have cut much figure in the latter’s life had it
not been for a whim of Fate and the Law—the damnable travesty on Justice
that men call the Law.”
V
“Young Carlstone had completed what would be the equivalent of a modern
public and high school education when one day there came the most
unfortunate moment of his life with tidings of the death of his father,
the one true friend who believed in him and would have sacrificed all for
him right or wrong. The elder Carlstone was drowned out of a canoe
during a storm on one of the inland lakes; the wilderness from which he
had won affluence and wealth swallowed him.
“That was the crucial turning-point in the life of young Alexander
Carlstone, the end of the dramatic career which he had dreamed of—the
last chapter in the life of the Man That Might Have Been.
“Owing to the lack of telegraph service across Canada at that time, the
news of his father’s passing was almost a week in reaching the young man.
The latter was out of funds and none had been sent him. His big-hearted
teacher, touched by the anguished grief of his pupil, advanced the cost
of his transportation home, though young Carlstone read in his moist old
eyes a something that was prescient of worse woes to come.
“Alexander Carlstone arrived at Kam City to find the doors of his
father’s house closed against him. Norman T. Gildersleeve, son of the
woman who was John Carlstone’s second wife, came out and ordered him off
the premises. An altercation followed, in the heat of which Gildersleeve
cried:—
“‘Get out of here, you tramp; get out or I’ll send for the provincial
police to throw you out! You have no claim here—you are nameless.’
“A presentiment of just what his dark words meant staggered Carlstone for
the moment. ‘Say that again!’ he defied.
“‘I’ll say it,’ mocked the other. ‘You are a nobody, and in the eyes of
the Law you are not John Carlstone’s heir. Your mother was merely his
squaw mistress.’
“At that taunt, young Carlstone saw all red. He bore down upon
Gildersleeve with the fury of a savage and struck as his fighting father
would have struck. Gildersleeve went over before a terrific blow that
laid his cheek open below the right eye. When he struggled to his feet
he was knocked down again with a similar smash under the left optic. As
he lay upon the ground, his face covered with blood, Carlstone stood over
him uttering the terrible cry that since infancy had afflicted him in
moments of high excitement.
“In his blind fury, young Carlstone might have finished for good the
usurper of his birthrights had it not been that passersby intervened. As
it was, he left two scars upon the face of Norman T. Gildersleeve that he
was to carry all his life.”
Josephine Stone shuddered. It was not altogether at the recital of the
details of the fight, but at remembrance of those very scars beneath the
eyes of the man she had seen with Louis Hammond that night on the
transcontinental train. She did not interrupt, however, as Acey Smith
proceeded:
“Alexander Carlstone was placed under arrest and tried before the
district magistrate on a charge of felonious assault with intent to kill.
The district attorney was a fair man, and in view of the provocation,
reduced the charge to common assault and battery. The magistrate, a born
snob and the voluntary creature of the now powerful Gildersleeve family,
imposed a fine of fifty dollars, in default of which young Carlstone was
to spend six months in jail.
“Staunch old friends of John Carlstone came to the rescue of his
unfortunate son. They engaged a lawyer to defend him, and when he was
sentenced, they supplied his fine that he might not have to bear the
further ignominy of spending a term in jail. They even went further and
started to raise a fund to defray the legal expenses of a fight for his
rights in the courts.
“But it turned out that what Norman T. Gildersleeve had said was based on
the Law—the Law which was made to crush the souls of the unfortunate and
to protect the smug hypocrites who revere it and Gold as their
established gods. John Carlstone’s first marriage to an Indian chief’s
daughter, under the red man’s rites, was not recognised by Church or
State; the son therefore was nameless and had no rights under the
Constitution. The further fact that John Carlstone had neglected to make
a will left the younger Carlstone’s case hopeless.
“Alexander Carlstone fled from the haunts of civilisation, filled with a
consuming bitterness of spirit, an atheist so far as garbled Justice and
revamped Christianity were concerned and nursing an undying hatred for
the usurper, Norman T. Gildersleeve.
“In his soul had been sown the self-same germs that have bred history’s
bloodiest revolutions.”