“THE MAN THAT WAS”
I
“JOSEPH STONE, your grandfather, was one of those vitally interested in
the fate of young Carlstone,” continued Acey Smith. “The old scientist
and prospector had been a personal cronie of John Carlstone; in fact, the
latter had been of financial assistance to him in some of his early
ventures. But in his eerie out here in the Cup of Nannabijou, where he
lived to himself, Joseph Stone did not learn of his friend’s death and
the disappearance of his son until he made one of his periodical visits
to the city for supplies. The old man was deeply grieved and made
diligent inquiry for the whereabouts of Alexander Carlstone, but the
young man had then been away several weeks and none knew whither he had
gone.
“Joseph Stone was himself a heart-hungry old man, his own only son having
left him during an altercation in which the younger Stone had insisted on
their leaving the wilderness for the western prairies where he saw a more
prosperous future for both. The upshot of it all was that the son left
for the West, swearing that he would never darken his father’s door
again. And he never did.
“It must be stated that your grandfather, though a learned and
open-hearted man, was extremely eccentric in some respects. He had
invested almost all of his modest fortune in equipping a laboratory in
this faraway fastness. He managed somehow to eke out a living by
engaging in trapping in the cold months and occasionally doing exploring
and investigating work in the then little known interior for the
government. His passion, however, was for scientific research, and his
one ruling hobby was to discover the answer to the riddle of pigmentation
whereby the colour is transmitted to the bodies and faces of the
dark-skinned races of men. His theory was that black, red, brown and
yellow men were so because of the prevalence of a tiny germ secreted in
the intricacies of the cuticle, and that this germ while alive resisted
the bleaching effects of the actinic rays of the sun’s light. He not
only pursued his research in this matter to a successful conclusion, but
actually produced a formula for a solution, which, when applied to the
skin, killed the active colour germs, so that only a few moments of
exposure to the sunlight, after treatment, would turn dark men or red men
white. Fortunately or unfortunately, as the case may have been, his
secret died with him.
“It was through the pursuit of these experiments and an Indian
witch-doctor, who was none other than our friend, Ogima Bush, that Joseph
Stone quite unexpectededly came in contact with the lost Alexander
Carlstone. The medicine men among the tribes and some of the more
exalted chiefs were the only Indians that would dare enter the sacred Cup
of Nannabijou to visit the white magician as they called him. Ogima the
crafty was a frequent caller. Joseph Stone cultivated him because the
Indian witch-doctor was something of an uncanny chemist himself in a
primitive way, though there are secrets among the medicine men of the
pagan tribes that it is better for the white man’s morals and peace of
mind that he should never dabble in.
“It so happened that when Joseph Stone had completed his formula for
bleaching the skin that he wanted to experiment on Ogima, but to his
intense surprise the Medicine Man became very indignant at the
suggestion. Why should he or any of his people wish to be white? Wasn’t
the red man of more noble lineage and the very colour of his skin
emblematic of the superior favours the sun-god had conferred upon him?
Any such trifling, he declared, would bring a curse upon his people, and
he would see that they had none of it.
“The Medicine Man’s word was law among the Indians, and Joseph Stone was
in despair of finding a living subject for experimentation until, one
day, Ogima, after a long smoke by the fireplace in the cabin, made the
announcement that he had discovered a young man among the bands who
should have been born white, and if Stone wished to try his witchcraft on
this young man, Ogima would send him to him.
“The scientist was perplexed at the Indian’s sudden change of front. He
suspected some extraordinary favour would be extracted in return; but
Ogima’s only pronouncement was that once he was changed to white the
young man in question must remain so and must no longer call himself an
Indian. He left abruptly with a promise that he would go immediately in
search of the subject. In three mornings he predicted the young man
would be waiting in the tunnel below the water-gate which was then
operated by hand on a given signal from below.
“On the third morning what was Joseph Stone’s amazement and delight to
discover that the young man sent him by Ogima Bush was none other than
Alexander Carlstone, son of his deceased benefactor. Carlstone
subsequently told him that since he had left Kam City he had been living
among the Indians of his mother’s tribe, and on account of her lineage he
had been created a chief or headman of the band. But these honours had
brought no joys; supreme discontent had gnawed at him always. The red
man’s ways, he found, were not his ways, and he wanted to be away doing
more useful things; to have his white man’s sagacity and ambition pitted
against problems and difficulties life among those primitive people did
not offer. He had come to regard himself with supreme self-pity as
neither a white man nor a savage; as an outcast from the former and a
lonely, discontented demi-god among the latter.
“I will not burden you with a detailed account of what followed, Miss
Stone,” Acey Smith went on. “The experiment was gone on with at once,
but by degrees, Carlstone first submitting his hands and face to the
solution. When it was over and he surveyed himself in a glass he could
scarcely believe it was himself that was reflected there, the
metamorphosis was so great. Thus transformed, and wearing white man’s
apparel, young Carlstone went back among the Indians, pretending to be a
trapper lost in the woods. His real identity was suspected by none of
the tribe.
“The realisation of what this change might mean inspired Alexander
Carlstone with the first hazy elements of what afterwards became a daring
scheme. He was filled with a savage rejoicing that came not entirely
from vanity over his white skin, but from the knowledge that this
transformation would make him unrecognisable as Alexander Carlstone, the
outcast of civilisation. At the bottom of it all, though he himself did
not fully realise it at the time, was a restless ambition, a consuming
desire for power and the opportunity to exert that power to avenge his
wrongs.”
II
“I once contended with you,” continued the man to whom Josephine Stone
listened as one in a dream, “that there is in all of us at least two
personalities—the Man That Is and the Man That Might Have Been. The Man
That Is is the man begot of environment and circumstances; the Man That
Might Have Been is the ideal we cherished in hopeful youth. For it is
circumstance that fashions our careers for us, no matter how cozy-corner
philosophers may argue to the contrary, just as the hills and harder rock
formations divert the courses of streams in their search for yonder lake
and the ultimate sea. Oftentimes, an even-flowing, placid stream is thus
suddenly transformed into a turbulent rapids, dealing destruction to all
that enters the path of its fury. The analogy holds good with humankind.
“In this case, Alexander Carlstone, who had dreamed of becoming a famous
actor in the world of the mimic drama, became Acey Smith the Timber
Pirate, a protagonist in a drama of real life, always with a grim climax
of revenge in view. As I see it now, I have always been acting a
self-proscribed part, putting into it the same intensity I might have
otherwise concentrated on the theatrical stage. Acey Smith is the man
that was made by circumstances—the Man That Is. For, as you have no
doubt surmised, Miss Stone, I was first Alexander Carlstone and
afterwards Acey Smith.
“But all this is digression. I did not at once set out to accomplish the
ambition that burned within me. Instead, I dreamed and planned and
plotted while I studied in the library of Joseph Stone. Dimly, I
believe, there was always a plan of action somewhere hidden in my back
mind, but the road to its interpretation was continuous, concentrated
mental drudgery. The element of accident has done more to solve men’s
problems than so-called inspirations; it remained for subsequent
circumstances to point the way to my goal for me.
“Joseph Stone told me of a simple tablet, that, dissolved in the mouth,
would prevent the loon-cry that rose in my throat in moments of
excitement, a remedy which I have since always kept by me. Meanwhile, in
the rôle of a white trapper, I made frequent trips to Kam City, which had
by then grown to the status of quite a thriving northern town, with a
lake port whose future was unquestioned. It was to be the gateway
between the East and the wheat-producing West just then opening up in
full earnest. In bitterness I saw the opportunity and wealth that might
have been mine; in double bitterness I discovered that the usurper,
Gildersleeve, had become the leading man of the place and owned and
controlled nearly all the important commercial undertakings in the town.
One day I passed him on the street and was thrilled that he did not
recognise me. I had no inclination to set upon him. My own calmness
under the circumstances amazed me. I could wait, something within me
seemed to whisper; my time would come.
“Joseph Stone was biding his time about giving his discovery to the
world. I was living proof of its efficiency, but there was one other
thing he wished for before he set out to make all the races of the world
white, and that was independent financial means. For the accomplishment
of this dream he depended on a rumour that came to him of indications of
a rich gold mine far in the interior.
“It was in the late autumn of my twentieth year that Joseph Stone and I
set out to locate the gold vein that he believed existed far up the
Nannabijou River. We took no guides and travelled light, for to both of
us the wilderness was an open book. To be brief, after a month of the
pack-trail and patient prospecting, we did discover the gold vein, which
gave indications far beyond the expectations of either.
“But winter came down with the sudden intensity which is often its wont
in the North. We were awakened one night by the cold and the howling of
a raging blizzard. We decided to set out on the return journey at once,
particularly on account of a shortage of vegetables and flour.
“As the rivers and lakes were frozen over, we had to abandon our canoe,
and, as we had brought no snowshoes with us, the going through the fine,
loose snow was exceedingly hard on the old man. Joseph Stone, I could
see, was gradually breaking down under the hardships of the gruelling
journey and the assaults of the cold. A cough he had developed and the
deepening shadows under his eyes were symptoms of the dreaded grippe.
Day by day his inertia increased until he finally pitched over and begged
me to let him go to his last sleep in the snow while I pushed on.
“I was carrying him on my back rolled up in blankets when I fortunately
came upon a band of roving Indians, from whom I borrowed a string of
dogs, a sled and a pair of snowshoes. Thus equipped, after I had gone
back up the trail and secured the provisions and equipment we had cached
when Stone broke down, I bundled the sick man up on the sled and made
haste to reach the cabin in the Cup.
“Joseph Stone breathed his last one night on the trail within a day’s
journey of home. Just before he died he cried out:—
“‘_You won’t forget, the mine goes to_—’
“Then his voice failed him, but what I caught when I bent near was a
whispered, ‘_to J— C— when twenty-one_.’
“With his last breath he called upon the spirit of my father, ‘Black
Jack’ Carlstone, to witness the injunction he had made to me.
“It was in my subsequent reflections standing there in the trail by the
dead man that a mad inspiration as to the course of my future operations
came to me in a flash. From Joseph Stone I had previously learned the
story of his son’s leaving him in white anger years before. The father
had never forgiven what he deemed ingratitude, and he apparently never
heard from the younger Stone again until his widow wrote of his death and
the subsequent birth of a daughter, who had been named in her
grandfather’s honour, Josephine Stone. Joseph Stone never answered that
letter, but he cherished the picture of the baby the mother had sent with
it, and, as he always referred to the child as ‘Josie,’ there was never
any doubt that his whispered ‘_J— C—_’ was meant to be Josie.
“It was like the eccentric old scientist to thus give out his last
orders. His oral will that the property was not to go to his
grand-daughter until she was twenty-one might ordinarily have presented
legal difficulties; but to me that injunction presented the opportunity
that comes to a man but once in a lifetime, if it comes at all.”
III
“I went back to civilisation as ‘A. C. Smith,’ using my actual initials
as a prefix to a pseudonym I felt would stir up the least curiosity.
Part of my plan of future operations was to keep my own personality as
much in the background as possible. I also devised the pseudonym,
‘J.C.X.,’ to represent Josephine Stone until she became of age and
heiress to the estate, but to have a legal significance as a trust
account in the bank it had to be made ‘J. C. Eckes.’ It was in favour of
J.C.X. that I filed the claim on the gold mine property, giving it out
that I was acting for this other party who wished to be identified as
little as possible with the transactions and had left me the authority to
take care of them. The drafting up of a fictitious written agreement to
this effect caused me no qualms of conscience, for I had long since lost
any reverence I might have held for legal technicalities.
“The following summer the mining claim was sold for thirty-five thousand
dollars. It was more than it subsequently proved to be worth, for the
vein was only a shallow out-cropping. But fortune was already playing
into my hands, for Norman T. Gildersleeve, who was one of the heaviest
shareholders in the company that bought it, lost a lot of money
developing it. Through the mine, unexpectedly, I had dealt him his first
blow.
“That thirty-five thousand dollars brought the North Star Towing and
Contracting Company into existence as a one-tug-and-barge concern. As
Acey Smith, a man from nowhere, I became its skipper and general outdoors
executive, but its actual ownership in the name of J.C.X. was known only
to its bankers. The general public believed it was backed by a syndicate
of eastern capitalists, a delusion I took every means to foster.
“The North Star prospered from the start. From then on its progress was
like that of a thing of destiny. Gildersleeve, who, with his associates,
had until now almost a complete monopoly of marine work, at first paid
little attention to the insignificant North Star. He was then more
concerned with city real estate and western land ventures. It was not
until it was announced that a leading Kam City citizen, holding the
patronage from Ottawa, had been appointed president of the North Star
that he became at all alarmed. What he did not fully realise was that
this political trickster and professional lobbyist had been bought body
and soul for the use of his name and his influence at the capital. He
was merely a dummy president, as all the presidents of the North Star
since have been, with no more real executive authority than the man in
the moon.”
IV
“Gildersleeve woke up too late. His first cold realisation that he had a
dangerous rival came when the North Star secured a huge government
contract for harbour dredging and improvements, for which an
appropriation of two million dollars had been placed in the parliamentary
estimates. With the money credit established by the acquisition of this
contract, the North Star was enabled to invest in a formidable fleet of
tugs and the most modern dredging equipment.
“There was no stopping now—the North Star’s only salvation lay in
continuous expansion to the last shred of money credit and the gobbling
up of every worthwhile contract. High capitalisation and enormous daily
overhead had to be met with tremendous production and what the newspapers
call profiteering on a large scale. There is an advanced stage of
development of a commercial enterprise when its directing head must
chloroform his conscience. The North Star had reached that stage. It
was a case of destroying or being destroyed. The war between the North
Star and the Gildersleeve interests was on in deadly earnest, and I saw
to it that the North Star was continuously the aggressor.
“Gildersleeve was no fool as a business man, and under his smug cloak of
respectability he knew no scruples save where the law might halt him.
But, as his potential destroyer, I had made a thorough, patient study of
his weaknesses rather than his strength. He had so long been used to
easy, safe stages of progress that he had lost the initiative of a
plunger. He considered too long and was over-cautious; while
Gildersleeve was holding long-winded conferences with his associates and
executives, the North Star was striking hard where it was least expected
to strike.
“Through a thoroughly organised private intelligence department, I knew
the Gildersleeve plans before they were put into operation. The North
Star too held conferences; but they were merely ‘blinds,’ the plans of
the company being devised by none but myself, and none knew what they
were until orders went out to the president over the signature of
‘J.C.X.’
“I picked my men for their ability to carry out instructions quickly and
thoroughly. I had no need for generals or advisors; except that their
recommendations regarding campaign plans gave me an idea what other
people, including our competitors, would be liable to conceive we were
about to do. If such recommendations tallied with the plans already
formulated, I promptly discarded the latter and set about devising
entirely different methods. The North Star never did the obvious thing,
and the element of surprise invariably helped carry the day.
“The North Star took a controlling interest in powerful newspapers it
could use, and it used their news columns and editorials in a subtle
manner that never gave them the appearance of mere organs. To be a power
in the land and so many stuffed clubs to drive the politicians to do the
North Star’s bidding, they had to be papers of the people and with the
people.
“The general conception that a mysterious outside personality directed
the affairs of the North Star had become a fixed make-believe with
myself. I actually used to come here to the cabin in the Cup to
‘consult’ the fictitious J.C.X., playing upon the violin the music that
was _en rapport_ with my mood. And with the music would come flashes of
inspiration from what I held to myself was the unseen agency of J.C.X.
It was whimsical, childish, if you like, but one must so pamper the
sub-conscious if he would have it function.
“The North Star’s great smash was the capture of the government
ice-breaking contracts for spring and fall, which the Gildersleeve
interests held until we had J. J. Slack elected to the Commons, elevated
to the cabinet and made him our president.
“The North Star gave Gildersleeve no quarter. A series of other
swiftly-succeeding coups broke the back of Gildersleeve’s control on the
upper Lakes. Soon his boats were lying idle at their docks, and when in
a tight year they were offered for sale at what would be little better
than their value as junk, the North Star secretly financed other small
companies to buy up the best of them, in order to make sure there would
not even be crumbs left for its rival.
“The North Star had gained undisputed monopoly of the Upper Lakes, and it
now turned its attention to inland activities, seeking where it could
strike Gildersleeve most vitally. It became a byword that the unknown
clique who guided the North Star could make and break other men and
businesses at its pleasure. Politicians and the so-called rulers of the
land came seeking the North Star ready to do its pleasure. It seems to
be a fact that the mob respect and fear only that which remains a
profound mystery to them. The unsolved riddle of the North Star’s
ownership and direction inspired a morale among its executives and
workers that familiarity with the master mind of the enterprise would
have negatived. Its operations and swift expansion to the exclusion of
others came to be looked upon with a sort of numbed fatalism by its
rivals and enemies. It seemed to appropriate with ease what it willed on
land and water; but none knew the continuous drudgery of one man’s
imagination to bring about those very things. And the North Star
fostered and preserved an element of colour that distinguished it from
the drab grind of most big business undertakings—it was picturesque as
well as successful.
“Before the year 1914, when the Great War broke out, the North Star had
driven Norman T. Gildersleeve from every holding he had originally
usurped in the estate of John Carlstone, and from other enterprises he
held stock in in Canada. He fled to the States, a bankrupt.
“I have given you a cold-blooded story of how the North Star succeeded.
Its operations were on a plane with those of nearly every big enterprise
in Canada to-day. Big business is war, always war—smash or be smashed.
But the North Star hid behind no smug cloak of hypocrisy; it gave no
quarter and it asked for none. On the other hand, the North Star lived
up to its contracts to the letter; it never swindled a legitimate
customer nor took advantage of a weak or struggling competitor. Its sole
prey was the Gildersleeve interests and those who stood in the way of its
becoming great and powerful.”
V
“And now I must go back to a detail that I would much rather not have to
touch upon,” said Acey Smith. “But in this account of my stewardship, I
promised you I should leave no mystery unexplained, and had not this
little matter been attended to I would feel I had been remiss in my duty.
“Some time after the North Star enterprise had been successfully placed
on its feet I had a trusted agent locate the whereabouts of Josephine
Stone and her mother. He brought back a report that they were living in
Calgary, and that the death of the heiress’ father had left them poorly
provided for. Joseph Stone’s eccentric will left no alternative in the
matter of supplying funds direct from the earnings of his estate to her
until she had reached her twenty-first birthday.
“How to supply you with an annuity that would provide for your livelihood
and education without leaving it open to discovery where the money came
from was one of the most perplexing problems of all I set out to solve.
The discovery that your father had been manager of a wholesale produce
concern in Edmonton before his health broke down and that he had invented
a secret method for preserving eggs for indefinite periods without the
use of salt finally gave me an idea. A man was sent to make your mother
an offer for the recipe. Fortunately, she had preserved the formula, and
she seemed only too delighted to dispose of it to the Kam City Cold
Storage Company at a royalty of three thousand dollars a year. It was as
much as I dared make the royalty lest—”
Josephine Stone gave a little gasp at thus suddenly learning the real
source of the income she and her mother had enjoyed. “And we had thought
that all came of father’s genius!”
“But wait,” interposed Acey Smith. “Your father’s invention earned fifty
times what the royalty cost each year. The Kam City Cold Storage Company
is one of the flourishing subsidiaries of the North Star, and your
father’s recipe for storing eggs is used in it to-day. It was the recipe
which actually contributed most to its success.”