THE JUDGMENT OF THE LOWLY
I
JOSEPHINE STONE and Acey Smith descended the cliff and walked to the
upper tunnel at the water-gate of the Cup of Nannabijou with scarcely a
word uttered between them. There was a host of things she wanted to say
to him and to ask him about, but his present mood entirely precluded it.
It made her feel like a child and baffled her so that she was vexed at
him and at herself.
In the tunnel he stopped to touch the secret button. As the gong sounded
he looked up at it quickly.
“That’s odd,” he remarked, “that sort of prolonged twin-stroke. I never
heard the bell ring just that way before.”
When the water in the channel had disappeared he helped her down the
steps.
They had progressed about half way, to the point where the channel curved
and the lower tunnel should next come into view on the left, when the
deep, vibrating alarum of the water-gate gong sang out again.
At his startled gasp she turned and saw racing at them a great wall of
foaming, raging water. Josephine Stone screamed out of very terror of
it.
“Quick!” he cried as he drew her swiftly with him. “There is one way I
may save you.”
She had a fleeting vision of a group of horror-stricken faces at the
lower tunnel’s mouth, Hammond’s among them.
The tunnel and the flight of steps running up to it were but a few short
paces away, but the raging, death-dealing torrent was foaming at their
very heels and the tunnel’s mouth was high above their reach.
Acey Smith stopped one instant. The next he seized her below the knees.
“Stiffen out!” he commanded.
As the tide of water smote them she was conscious of being thrust upward
by his powerful arms, of his fingers releasing themselves from her lower
limbs and of her form being catapulted unerringly through space to the
mouth of the tunnel and into the arms of Louis Hammond.
All went black for the briefest space. With a supreme effort of will she
warded off the fainting spell.
She, with the others, was looking with horrified fascination into the
channel where the water wall had swept on and ceased to flow. On the wet
rock bottom lay Acey Smith, face up, where he had been flung by the
torrent that was cut off too late.
His great proud form, which a moment ago had been flexing, powerful
muscles, was ominously inert, and from a corner of his mouth trickled a
crimson stream.
Willing arms carried him up the stone steps, through the tunnel and out
into the open. There they laid him gently upon the sward.
The girl bent over him her hand feeling for his heartbeats as she
tenderly wiped the blood-stains from his mouth and cheek, Hammond
silently kneeling beside her.
At her touch Acey Smith’s eyes fluttered and there came a wan smile of
recognition as he looked from the girl’s face to Hammond’s.
Tremblingly, he groped for a hand of each and brought them together over
his breast.
“Tell Sandy Macdougal,” he whispered weakly, “to come up and get my
packsack. I could have wished—to have lived—to kiss the bride.”
The heart of Josephine Stone was too full for words. Silently, she
stooped and pressed her warm lips to his chilling ones. With scarcely a
tremor the light left his face and he was very still.
The spark that had been a man had fled.
II
Sandy Macdougal, who, by the way, afterwards discovered he was the main
beneficiary in Acey Smith’s will, insisted on going up alone to recover
the packsack of the Big Boss. What he found it to contain he told to no
living being, but those contents threw a light on another weird phase of
the protagonist soul of the Timber Pirate. In the pack, neatly
parcelled, were: a suit of coloured blanket-cloth trimmed with buck-skin
lacing, a pair of beaded shoe-packs, necklaces of wolves’ teeth, a wig of
long, coarse black hair with a purple band around its crown holding a
single eagle’s feather at the back, a bottle of stain that dyed the skin
a copper hue, a stick of blood-red grease-paint and a solution for
quickly washing the stain and the grease-paint from the face and hands.
Acey Smith who had been Alexander Carlstone was also Ogima Bush the
Medicine Man!
III
They buried Acey Smith on the crown of one of his native hills where
trails fork to the cardinal points of the compass into the wild scenic
grandeur he loved and called his home. There the shore-wash of the great
lake is within ear-shot on the one side, while to the other the fantastic
Laurentian ranges forever lift their scarred and battered breasts to
heaven as if in mute testimony to the travail of man below.
On the mound above his resting-place the Indians set up a great
totem-pole bearing graven images and painted faces relating his merits
and his deeds, and on it they gave place for an epitaph from the white
workers of his camps and boats.
Because none knew of any faith he held to there was no religious
ceremony; but a little later there came a strange company to pay last
respects to one who had proved their friend in the hours of dire need.
There were aged ones, lame men and blind men—and with them was a woman;
she whose daughter was a Mary Magdalene and had been snatched from the
burning by the strange, whimsical man that was gone. They brought with
them a few cheap wreaths as tributes of their regard; and, noting the
absence of Christian emblems, these simple people made of birch boughs a
little white cross which they planted in the centre of the grave in soil
hallowed by their tears.
The following year Mrs. Josephine Hammond, accompanied by her husband,
paid a visit to the grave to give instructions for the placing of a more
substantial and appropriate monument there to the memory of Captain
Alexander Carlstone, V.C. They found that the wind and the sun had riven
the great totem-pole, and the frost had heaved its base so that it fell
to one side.
But the little white birch cross of Christ’s poor remained firm in its
place, where, in the evening shadow, it gleamed steadfastly like the good
that endures when might and genius have passed away.
* * * * *
THE END