I
When Acey Smith returned to his office after seeing Hammond to his sleeping quarters the night the latter arrived at the Nannabijou Limits, he sat long by his desk in strange cogitation, his eyes narrowed to brooding slits, his mouth drawn over his even white teeth until it became a long cruel hairline in a face that no longer masked its ruthless craftiness. Acey Smith believed the faculties became most acute after midnight. Most of the problems that arose in the province of his activities were solved in the dead hours of the night. And when a light burned late in Acey Smith’s office—well, there were sometimes orders to execute that proved an unlovely surprise for one or more persons of consequence on the morrow.
Of all the executives of the North Star Towing and Contracting Company and its subsidiaries Acey Smith was the deepest enigma; a man who lived for the most part to himself, kept no counsel with his fellows. Of his antecedents there was little known. He had risen from the obscurity of dear knows where to the post of superintendent for the North Star Company; in fact had been its chief out-of-doors executive since its inception as a one-tug-and-barge salvaging and towing concern. He had seen it rise to a position dominating the marine business of the upper lakes and spread out commercial branches into the lumber limits, the fur territories, urban manufacturing and even the grain belts of the prairie west. The North Star became the mightiest commercial octopus of the North and the Northwest, but Acey Smith never moved beyond the post of superintendent for the parent company and general over-man of the subsidiaries.
Why this was so not even his brother executives of the North Star enterprises could understand. That he “held cards” with the executives of the company was current belief. Some declared he was more in their confidence than the president, Hon. J. J. Slack himself. Deeper ones sensed some secret personal barrier that precluded his promotion.
In truth, there were times when Acey Smith cursed bitterly a creature that had put a curse upon him through his mother—startled her before he was born with a black curse that stuck.
The Latin races in the cutting gangs steadfastly held Acey Smith was in league with the Evil One, a superstition which gained weight from a tale of old-timers of how he had once broken a Finnish bully of the camps with his bare hands. Smith had gone out to reprimand the Finn for causing a disturbance, whereat the latter made use of a name that is a fighting-word wherever men revere the honour of their parents.
The superintendent’s form leaped out of his mackinaw like the unsheathing of a rapier. The giant rushed him with a roar; flailed at him with his great ape-like arms, intending first to knock him to the ground and then stamp and lacerate him with his caulked boots, after a refined custom of victors in back-country encounters of those days.
Instead, the great Finn halted abruptly a few feet from Acey Smith with a queer sound that was half sob, half moan.
The Boss’s arms had shot out like flickers of light to the throat and face of the other, and what happened after that would pale the story of the cruellest one-sided prizefight on record. They carried the Finn away a bleeding, quivering mass with a head that wabbled weirdly on a swollen, distorted neck.
It was the Finn’s last fight. Just what happened he never told, and at mention of it he would jabber incoherent things through teeth that chattered like those of one in the grip of the ague. When he recovered sufficiently to get upon his feet, he left camp at a limping run and was never seen in those precincts again.
It was the look upon Acey Smith’s face on that occasion that left an indelible impress upon the memory of witnesses—a light of incarnate fury and hate that sat there while he pummelled the other into a pulp. None had ever seen such a baneful gleam on the face of a man, and among those hard-bitten, devil-may-care lumber-jacks there was none who wished to ever look upon its like again.
What the witnesses to that fight had seen in Acey Smith’s face was a something that was always there, subdued almost beyond detection in his normal moments, but ever leaping in flickers to his features when powerful impulses were upon him—an all-crushing, sinister thing that seemed to be crying out from within him: “Destroy! Destroy! Destroy!”
That was what Louis Hammond had seen, momentarily, when Acey Smith had gripped his wrist at the door. It had brought upon Hammond an unknown fear that it took all his strength of will to hide.
But now, in the privacy of his midnight meditations, conflicting emotions were mirrored in the countenance of the master of the Nannabijou camps. As he sat pondering by his desk the remnants of that evil light leaped alternately to his eyes only to dissipate in a softer glow that seemed to signal the triumph of some better element of his nature.
Two problems assailed Acey Smith—one the hidden reason for sending Louis Hammond to the limits and the other the haunting eyes of a beautiful woman whose visit to his office earlier in the evening had brought a magical surprise.
It was not that either of their visits was unexpected. He had been apprised of their coming through the North Star’s own channels of information. “As for Hammond,” he finally deduced, “he’s merely a stool-pigeon—nothing more. But for what purpose? There’s what must be found out right away.”
He picked up Slack’s letter of introduction. It was a somewhat different epistle from what he had inferred it was to Hammond:—
Dear A.C.S.—The bearer, one Louis Hammond, has evidently got something on the Big Quarry, who wants us to keep him hidden on the limits at a good salary. It might be a good idea to hang onto him and draw him out. What he knows might be of value to us.
J. J. Slack
Acey Smith tore the letter into tiny shreds and dropped them into the stove. “Slack,” he passed judgment, “has about as much real thinking matter above his eyebrows as a yellow chipmunk.”