I
Louis Hammond returned to the camp that morning after he had parted with Josephine Stone down on the beach near Amethyst Island in a seventh heaven of ecstatic speculation. It was his first genuine love affair. The thrill of having held the svelte, firm form of that lovely creature yielding in the embrace of his arms was still upon him. He had discovered a new world—mating youth’s own wonder world, where the blue sky, the waving trees and the dancing water take on a new significance and seem to weave out of a sympathetic gladness the song of Eden’s first splendrous dawn. Ah, the magic and the poetry that come with the first sweep of Cupid’s wand in the early flush of manhood. . . . Youth that has yet to encounter it dreams not of the completeness of its power. . . . Middle life sighs for the dream that has vanished. . . . Age secretly revels in its memory as a miser gloats over his hoarded treasure. If, as the glum-faced realists tell us, it is all illusion—then, let Illusion reign!
“When all the world is young, lad,
And every field is green;
And every goose a swan, lad,
And every lass a queen,
Then hey for boot and horse, lad,
And round the world away;
Young blood must have its course, lad,
And every dog his day.”
Already young Hammond was looking forward to their next meeting—the very next morning, in fact, he planned to again saunter down to Amethyst Island on a chance of gaining a few hours of her exquisite society. She—she must be his own completely.
But always our profoundest dreams are ephemeral when grim Reality stalks in the background. Later, the natural law of moods brought to Hammond the inevitable reaction. He was smitten with a sense of duty unperformed. He could not exactly define it, but he had a feeling of uselessness, a vague notion that he was drifting nowhere. What indeed had a man, situated as he was at present, to offer a girl of Josephine Stone’s evident refinement and high aspirations? So far as appearances were concerned he was nothing more than a vagrant biding his time on the pulp limits at the whim of a man who had dropped out of sight.
An inner voice demanded he should make a herculean effort to find his bearings at once. So far as he was concerned, things had drifted as long as he intended to allow them.
He must work out a plan of action—must find the answer to the conflicting incidents of the past few weeks and meanwhile secure real and useful employment. He had it! No doubt the officials in charge of the Kam City Company’s pulp mill would instal him in the position Norman T. Gildersleeve had promised him that night on the train. First, he must find a means of getting to the city. It should not be a very difficult feat to steal aboard one of the outgoing tugs. Yet, if he did succeed in doing that very thing, what might be the possibilities of his getting back to see Josephine Stone? What if she should stand in need of his help and protection?
Hammond was on the horns of a dilemma, with the problem ever recurring to him: What was Josephine Stone doing here, and what could there be in common between her and the pulp camp superintendent?
The road to a mental solution of these questions proved as baffling as an attempt to find the reason for the numerous weird experiences he had gone through since the night he had made the deal with Norman T. Gildersleeve. All those circumstances, he conceived, had been too remarkable to be the result of mere accident. Human ingenuity was somewhere at work with its own ends in view, and, back of it all, Hammond was convinced, a sinister drama was being woven into the texture of affairs with a design of bringing some terrific climax about. All these apparent things must be the by-play of hidden plot and counter-plot.
However, what was the use of trying to analyse situations that seemed to lead nowhere? Hammond wanted action—and, he was going to have it. . . . He would wait till to-morrow, see Josephine Stone in the morning and find out definitely if she felt quite sure of her own safety in this wild place. Then, if everything appealed to him as well, he would stow away on the tug for town in the afternoon. Once off the tug at Kam City he would be a free citizen and he could make a trip back to Amethyst Island at his pleasure in a motorboat.
But the way was made easier for Hammond to reach Kam City than he for the moment hoped, with subsequent events seemingly gauged for his further bewilderment.