I
On the night of September twenty-third, Louis Hammond had been train-bound from Saskatoon east.
The transcontinental on which he was travelling had long since passed the Saskatchewan and Manitoba boundaries and was thundering over the muskegs and through the rock-cuts in the great wilderness of the Ontario divide. While the porter was making up his berth, Hammond sought the smoker, but it happened that a garrulous traveller was there holding forth on how the league of nations should have disposed of things to bring about eternal peace, and the young man fled as he might have from the deadly presence of smallpox.
He passed on to the next coach, a compartment and parlour car. The little smoker there promised peace and quiet. In it there sat alone a spare grey little man with a cadaverous face, who looked up from the book in his lap and gazed interestedly at Hammond. The latter lit his pipe and taking a seat in the opposite corner beside the window peered into the moon-bathed night and out over the shadowy wastes to the ragged ranges, where fitful wisps of ground aurora seemed to race with the train like wild ghouls of the night startled from their eeries by this mad, man-made thing tearing through the solitudes.
“Wild country, isn’t it?”
The voice of the little grey man startled Hammond from his reverie. “It is, magnificently so,” he replied. “There is something in its very hostile majesty that fascinates me immensely.”
“Yes? Easterner, I suppose?”
“Not exactly.” Hammond laughed. The other’s geniality drew him out of his mood. “You see, I’ve been a westerner too, and right here I feel sort of neutral.”
The little grey man laughed with him, a low, sociable cackle. “Still,” he pursued, “I’d wager you’re not a travelling man.”
“No,” a bit wearily. “Newspaper man—ex-newspaper man, I hope.”
The announcement seemed to agitate the little man more than such a commonplace announcement should. He was silent a moment while he brought forth a silver card-case. He lifted a bit of pasteboard from it, scrutinised it through his glasses, hesitated as though about to replace it in the card-case, then quite deliberately passed it to Hammond, who took it in at a glance:—
| EULAS DALY UNITED STATES CONSUL, RAM CITY, ONTARIO, CAN. |
Hammond drew out one of his own cards from a vest-pocket and reciprocated. The other still seemed needlessly perturbed. He spoke up at last as though it had cost him some effort to select a tactful opening: “And so you’ve quit the fourth estate, Mr. Hammond?”
“I intend to; that is, if I can otherwise earn a decent livelihood. I’ve had five years of the living-ghost world and I want to get clear of its grind and live things for awhile.”
“So—that is it? Quite natural too.” Mr. Daly seemed to be feeling his way, syllable by syllable. “Do you know, it is almost providential that you should have come in here at this moment, Mr. Hammond.”
“Yes?”
“It’s this way—you see: I just a few moments ago left a party who is privately seeking the services of a man of your particular type—and he wants him right away.”
“A newspaper publisher?” wryly.
“No—no, not a publisher. By George, I’ll bring him here to meet you. What do you say?”
“Hold on,” exclaimed Hammond detaining him. “What is the job and who is the man?”
“Your first question I cannot answer, because I do not definitely know myself,” replied the American consul. “But you have just hinted to me that you would like to play a part in big things, and if there’s one man on the continent who holds that opportunity for you in the hollow of his hand it is Norman T. Gildersleeve.”
The little grey man stood in the green-curtained entrance of the smoker, an expectant twinkle in his grey eyes. “What do you say?” he reiterated.
“Go ahead,” agreed Hammond. “There can be no harm in meeting him anyway.”
After Eulas Daly had gone, Hammond kept turning the name over and over in his mind: Gildersleeve—Norman T. Gildersleeve? Where had he read or heard that name before? Somehow it seemed connected with big business and stock market reports. Ten to one he was looking for a private secretary, a biographer or a publicity agent. Well, any one of those things wouldn’t be so bad, and it would be a change from the exacting grind of the daily newspaper where one was always behind the scenes of big things in process, but never, never quite a part of them. Hammond was twenty-five, the age of limitless discontent, alone in the world and intensely ambitious.
But he was far from guessing the extraordinary nature of the proposition that was about to be put up to him.