I
Strange events took place on the Nannabijou Limits during the morning of the day Hammond left by tug for Kam City.
Josephine Stone arose early after a restless night of nervous dread of she knew not what. There had been disturbing incidents that had contributed to her trepidation. When she had returned to the island after her fright at encountering the Indian wizard, Ogima Bush, on the trail, she found Mrs. Johnson, her companion, was absent. Inquiry of her Indian woman-of-all-work, brought out fragmentary information that Mrs. Johnson had left shortly after Miss Stone and Hammond had set out on their trip up Nannabijou Hill.
“Two men come in boat,” said the girl, “and big lady go way with them.”
“But, Mary,” insisted Miss Stone, “didn’t she leave any message—didn’t she tell you any words to tell me?”
“Maybe tell Mary—don’t know. They talk fast. Walk fast. Go way fast—in put-put boat. Maybe go some place big lady know, for she laugh and look—glad. Mary think she say she not come back for long time.”
“Which way did the boat go?”
The Indian girl swung her arm to the west. “Maybe go to city, don’t know.”
Mrs. Johnson must have been sent for hurriedly. Most likely she had received an urgent message from her home in Calgary. Something sudden must have happened, but Josephine Stone could not imagine the considerate Mrs. Johnson leaving without an explanation. She again frantically searched every possible place in the cottage for sign of a note that she might have left behind. There was none.
The messengers in the boat must have brought a telegram from Calgary to her. Perhaps, in her excitement, she had forgotten to leave a message of explanation. But just what sort of news Mrs. Johnson could have received that would make her laugh and “look glad,” as the Indian girl had said, was more than she could imagine.
“Mary,” Miss Stone demanded, “did you see the men give Mrs. Johnson a piece of paper to read before she left?”
“Maybe give piece of paper. Mary don’t know.”
It was utterly no use. The girl could tell her nothing, and her brother Henry, who looked after the boats and cut the wood when he was not engaged in the glorious Indian pursuit of doing nothing, was even more stoically stupid.
After a night of fitful rest, when she had tried to compose her mind that everything would turn out all right, she rose with an ominous presentiment. Even after she had had breakfast and had gone out for a short stroll around the island, the glory of the autumn morning did not tend to dissipate her depression.
As she was nearing the cottage door on her return, the white glare of a large, bell-shaped military tent struck on the clearing of a hill some distance south on the lake-shore caught her attention. Soon picturesque figures appeared about the tent—stalwart-looking chaps in scarlet tunics, stiff-brimmed stetsons and dark trousers with wide gold braid stripes. She instantly recognised them as Canadian mounted police and remembered that Acey Smith had said the day previous that an outpost of the mounties would possibly be stationed somewhere near Amethyst Island.
The young policemen were busying themselves about a small camp-fire, evidently preparing an outdoor breakfast, their gay chatter and outbursts of laughter ringing strangely clear on the limpid morning air. . . . Then from out of the woods there came a single soft stroke of the gong of Nannabijou.
The figures round the camp-fire stood one moment in silent mystification; then, as if they had simultaneously made the discovery, their gaze was turned on the figure of Josephine Stone. One of the men focussed a field-glass upon her, and the girl, embarrassed by the attention she was provoking, moved back into the shelter of the trees.
She could not bear to return to the interior of the cottage. An overpowering sense of an intangible something out there in the woods had taken such a hold on her she quaked at times as with the cold. It was as if unseen eyes watched her every movement from the fastnesses; as though a designing, hating presence prowled out there, always watching—waiting. She could not entirely account for the sensation. So far, she had never been afraid, alone as she and Mrs. Johnson had been so far as white company was concerned. Partly, of course, it came of her fright at the unexpected meeting with Ogima Bush on the trail, the unexplained departure of Mrs. Johnson and the urgent demand of Acey Smith that she leave the island, because of an unnamed danger, until the appointed time for meeting J.C.X.
J.C.X.!
The very name now seemed to fill her with dread. Previously she had pictured a dashing czar of the bush camps, handsome as he was poetic by nature. At one time she had even suspected that J.C.X. was none other than Acey Smith himself. Now she knew that could not be the fact; she knew now that the timber boss of the Nannabijou Limits, iron man though he was in other respects, bent abjectly to the sinister influence and will of some powerful factor he lived in constant dread of and dare not explain. The remorse that had been in his tones when yesterday he had spoken of “the Man That Might Have Been” had uttered volumes as to the mental and spiritual shackles he had allowed to be placed upon his better self. Why had he so contemptuously referred to the tragic ending of the career of Captain Carlstone? Had the gallant soldier also been vassal to the grim J.C.X. and killed himself to escape his despair?
She now heartily wished she had never come to Amethyst Island—that she had not pressed on Acey Smith to bring about a meeting with J.C.X. If J.C.X. were a presentable human being of sane and upright character, why was it not possible for Acey Smith to induce him to come to meet her, instead of asking her, an unprotected stranger, to journey she knew not where to gain the information referred to in his letter? True, she trusted Acey Smith so far as her personal safety was concerned; her woman’s intuition told her that, away from the weird outside influence that seemed to dominate him body and soul, he possessed the born instincts of a gentleman—but, under its sway, it was problematical what he might not be capable of doing.
That was one of the reasons she had refused to leave the island for an undesignated destination without notifying any one—the other was Louis Hammond. Louis Hammond would surely come to-day—when she so sorely needed him. Instinctively her eyes searched the lakeshore trail in search of a youthful, buoyant figure.