I
“Joseph Stone, your grandfather, was one of those vitally interested in the fate of young Carlstone,” continued Acey Smith. “The old scientist and prospector had been a personal cronie of John Carlstone; in fact, the latter had been of financial assistance to him in some of his early ventures. But in his eerie out here in the Cup of Nannabijou, where he lived to himself, Joseph Stone did not learn of his friend’s death and the disappearance of his son until he made one of his periodical visits to the city for supplies. The old man was deeply grieved and made diligent inquiry for the whereabouts of Alexander Carlstone, but the young man had then been away several weeks and none knew whither he had gone.
“Joseph Stone was himself a heart-hungry old man, his own only son having left him during an altercation in which the younger Stone had insisted on their leaving the wilderness for the western prairies where he saw a more prosperous future for both. The upshot of it all was that the son left for the West, swearing that he would never darken his father’s door again. And he never did.
“It must be stated that your grandfather, though a learned and open-hearted man, was extremely eccentric in some respects. He had invested almost all of his modest fortune in equipping a laboratory in this faraway fastness. He managed somehow to eke out a living by engaging in trapping in the cold months and occasionally doing exploring and investigating work in the then little known interior for the government. His passion, however, was for scientific research, and his one ruling hobby was to discover the answer to the riddle of pigmentation whereby the colour is transmitted to the bodies and faces of the dark-skinned races of men. His theory was that black, red, brown and yellow men were so because of the prevalence of a tiny germ secreted in the intricacies of the cuticle, and that this germ while alive resisted the bleaching effects of the actinic rays of the sun’s light. He not only pursued his research in this matter to a successful conclusion, but actually produced a formula for a solution, which, when applied to the skin, killed the active colour germs, so that only a few moments of exposure to the sunlight, after treatment, would turn dark men or red men white. Fortunately or unfortunately, as the case may have been, his secret died with him.
“It was through the pursuit of these experiments and an Indian witch-doctor, who was none other than our friend, Ogima Bush, that Joseph Stone quite unexpectededly came in contact with the lost Alexander Carlstone. The medicine men among the tribes and some of the more exalted chiefs were the only Indians that would dare enter the sacred Cup of Nannabijou to visit the white magician as they called him. Ogima the crafty was a frequent caller. Joseph Stone cultivated him because the Indian witch-doctor was something of an uncanny chemist himself in a primitive way, though there are secrets among the medicine men of the pagan tribes that it is better for the white man’s morals and peace of mind that he should never dabble in.
“It so happened that when Joseph Stone had completed his formula for bleaching the skin that he wanted to experiment on Ogima, but to his intense surprise the Medicine Man became very indignant at the suggestion. Why should he or any of his people wish to be white? Wasn’t the red man of more noble lineage and the very colour of his skin emblematic of the superior favours the sun-god had conferred upon him? Any such trifling, he declared, would bring a curse upon his people, and he would see that they had none of it.
“The Medicine Man’s word was law among the Indians, and Joseph Stone was in despair of finding a living subject for experimentation until, one day, Ogima, after a long smoke by the fireplace in the cabin, made the announcement that he had discovered a young man among the bands who should have been born white, and if Stone wished to try his witchcraft on this young man, Ogima would send him to him.
“The scientist was perplexed at the Indian’s sudden change of front. He suspected some extraordinary favour would be extracted in return; but Ogima’s only pronouncement was that once he was changed to white the young man in question must remain so and must no longer call himself an Indian. He left abruptly with a promise that he would go immediately in search of the subject. In three mornings he predicted the young man would be waiting in the tunnel below the water-gate which was then operated by hand on a given signal from below.
“On the third morning what was Joseph Stone’s amazement and delight to discover that the young man sent him by Ogima Bush was none other than Alexander Carlstone, son of his deceased benefactor. Carlstone subsequently told him that since he had left Kam City he had been living among the Indians of his mother’s tribe, and on account of her lineage he had been created a chief or headman of the band. But these honours had brought no joys; supreme discontent had gnawed at him always. The red man’s ways, he found, were not his ways, and he wanted to be away doing more useful things; to have his white man’s sagacity and ambition pitted against problems and difficulties life among those primitive people did not offer. He had come to regard himself with supreme self-pity as neither a white man nor a savage; as an outcast from the former and a lonely, discontented demi-god among the latter.
“I will not burden you with a detailed account of what followed, Miss Stone,” Acey Smith went on. “The experiment was gone on with at once, but by degrees, Carlstone first submitting his hands and face to the solution. When it was over and he surveyed himself in a glass he could scarcely believe it was himself that was reflected there, the metamorphosis was so great. Thus transformed, and wearing white man’s apparel, young Carlstone went back among the Indians, pretending to be a trapper lost in the woods. His real identity was suspected by none of the tribe.
“The realisation of what this change might mean inspired Alexander Carlstone with the first hazy elements of what afterwards became a daring scheme. He was filled with a savage rejoicing that came not entirely from vanity over his white skin, but from the knowledge that this transformation would make him unrecognisable as Alexander Carlstone, the outcast of civilisation. At the bottom of it all, though he himself did not fully realise it at the time, was a restless ambition, a consuming desire for power and the opportunity to exert that power to avenge his wrongs.”