The Timber Pirate

by Charles Christopher Jenkins

I

Josephine Stone sat a rapt listener to this, the first relation of the inner story of the North Star Towing and Contracting Company’s operations. She had only grasped in a dazed way the tremendous significance it had to her personally. The magnetic nearness of the master mind that had created and developed the huge enterprise and its subsidiaries single-handed diverted her thoughts for the time being from her own personal interest in the matter. Here close to her was that rare type, a man of dreams with the will and initiative to weave reality from the gossamer skeins of his picturesque imagination—a genius and a man of purpose.

The thought that struck her was: What must this man have gone through in all those years! He had not referred to that. His stress had been on the might and achievements of the North Star. But the North Star was Acey Smith; a man’s greatest achievements in life are no more than the expression and embodiment of the hidden emotions that rule his being. These things must have come, not alone from the desire for revenge on his usurper, but from the irresistible urge of a great protagonist soul for self-expression—the consciousness of power—the restless fire that consumes a conqueror. What might this man not have been under other circumstances?

She glanced shyly at his face as he proceeded in low, musical tones with the tale. The bitter, sinister lines were gone from it now, and in their place there sat the tragedy of it all; the lonely years he struggled and fought and pitted himself against the giants of his time—anonymously, because of his terrible affliction, that loon-cry, and the calamitous circumstances of his birth. About those unhappy features, she intuitively knew, he was extremely sensitive—secret sorrows that until now had been sealed books. He had dared have no sympathetic confidante and no solace in his periods of relaxation but the voice of his violin up in the solitary confines of this Cup of Nannabijou. Now—now she understood that terrible heart-hunger that had wailed to her on the notes of the number he played last night.

But there was that yet that she had not learned.

“When war broke out and Canada offered her all in the cause of civilisation,” he was saying, “I experienced the thrill that gripped the manhood of British nations round the world. I wanted to get in on a bit of the fighting, and I wanted to fight under my father’s name. I found a way.

“Instructions went out to the executives of the North Star that the directing heads of the company were called away temporarily on war duty, and Hon. J. J. Slack was put in absolute charge in the interim. A. C. Smith, superintendent, it was announced, was being despatched on confidential business and would be absent from his duties for an indefinite period, his chief assistant taking care of his work in the meantime. This all looked plausible enough because two of the North Star’s most powerful tugs had been sent overseas when the first call for boats of their type went out.

“Before I enlisted I left a sealed envelope containing explicit instructions as to the disposition of the affairs of the North Star, in case I did not return, with Sir David Edwards-Jones, president of the Regal Bank of Canada, a man I had grown to estimate as the soul of thoroughness and honour. Those instructions were to be returned to me with the seals unbroken if I did come back. Then one night, unnoticed, I took a midnight train for the West.

“I stained my skin the copper tint it had been before old Joseph Stone bleached it with his formula, and in Vancouver enlisted as Private Alexander Carlstone. None that knew me as Acey Smith knew my name, number or battalion except Yvonne Kovenay, a rather wonderful young woman who was head of the North Star’s intelligence department. I confided that much to her, under pledges of strictest secrecy, in order that I might be kept in touch with the affairs of the North Star while I was at the front.

“From what you told me that day on Amethyst Island, Miss Stone, I gather that you have heard most there was to know about the record of Alexander Carlstone with the Canadian army; except that the story as it was passed on by others gives me much more credit for deeds of valour than is coming to me. How I slipped away unnoticed from the base hospital and reverted to the role of Acey Smith is a little story in itself, but we have no time for those details now. The fighting was almost over and I wanted to get back to Canada as quickly as possible, lest in the process of demobilisation my identity should be learned.

“Incidentally, news had come to me that Gildersleeve was organising a new company to enter into competition with the North Star’s pulpwood activities along the North Shore.”