II
“Sh-h-hish!”
Hammond’s cogitation was startlingly interrupted by the faintly spoken warning as a figure leaned forward from the shadow of a clump of willows and seizing his nearest hand squeezed something small and square into the palm of it. “Don’t look—walk on—some one might see,” came a low, hoarse whisper, then the other seemed to melt into the darkness.
Hammond took the cue from the unknown messenger and pursued his way to his quarters with an assumption of unconcern that he by no means possessed. The suddenness of it had considerably startled him. Sandy Macdougal was not yet in when Hammond arrived, and the latter, sitting close to the wall where his actions could not be observed from the outside through the window, examined the folded bit of paper which the stranger had pressed into his hand. It bore no address on the outside, and the faint scrawl in backhand on the inner side was unfamiliar:—
The young lady stopping on Amethyst Island, west of the camp, may need a friend. Why not stroll out that way to-morrow morning?
That was all. What the devil did it all mean?
The young lady referred to could be none other than the Girl with the High-arched Eyebrows— Hammond’s fingers gripping the note trembled. He had several times started out for the vicinity of Amethyst Island, and each time at thought of actually meeting her turned back. Now—now, armed with this note, there would be a legitimate excuse—
At the sound of foot-steps outside he hurriedly folded the note and secreted it in an inner pocket.
Sandy Macdougal plunged in and tossed a newspaper to Hammond. “One of the scalers brought it in when he came over on the government launch to-night,” he exclaimed. “See, this paper says that millionaire chap, Gildersleeve, that disappeared off a train has been seen in Montreal. Guess the gink must’ve been celebrating with a crock of bootleg hootch and passed his station, eh?”
Hammond hastily read the headlines and the story which told of a man of Norman T. Gildersleeve’s appearance being seen boarding a train west at the Windsor street station, Montreal. That was about all there was to it. He tossed the paper down in disgust. As an ex-newspaper man he could thoroughly appreciate the avidity with which correspondents and telegraph editors seize upon every tittle of rumour while a big unsolved mystery grips the public’s mind.
“Sandy,” he said, speaking his thoughts, “I’m beginning to think there’s something in all that you were telling me this morning.”
The cook paused in the act of lighting his pipe. “Any thing happened to make you believe that?” he asked casually.
“No,” replied Hammond, “but I have had proof that I am being shadowed around here, though by whom I haven’t a faint idea.”
Macdougal with ready generosity produced the revolver and a box of cartridges. “You’d better pack these,” he advised.
But Hammond had all a journalist’s contempt for firearms. “Thanks, Sandy,” he declined. “I’d rather win through without it. I haven’t carried a gun since—”
“You left the army,” supplied the cook when Hammond paused cautiously. “I knew you’d been over there too. Why don’t you wear your service button on the outside of your coat same as I do? The Big Boss, for all he don’t let on, has got a weakness for returned men.”
“I’m sleepy, let’s turn in,” said Hammond.
He wasn’t really sleepy, but he wanted a chance to think quietly. The truth of the matter was the young man viewed that note that had been poked into his hand with considerable suspicion. He did not know whether to conceive that the intent was to lead him into some sort of a trap or make a laughing-stock of him. In any case, he was going to see the matter through.
Next morning he dressed with more than usual care, and when he had breakfasted sauntered out one of the inland tote roads. Out of sight of the camp, he cut down through the solid woods until he reached the lake-shore trail, where he crossed the Nannabijou River by way of the wooden suspension bridge built there by the Indian workers.
It was a laughing autumn morning, crisp, with that mellow sunlit stillness that prevails during the period in the latter part of September and the earlier weeks in October before the first great “blow” comes hurtling down along Superior’s north shore oft-times taking its grisly toll of men and boats. There was an invigorating tang of spruce in the air, and the mighty lake to Hammond’s left lay like a great shimmering sea of glass. Afar out on it grain carriers rode lazily, trailing their long, black plumes north and south. In the brush to either side of the trail partridge strutted noisily or drummed up into the peaks of the evergreens. In the soft blue of the skies and the thin haze of the horizons hung that infinite serenity of mid-autumn in the majestic North.
Hammond forgot about the ruses he had planned to discover if he were shadowed. The very gladness of Nature round and about him made him whistle and sing like a boy, for all that a certain shy nervousness was upon him. Such a morning breeds recklessness in vigorous youth—a quest for Adventure and Old Romance.
He topped a long slope, from which the trail dipped gradually to the very edge of the lake at the foot of a wide ravine gashed up the side of the mountain to his right to the plateau below the forbidding black granite battlements of the Cup of Nannabijou. Almost on his immediate left lay the tiny Island of Amethyst with its soft wooded groves and grotesque, old-fashioned bungalows.
Hammond’s eyes swept from the island to the shoreline opposite—then he stopped dead in his tracks with a sharp intaking of breath.
Seated upon a fallen tree-trunk near the water’s edge where her canoe was drawn up, with the lake and the dense foliage above and around her for a background, was a young woman whose charm of face and figure held him for the moment in spellbound admiration.
It was the Girl with the High-arched Eyebrows; she whom he had now twice met under unusual circumstances, once in the parlour car of a transcontinental train and again just below the doorway of Acey Smith’s office at the pulp camp. She was obviously waiting for some one. So—so—could it have been that she had actually sent for him?
She was looking straight at him, expectancy, wonder in her great blue eyes. With an effort he regained part of his composure and plunged precipitously down the trail against a wild impulse to turn on his heel and flee.
Somehow, he finally stood before her with bared head and wildly-beating pulse.
“I—I came in response to your note.” He did not stammer it so awkwardly as he feared he would.
“My note?” The finely-pencilled brows were elevated in bewitching perplexity. “My note?”
“Yes—the note you—I have it here somewhere.” Hammond at first searched vainly through his pockets for the tiny bit of paper. He felt he was somehow making a confounded ass of himself.
“But I—I wrote you no note. There must be some mistake.” There was the faintest trace of amused curiosity in her tones.
Hammond suddenly felt like one who drops from the clouds into a pit of gloom. Either he had been humbugged or he had accosted the wrong woman.