II
Hammond did come again—almost every morning when the weather was clear. They spent most of the time in her launch or one of the canoes, trolling for lake trout and coasters or exploring the many fantastic inlets along the North Shore. On some occasions Mrs. Johnson, Miss Stone’s companion, accompanied them, but most of the time they went alone, the elder woman not caring for the water. Of her past or her reason for staying at Amethyst Island at this season of the year the girl never spoke. Twice Hammond mentioned Acey Smith, the superintendent of the pulp camps, and of the latter’s strange behaviour, but each time Miss Stone adroitly changed the subject. But these aspects did not weigh heavily upon Louis Hammond; he was too happy in her company. What he most dreaded was an announcement that she would be leaving.
In the thrall of his new adventure he ceased to worry over the mystery of his mission to the limits or as to what had become of Norman T. Gildersleeve. Of Acey Smith he saw as little as possible. If Smith objected to his visits to Josephine Stone at the island he said no word about it; but once when Hammond was striking off along the lakeshore trail he turned to glimpse the Big Boss of the Nannabijou camps staring after him, a black scowl on his face that spoke volumes.
There came the morning when they were to make the ascent to the Cup of Nannabijou. He found her waiting for him by the fallen tree-trunk attired in a blue riding coat, fawn riding bloomers and high, laced tan walking boots, a costume that set off to advantage the indescribable charm of her.
She greeted him with a quaint shyness. “They told me it would be impossible to get through the woods in skirts,” she said.
“Why of course it would.” His frank, boyish admiration was reassuring. “I should have told you that myself.”
For all her fragile, girlish form he found her agile and strong as a young deer, and in her close-fitting costume and firm-soled walking boots she seemed quite as tireless as he. They spoke but little, for the ascent was fairly steep, and a few hundred yards from the lake-shore it became almost precipitous in places. At times the trail went up anglewise in a series of steps across the face of cliffs; then for a space they would travel over gentle slopes of heavily wooded territory. Always she kept to his side with a companionable nearness that made him utterly forget the toil of the climb. Over the very steep places she accepted his arm.
The trail took them to the summit of a bald hump of ages-old lava rock shaped like the top of a huge beehive. From there the view in the crystal northern sunlight was magnificent. Before them stretched the valley of Solomon Creek, and along the base of the cliffs a translucent ribbon of mist disclosed the tortuous course of the stream down to where the vapour expanded into a great spade-shaped cloud above the lake formed by a beaver-dam near the creek’s confluence with the Nannabijou River. Close-packed along the leaden thread of the stream the evergreen forests stood like spell-struck hosts in a mystic communion of silence. Beyond the creek the frowning black cliffs of the Cup of Nannabijou rose into dizzy space like impregnable walls and battlements of a giant’s castle. Nowhere in the semicircle of those cliffs could Hammond discern sign of a draw or even a path that a goat could climb.
The pair traversed the valley and crossed the creek over a bridge built of unbarked cedar logs. At the base of the cliffs the trail turned sharply to the left and followed the course of the creek upwards for about an eighth of a mile. There it again swung through the thick-grown green stuff, this time to the right, disclosing a hidden draw in the cliffs. They could no longer see the creek, but they could hear its murmur somewhere to their left.
Suddenly out of the sunlit upper air there came a sullen rumble of thunder that died away in the most sinister of echoes. The girl clutched Hammond’s arm. “I am really getting frightened,” she whispered.
“Oh, that’s only an echo of sound waves caught from dear knows where in this chasm,” he assured her. “This no doubt is the entrance to the Cup.”
They pushed on, up and up. Though fairly steep the trail was well-worn and clean-going. Soon they found themselves out of the woods but shut in by high rock walls. The aisle through the living rock finally ended abruptly, but to their left yawned the opening of a man-high tunnel along which the trail apparently continued. From out of this came the low thunder of waterfalls and the swishing purl and splash of rapids.
Then, above them this time it seemed, they heard the melodious alarum of the mysterious gong. The rumble of rapids grew fainter and fainter and finally almost died away.
“Do you think we should go on?” the girl asked anxiously.
“Let’s go to the edge of the creek anyway,” he suggested. “It must be at the other end of this tunnel.”
Josephine Stone looked up the towering black walls that hemmed them in like a prison. “It makes one think,” she said, “that there might be something in the Indian superstition that an awful spirit presides in these cliffs.”
“Nothing to that,” laughed Hammond, “but the fruit of poor Lo’s untutored mind and his over-active imagination.”
But this carefree young man little dreamed of the grim guardian of the way to the Cup which kept inviolable the secrets beyond the cliffs—a white monster, which, once unleashed, could not be recalled by its masters till it had wreaked its will to destroy.
They were both soon to learn something of it in a manner most startling.