II
“It is not a long story,” she began. “The military career of Captain Carlstone was meteoric—he flashed into the thick of things from nobody knew where and disappeared in the fog of war as mysteriously.
“I was one of the first contingent of nurses who accompanied the Canadian forces to the front,” she continued. “I never had the privilege of meeting the wonderful captain, but everybody in the —th division heard of him and his dare-devil exploits. He was not only noted for his bravery but for an almost superhuman cunning and resourcefulness. The men fairly worshipped him. I nursed wounded soldiers who swore they would cheerfully walk into the mouth of hell behind Captain Carlstone and declared that to die fighting by the side of such a man would be the height of glory.
“With his superior officers, however, he was not so popular. They were jealous of the handsome, dare-devil captain, who seemed himself to devise obstacles against further promotion. At the battle of Vimy Ridge he won the Victoria Cross, and he might have had higher promotion as well but for a sarcastic remark made publicly that he valued the companionship of his boys more than any ‘dug-out office’ they could give him.
“Captain Carlstone was a mystery man whose previous history none knew beyond the facts that he enlisted in the West early in the war and won first a promotion from the ranks to lieutenant and then to captain on the field. He was very dark-complexioned—so dark it was generally conceded he had Indian blood in him or a foreign strain from some remote ancestor in Canada. Some were inclined to the belief that he was fighting under an assumed name.
“Captain Carlstone seemed to bear a charmed life. He was always where the fighting was heaviest and came out unscathed until his last memorable engagement, when, with a picked body of men, he captured a strategic position in a clump of woods the enemy was holding. He was to have had further honours for that, but they brought him from the wood in a state of coma induced by shell-shock.
“He was conveyed to a base hospital where he came out of the stupor a raving maniac. His complete recovery came with that remarkable suddenness that sometimes characterised such cases, but the morning following the day he became normal he was not in his cot. Not a clue to his whereabouts was ever afterwards discovered. He was one of the unsolved mysteries of the war.
“Now then, Mr. Smith, we come to the point where I became so personally interested in locating J.C.X.,” concluded Josephine Stone. “While in the base hospital Captain Carlstone was under the care of an old chum of mine, Sister Cummings. It was she who afterwards told me of the vivid story he related during his ravings of the death of Joseph Stone, my grandfather, on a northern trail years ago. Alternately, he talked of a mine and a will, most of it incoherent, but—”
Josephine Stone paused. Acey Smith was gazing fixedly beyond her into the thicket above, but at her cognisance of it the alertness in his features relaxed in a whimsical smile and his eyes came back to a level with hers.
“It seemed almost an unbelievable coincidence when I received the letter signed by J.C.X., asking me to come here to learn something of interest to myself,” continued the girl.
Again Acey Smith flashed an apprehensive glance at the woods above. “Come,” he urged, “we’ll go down to the open space on the beach.”
She had heard nothing and could discern no sign of life where his eyes had been focussed. Nevertheless, she accompanied him without question down the beach out of earshot of the woods.
He turned to her. “Your grandfather died when you were a child?” he asked.
“When I was two years of age, yes. He was by hobby a scientific man and a recluse, I believe, but he did considerable prospecting. My father was an only son, and, after the death of my grandmother, he insisted on father leaving the wilds. There followed a heated dispute which led my father to leave never to return. He seldom spoke of grandfather, and mother and I learned only the most fragmentary details of him and his life. Father died before I started to school and mother passed away a few years later, leaving me quite alone in the world, and had it not been for an invention of father’s, purchased on a royalty basis after his death by a manufacturing firm, I might also have been left quite penniless.”
“You never learned definitely just what happened your grandfather?”
“No. There were rumours reached us that he was killed by Indians in the bush and that rival prospectors had made away with him after he had discovered a gold mine. But none of these stories seemingly were ever confirmed.
“All my life I’ve wanted to learn about grandfather and what happened him,” she went on. “Though I had never known him it seemed as though he was very near to me—as if actually I had been in his dying thoughts. I had intended to explain all this to you that first night I went to your office, but—I was at first—afraid of you. Since then—”
“Yes?” he urged as she hesitated.
“Since I’ve felt instinctively you knew what I came to seek and you would find a way. I know now I could trust you.”