II
The tempest broke over Nannabijou camp in shrieking fury between seven and eight o’clock out of a night of stygian blackness. It came a great gust that screamed and skirled overhead like legions of the damned on a terrestrial rampage. Tents of the Mounties along the waterfront were overthrown by the first blast and pressed flat as before the smash of a giant’s hand. Great trees were bent and twisted until they turned over at the roots or broke at the base like matches.
The rain was flung down with the wind in great drenching splashes that beat through crevices of the windows and doors of the camp buildings in hissing jets of spray. Every path and roadway into the hills was transformed into a miniature torrent racing down to the bay.
It was a night such as mocks the courage of the stouthearted and sends the wonder-fright of children into the beings of men. Every living thing in the camp scuttled to the most convenient shelter, except the patrolling policemen, who maintained their beats like fantastic wraiths of the storm the while their searchlights played feebly into the murk and downpour over the field of pulpwood booms in the bay.
Secure in a stout log cabin, Norman T. Gildersleeve and Artemus Duff sat by a roaring fire in a sheet-iron Queen heater. Duff, twisting his inevitable dead cigar from corner to corner of his mouth, was obviously trying to conceal the nervousness that was upon him. At each succeeding blast of the storm, which seemed to swoop down upon the cabin like a demon bent on pressing it into the face of the earth, and at the intermittent crash of falling timber, he would half start from his chair, his fat cheeks blanching with terror and his chubby knees quaking. Gildersleeve, whose early life had inured him to the savage moods of the North, sat silent, imperturbable, as though engrossed with some irrelevant problem.
Suddenly the millionaire, like one awaking from a doze, straightened in his chair and lit a fresh cigar. “Gad, what a night, Duff,” he mused. “What a hell of a night.” He glanced at his watch. “I wonder what in blazes has become of my man, Lynch?”
“If he’s up there—in this—” Duff waved excitedly in the direction of the hills. “If he’s up there—he’s likely got his—by now.”
“The confounded idiot!” stormed Gildersleeve with unfeeling heat. “He ought to have had sense enough to get out of the timber when he saw what was coming. Even a child would know enough to do that.”
“Maybe when he saw it coming he decided to stay in some safe place until it was over.”
“No—not Lynch. He’s scared plain stiff of the bush at night. For a detective who’s done dirty, risky jobs all over the country he’s the veriest coward in the woods after nightfall. He’d sneak into a king’s bed chamber and steal his private papers for a ten-dollar bill, but he wouldn’t go into the big timber after sun-down for a million.”
“Then—what do you think—could have happened to him?” Duff was glad of any diversion, gruesome or otherwise, that might take his thoughts off the raging of the storm outside.
“It’s hard to say, Duff.” Gildersleeve got up and paced the floor. “He must have met with some accident; twisted an ankle in the windfalls, fallen over a cliff, or else—well, it’s hard to say—”
He stopped in his tracks as a scraping thud resounded at the cabin door.
Duff lurched to his feet as the door sprang open and the bedraggled figure of a man thrust itself across the threshold accompanied by a welter of flying rain that spattered across the floor to the wall beyond.
“Lynch!” gasped Gildersleeve.
“That’s me—least—what’s left—of me,” asserted the newcomer between panting gasps as he crowded the door shut.
He was a wiry-looking little man with a face like a rat; beady eyes back of an insignificant nose, high upper lip and receding chin. He immediately proceeded to divest himself of his reefer and boots and stood up a-drip and steaming by the sheet-iron stove.
“That’s right, Lynch,” approved Gildersleeve, “let your clothes dry on you, and you won’t catch cold. Here, have a bolt of Scotch.” He poured out a stout bracer from a silver pocket-flask into a metal cup and handed it to Lynch who downed it neat at a gulp, his beady eyes glittering. “There,” said Gildersleeve, “that’ll make a new man of you, Lynch. How is it you didn’t strike out for camp before it got dark and the storm came up?”
“Got lost,” explained Lynch. “Didn’t notice it was getting late until it was near sun-down. Tried to make a short cut through the bush to the creek and lost my bearings in that rotten mess. Couldn’t see the sun or a blessed thing to guide me out. Struggled in all kinds of circles through windfalls breast-high and every time I’d stop for breath I’d hear sneaking sounds all round me like things watching for me to fall so they could jump me while I was down.
“Then—then—I heard a horrible yell. No, it wasn’t a yell either; it was like wailing and laughing all mixed up. It made my blood run cold. I can hear it yet.
“Ugh!” He shuddered. “I don’t know which was the worst—floundering round in the windfalls or coming down the trail in the hurricane with deadfalls smashing down in the wind everywhere. I nearly got mine with falling timber a dozen times, and every ten steps or so I’d go flying on my face in the muck. I wouldn’t go through it again for a hundred thousand.”