III
An hour later that morning, in the cook’s quarters, Louis Hammond came out of a dreamless sleep and for some moments sat blinkingly trying to adjust himself to his new surroundings. He wasn’t so sure now he was going to like his new job or its environment. Used to an active routine, he would many times rather have had some set schedule of duties to perform than be left to find his own means of occupying his time. There was something highly unsatisfactory about the whole thing, and had it not been for the element of mystery that challenged his patience, he would have felt like dropping the assignment and leaving by the first tug for the city.
As if it were an echo of his thoughts, there came the shrill tooting of the incoming morning tug down by the dock. Hammond rolled out of his bunk and ran to the four-paned window of the cabin. The tug had already been docked and snubbed with the despatch characteristic of upper lakes sailormen. The crew, hustling off supplies, paused while a single passenger, a young woman wearing sable furs and a large picture hat, landed. Something familiar about her caused Hammond to watch by the window while she came leisurely up the camp road.
He started back with a suppressed exclamation as her features became discernible. It was the face of the dark-eyed woman he had seen get off the train at Moose Horn Station in the wake of Norman T. Gildersleeve.
She turned and walked into the office of the superintendent without rapping on the door.
“All our trails seem to lead to Acey Smith’s layout,” grimly ruminated Hammond as he turned from the window.
Breakfast, however, was uppermost in Hammond’s mind at the moment, and, hastily donning his clothes, he hurried over to the dining camp just across the road from his sleeping quarters. He expected a sharp reprimand for being late, but he was met by a genial-faced, auburn-haired young man who introduced himself as his shack-mate, Sandy Macdougal, head cook.
“There’s orders from the Big Boss you’re to feed when you like and sleep as long as you want,” he said smilingly as he indicated a place at one of the long plank tables set out with accurately aligned rows of graniteware dishes and great graniteware bowls of white sugar.
One of Macdougal’s bull cooks brought in oatmeal porridge, a platter heaped high with bacon and eggs, toast, a jug of Snowshoe syrup and a big graniteware pot of steaming coffee. Hammond had the diner to himself. He never remembered an occasion in his life when he felt so hungry or a meal appealed to him as so inviting. There is something in the tang of the open-air North that puts a real edge on one’s appetite, and there are no workers so insistent about the skill of the men who cook meals for them as lumber-jacks.
Macdougal returned from the kitchen a few moments later, and, lighting a cigarette, sat down on the plank bench near Hammond with back and elbows on the table. “I saw your duds when I tumbled out this morning,” he remarked, “but I suspected you were some friend of the boss’s who’d come late in the night and I didn’t wake you—Well, for the love of Mike, look who’s here!”
Hammond whirled.
At the door of the diner stood a weird figure. His face was swarthy, almost black, with livid red scars on the cheek-bones below each eye. Straight black hair, coarse as a horse’s mane, fell in glossy strands to his shoulders from his uncovered head, where a single eagle’s feather was fastened at the back with a band of purple bound round the temples and the brow. He wore a much-beaded, close-fitting costume of brightly-coloured blanket-cloth, shoepack moccasins and string upon string of glistening white wolves’ teeth around his neck.
His was a face of deep sagacity, features aquiline and regular as a white man’s but possessing that solemn majesty of the headmen of Northern tribes. It was made the more forbidding by the self-inflicted wounds in the cheeks, and the whites of his eyes showed garishly as he leisurely surveyed the room.
“Ogima Bush,” he announced in a deep voice that commanded respect in spite of his bizarre appearance. “Ogima Bush look to find Big Boss.”
“Mr. Smith?” It was Macdougal who spoke.
“Un-n-n-n—Smid. Maybe you know where me find?”
“Gone,” informed Macdougal, throwing out his arms expressively. “Gone away out on lake early. Maybe not be back for long time.”
The Indian grunted. “Maybe you tell him Big Boss Ogima Bush come to see him? Tell him big Medicine Man.”
“All right,” assented Macdougal.
The Indian turned and strode out, but not before he fixed Hammond for one fleeting instant with an uncanny flash from his fierce black eyes, a glint in them that seemed to pierce the young man through and through.
“Some motion picture get-up that,” Hammond observed when the door closed behind him. “An Indian chief, I suppose?”
“No, worse than that,” sniffed the cook. “He’s what they call a medicine man; even the whites out here step out of the trail to let that bird pass. Besides, one’s got to be civil to them red-skinned loafers,” he explained, “because the super. is in some way cahoots with them and their pagan deviltry. Some say he’s really one of them only he happened to be born white.”
Hammond had to laugh over the other’s rueful seriousness. “But is Smith really out?” he questioned. “I saw a lady come off the tug this morning and go into his office.”
“A pretty little devil with dark eyes and a flashy set of furs?”
Hammond nodded.
“That’s Yvonne,” said Sandy the Cook. “Yes, and maybe she wasn’t rearin’ mad when she found the Big Boss was out. She’s got to go back on the tug this morning, and nobody here, not even Mooney, the assistant super., knows where Smith’s gone or when he’ll be back.”
Breakfast finished, Hammond lit his pipe and strolled out intending to look up the camp store and secure the bush clothing Acey Smith had the night before advised him to rig out in. At the door his attention was attracted to the dock by the tooting of the tug now making ready to pull out. Two figures stood in earnest conversation at the foot of the tug’s tiny gangway. The one was the girl in the sable furs and picture hat and the other was a tall, black-bearded man in a rusty black suit, the coat of which was over-long and square cut at the bottom.
“Now I wonder what Yvonne is chinnin’ to that old goof about?” speculated the cook at Hammond’s shoulder. “He’s another character that just bumped into camp a day or so ago.”
“Looks like some sort of a preacher,” hazarded Hammond.
“That’s what he calls himself—Rev. Nathan Stubbs,” replied Sandy. “He holds psalm-singing sessions nights and Sundays, but he’s never around camp through the day when the Big Boss is here. The Big Boss gave Mooney orders to keep him out of his sight because he always made him feel like committin’ murder. Smith’s funny that way; some people he takes a violent dislike to right away.”
One of the tug’s men plucked at the girl’s sleeve and motioned her to hurry up the gangway. The Rev. Nathan Stubbs lifted his hat and shook hands with her when they parted.
“That’s funny—damn funny.” There was perplexity in Macdougal’s undertone observation. “I can’t understand Yvonne making up to the likes of him.”
“Does she often come out here?” Hammond asked it with an incautious inflection. He sensed that when it was too late.
The other eyed him queerly, almost suspiciously. “Now maybe that isn’t any of my business to be gassin’ about,” the cook declared. “But you don’t look like a snoop, and I don’t know anything that’s worth quizzin’ me for at that. I’ll advise you this much, mate: Don’t be surprised at anything you see or hear out here, and if you know what’s good for you you won’t go pryin’ into what you don’t understand. It’s a queer layout this, a mighty queer layout—and Acey Smith, the Big Boss, is the queerest thing in it.”