III
That afternoon Hammond wandered out into the woods to quietly think things over. He selected a spot at the top of a bald hill where any one shadowing him would have difficulty in finding sufficient cover within a hundred yards in any given direction. Lighting his pipe, he started piecing things together as they had occurred since he made that extraordinary bargain with Norman T. Gildersleeve on the night of September the twenty-third. First, Gildersleeve had engaged him to come out here and put in his time any old way he cared to so long as he did not disclose his identity or the facts of his bargain with Gildersleeve. Secondly, Gildersleeve had confided nothing to him as to the object of his mission and had not even told him that he, Gildersleeve, was the head of the corporation that financed the company that had gained the cutting rights on the Nannabijou Limits over the head of the North Star Towing and Contracting Company now in control. In the third place, there was the cold fact that Gildersleeve had almost immediately disappeared and Hammond was left in the air out at the pulp camp, an object of suspicion constantly shadowed and still left totally at sea as to what he was to do next.
He initiated some of the methods he had used with considerable success in his old police court reporting days to devise plausible theories for crime mysteries, but none of them seemed to work. Gildersleeve for one thing was a keen, hard-headed business man. If he wasn’t he could never have reached and maintained a place at the head of a big financial corporation. He had certainly shown no symptoms of mental derangement while Hammond had been talking to him, and, if he had been stricken with aphasia, as the papers said, it must have been after he left the train at Moose Horn Station. Therefore, when he engaged Hammond, a total stranger to him previously, at one thousand dollars a month plus his keep and a hundred dollars as a camouflage salary, he must have had some deep, important motive. It could not have been for espionage work; in fact, Hammond remembered, Gildersleeve had emphasised the point that he, Hammond, would not be asked to do anything more than hold down any job that was assigned to him and keep his identity concealed.
There was every reason to conclude, Hammond theorised, that the whole object of his residence at the pulp camp was to make himself a mystery. Perhaps he was thus unconsciously impersonating some one else for a purpose that only more knowledge of the situation would disclose. This theory was plausible enough when he sized the thing up from the angle of his agreement with Gildersleeve alone.
There had been surrounding circumstances, however, that led him mentally around in circles and up against baffling blank walls. There had been the strange perturbation of Eulas Daly, the U. S. consul, when the latter had broached Hammond regarding meeting Gildersleeve, and the appearance of the dark-eyed woman wearing the sable furs on the platform of Moose Horn Station after Gildersleeve had gone out wearing his overcoat and carrying his bag with no apparent intention of returning to catch the train. A woman does not get off a train at a wilderness station in the dead of the night merely to look around for pleasure, and the mystery of her performance was heightened by her subsequent appearance at the pulp camp in search of Acey Smith. She was known there, for Sandy Macdougal had spoken familiarly of her as “Yvonne,” but had afterwards refused to discuss her.
Acey Smith’s question about aphasia that first night he had arrived at the Nannabijou Limits struck Hammond as a very, very odd coincidence—if it was a coincidence. Still, Acey Smith could not have had definite knowledge of the manner of Gildersleeve’s disappearance at that stage of proceedings. So Hammond discarded that incident as unsolvable for the present and therefore an impediment to clear thinking.
The Girl with the High-arched Eyebrows constantly limned up in the background of all his conjectures, a beautiful, distracting presence, but Hammond could not bring himself to the point of concluding she was in any way consciously connected with this queer business. She might be Gildersleeve’s private secretary, or even his daughter, which circumstances might explain her visit to the camp as one in quest of possible information as to Gildersleeve’s whereabouts. But the articles in the papers made no mention of any one accompanying Gildersleeve on his journey, and, if there had been, that point would scarcely be overlooked, though it sorely puzzled Hammond on that same score how it was no mention was made of Eulas Daly being with the magnate. Why was it that Daly didn’t tell what he knew about the matter?
Finally, there was Gildersleeve’s instruction to Hammond to stick to his post at the pulp camp no matter what happened until such time as he was communicated with. Possible happenings in Gildersleeve’s mind could not have included his dropping out of sight.
Out of it all Hammond could sift but two simple conclusions that would stand analysis, one of which was that Gildersleeve had actually been stricken and was wandering about the West somewhere without knowledge of who he was, and the other that Gildersleeve must have met with foul play and the man who was seen above Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, was some one else so afflicted, or feigning such affliction, who strongly resembled him.
In the first case, Hammond’s remaining at the camp would be useless unless Gildersleeve suddenly recovered and returned to his duties. The second possibility would make it incumbent upon Hammond to tell the authorities what he knew with the least possible delay.
It all left him in a dilemma as to how he should act and take no chances on making a blunder of things. But wait—there was one link in the mystery, one of the first links at that that he had so far overlooked in the matter of its possibilities. That link was Eulas Daly, U. S. consul at Kam City, the man who had brought about his meeting with Gildersleeve. Why not slip over to the city and see Daly? Daly might be able to throw new light on the situation without Hammond disclosing anything that was confidential between himself and Gildersleeve. He would see about that at once anyway.
Hammond glanced at his watch and sprang to his feet. A tug would be pulling out for Kam City in less than an hour. That would just give him time to get back to camp and change his clothes for the trip. He planned to spend the night and the following day in the city if Daly’s information were re-assuring. If it were not he felt he must immediately see the police and tell them what he knew.
The young man hurried over the trail quite unconscious of the lithe, dark figure that rose from its hiding place at the edge of the bush and stole along in his wake as silent as a shadow. He reached the camp, changed his clothes, had a bite to eat in Sandy Macdougal’s kitchen and hurried to the superintendent’s quarters in search of a pass over on the tug.
Hammond was due to run into two new surprises, the first of which was a galling disappointment and the second of such a thrilling nature from a purely speculative standpoint that, for the time being, he forgot all about the first.