III
She looked up at him. His eyes did not meet hers and she was unprepared for the answer he gave her: “If you had asked sixty people, forty-nine who know me best would have told you you had better put your trust in Mephistopheles himself.”
She caught her breath. “But that—that is because they do not know you intimately.”
“It is because they know me too intimately—the reputation is not unmerited.”
There was a bitter indifference to his words that chilled her, a drooping sneer at his mouth and a cold gleam in his black eyes as he made frank, unboastful admission of iniquity. It seemed for a space as though the demon he had confessed looked out mockingly from the man at her.
“Yet you made no mistake,” he assured her almost immediately. “Your woman’s intuition told you aright; there is that I must assist you to learn of, even if—if I did not care.”
“But about Captain Carlstone,” she reminded him. “You have not told me whether he has any connection with the matter or not.”
“Captain Carlstone does not matter. He is gone—made away with himself somewhere overseas.”
“Killed himself?” she asked aghast.
Acey Smith gave vent to a soulless, soundless laugh. “Something like that,” he answered indifferently. “At any rate, he never came back to Canada. There were vital reasons why he dare not. But don’t waste pity on him; as I said, he doesn’t matter, and, lest you may have conceived otherwise, I may tell you there was never anything in common between Captain Carlstone and J.C.X. In fact, they were as unalike as it is possible for two individuals to be.”
His utter callousness bruised the sensitive girl—angered her so that she could have wished to have been a man to strike him where he stood.
“Be patient for a little while.” He intercepted the retort that trembled on her lips. “You shall know and you shall understand. You shall be the first person outside myself to meet face to face the mysterious J.C.X., whose power is greater than any other one individual in the Dominion of Canada, who makes and unmakes big businesses at his will, sways big men as puppets, uses political parties as pawns to his own advantage, advises and the Press thunders his words, and yet works as with an unseen hand. You shall be the first to meet J.C.X. and know definitely in whose presence you stand.”
“I don’t think I care to meet him—now,” coldly.
“But you wanted to know about your grandfather.”
“You mean he alone can tell me?”
“No, J.C.X. could tell you nothing of that. But it is through your coming meeting with him that you will learn all that you seek to know and more.”
“But why all this intense mystery about it?” Josephine Stone plucked up courage to demand. “I confess I am at a greater loss now than ever to know what all these complications mean—where they lead to.”
There came frank concern into his face. “I only wish it were in my power to tell you—now,” he said. “But it is out of my province to say more. In a week, or likely less, the appointed time will arrive.
“Meanwhile, I have to go east on urgent business,” he added. “I will return as quickly as possible, but before I go I am going to ask you if you will put yourself in my care without question as to the reasons.”
“You mean to leave here—with you?”
“Exactly. Oh, but you may bring your chaperon, Mrs. Johnson, with you. It will be all perfectly proper. Only, I must ask you to leave without notifying a soul, not even your Indian servants. There’s a reason.”
“A reason? Another unexplained reason?”
“No, I may tell you this time. I fear for your safety during the next few days while I am away.”
“But I am not afraid.”
“That’s because you do not sense your danger.”
“From what?”
“An enemy.”
“An enemy?” she echoed. “Who?”
“The one who despatched notes to yourself and young Hammond to bring about your first meeting here.”
“Come,” he urged before the exclamation of surprise died on her lips. “Say you will go to-night. I’ll come over in the motorboat this evening and we can make the arrangements. It is vital that you should leave here at once and without any one knowing or I would not ask it.”
“Without notifying my friends?”
She read from his keen answering glance that he knew she was thinking of Hammond. “Without notifying any one,” he insisted.
“Then I refuse to go.”
“That is final?”
“It is, unless I can be shown a more coherent reason for going in such a manner.”
The worried look that had come into his face receded and he laughed a queer, bitter, little laugh. “Oh, well, if you will have it so, it is up to me to change my plans,” he said. “And that being so, I must bid you good-bye until I return from Montreal.
“Oh, by the way,” he added, “if you should hear men striking camp up the trail along the lakeshore this evening don’t be alarmed. It will be merely a squad of the mounted police who’ve come to patrol this section of the waterfront during the strike.”
“Strike?” she echoed perplexed.
He walked up the beach, drew his cached packsack from a clump of green stuff and returned. “Yes, we’re to have one of those modern luxuries in the camp within the next few days,” he answered.
He lifted his hat, whirled on a heel and was away.
In a maze of doubt as to whether her recent refusal to leave the island as he had requested were a wise decision, she watched Acey Smith go up and over the first hill of the lakeshore trail. When his figure had disappeared she was assailed by a sudden apprehension—an overwhelming apprehension—that she had made a grave mistake. There must have been deep, very deep reasons for his asking her to leave the island. No doubt she was imperilling not only her own safety but his plans as well.
On an impulse she sped forward after him. She felt that she could easily get within call of him before he reached the crown of the second hill. In her close-fitting garments she made fast time, but on the top of the first hill she paused all out of breath. The trail before her down through the valley and up the further rise was silent and empty.
At a tramping sound in the brush to her left she hesitated about proceeding. It might be a wandering bear or moose.
The bushes up the trail parted and a fearsome figure strode out—a figure as forbidding as one might well conceive an evil spirit to be. His face was almost black and on his cheek-bones stood out two livid red gashes. He wore no head-covering save a band of purple which held a single eagle’s feather in place in his lank, black hair. Round his neck were hung string upon string of gleaming white wolves’ teeth.
At the girl’s involuntary cry of dismay he whirled, the whites of his evil black eyes showing garishly in his satanic visage. It afterwards recurred to her that he had at first appeared quite as startled as she had been, but he almost immediately straightened, and, folding his arms on his chest, pronounced himself in deep, strangely-vibrating guttural tones.
“Ogima Bush,” he said, “big Medicine Man. Him no hurt white lady. Un-n-n-n—white lady pass.”
But Josephine Stone waited to have no further parley. She turned and fled on trembling limbs back toward the island. And, as she ran, there fell upon her ears a penetrating, wailing cry, long-drawn-out and blood-curdling in its mixture of mockery and despair—a cry that for subsequent reasons she was destined to remember all the days of her life.