III
“I went back to civilisation as ‘A. C. Smith,’ using my actual initials as a prefix to a pseudonym I felt would stir up the least curiosity. Part of my plan of future operations was to keep my own personality as much in the background as possible. I also devised the pseudonym, ‘J.C.X.,’ to represent Josephine Stone until she became of age and heiress to the estate, but to have a legal significance as a trust account in the bank it had to be made ‘J. C. Eckes.’ It was in favour of J.C.X. that I filed the claim on the gold mine property, giving it out that I was acting for this other party who wished to be identified as little as possible with the transactions and had left me the authority to take care of them. The drafting up of a fictitious written agreement to this effect caused me no qualms of conscience, for I had long since lost any reverence I might have held for legal technicalities.
“The following summer the mining claim was sold for thirty-five thousand dollars. It was more than it subsequently proved to be worth, for the vein was only a shallow out-cropping. But fortune was already playing into my hands, for Norman T. Gildersleeve, who was one of the heaviest shareholders in the company that bought it, lost a lot of money developing it. Through the mine, unexpectedly, I had dealt him his first blow.
“That thirty-five thousand dollars brought the North Star Towing and Contracting Company into existence as a one-tug-and-barge concern. As Acey Smith, a man from nowhere, I became its skipper and general outdoors executive, but its actual ownership in the name of J.C.X. was known only to its bankers. The general public believed it was backed by a syndicate of eastern capitalists, a delusion I took every means to foster.
“The North Star prospered from the start. From then on its progress was like that of a thing of destiny. Gildersleeve, who, with his associates, had until now almost a complete monopoly of marine work, at first paid little attention to the insignificant North Star. He was then more concerned with city real estate and western land ventures. It was not until it was announced that a leading Kam City citizen, holding the patronage from Ottawa, had been appointed president of the North Star that he became at all alarmed. What he did not fully realise was that this political trickster and professional lobbyist had been bought body and soul for the use of his name and his influence at the capital. He was merely a dummy president, as all the presidents of the North Star since have been, with no more real executive authority than the man in the moon.”