III
“With the approach of the greatest crisis in the history of the North Star, another important matter claimed immediate attention. Your twenty-first birthday, Miss Stone, fell one week before cancellation of the North Star’s rights on the limits must be prevented. I’ll confess that when I sent you for in the name of ‘J.C.X.’ I saw an opportunity of thus mixing in a little more mystery to keep our rivals guessing just what we were about.
“By an odd coincidence, Norman T. Gildersleeve and your friend, Mr. Hammond, were bound for Kam City on the same train that brought you from the West. The North Star’s intelligence department had been keeping close tab on Gildersleeve. So far as I can gather, he must have gained some vague notion as to the truth of the North Star’s direction and control. He had been filling our camps with cheap private detectives of the transom and keyhole peeking type, some of whom were entertained to exciting adventures but gained no knowledge worth while. Gildersleeve was growing certain the North Star had some trump card to play, and he thought to take a leaf out of the North Star’s book of methods to get at the bottom of it and frustrate it. He concocted a wild scheme of appearing to disappear personally and gain admission to the limits in the disguise of a preacher. He was egotistic enough to believe that what his detectives had failed in he could accomplish himself.
“Our agents kept me apprised of his every move, even to his inveigling young Hammond to undertake a seemingly mysterious mission to the limits to divert attention from his own operations. In many respects it appealed to me as a nice bit of comedy, but Gildersleeve and Hammond were shadowed day and night; the former for obvious reasons and the latter to see that no harm befell him. Our newspapers meanwhile published all sorts of conflicting news stories of Gildersleeve’s disappearance; much to the discomfiture of Gildersleeve’s one confidante, a Kam City lawyer named Winch. Just by way of adding to the gaiety of nations, I wrote an editorial on the subject of aphasia, inferring that it was this trouble that had suddenly afflicted. Mr. Gildersleeve and had it published in our string of dailies.
“Gildersleeve might have been allowed to play out his little fiasco to his heart’s content for all the interference it would have proved to the North Star’s plans had he not been rash enough to think he could spirit you away from Amethyst Island right under our eyes. The plot was to get Hammond to cultivate your acquaintance and thus unwittingly lead you into the hands of a gang of low-brows who were to carry you off in a yacht and keep you on the lake until after the twenty-third of October.”
“But why should Mr. Gildersleeve have desired to carry me off?” cried Josephine Stone in perplexity.
“Because,” replied Acey Smith, “he believed you were in some way essential to the plans the North Star had on foot. His first and only attempt to seize you was staged in the woods that day you made the trip up to the cliffs with Louis Hammond. It was nipped in the bud, without either you or Hammond knowing about it, by the North Star’s faithful Indian trackers.
“There was no second attempt because I took no further chances. When I could not induce you to voluntarily leave the island at once, I had you carried off by Ogima Bush, the only man I could trust to handle so delicate an undertaking. A ruse used simultaneously to implicate Gildersleeve in his disguise as the camp preacher worked so successfully that he was arrested by the Mounted Police, and his company had to forfeit a thousand dollars bail in order to get him out of jail and an extremely embarrassing situation.
“That was the beginning of the end. I went to Montreal while the Gildersleeve crowd were frantically concentrating their nimble brains to force a settlement of a strike among the North Star’s tugmen. In Montreal I made final arrangements for the transfer of the estate of Joseph Stone to his rightful heiress, Josephine Stone, after having had the loan of it for the nineteen years it was left in my trust.
“There were just two little details left for me to complete when I returned. The one was to give you an account of the manner in which I managed your property while it was held in trust and the other was to see that there were no poles for the Kam City Pulp and Paper Mills to grind on the twenty-third.
“Come look!”
He led her to the edge of the cliff, pointing to the empty bay in front of the camp below.
“Oh,” cried Josephine Stone, “the booms are gone. What became of them?”
“They went out last night in the freshet caused by the breaking of the beaver-dam in Solomon Creek during the storm.”
“But those poles,” questioned the girl, “weren’t they very valuable?”
“They had not yet been paid for by the Kam City Company and they were still the North Star’s property,” he told her. “And they can be salvaged—but by no effort could they be salvaged to start the Kam City Company’s mills on time, much less to keep them in continuous supply all winter. They will be salvaged to be ground and manufactured into paper at the North Star’s own mills next year.”
“Still the storm last night was an accident. If it had not happened—”
“I did not say it was the storm,” he reminded her. “Just what made the beaver-dam go out will always remain a mystery. Ogima Bush the Medicine Man, who had led his Indians to believe the dam contained an evil spirit that was bringing misfortune to them, held some sort of a pagan incantation down there last night which might or might not explain a lot.”
“The Indians told Mrs. Johnson he was killed in the storm.”
“Who—Ogima? Not much. Ogima Bush has as many lives as a cat. But the chances are he’ll never be seen in this locality again.”
Josephine Stone turned to him. “But what about yourself?” she asked. “In your account of the North Star’s operations and the final disposition of the property you have not said one word as to the provisions made for the man who engineered it all.”
“Oh, that too has been taken care of,” he replied. “During my trusteeship of the estate I drew a salary quite commensurate with the services I rendered. I made a few investments also that are turning out well.”
“But your plans for the future?”
“I had not thought of that,” Acey Smith answered, his eyes fixing in that peculiar abstraction that made him an enigma among men. “Always I have had the gift of visualising the future; of seeing clearly what was ahead of me until now. But beyond what is now accomplished, beyond to-day, everything appears like a void—a nothingness. To put it that way, I feel like one who peruses the last chapters of an exciting tale and knows, though he has not yet seen the author’s finis, that the end is near.”
Something tragically prophetic in his tones, a detachedness of his manner and a realisation of his terrible loneliness of spirit smote Josephine Stone. Her lips trembled and her eyes filled.
“Come, come, little girl,” he chided banteringly, “you must not cry on this of all your birthdays.”
But she had turned from him. “I was thinking,” she murmured, “of Captain Alexander Carlstone, the Man That Might Have Been.”
Her shoulders were quivering. The man’s arms went out as though to sweep her exquisite little form to him, but by a tremendous effort of will he desisted and they dropped to his side. A paroxysm went through his frame and his hands went cupping to his mouth to muffle and strangle the cursed cry of the loon that was rising in his throat.
When she turned his face was the old grim, sinister mask. “Let’s go,” he urged almost gruffly. “I had planned to have you reach Amethyst Island early this afternoon and go over on a special tug to Kam City as soon as you could get ready. The Indians are waiting with a sedan in the bush just a few hundred yards below the water-gate.”
He paused suddenly in their progress toward the pathway leading down from the summit. “My pack-sack!” he exclaimed staring at the empty place where it had hung on the little jackpine.
He strode over to the rim of the cliff and looked down. “Might have had better sense than to have hung it there,” he ruminated. “Wind shook it loose and it has fallen down to the gully below. Oh, well, I’ll come back up for it after I see you down to the island. I’ll have to remember that.”