IV
The plump figure and ruddy visage of Sandy Macdougal appeared momentarily at the cabin doorway and he flung a bundle of newspapers across at Hammond. “The Big Boss left them at the breakfast table this morning and said you might like to see them,” he explained. “I guess he’s beat it for somewhere for the day, for I saw him leave with his pack on his back just a minute or two after you left his office. Come over to the beanery for a chat when you’re through reading up the news.”
The head cook turned and departed for his realm of bake ovens and enamelled pots and pans.
That was Acey Smith’s humiliating system all over again, ruminated Hammond. Smith had eaten that very morning just two seats away from Hammond with the newspapers spread on the table before him. When he had finished breakfast, he folded them up and sat smoking until Hammond left the diner. Why did he wait till Hammond went out and then tell the cook to give him the papers? It was a by-word around the camps that Acey Smith never did anything out of the ordinary without a definite object in view. He was evidently baiting Hammond for a purpose.
Nevertheless, Hammond gathered up the newspapers gratefully. They were the first of recent date he had seen since coming to the pulp camp. The light in the cabin was none too bright, so Hammond took the papers outside and seated himself on a rustic bench back of the cabin.
The outer paper in the bundle was the Kam City Star of the previous morning, but Hammond, his eyes starting from their sockets, scarcely noted the dateline in the shock that went home from the three-column heading that fairly shouted at him in black-faced gothic from the upper left-hand corner of the front page:—
MAN RESEMBLING NORMAN T. GILDERSLEEVE
REPORTED SEEN NEAR PRINCE ALBERT, SASK.
MAY BE MISSING PULP AND PAPER MAGNATE
In fevered haste, Hammond skipped over the subheadings to the despatch below them date-lined from Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, with date of the day previous:—
To-day, lumbermen coming in from the woods north of here told of the arrival in the McKenzie camps of a middle-aged stranger strongly resembling the descriptions sent broadcast of the missing Norman T. Gildersleeve, of New York, head of the International Investments Corporation, whose disappearance from a transcontinental train bound east from Winnipeg, on the night of September 23, caused a sensation in financial circles in Canada and the United States.
Strength is lent the theory that the man is Norman T. Gildersleeve by the statement of the lumbermen that the stranger seemed to be afflicted with loss of memory. He told the superintendent of the camps that he had seemed to come out of a state of trance after leaving a train at the terminus of the bush railway and had no idea who he was or where he came from. He put up for the night at the lumber camp, but the next morning disappeared as mysteriously as he had arrived.
Mr. Gildersleeve, it will be remembered, first dropped out of sight while on a train bound from Winnipeg, Man., to Kam City, Ont. His intended visit to the latter place, it is understood, was in connection with the construction of the Kam City Pulp and Paper Mills plant, a Canadian subsidiary of the International Investments Corporation, now being erected at the lakeport town.
Since Mr. Gildersleeve’s disappearance the police of the Dominion have been vainly scouring the country for trace of him. The news from the McKenzie Camps to-day will no doubt provide a fresh trail, though how Mr. Gildersleeve could travel back west almost a thousand miles without being identified by some one, particularly trainmen, is beyond the comprehension of authorities here.
There followed a grist of newspaper theories in which Hammond was not particularly interested. He scanned thoroughly the newspaper and two others in the bundle, but found no other items throwing further light on the mystery. An editorial in the edition he had first read caught his eye. It dealt with the odd circumstances of Norman T. Gildersleeve’s disappearance and was headed:—
APHASIA, OR LOSS OF IDENTITY
Aphasia—aphasia—where had Hammond recently heard or read that word? Then with an electric start he remembered that disconcerting first question Acey Smith had flung at him the night he arrived at the pulp camp: “What do you know about aphasia?”
A coincidence it must have been, he reflected on calmer deduction. Acey Smith, out here at the pulp limits, twenty miles from the nearest outpost of civilisation, could then have no knowledge of Gildersleeve’s disappearance several hundred miles west of the port of Kam City.
And yet—yet the Girl with the High-Arched Eye-brows had just been in to see Smith previous to Hammond’s visit. She had been in the same coach of the transcontinental when Gildersleeve had left the train at Moose Horn Station and failed to return—and her nervous perturbation on two occasions when she had caught sight of Hammond had been marked.
Great heavens, it could not be that she—this beautiful creature he had dreamed about, whose wondrous blue eyes haunted his waking hours—that she knew and had carried the news to Acey Smith! Hammond tried to banish the thought as a low, unfounded suspicion. It was merely a sinister muddle of events, he told himself, into which she, more so than himself, had been innocently drawn. That was it—certainly that was it.
He leaped to his feet and turned at a raucous, croaking sound behind him.
A hoarse, half-angry, half-startled exclamation came through his teeth as his gaze fell upon the gloomy, spectrelike figure of Ogima Bush the Medicine Man standing between two birch trees directly behind his seat. The Indian was as immovable, as untouched in face by any human emotion as if he had always stood there a carved figure in wood. The scars on his cheek-bones gleamed in fresh and horrid scarlet lividity, and his eyes with their garish white setting glowed like embers of hate in a gargoyle of unspeakable wickedness.
“What do you want?” demanded Hammond sharply.
“Un-n-n-n ugh.” The Medicine Man’s eyes centred on Hammond much as they might have had he been a passing wesse-ke-jak while he gutturalled it. “Ogima Bush takes what he wants. Kaw-gaygo esca-boba?”
He turned leisurely, chuckling queerly in his throat as he uttered the question in Objibiwa.
Then he strode off into the bush quite unconcerned as to what answer Hammond might make.