IV
All the smug self-confidence had gone out of Slack, leaving him a towering mass of perspiring flabbiness. But there was a mulish streak in him that prevailed in the face of his trepidation.
He started to hark back to his primal grievance. “If it wasn’t for this strike—”
“Forget the strike!” cut in Acey Smith. “The strike of the tugmen is a side-issue that will be forgotten long before a general election can be got under way. It will last only so long as it serves the ends of the North Star—a couple of weeks at the very most. But it must last until word comes from J.C.X. to settle it. The men will then be reinstated on their own terms with full back pay for the time they have been idle. The North Star wants no hardship to come to its men out of this incident. And, if the Hon. J. J. Slack, M.P., is then still president of the company, he shall have the full credit for making the magnanimous settlement.”
Slack’s face brightened. “I begin to see the light,” he acknowledged.
“And the object?”
“Yes. This strike will preclude delivery of the poles at Nannabijou Bay to the Kam City Company’s mills in time for them to live up to their agreement with the government.”
“And they’d thus automatically forfeit their rights on the Nannabijou Limits,” added Acey Smith, but the queer, half-pitying ghost of a smile that flickered at the corners of his mouth escaped the politician.
“I see, I see,” reiterated Slack, “and, by virtue of that rider in the government contract, the limits would be returned to us on the terms of our old tender with an extension of time for the completion of our mill. Great Scott, that would mean too that the Kam City people would have a useless mill on their hands they’d be forced to turn over to the North Star at its own price. That’s strategy for you, with a vengeance!”
“Good!” Acey Smith’s approval came with a sardonic chuckle. “It is to be hoped the International Investment Corporation and the Kam City Pulp and Paper Mills Company make the same wild deductions that you do, Slack.”
Slack blanched under the rebuff. “Why, what do you mean?” he cried.
“Just this,” replied the other. “Do you think the North Star would allow this tremendous issue to depend on such an obvious and clumsy piece of trickery? Why, man, the Kam City Company would have legal redress whereby they could force us to settle the strike and live up to our delivery contract in less than a week’s time.”
“Then what on earth is the object of the strike?”
“It’s a blind—to hide the real coup.”
“And the real coup?”
“One individual could answer that question—J.C.X.”
Slack was silent a moment, then he blurted rather than asked: “Tell me as man to man, Smith, are you J.C.X.?”
“I have wondered that you did not ask me that before,” returned the superintendent quietly. “I can inform you, as man to man, I am not J.C.X.
“But come, Mr. Slack,” he urged next moment. “We’re wasting time, and I have yet some things to attend to before I catch the train east. What answer do I send from you to J.C.X. regarding those last instructions?”
“Tell him they will be carried out to the letter,” admonished the president.
Acey Smith extended his hand. “I congratulate you, J. J.,” he offered.
“Hold on, Smith,” called Slack as the other turned to leave. “Wait till I get my coat and hat, and I’ll be with you.”
He went to a locker for the articles of wear. “We’ll slip over to the club and have dinner together,” he suggested. “You’ll have lots of time to—”
There was an eerie emptiness to the ring of his voice in the room. He whirled with the sentence uncompleted.
Acey Smith was gone.
Slack shrugged uncomfortably. “Vanished,” he muttered. “I can almost fancy a faint smell of brimstone fumes hangs about the place.”