IV
Gildersleeve was the first to move. With an inarticulate cry he flung open the door and leaped into the night.
Outside all was pandemonium. With the advent of the new terror the storm had subsided considerably, though rain was still pouring down. Men awakened from their sleep were rushing everywhere through the wet and darkness. There were hysterical shouts and coarse, ugly curses. In another moment scores of lanterns gleamed blearily in the murk and the search-lights of the police sent shafts of light playing up from the waterfront.
Twenty-five feet from the river Gildersleeve found the Mounties holding back the crowd with hoarse commands, their carbines held crosswise before them.
Conjecture ran rife. “Cloud-burst in the hills,” some one cried. And another: “Look, look, the Nannabijou River’s roarin’ full to the top of the banks!”
“The bridge is going!”
There came the wail of great timbers as they were twisted and torn from their places. As Gildersleeve’s eyes became more adjusted to the dim, uncertain light, he saw that the torrent rode almost to the brim of the high banks of the Nannabijou, fully thirty feet above the stream’s normal level. In mad succession on its crest swirled logs, stumps, whole trees and other debris from the hills.
It was a terrifying, majestic sight, this great river moving out like an all-conquering, irresistible host, and carrying captive the things that stood in the way of its might as it swept from the confining hills to the freedom of the lake.
From beyond the mouth of the river, above the din of the storm and the freshet in the hills came a sibilant hissing sound like that when waves break over jagged reefs, only this was intensified a hundred-fold.
Shafts of light from the search-lights were flung over the bay.
“The booms are going out!”
Gildersleeve stood fascinated, dumb before the inevitable. The gorged river flinging itself out into the bay swept over the field of pulpwood an ever-widening tidal wave; then the poles rose through the boiling flood, heaving flat for one instant and the next rolled forward in great jams that again held until the invading torrent, gathering head, swept them before it in tossing, grinding masses.
The unequal struggle lasted but a few brief seconds. Then when the connecting links of the boom timbers beyond gave way the whole field of pulpwood sprang forward with a mighty, grinding roar and crowded out of the bay into the raging lake beyond where wind and wave carried it off in howling triumph.
In less time than it takes to tell the magnificent field, comprising thousands of cords of wood ready for grinding, had vanished all but an insignificant remnant the backwash had flung up on the shores of the bay.
The torrent in the river was gradually subsiding now, but still the crowd hung about in the drenching rain.
“What do you think caused it!” some one who had just come up asked of a little knot near Gildersleeve.
“Cloud-burst in the hills most likely,” vouchsafed one of the group.
“Cloud-burst nothing,” derided another. “I could tell you just what happened: The beaver-dam in Solomon Creek has busted and let that lake of water behind it loose.”
“Anyway, it will make more work for the workers,” piped a loose-tongued disciple of Lenin. “We’ll be kept busy salvagin’ them poles up along the shore till the freeze-up comes and all next spring. The North Star won’t let all that good timber go to waste.”
“Salvage!”
The word rang in the brain of Norman T. Gildersleeve like a clang of doom. It meant—it meant that those poles could now never be recovered in time to start the Kam City Mills on the date set by the government.
The crowd was thinning out, but Gildersleeve, soaked to the skin, stood as one in a daze till a police officer came up.
“Costly night’s damage for the North Star Company, sir,” he remarked gravely.
Norman T. Gildersleeve made a strange noise in his throat but no more coherent answer as he stood staring into the blackness over the lake.
“But then they say that timber can be salvaged in due time,” suggested the friendly officer.
“Salvaged—in due time,” echoed the financier vacantly. Then to the policeman’s amazement he let loose a torrent of bitter curses and flung his arms about like a madman.
V
Back at the cabin Duff and Lynch ceased their chatter about the disaster at sight of Gildersleeve’s grim, ghastly face. In silence he made preparations to retire.
Just before he blew out the light, Lynch approached Gildersleeve’s bunk. “Will we be going up into the hills to look over that secret passageway in the morning?” he asked tactlessly.
“You can go where you damned well please—to hell and back, if you like,” came the snarling retort. “Any place will suit me to-morrow—any place outside this cursed country.”
But while Gildersleeve cursed the north country, as others who have failed to conquer its moods and its tremendous difficulties have cursed it, he sensed in this last disaster the hand of an agency that was not the elements—an inscrutable, sinister agency that had thwarted, blocked and bankrupted his projects on the North Shore for two decades—an agency that, however exotic the idea might seem, had in its destructive designs the coordination of the tempest.
As he tossed sleepless between the grey blankets his thoughts kept converging on something Lynch had given utterance to in the story of his flight down Nannabijou Mountain—something that faintly but insistently brought up black memories out of his early youth. He tried to think of other things, to laugh it away as a foolish bit of imagination. It was no use—the face of a youth rose before his tortured eyes, a face handsome and boyish, but very dark of skin. It was the eyes in that face—those terrible, great black eyes where he saw mirrored in turn entreaty, despair—then black, black hate.
“Alexander!”
Gildersleeve breathed it in wretched entreaty. His hands involuntarily went upwards as he felt a stinging smash first under the right eye, next under the left. The points where the two tiny scars were stung like fire.
Then he heard. . . . Great God, he heard out in the night somewhere a cry that made his soul quake.
Gildersleeve sprang from his bunk. With hands that trembled he lit the lamp and shook Lynch into wakefulness.
“Lynch,” he demanded, “that cry you heard up in the hills when you were coming down—just what was it like?”
The detective sat up blinking. “I’m not likely ever to forget it, Mr. Gildersleeve,” he replied. “It was a howl that was half laughter, half wail—like the cry of a loon.”
Gildersleeve started back a-tremble. “And—and did you see anything, Lynch?”
“S’help me the only living thing I saw I didn’t want to tell you of before—you wouldn’t believe it. As heaven is my judge, the thing that gave that terrible cry was in the shape of a man.”
“That’s all I wanted to know, Lynch.”
Gildersleeve stumbled back to his bunk leaving the light burning. Between teeth that chattered he mumbled to himself:—
“The cry of a loon—from a man. At last—at last, I understand.”