IV
The superintendent placed a cigarette in a holder and lit it.
“The story,” he opened, “should properly start with the advent of John Carlstone here half a century ago. ‘Black Jack’ Carlstone, as he was known, was an eastern Canadian, the second generation of the old pioneer school and a mixture of the romantic races that migrated to the Niagara Peninsula from the valley of the Mississippi in the States—English, Welsh, Dutch and Irish blood ran in his veins. He was a tall, powerfully-built, black-whiskered demon of a man, with a heart as great as his physical dimensions—a man who was known to recognise no such elements as difficulty or danger. He was a born trader, the particular type that made good and amassed fortunes in those tremendous days.
“John Carlstone located near a trading-post which then thrived on what is now the site of Kam City, and it was not long before he was identified with almost every undertaking in which there was money to be made, bartering with the Indians for furs, getting out timber and building wharfs and roads for the government. There were few white women in the North in those days, and John Carlstone took as his wife the daughter of an Indian chief who was headman of all the North Shore tribes, and, standing little on ceremony, was married under the pagan rites of the Indians.
“With the birth of his son there came two heavy blows to John Carlstone. He lost his wife, and her child was cursed with an infirmity that came of a prenatal accident. In moments of stress or high nervous excitement, the boy would be overcome with a strange paroxysm and cry out with the weird, unearthly call of the northern loon. But this son, despite his infirmity and the fact that he inherited a skin the colour of his mother’s race, was the apple of John Carlstone’s eye. He named him Alexander, because, as he told the boy when he grew older, ‘Alexander was a conqueror, and you must conquer all this wild North Shore some day.’ It was a remark that afterwards rang in the consciousness of Alexander Carlstone with all the glamour of prophecy.
“Young Carlstone was from the first a dreamer of wild dreams of power—a boy apart and an albino among his playmates. Timid, studious and extremely sensitive in the beginning, the ridicule of his fellows begot the first bitterness that was later to engulf his whole better nature.
“The elder Carlstone’s wealth grew and grew. He became the owner of a modest fleet of lake boats and a string of inland trading-posts. Dissatisfied with the progress he was making in the crude pioneer school, Carlstone sent his son east to be educated at a private college, where the lad, under a sympathetic teacher, went far and quickly in his studies. He grew to know that he had inherited his father’s initiative and force of character along with an abnormal gift for grasping and visualising situations that baffled the analyses of others. The father planned to make a great merchant or business man of him; the son dreamed of becoming a star on the stage. Young Alexander Carlstone knew that the fire that burned in his veins was the fire of a born protagonist. But he hid this ambition from his father and even his teacher; he felt he must first overcome the affliction that had clung to him since birth.
“While his son was away at school the elder Carlstone married again, this time to the widow of Captain Norman Gildersleeve, who had been master of one of Carlstone’s boats. She was a designing, unscrupulous woman, and she brought with her a son, some years older than Carlstone’s, who inherited all his mother’s malicious and covetous nature. But with John Carlstone’s undying affection for his son, the influence of the Gildersleeves might not have cut much figure in the latter’s life had it not been for a whim of Fate and the Law—the damnable travesty on Justice that men call the Law.”