III
At Sicamous station a railwayman slipped on board the car and spoke to Gatineau. Gatineau and Clement left the train at once, walked straight into the pretty hotel that hangs right above the lake and is the only considerable structure in the place, and, passing straight through the lounge, found themselves in the manager’s sitting room.
A youngish man with the nondescript clothes and the air of a homesteader got up from a rocker-chair and said: “You’re Mr. Gatineau. Pleased to meet you. And Mr. Seadon. My name is Cager. Plenty of news, Mr. Gatineau.”
“You sent the wire I asked?” asked Gatineau. The young man handed over a cable form. It was the wire to Méduse. “Good. Did the woman send anything?” Again, without a word, the young man handed over another cable form. Both men read it. It was to Arthur Newman c/o Wandersun. It ran:
“Arrived Banff. No message from you. M. S.”
“Blocked that, of course,” explained Cager.
“Any telephone message through, do you think, to Lucas or Siwash at Wandersun’s shack?”
“No telephone,” said Cager. “An’ then Siwash isn’t there. That is part of the news. He went along the lake yesterday—to Gunning’s shack.”
“What time?” asked Gatineau anxiously.
“About five.”
“Before those ladies made Banff,” said Gatineau with relief. “Unless, of course, they got a message through on the way.”
“They didn’t,” said Cager. “No wires, no train letters came through. I’ve been watching Siwash—Lucas, as he calls himself—pretty close. I guess he didn’t get any sort of message.”
“Not from along the lake?”
“Not even that. But I don’t know why he went. He just went up in a canoe. I think he’s coming back. You see he was to meet them ladies, and the woman, Mrs. Wandersun, hasn’t come back, or Neuburg shown himself? No—then about those people who had a letter for Siwash when he came along—I mean those neighbors who were told that he was coming, and the ladies, too. Are they in this, do you think?”
“My opinion is, they’re just neighbors. They were here years before the Wandersuns showed up. My opinion is that they are not in with Neuburg.”
Gatineau thought a while. “We’ll risk it, anyhow,” he said. “Look here, Mr. Seadon, you’d better not show, but I will. I’ll go ’long an’ talk to them.... Got a boat to take us along the lake, Cager?”
“Not a power boat, just now. You can have a skiff or a canoe.... Skiff? Well, that’s less dangerous in a scuffle. I’ll get one ready while you’re going to the Bloss’s.” He went to the window. “That path leading up hill. It’s one of them two shacks you c’n see. There’s a chintz settee on the porch.”
Gatineau was back in half-an-hour, his face was puzzled.
“Some news, Mr. Seadon,” he said. “Lucas—that’s Siwash, they don’t know his real name, they’re on the square all right—Lucas will be back to-morrow to meet the ladies.” He glanced deliberately at Clement. “He’s gone up the lake to sit at the bedside of his dear cousin Henry Gunning.”
“What!” cried Clement.
“Sure thing. Cousin Henry Gunning—he’s lying at death’s door.”
Clement stared at him in amazement. That Gunning was dangerously ill seemed incredible.... Suddenly he remembered a passage in the Joe Wandersun letter to Heloise at Banff. He remembered a passage in Neuburg’s note to Méduse. He remembered the buying at the drug stores in Revelstoke, and Mrs. Wandersun’s going to a sick friend. He smiled grimly. “That’s the shock,” he said. “Remember Méduse was to be prepared for one, and to play up to it. She won’t expect to learn that a quite healthy man is abruptly at death’s door.”
“But I wonder what it means, just how it fits in with the scheme of that blackguard Neuburg? Don’t you see, it’s saddling that outfit with a sick man—even though he’s faking.”
“He’s got more time than he thought,” said Clement. “We’re at Montreal, don’t forget.”
“With the long distance wire ever handy. He may have time, but not for a long, sentimental sickness. I don’t see it fitting in.”
“No,” said Clement reflectively. “A long illness seems barred—but, look at the effect of this sudden news of Gunning’s dangerous illness on a nature like Miss Reys. It’ll bowl her over. Coming at the end of all these lost trails and excitements, and the end of all the emotions she’s been bottling up for months, this sudden, dramatic threat at the last moment will emotionally sweep her right off her feet.”
“She’ll be crazy with anxiety—I see,” said Gatineau. “She’ll be right off her guard, not noticing anything but how he is to be looked after, that’s it. It’s a sweet move on that rotten rogue’s part.”
“Also,” said Clement, grimly, “Henry will look better in bed—more presentable. He’s been on the loose, and it probably shows. But what would look disgusting in a man standing on his feet, will only look like the ravages of illness in a man lying and moaning on a sick bed.”
“The pathetic stop,” said Gatineau.
“The pathetic stop,” agreed Clement. “And they’ll play it for all they’re worth to the undoing of that girl.”
In a very short time Clement Seadon and Gatineau were rowing up the lake towards Gunning’s shack. To their friends they would have been quite unrecognizable. Cager, the alert, had provided them with floppy hats and clothes and fishing tackle. To the world at large they were two westerners avid for the lake’s celebrated trout.
They had discussed with Cager the problem of getting at Neuburg and his gang by stealth, and decided that they had best drift up to it alone under their fishermen disguise. To guard against any eventuality, a boatload of short, sturdy, and well-armed men followed them.
These men would wait behind a headland that cut off Gunning’s shack from the rest of the lake, and at a signal, or if, through glasses, they saw any signs of foul play, they would dash to the rescue.
Rowing up the lake, Clement could not repress a shudder at its ominousness. The great spruce-clad mountains came right down to the fillet of water, hemming it darkly. As they turned a shoulder, and the hotel and railway buildings, standing up sharply in this clear air a mile behind, were cut off from view, they seemed to be plunged at once into the heart of No Man’s Land. The dark lake was stark and empty and utterly beyond human touch and help, it seemed. What might not happen to Heloise in a place like this?
They went ashore at the headland to spy out the land. From amid the trees at its crest, Clement looked down on a mountain bay that might have been the crater of an extinct volcano in the mountains of the moon. At first it appeared almost terribly empty, then his glasses picked out a shack well hidden in the trees alongside the lake. He saw four people about that shack.
One was a man who sat smoking at his healthy ease and reading a paper on the porch of the shack. One was a woman, who sometimes came out of the door of the shack with a flutter of garments. She stood for a moment, always, and looked along the lake. Once she picked up what obviously were glasses, to stare across the water. She was watching. She was Mrs. Wandersun; the man reading was undoubtedly Gunning.
Undoubtedly Gunning—neither of the other two men by the waterside were.
These two men were in a motor boat. They were obviously working with some concentration on that motor boat. Only once, as Clement looked, did they become erect and examine something.
One of the men was a slight, slim fellow with his arm in a sling. That was Siwash.
The other was a big, massive mountain of a man, who sat up and moved with curiously swift movements. That was Neuburg.
Neuburg, the murderer, and Siwash, busy over something in a motor boat. Gatineau looked at Clement.
“What are they doing?” he asked. “What are they up to in that boat?”