But the cook had turned in and was snoring raucously when they reached his quarters, a substantial log shack that stood directly opposite the huge dining-camp. Four bunks were built into the further wall of the one-room interior, each equipped with a mattress and any amount of dark-grey blankets. The place was dimly illuminated by a sullen fire that gave out fitful, subdued cracklings in the little sheet-iron heater banked for the night with green wood.
Acey Smith lighted a wall lamp. Only one of the bunks was occupied, so Acey Smith directed Hammond to the other lower, bade him good-night and left abruptly.
III
The young man did not immediately retire in spite of his fatigue. Instead, he sat down by the stove, lit his pipe and tried mentally to propound something tangible out of the hodge-podge of mystery that had surrounded him since the night of September the twenty-third when he had allowed himself to be pitch-forked into a commission without definite instructions as to how he was to act or whom he was to accept as friends or enemies. Surely the whole world had not gone mad since that hour; there must be a sane method in the whole thing somewhere, but try as he could, cudgel his imagination as he might, he could build up no theory that was at all satisfying.
Then, after he retired, came memory of the fearsome visage of Acey Smith when he had flung him off over there at the door of his office. That was no “play-acting” as Smith had tried to pass it off. For the moment the man had been in deadly earnest, Hammond was sure of that.
But a pair of great startled, blue eyes under fine, high-arched eyebrows, came to drive all other haunts of the night away. Those eyes seemed to speak at him out of the shadows, and the fear in them took him back again to the night of the twenty-third when Fate had literally seized him by the scruff of the neck, yanked him out of a commonplace groove in life and tossed him into a vortex of baffling intrigue and mystery.
CHAPTER II
A STRANGE PACT ON A TRAIN
I
On the night of September twenty-third, Louis Hammond had been train-bound from Saskatoon east.
The transcontinental on which he was travelling had long since passed the Saskatchewan and Manitoba boundaries and was thundering over the muskegs and through the rock-cuts in the great wilderness of the Ontario divide. While the porter was making up his berth, Hammond sought the smoker, but it happened that a garrulous traveller was there holding forth on how the league of nations should have disposed of things to bring about eternal peace, and the young man fled as he might have from the deadly presence of smallpox.