“No, I wouldn’t say that,” replied Gildersleeve. “Stubbs at the last minute tried to prevent your getting on the tug before it left, but that wasn’t what was at the bottom of his arrest. However, you both did well to stay out there as long as you did. We discovered the North Star’s plot to prevent delivery of the poles in time to frustrate it, we hope.”
“The strike?”
“You’ve guessed it. And the strike, as you have likely further surmised, has been cunningly engineered by the North Star principals themselves, though, mind you, that would be a difficult thing to prove and a dangerous statement to make publicly.”
“But,” contended Hammond, “the North Star must have known that, under the existing circumstances, you could bring government pressure to bear to force them to settle the strike and deliver the poles as per the contract.”
“True, but therein lay the very advantage of our knowledge in advance they were bringing this strike on,” explained the other. “We have thus been enabled to get in private touch with the attorney-general, as well as the minister of forests and mines, so that the minute the strike breaks a fiat will come through ordering the North Star to submit their strike to a swift arbitration. We did not suppose the North Star was relying on the strike alone to tie up delivery, but took it as a means to another end, which, undoubtedly was to have the plants in their various tugs blown up and disabled. The blame would be laid at the door of extremists among the strikers and they would thus be so crippled they could not move a pole from the limits to get our mills running on time.
“But we took care of that part of it,” continued Gildersleeve. “We got the mounted police on the job of watching not only the booms at the limits, but the North Star’s waterfront property in this city as well. Incidentally, to make doubly sure of not being trapped, we wired Duluth to have tugs and equipment ready to send over to us on a moment’s notice.”
“You knew that Acey Smith is leaving for Montreal to-night?” asked Hammond.
“We did,” said Gildersleeve. “The superintendent took care to have that generally noised about; there’s even an item in both local papers to-night about his trip. It has never been Acey Smith’s habit to advertise his personal movements, so we can discount that as another ‘red herring’ drawn over the trail. Just the same we have two detectives shadowing the pulp camp superintendent’s movements.”
Hammond had to smile over the idea. “Might as well send two men to shadow a timber wolf,” he observed ironically.
“Or the Devil himself,” agreed Gildersleeve. “However, I don’t think there’s much to worry about in that direction. Now we’ve come to a matter that I would like to talk over with you privately, Mr. Hammond—if Mr. Winch doesn’t mind.”