“There’s a vast difference,” coldly observed Inspector Little. “A vast difference, Mr. Gildersleeve. Nevertheless, your assertion provides the germ of a new theory.”
He did not add as the pulp mill men were leaving his tent that that same new theory presented a worse tangle than the old one.
“Stubbs the camp preacher had two enamelled patches covered with talc powder under his eyes; Ogima Bush the Medicine Man has two red gashes under his and this man Gildersleeve has two tiny white scars in the same places.” Those observations kept recurring stubbornly in the inspector’s mind. “I wonder,” he mused, “if this part of the North Shore isn’t really under a hoo-doo as the Indians say it is—or, am I getting old and losing my grip?”
IV
Gildersleeve cautiously refrained from uttering what was on his mind as he and Duff wended their way up to their quarters in one of the smaller log shacks the former had rented during his stay on the limits.
At the door, Gildersleeve paused to scan the lake and the sky. “Gad, it looks as though we are in for some bad weather, Duff,” he observed ominously.
“You kin bank on that, Mister,” offered a grizzled lumberjack who stopped in passing. “Win’s been a-blowin’ outen one spot all day—an’ when the win’ don’t follow the sun round on of Lake Supe’ you kin look out fer high-jinks in the weather line afore monin’.”
CHAPTER XXII
THE NIGHT OF THE TEMPEST
I
The sun went down that evening on a weird northern world. The wind, which had been pressing out of the east all day, had dropped as at some elemental sunset signal; but the great lake, lashed to fury, raced by windrow upon windrow of long, curling “shanty” waves—the terrible seas for which Superior in its wrath is peculiar. Three “mock suns” stood in vertical alignment above the declining orb of day, and the air was filled with a ghostly, brassy light that tinted the wild hills, the forests and the raging sea with its exotic saffron glow.