“Salvaged—in due time,” echoed the financier vacantly. Then to the policeman’s amazement he let loose a torrent of bitter curses and flung his arms about like a madman.
V
Back at the cabin Duff and Lynch ceased their chatter about the disaster at sight of Gildersleeve’s grim, ghastly face. In silence he made preparations to retire.
Just before he blew out the light, Lynch approached Gildersleeve’s bunk. “Will we be going up into the hills to look over that secret passageway in the morning?” he asked tactlessly.
“You can go where you damned well please—to hell and back, if you like,” came the snarling retort. “Any place will suit me to-morrow—any place outside this cursed country.”
But while Gildersleeve cursed the north country, as others who have failed to conquer its moods and its tremendous difficulties have cursed it, he sensed in this last disaster the hand of an agency that was not the elements—an inscrutable, sinister agency that had thwarted, blocked and bankrupted his projects on the North Shore for two decades—an agency that, however exotic the idea might seem, had in its destructive designs the coordination of the tempest.
As he tossed sleepless between the grey blankets his thoughts kept converging on something Lynch had given utterance to in the story of his flight down Nannabijou Mountain—something that faintly but insistently brought up black memories out of his early youth. He tried to think of other things, to laugh it away as a foolish bit of imagination. It was no use—the face of a youth rose before his tortured eyes, a face handsome and boyish, but very dark of skin. It was the eyes in that face—those terrible, great black eyes where he saw mirrored in turn entreaty, despair—then black, black hate.
“Alexander!”
Gildersleeve breathed it in wretched entreaty. His hands involuntarily went upwards as he felt a stinging smash first under the right eye, next under the left. The points where the two tiny scars were stung like fire.
Then he heard. . . . Great God, he heard out in the night somewhere a cry that made his soul quake.