“I told you there would be no mystery after to-day,” he went on, “and what I am about to tell you is bald fact. To-day, on your twenty-first birthday, Miss Josephine Stone, you become heir to the estate of your grandfather, Joseph Stone, and that estate now includes all the holdings of the North Star Towing and Contracting Company and the controlling share in all its various subsidiaries. In compliance with the dying injunction of your grandfather, the ownership of those properties has been transferred to your name, where they were formerly held in trust by myself and the executives of the North Star for you under the pseudonym of ‘J.C.X.’”
“But I can’t understand all this,” she murmured in perplexity. “Grandfather, I always understood, was not very wealthy. He was merely a prospector and scientist.”
“True,” replied her companion, “and in what you do not understand lies the story—a story in which I’m afraid I will have to tell altogether too much about myself.”
“Please do tell me,” she urged. “I am sure I will be deeply interested in that very part of it.”
“Then let’s step over yonder where we will be sheltered from the breeze and still have the benefit of the sunshine.”
Acey Smith unslung his pack and hung it by one of the straps on the bough of a stunted jackpine whose roots somehow drew sustenance from a crevice near the edge of the cliff. He led the girl to a seat on a moss-covered ledge and himself sat down facing her.
IV
The superintendent placed a cigarette in a holder and lit it.
“The story,” he opened, “should properly start with the advent of John Carlstone here half a century ago. ‘Black Jack’ Carlstone, as he was known, was an eastern Canadian, the second generation of the old pioneer school and a mixture of the romantic races that migrated to the Niagara Peninsula from the valley of the Mississippi in the States—English, Welsh, Dutch and Irish blood ran in his veins. He was a tall, powerfully-built, black-whiskered demon of a man, with a heart as great as his physical dimensions—a man who was known to recognise no such elements as difficulty or danger. He was a born trader, the particular type that made good and amassed fortunes in those tremendous days.
“John Carlstone located near a trading-post which then thrived on what is now the site of Kam City, and it was not long before he was identified with almost every undertaking in which there was money to be made, bartering with the Indians for furs, getting out timber and building wharfs and roads for the government. There were few white women in the North in those days, and John Carlstone took as his wife the daughter of an Indian chief who was headman of all the North Shore tribes, and, standing little on ceremony, was married under the pagan rites of the Indians.