“As the rivers and lakes were frozen over, we had to abandon our canoe, and, as we had brought no snowshoes with us, the going through the fine, loose snow was exceedingly hard on the old man. Joseph Stone, I could see, was gradually breaking down under the hardships of the gruelling journey and the assaults of the cold. A cough he had developed and the deepening shadows under his eyes were symptoms of the dreaded grippe. Day by day his inertia increased until he finally pitched over and begged me to let him go to his last sleep in the snow while I pushed on.
“I was carrying him on my back rolled up in blankets when I fortunately came upon a band of roving Indians, from whom I borrowed a string of dogs, a sled and a pair of snowshoes. Thus equipped, after I had gone back up the trail and secured the provisions and equipment we had cached when Stone broke down, I bundled the sick man up on the sled and made haste to reach the cabin in the Cup.
“Joseph Stone breathed his last one night on the trail within a day’s journey of home. Just before he died he cried out:—
“‘You won’t forget, the mine goes to—’
“Then his voice failed him, but what I caught when I bent near was a whispered, ‘to J— C— when twenty-one.’
“With his last breath he called upon the spirit of my father, ‘Black Jack’ Carlstone, to witness the injunction he had made to me.
“It was in my subsequent reflections standing there in the trail by the dead man that a mad inspiration as to the course of my future operations came to me in a flash. From Joseph Stone I had previously learned the story of his son’s leaving him in white anger years before. The father had never forgiven what he deemed ingratitude, and he apparently never heard from the younger Stone again until his widow wrote of his death and the subsequent birth of a daughter, who had been named in her grandfather’s honour, Josephine Stone. Joseph Stone never answered that letter, but he cherished the picture of the baby the mother had sent with it, and, as he always referred to the child as ‘Josie,’ there was never any doubt that his whispered ‘J— C—’ was meant to be Josie.
“It was like the eccentric old scientist to thus give out his last orders. His oral will that the property was not to go to his grand-daughter until she was twenty-one might ordinarily have presented legal difficulties; but to me that injunction presented the opportunity that comes to a man but once in a lifetime, if it comes at all.”
III
“I went back to civilisation as ‘A. C. Smith,’ using my actual initials as a prefix to a pseudonym I felt would stir up the least curiosity. Part of my plan of future operations was to keep my own personality as much in the background as possible. I also devised the pseudonym, ‘J.C.X.,’ to represent Josephine Stone until she became of age and heiress to the estate, but to have a legal significance as a trust account in the bank it had to be made ‘J. C. Eckes.’ It was in favour of J.C.X. that I filed the claim on the gold mine property, giving it out that I was acting for this other party who wished to be identified as little as possible with the transactions and had left me the authority to take care of them. The drafting up of a fictitious written agreement to this effect caused me no qualms of conscience, for I had long since lost any reverence I might have held for legal technicalities.