Josephine Stone gave a little gasp at thus suddenly learning the real source of the income she and her mother had enjoyed. “And we had thought that all came of father’s genius!”
“But wait,” interposed Acey Smith. “Your father’s invention earned fifty times what the royalty cost each year. The Kam City Cold Storage Company is one of the flourishing subsidiaries of the North Star, and your father’s recipe for storing eggs is used in it to-day. It was the recipe which actually contributed most to its success.”
CHAPTER XXVII
AT THE MEETING OF THE TRAILS
I
Josephine Stone sat a rapt listener to this, the first relation of the inner story of the North Star Towing and Contracting Company’s operations. She had only grasped in a dazed way the tremendous significance it had to her personally. The magnetic nearness of the master mind that had created and developed the huge enterprise and its subsidiaries single-handed diverted her thoughts for the time being from her own personal interest in the matter. Here close to her was that rare type, a man of dreams with the will and initiative to weave reality from the gossamer skeins of his picturesque imagination—a genius and a man of purpose.
The thought that struck her was: What must this man have gone through in all those years! He had not referred to that. His stress had been on the might and achievements of the North Star. But the North Star was Acey Smith; a man’s greatest achievements in life are no more than the expression and embodiment of the hidden emotions that rule his being. These things must have come, not alone from the desire for revenge on his usurper, but from the irresistible urge of a great protagonist soul for self-expression—the consciousness of power—the restless fire that consumes a conqueror. What might this man not have been under other circumstances?
She glanced shyly at his face as he proceeded in low, musical tones with the tale. The bitter, sinister lines were gone from it now, and in their place there sat the tragedy of it all; the lonely years he struggled and fought and pitted himself against the giants of his time—anonymously, because of his terrible affliction, that loon-cry, and the calamitous circumstances of his birth. About those unhappy features, she intuitively knew, he was extremely sensitive—secret sorrows that until now had been sealed books. He had dared have no sympathetic confidante and no solace in his periods of relaxation but the voice of his violin up in the solitary confines of this Cup of Nannabijou. Now—now she understood that terrible heart-hunger that had wailed to her on the notes of the number he played last night.
But there was that yet that she had not learned.
“When war broke out and Canada offered her all in the cause of civilisation,” he was saying, “I experienced the thrill that gripped the manhood of British nations round the world. I wanted to get in on a bit of the fighting, and I wanted to fight under my father’s name. I found a way.
“Instructions went out to the executives of the North Star that the directing heads of the company were called away temporarily on war duty, and Hon. J. J. Slack was put in absolute charge in the interim. A. C. Smith, superintendent, it was announced, was being despatched on confidential business and would be absent from his duties for an indefinite period, his chief assistant taking care of his work in the meantime. This all looked plausible enough because two of the North Star’s most powerful tugs had been sent overseas when the first call for boats of their type went out.