“By an odd coincidence, Norman T. Gildersleeve and your friend, Mr. Hammond, were bound for Kam City on the same train that brought you from the West. The North Star’s intelligence department had been keeping close tab on Gildersleeve. So far as I can gather, he must have gained some vague notion as to the truth of the North Star’s direction and control. He had been filling our camps with cheap private detectives of the transom and keyhole peeking type, some of whom were entertained to exciting adventures but gained no knowledge worth while. Gildersleeve was growing certain the North Star had some trump card to play, and he thought to take a leaf out of the North Star’s book of methods to get at the bottom of it and frustrate it. He concocted a wild scheme of appearing to disappear personally and gain admission to the limits in the disguise of a preacher. He was egotistic enough to believe that what his detectives had failed in he could accomplish himself.
“Our agents kept me apprised of his every move, even to his inveigling young Hammond to undertake a seemingly mysterious mission to the limits to divert attention from his own operations. In many respects it appealed to me as a nice bit of comedy, but Gildersleeve and Hammond were shadowed day and night; the former for obvious reasons and the latter to see that no harm befell him. Our newspapers meanwhile published all sorts of conflicting news stories of Gildersleeve’s disappearance; much to the discomfiture of Gildersleeve’s one confidante, a Kam City lawyer named Winch. Just by way of adding to the gaiety of nations, I wrote an editorial on the subject of aphasia, inferring that it was this trouble that had suddenly afflicted. Mr. Gildersleeve and had it published in our string of dailies.
“Gildersleeve might have been allowed to play out his little fiasco to his heart’s content for all the interference it would have proved to the North Star’s plans had he not been rash enough to think he could spirit you away from Amethyst Island right under our eyes. The plot was to get Hammond to cultivate your acquaintance and thus unwittingly lead you into the hands of a gang of low-brows who were to carry you off in a yacht and keep you on the lake until after the twenty-third of October.”
“But why should Mr. Gildersleeve have desired to carry me off?” cried Josephine Stone in perplexity.
“Because,” replied Acey Smith, “he believed you were in some way essential to the plans the North Star had on foot. His first and only attempt to seize you was staged in the woods that day you made the trip up to the cliffs with Louis Hammond. It was nipped in the bud, without either you or Hammond knowing about it, by the North Star’s faithful Indian trackers.
“There was no second attempt because I took no further chances. When I could not induce you to voluntarily leave the island at once, I had you carried off by Ogima Bush, the only man I could trust to handle so delicate an undertaking. A ruse used simultaneously to implicate Gildersleeve in his disguise as the camp preacher worked so successfully that he was arrested by the Mounted Police, and his company had to forfeit a thousand dollars bail in order to get him out of jail and an extremely embarrassing situation.
“That was the beginning of the end. I went to Montreal while the Gildersleeve crowd were frantically concentrating their nimble brains to force a settlement of a strike among the North Star’s tugmen. In Montreal I made final arrangements for the transfer of the estate of Joseph Stone to his rightful heiress, Josephine Stone, after having had the loan of it for the nineteen years it was left in my trust.
“There were just two little details left for me to complete when I returned. The one was to give you an account of the manner in which I managed your property while it was held in trust and the other was to see that there were no poles for the Kam City Pulp and Paper Mills to grind on the twenty-third.
“Come look!”
He led her to the edge of the cliff, pointing to the empty bay in front of the camp below.