“But your plans for the future?”
“I had not thought of that,” Acey Smith answered, his eyes fixing in that peculiar abstraction that made him an enigma among men. “Always I have had the gift of visualising the future; of seeing clearly what was ahead of me until now. But beyond what is now accomplished, beyond to-day, everything appears like a void—a nothingness. To put it that way, I feel like one who peruses the last chapters of an exciting tale and knows, though he has not yet seen the author’s finis, that the end is near.”
Something tragically prophetic in his tones, a detachedness of his manner and a realisation of his terrible loneliness of spirit smote Josephine Stone. Her lips trembled and her eyes filled.
“Come, come, little girl,” he chided banteringly, “you must not cry on this of all your birthdays.”
But she had turned from him. “I was thinking,” she murmured, “of Captain Alexander Carlstone, the Man That Might Have Been.”
Her shoulders were quivering. The man’s arms went out as though to sweep her exquisite little form to him, but by a tremendous effort of will he desisted and they dropped to his side. A paroxysm went through his frame and his hands went cupping to his mouth to muffle and strangle the cursed cry of the loon that was rising in his throat.
When she turned his face was the old grim, sinister mask. “Let’s go,” he urged almost gruffly. “I had planned to have you reach Amethyst Island early this afternoon and go over on a special tug to Kam City as soon as you could get ready. The Indians are waiting with a sedan in the bush just a few hundred yards below the water-gate.”
He paused suddenly in their progress toward the pathway leading down from the summit. “My pack-sack!” he exclaimed staring at the empty place where it had hung on the little jackpine.
He strode over to the rim of the cliff and looked down. “Might have had better sense than to have hung it there,” he ruminated. “Wind shook it loose and it has fallen down to the gully below. Oh, well, I’ll come back up for it after I see you down to the island. I’ll have to remember that.”