Of all the executives of the North Star Towing and Contracting Company and its subsidiaries Acey Smith was the deepest enigma; a man who lived for the most part to himself, kept no counsel with his fellows. Of his antecedents there was little known. He had risen from the obscurity of dear knows where to the post of superintendent for the North Star Company; in fact had been its chief out-of-doors executive since its inception as a one-tug-and-barge salvaging and towing concern. He had seen it rise to a position dominating the marine business of the upper lakes and spread out commercial branches into the lumber limits, the fur territories, urban manufacturing and even the grain belts of the prairie west. The North Star became the mightiest commercial octopus of the North and the Northwest, but Acey Smith never moved beyond the post of superintendent for the parent company and general over-man of the subsidiaries.
Why this was so not even his brother executives of the North Star enterprises could understand. That he “held cards” with the executives of the company was current belief. Some declared he was more in their confidence than the president, Hon. J. J. Slack himself. Deeper ones sensed some secret personal barrier that precluded his promotion.
In truth, there were times when Acey Smith cursed bitterly a creature that had put a curse upon him through his mother—startled her before he was born with a black curse that stuck.
The Latin races in the cutting gangs steadfastly held Acey Smith was in league with the Evil One, a superstition which gained weight from a tale of old-timers of how he had once broken a Finnish bully of the camps with his bare hands. Smith had gone out to reprimand the Finn for causing a disturbance, whereat the latter made use of a name that is a fighting-word wherever men revere the honour of their parents.
The superintendent’s form leaped out of his mackinaw like the unsheathing of a rapier. The giant rushed him with a roar; flailed at him with his great ape-like arms, intending first to knock him to the ground and then stamp and lacerate him with his caulked boots, after a refined custom of victors in back-country encounters of those days.
Instead, the great Finn halted abruptly a few feet from Acey Smith with a queer sound that was half sob, half moan.
The Boss’s arms had shot out like flickers of light to the throat and face of the other, and what happened after that would pale the story of the cruellest one-sided prizefight on record. They carried the Finn away a bleeding, quivering mass with a head that wabbled weirdly on a swollen, distorted neck.
It was the Finn’s last fight. Just what happened he never told, and at mention of it he would jabber incoherent things through teeth that chattered like those of one in the grip of the ague. When he recovered sufficiently to get upon his feet, he left camp at a limping run and was never seen in those precincts again.
It was the look upon Acey Smith’s face on that occasion that left an indelible impress upon the memory of witnesses—a light of incarnate fury and hate that sat there while he pummelled the other into a pulp. None had ever seen such a baneful gleam on the face of a man, and among those hard-bitten, devil-may-care lumber-jacks there was none who wished to ever look upon its like again.
What the witnesses to that fight had seen in Acey Smith’s face was a something that was always there, subdued almost beyond detection in his normal moments, but ever leaping in flickers to his features when powerful impulses were upon him—an all-crushing, sinister thing that seemed to be crying out from within him: “Destroy! Destroy! Destroy!”