III
An hour later that morning, in the cook’s quarters, Louis Hammond came out of a dreamless sleep and for some moments sat blinkingly trying to adjust himself to his new surroundings. He wasn’t so sure now he was going to like his new job or its environment. Used to an active routine, he would many times rather have had some set schedule of duties to perform than be left to find his own means of occupying his time. There was something highly unsatisfactory about the whole thing, and had it not been for the element of mystery that challenged his patience, he would have felt like dropping the assignment and leaving by the first tug for the city.
As if it were an echo of his thoughts, there came the shrill tooting of the incoming morning tug down by the dock. Hammond rolled out of his bunk and ran to the four-paned window of the cabin. The tug had already been docked and snubbed with the despatch characteristic of upper lakes sailormen. The crew, hustling off supplies, paused while a single passenger, a young woman wearing sable furs and a large picture hat, landed. Something familiar about her caused Hammond to watch by the window while she came leisurely up the camp road.
He started back with a suppressed exclamation as her features became discernible. It was the face of the dark-eyed woman he had seen get off the train at Moose Horn Station in the wake of Norman T. Gildersleeve.
She turned and walked into the office of the superintendent without rapping on the door.
“All our trails seem to lead to Acey Smith’s layout,” grimly ruminated Hammond as he turned from the window.
Breakfast, however, was uppermost in Hammond’s mind at the moment, and, hastily donning his clothes, he hurried over to the dining camp just across the road from his sleeping quarters. He expected a sharp reprimand for being late, but he was met by a genial-faced, auburn-haired young man who introduced himself as his shack-mate, Sandy Macdougal, head cook.
“There’s orders from the Big Boss you’re to feed when you like and sleep as long as you want,” he said smilingly as he indicated a place at one of the long plank tables set out with accurately aligned rows of graniteware dishes and great graniteware bowls of white sugar.
One of Macdougal’s bull cooks brought in oatmeal porridge, a platter heaped high with bacon and eggs, toast, a jug of Snowshoe syrup and a big graniteware pot of steaming coffee. Hammond had the diner to himself. He never remembered an occasion in his life when he felt so hungry or a meal appealed to him as so inviting. There is something in the tang of the open-air North that puts a real edge on one’s appetite, and there are no workers so insistent about the skill of the men who cook meals for them as lumber-jacks.
Macdougal returned from the kitchen a few moments later, and, lighting a cigarette, sat down on the plank bench near Hammond with back and elbows on the table. “I saw your duds when I tumbled out this morning,” he remarked, “but I suspected you were some friend of the boss’s who’d come late in the night and I didn’t wake you—Well, for the love of Mike, look who’s here!”