He stared strangely at Hammond for a silent second, his black eyes glazing in a weird fixidity. Hammond was conscious Acey Smith was speaking now more as one trying to interpret a whim of the back mind: “Now, if I were a novelist, which I am not, and in the mood, likewise absent, I might make myself the author of the queerest tale ever written. It’s a pity the world gets most of its literature second-hand and consequently garbled; the man who lives things doesn’t write, and the man who writes never seems able to live the things he writes about.
“Real writers then must be men born twice who never touched pen to paper till their second existence, don’t you think so, Mr. Hammond?”
“I have never considered it from that angle,” replied the younger man. “Thank you for the paper, Mr. Smith.”
“Think it over,” urged Acey Smith enigmatically as he whirled on a heel and returned to his desk.
Hammond went away inwardly as chagrined as a disguised man who has had his wig and false beard suddenly whisked from his head and face. His attempt to conceal his identity from Acey Smith surely had been a ridiculous farce. Perhaps the pulp camp superintendent knew more than he did himself about what purpose lay behind his being sent to the limits.
The situation was a humiliating one, Hammond bitterly conceded as he sat alone in the cabin he shared with the cook. It would be bad enough to be found out and know what one was found out for, but it was infinitely more exasperating to feel that he was a marked man without knowing the exact nature of the predicament he had allowed himself to be dropped into. Acey Smith had a manner of making Hammond feel like a mere outsider every time they came in contact, and the latter, completely in the dark as to the objects of his own mission, was as impotent to meet and parry the other’s stinging thrusts as a man who fences with a blindfold on. Smith did not exactly despise him; he had reason to believe that. It was Smith’s lightly-concealed exultation over knowledge of his helplessness that galled him so.
Hammond longed to meet the other on fair ground—in a battle of wits or fists, he was not particular which, so long as he could exact satisfaction for his hurt pride. But this fighting in the dark was a hopeless business, and he was becoming weary of it.
Yet—what did Smith know? What did he know?
With this conjecture came an inspiration that brought Hammond a newer and a brighter viewpoint. When he more calmly mulled the situation over in the seclusion of his quarters, it struck him Acey Smith was merely guessing. He had not definitely referred to him as an ex-newspaper man, but had merely insinuated he knew him to be a writer. This was a thing one so shrewd of observation as the pulp camp master might easily surmise when Hammond asked for writing paper. That subsequent drifting of his onto the status of fiction writers was a cast for information, his reference to the genius of writing men an obvious attempt at flattery—and the hook was baited with a hint that he himself had a life-story that would be worth while getting hold of.
The whole thing seemed so clear now that Hammond accused himself of stupidity in not seeing through it before. Hammond’s plan therefore would be to follow the plane of the least resistance and let Smith go on thinking what he pleased. Even better still, why not approach Smith for that “queerest tale” he had referred to and make a play to his vanity? No doubt egotism was Acey Smith’s most vulnerable point and the open sesame to his confidence, as Hammond in his journalistic experience had found it to be with most despotic executives, high or low.