I
Louis Hammond, picking his way in the rapidly-failing twilight, dodged a pot-hole in the pulp camp’s “main street,” looked up at the unexpected sound of a woman’s voice, and, misplacing a foot, went sprawling into another. He arose bespattered and with ice-cold ooze seeping to his ankles over the tops of his city shoes.
The young man barely checked the exclamation more forceful than polite that rose to his tongue when a lithe, girlish form, close-wrapped to the throat in a light fall coat, stepped out to the road from the shadowy verandah of the building that had been pointed out to him as the office of the superintendent.
A big man in a reefer and high boots laced to the knees followed, but before he gained her side, the woman turned.
“No, I thank you,” Hammond heard her decline in a bright voice. “It is only a step down to the dock.”
The man bowed deferentially, lifted his narrow-brimmed stetson with a courtliness oddly at variance with his rough garb, followed her with his eyes for a moment, then wheeled and returned to the building.
On the Nannabijou Limits, in the farthest reaches of Lake Superior’s wild North Shore, was about the last place on earth Hammond expected to encounter a white woman, especially one whose voice and every movement betokened long association in refined environment. Her verve and grace were the more apparent to him as she came tripping sure-footedly down through the half-light toward the water-front.
She passed him on the other side of the road, and just then the door of a camp to his right was flung open emitting a widening flood of yellow lamplight that threw them both in relief.
Hammond caught a fleeting glimpse of an oval little face, fascinating in its contour; of a daintily-moulded mouth and chin and fine, high-arched eyebrows traced as with the delicate brush of an artist. He looked into great darkened blue eyes that held startled recognition; saw her lips open in a suppressed gasp, then she hurried on as though fearful he might accost her.
The time, the place and the extremely odd circumstances under which he had last felt the magnetic sway of those eyes beneath the unforgettable brows recurred to him as, with wildly-beating pulse, he stood wiping the mud from his hands and clothes with his pocket-handkerchief.