“These things are what you’d call precedent in legal parlance, Winch,” opined Duff, “and therefore, what we’ve got to figure on meeting from the North Star is the unexpected—like a bolt from a clear sky.”
II
Martin Winch fussed with a sheaf of clipped typewritten sheets before him. “They cannot very well get away with any trickery in the face of this government order,” he persisted laconically.
“Just a scrap of paper so far as the North Star is concerned,” asserted Duff. “Legally it may be watertight from forty-nine different angles, but there’s bound to be a fiftieth with a loop-hole in it that nobody ever thought of but the North Star Company. You knew, of course, that Gildersleeve sensed this very thing; that he left New York this last time with the express purpose of thwarting some nefarious plot the North Star were hatching up.”
“No, I didn’t know that.” Winch appeared to be evincing a mild interest now. “Mr. Gildersleeve never even hinted at such a thing in his correspondence.”
“That’s just the trouble,” complained the paper mill president. “Norman Gildersleeve didn’t take any of us into his confidence with regard to his inside information and his definite plans, and when he dropped out of sight at this critical period he left us all helpless and in the dark.”
“You are sure Mr. Gildersleeve had reason to suspect treachery on the part of the North Star?”
“I know this much: He employed two of the cleverest detectives in the country to run down something crooked afoot on the Nannabijou Limits. One of the detectives returned a broken-down wreck of a man; the other just dropped out of sight. His hat was found floating on a creek at the limits and that’s all they ever heard of him afterwards. I do know that Gildersleeve got a line on something that means disaster for the Kam City Paper Mills if it is not thwarted in time.”
Martin Winch drummed his fingers on the glass top of his desk and stared at the ceiling. “Yet I can’t see that anything short of hiring some one to blow up the mill would accomplish such an end for the North Star,” he observed skeptically.
“Which would be a crude, bolshevik method altogether lacking the finesse of the North Star. No, Winch, they’re figuring on getting the machinery that’s going into that mill of ours away from us for just what they’ll care to pay when they have us with our backs to the wall. I’m becoming positive that’s the objective of their plot.”