“I’m sleepy, let’s turn in,” said Hammond.
He wasn’t really sleepy, but he wanted a chance to think quietly. The truth of the matter was the young man viewed that note that had been poked into his hand with considerable suspicion. He did not know whether to conceive that the intent was to lead him into some sort of a trap or make a laughing-stock of him. In any case, he was going to see the matter through.
Next morning he dressed with more than usual care, and when he had breakfasted sauntered out one of the inland tote roads. Out of sight of the camp, he cut down through the solid woods until he reached the lake-shore trail, where he crossed the Nannabijou River by way of the wooden suspension bridge built there by the Indian workers.
It was a laughing autumn morning, crisp, with that mellow sunlit stillness that prevails during the period in the latter part of September and the earlier weeks in October before the first great “blow” comes hurtling down along Superior’s north shore oft-times taking its grisly toll of men and boats. There was an invigorating tang of spruce in the air, and the mighty lake to Hammond’s left lay like a great shimmering sea of glass. Afar out on it grain carriers rode lazily, trailing their long, black plumes north and south. In the brush to either side of the trail partridge strutted noisily or drummed up into the peaks of the evergreens. In the soft blue of the skies and the thin haze of the horizons hung that infinite serenity of mid-autumn in the majestic North.
Hammond forgot about the ruses he had planned to discover if he were shadowed. The very gladness of Nature round and about him made him whistle and sing like a boy, for all that a certain shy nervousness was upon him. Such a morning breeds recklessness in vigorous youth—a quest for Adventure and Old Romance.
He topped a long slope, from which the trail dipped gradually to the very edge of the lake at the foot of a wide ravine gashed up the side of the mountain to his right to the plateau below the forbidding black granite battlements of the Cup of Nannabijou. Almost on his immediate left lay the tiny Island of Amethyst with its soft wooded groves and grotesque, old-fashioned bungalows.
Hammond’s eyes swept from the island to the shoreline opposite—then he stopped dead in his tracks with a sharp intaking of breath.
Seated upon a fallen tree-trunk near the water’s edge where her canoe was drawn up, with the lake and the dense foliage above and around her for a background, was a young woman whose charm of face and figure held him for the moment in spellbound admiration.
It was the Girl with the High-arched Eyebrows; she whom he had now twice met under unusual circumstances, once in the parlour car of a transcontinental train and again just below the doorway of Acey Smith’s office at the pulp camp. She was obviously waiting for some one. So—so—could it have been that she had actually sent for him?
She was looking straight at him, expectancy, wonder in her great blue eyes. With an effort he regained part of his composure and plunged precipitously down the trail against a wild impulse to turn on his heel and flee.