After her figure merged into the gloom down by the dock he waited, despite the chill that was searching at his damp ankles. Soon he heard subdued voices and the preliminary cough of a marine engine being started. Followed the even chug-chug of the motor’s exhaust and a moving finger of light from a small marine searchlight swept out and felt its way through the channel in the immense field of pulpwood booms that all but filled Nannabijou Bay. Out beyond, the boat headed due west.
Who was the girl, and by what odd coincidence did she reappear in this ungodly place? He wondered. But in the maze of other inexplicable circumstances that had surrounded him since the night of the twenty-third of September when he had accepted his present strange mission, he gave up trying to guess the answer. The damp, oppressive gloom of a Northern Ontario pulp camp after sundown is not contributive to romancing and Hammond had pressing business in hand.
He crossed the road and knocked at the door of the superintendent’s office.
II
“Come in!”
The command came clear and loud with an odd vibrating quality in its not inhospitable note.
The room which Hammond entered, an office in the fore of the superintendent’s living and sleeping quarters, presented a scene of orderly confusion. Its desks were littered with newspapers, magazines and typewritten flimsies, and on its wall shelves sprawled reference books, encyclopedias, dictionaries and thumb-worn volumes of the classics.
The place struck Hammond as not being unlike the work-rooms of free-lance writing men he had known. But the one occupant, a tall, magnificently set-up figure of a man, was obviously not of the type that put their dreams on paper, but live them.
He barely glanced up when Hammond entered.
The visitor, awaiting recognition, was struck by the conscious power and subtle craftiness that lurked in the pale, exotic features of the other. Stratagem, deep and super-capable, might be read in the eyes, black as night, over which the lids compressed ever so faintly now in a dreamy, faraway gaze. Wide, coldly-moulded temples, under close-cropped, crisp black hair, surmounted a face not to be put out of memory once even casually visualised, and the whole bespoke a mind that, one sensed, worked a dual lightning shift, analysing and sifting its impressions ever in advance of action and word. The lower features narrowed symmetrically to the alert, square-set chin; spare beneath the rounded prominence of the cheek-bones, with a sensitive mouth that could compress thin-lipped with a flicker in its half-smile that was cruel as sin.