The agent at Sicamous reported that a young, dark-faced, slim man with his right arm in a sling had arrived at Sicamous. He had gone to Mrs. Wandersun’s shack. He called himself Lucas, and looked like a halfbreed.
“Siwash on the spot,” commented Clement.
The next fact was that a wire had come through from Méduse Smythe at Winnipeg, saying she was coming straight through to Banff. Immediately on receipt of this, things happened. The man Lucas—despite his bad arm—went off up the lake in a canoe, apparently to Gunning’s shack. On his return there was a bustle. Mrs. Wandersun, in the language of the agent, flacked about like a worried hen.
She had run down to the station and had sent off a train letter to Heloise Reys—to await arrival at Banff—and also another to Méduse Smythe.
Having got rid of these letters, Mrs. Wandersun immediately prepared herself for a journey. That done, she bounced into her neighbor’s shack with a lamentable story of a friend taken dangerously ill up the lake. She said she had wired to his relatives, and she thought they were coming on. She said she was going to her sick friend with the young man Lucas to run the power boat for her, and she asked her neighbors if they would mind telling anybody who might arrive before Lucas returned, that he was coming back from the sick man in order to take them up to him.
Having impressed this upon her kindly friends, she got into the motor boat with Lucas, and went up the lake. Lucas had not returned yet. The agent had not pressed his inquiries for fear of stirring up suspicion.
Clement had listened to the reading of this report with a face grim and white. When it was finished he said, “This seems to be the first move in the definite plot. Once she arrives in Sicamous, Heloise Reys will be spirited away into the wilds. You can see how they have planned it. Nobody but Lucas is to take her there; they don’t want outsiders to figure in this.”
“An’ it seems to me that they don’t want anybody—even Miss Reys—to get there before they are ready for her,” said Gatineau.
“Yes, that seems likely.—Now the letters.”
The one addressed to Heloise Reys was a simple letter stating that Henry Gunning had returned to Sicamous and had gone along the lake to his home. The letter said that Gunning was quietlike, and not quite his usual self. He said he was going to rest up for a while as he felt sort of seedy. The writer concluded by giving directions how to find his shack, and declared himself ready to do all in his power to help Miss Reys. He signed himself—Joe Wandersun.