When Louis Hammond went away from the City Club after his conference with Norman T. Gildersleeve he was convinced of two things. The one was that Gildersleeve had not told him the entire truth. There had been a furtiveness about the demeanour of Gildersleeve that irritated Hammond: furthermore, there had been the acknowledged duplicity of Winch in passing himself off as a United States consul, not to mention Gildersleeve’s veiled insinuations as to Josephine Stone’s connection with the North Star. To Hammond’s way of thinking, these and other elements of Gildersleeve’s methods did not “hang” very well. The other conviction was that the North Star people had been cognizant of Gildersleeve’s plans from the very first. There was now no doubt, in view of what had happened, that Acey Smith, the pulp camp superintendent, suspected, or perhaps knew definitely, from the night he landed that he, Hammond, was identified with Gildersleeve and had been sent out to the limits for the purpose of aiding in balking the North Star’s plans. That being so, either Acey Smith had his own hidden objects in view in allowing Hammond the freedom of the camp, or else—well, Hammond rather scouted the idea that the Argus-eyed master of the Nannabijou Limits considered him a nonentity in this conflict of wits who wasn’t worth troubling his head about. It couldn’t be that, he surmised, because Smith was not the type to overlook any possibilities of interference with his plans. The deeper motive that he might have had in view eluded Hammond’s shrewdest deductions. Out in the woods Acey Smith was playing at his own game, and more experienced men than Hammond had failed to fathom him. Even those most closely associated with him admitted they never intimately understood this most inaccessible man of moods.

Anyway, Hammond felt immensely relieved to be free of all responsibility to either of the contending companies, and, having cashed Norman T. Gildersleeve’s cheque in payment for his services next day, he began planning a certain little affair of his own.

He was unable to get passage out to the limits until noon, and the trip was made on a cranky, wheezing little gasolene tug manned by inexperienced seamen.

The tugmen’s strike was on. Not only had all the North Star seamen left their boats, but they had taken out with them the crews of all the other towing and salvaging companies between the Soo and the Head of the Lakes. It was rumoured that the strike would next extend to the grain carriers and the passenger and freight boats plying up and down the Great Lakes.

The lumberjacks’ unions, however, had not yet called their sympathetic strike. At the Nannabijou Limits Hammond found things much the same as when he had left, except that there seemed to be a large number of strange men prowling around the camp, who, though they wore bush garb, were patently not North Star men. At regular intervals, along the waterfront and the roads leading up into the woods, armed members of the Canadian Mounted Police were stationed, obviously for the protection of property in case violence followed.

The lumberjacks were plainly in a sullen mood, especially the foreigners, on whom the presence of the uniformed representatives of Canadian law and order produced an ugly irritation. But, under the iron rule of Acey Smith, weapons of any sort beyond the axes which the men used in their work were strictly forbidden, so that an armed outbreak was out of the question.

Hammond himself, on landing and producing his pass of identification, was requested to step over to a little group of police, where his pockets were lightly tapped to detect the possible presence of concealed weapons. “Sorry to put you to this bother, sir,” smiled the officer in charge. “Just a matter of form, you know. Connected with the North Star Company, I suppose?”

“No,” replied the young man. “I am here on private business of my own, but I expect to be in camp for a short time.”

The officer gave him a sharp look as though committing his face to memory. He seemed about to ask another question, but instead nodded politely to signify the interview was over.

II

Sandy Macdougal was enjoying his afternoon nod when Hammond dropped in at their bunkhouse, but immediately after the latter’s entry the cook rolled out of the blankets in his sock-feet. “Cripes, didn’t I lock that door?” he gasped as he sat blinking at the newcomer. “Huh, guess I’m gettin’ nerves, but the goings on here lately is enough to make a man loco.”

“Why—what’s up now, Sandy?” laughed Hammond.

“Place is alive with cut-throats,” declared the other. “Fellow has to sleep with one eye open to watch that one of ’em don’t come in to bean him for his wad.”

“Yes, I saw a lot of strangers about the camp,” observed Hammond. “Who are they anyway?”

“Gang of low-brow detectives and strike-breakers brought in from Winnipeg and Duluth on a towed barge early this morning. They’re the scum of creation, and the way they gave orders to my boys when they came in for eats—well, when Acey Smith comes back he’ll have another strike on his hands. My outfit didn’t hire on here to be bossed around by no second-class bums like them.”

“So the North Star’s putting up a bluff of breaking the strike?”

“North Star nothin’!” derided Sandy. “If it was I wouldn’t feel so cussed mean toward them. This gang’s been put in here by the other company—the Kam City Pulp and Paper Mill crowd—to take hold of the camp work if the North Star’s pole-cutters and boom-tenders go out in sympathy with the tugmen. Mooney put me wise, and you bet we make ’em whack up for every meal they get here at rates just the same as if they was stoppin’ at the Royal Aleck in Winnipeg.”

Hammond whistled. “So that’s the idea, eh?” He had to concede to himself that Gildersleeve must have acted with considerable despatch. No doubt he intended to use these men for waterfront land work when he got his tugs over from Duluth to convey the poles to Kam City.

“Oh, they ain’t goin’ to come very much, at that,” insisted Macdougal. “Any old time this strike is settled it will be settled by the North Star itself—and it won’t be settled till then, not if they bring all the strikebreakers and mounties between here and hell’s gangway to the camp.”

“So you think the North Star has the upper hand in this deal, Sandy?”

Macdougal fished out his black bottle and insisted on Hammond having a “nip” with him. “If they ain’t got the upper hand right now,” he replied, “they will have it when the shuffle’s over. There ain’t any outsider can come in here and put it over Acey Smith. . . . And believe me, whatever is his game, I’m one who wants to see the Big Boss win. Here’s to him!”

The deep underlying note in Sandy’s tones made Hammond gaze at him fixedly. “You used to say, Sandy, that he was the king of crooks,” he reminded. “You used to say, in fact, that Acey Smith was a devil in human form.”

“Crook he may be and devil too,” conceded the other. “But I’m with him because—” and Sandy smote a nearby bench with his fist,—“because he’s a man! He’s one of them kind of men that if the whole world was jumpin’ at his throat he’d put his back again’ a rock and fight it out without askin’ help or sob-stuff from any of ’em. And he’d go down grinnin’ that little devil-grin o’ his and tellin’ them all to go to hell and be damned to them—that’s the kind of a man the Big Boss is!”

Hammond did not smile at this unexpected outburst of hero-worship. The little Scotch-Canadian was so emotionally intense about it.

“Listen, Hammond,” he was saying. “The Big Boss likely is as black a rascal as they say he is, and that’s a whole lot; but he never fights the weak or the poor. Ain’t I seen what he’s done unbeknownst to most for unfortunates in this camp? Ain’t I been in the city when I seen him stop on the street to help a blind bum over a dangerous crossin’ when everybody else was hustlin’ by and lookin’ the other way so they wouldn’t see their duty? Don’t I know that in the hard times six years ago it was this same Acey Smith who bought up a row of shacks in the coal docks district where the landlords was dumpin’ whole families out because they had nothin’ to pay them with, and don’t I know that none of them has ever paid since when they was hard up? I know because it was one of my side jobs to look after them houses and see that the taxes was paid.

“Yes, and I could tell you lots of other things about the Big Boss that would be just as hard to believe,” the cook went on. “Suppose you never heard about the case of that Frompton girl?”

Other matters were uppermost in Hammond’s mind, but he knew there was no stopping Sandy when the talking mood was on him, so he said good-naturedly: “No, Sandy, tell us the story.”

III

“That all happened in the days before the war when the Big Boss was feelin’ a lot more cocky than he seems to be nowadays,” began the cook. “This Frompton girl, who was a waitress in one of the city eatin’ houses, was something of a good looker, but it seems that down east she’d had a nasty bit of past, mostly some low skunk’s fault who deceived her and skipped out leavin’ her to face it alone. After her baby, maybe lucky for its poor little self, died, her and her mother came up to Kam City where nobody knew them. But scandal like that, especially if it’s about a woman, will travel. One night a young blood, a son of one of the wealthy ginks in the town, being a little worse of bootleg, tried to get fresh with her, and the hot-tempered little thing hauls off and biffs him in the face. The poor prune wasn’t man enough to take his medicine, but bawls her out with some dirty remark about what she’d been in the town she’d come from. I guess she got seein’ red over that, for she picked up a catsup bottle and bashed him on the head with it. The rich man’s son came near kickin’ the bucket from that clout, and, as it was, he was a month or so in the hospital before they were sure he’d pull through. They didn’t pull the girl up for attackin’ him, because his family didn’t want the notoriety; but she was held in jail on a charge of disorderly conduct till they’d see what would happen to him. Then, if he lived, they intended to bring her before the magistrate and get her packed off to a reformatory as an example of what happens to bad girls who beat up rich men’s sons.

“Well, I happened to know some of the crowd that was mixed up in the rumpus and had been followin’ the case. One night when the Big Boss was in the dinin’ camp havin’ supper I threw down the paper and started to cuss.’

“He looks over at me and asks: ‘Why all the sweet language, Macdougal?’

“I starts in and tells him all about the case and how I thought the world was all wrong that nobody would lift a finger to help out a poor, fallen woman like this one. He listened with a lot more interest than you can generally get out of him, and I wound up by sayin’, ‘Cripes, what’s all the preachers for that they don’t start in scorin’ the guilty parties instead of standin’ by while everybody pans the girl?’

“‘The preachers ain’t to blame, Sandy,’ he comes back. ‘Most of the preachers go as far as they dare in settin’ the world right, and every once in awhile you read about some of the darin’ ones being bumped out of their pulpits for speakin’ their minds.’ Then his face gets chalk-white like you see it when he’s mad. ‘It’s this system they call Society needs fixin’, Sandy,’ he sneers. ‘Society that just wants to use the law and the preachers to keep its chosen crowd out of jail in this world and out of hell in the next.’

“Think of him, the king of the big timber crooks, a-talkin’ this way. But that was just like him—always contrary to everybody else.“‘Macdougal,’ says he suddenly, ‘don’t you wish you was a great lawyer?’

“‘Why?’ I asks.

“‘Because,’ says he, ‘you could defend this girl before the court and maybe cheat the thing they call the Law.’

“‘I never thought of that,’ I replied, but I could see there was something comin’.

“That little devil-grin flickers around the Big Boss’s poker face that’s always there when he’s plannin’ hellery. ‘We ain’t lawyers, Macdougal,’ he states, ‘but I know where the money can be found to hire the best sob-stirrin’ lawyer in Kam City, and if he gets her clear there’ll be a bonus of a couple of hundred in it for him.’

“I knew what that meant. I had wished myself into the job of hirin’ the lawyer and seein’ that he got the money on the quiet. Acey Smith outlines how I am to go about the deal and says: ‘If the lawyer gets her off, we’ll see if we can’t get a job for her.’

“To make a long story short we got Jacobs, the best lawyer on them sort of cases in Kam City, and he puts up such a talk for her, a-quotin’ Scripture and so on, that he had everybody in the courtroom except the district crown attorney wipin’ the corners of their eyes. He winds up by statin’ there was a party who was prepared to start her off fresh on a decent job. The old magistrate was so taken with Jacob’s speil he said he thought she hadn’t had a chance, and, after a lecture to her on the straight and narrow path, he lets her off without even the suspended sentence the crown attorney tried to horn in with as a last resort.

“It was Jacobs turned the girl and her mother loose on me when they insisted on thanking the man who’d put up the money to defend her, and in a weak moment, bein’ kind of flustered, I promised to take them to him. I’ll never forget what happened when I took them out to the old camp layout on the tug. As I said, the girl was rather a good-lookin’ kid and she hadn’t commenced to get that hard jib women who go under seem to take on. She seemed still kind of dazed over it all when I walked her and her mother into the superintendent’s office. ‘There’s the man,’ says I before I had yet thought just what I was doing. ‘There’s the man you can thank for savin’ you from the clink.’

“The Big Boss he scowls at me as black as thunder and I knew I’d put my foot in it for fair, but the girl breaks down and falls at his feet, a-sobbin’ that she wasn’t worth savin’. In sort of hysterics she was. For once the Big Boss seemed like he didn’t know what to do. He looked around wild-eyed as though he’d like to beat it out the door. But he couldn’t, because in her little cryin’ fit she’d taken a strangle hold on his boots. So he lifts her up and chucks her into her mother’s arms.

“‘Get up, girl,’ he cries kind of hoarse and bashful-like. ‘I ain’t your judge, and if you’ve done any wrong I don’t know anything about it and don’t want to. The North Star’s goin’ to offer you a job, and Macdougal here has the lookin’ after of that. Go straight, girl,’ he adds, fixin’ her with them flashin’ coal-black eyes of his, ‘and if any one throws this thing up at you again let us know about it and there’ll be little old hell to pay!’

“Then he packs us back on the next tug with orders where she was to look for the job. It wasn’t in a North Star office, but one of the other factories in town that people say is run with North Star money.

“But don’t you think there wasn’t a curtain-call for me when I got back to camp for givin’ away to the girl and her mother as to the man whackin’ up for her lawyer. The Big Boss nearly fired me.

“‘You don’t know me, Macdougal,’ he grits. ‘I ain’t a movin’ picture hero such as you seem to think. Didn’t I tell you we were in on this thing just for the fun of cheatin’ the law? Besides, it wasn’t my money but the North Star’s that paid for her lawyer, and it was the North Star’s influence that got her that job, just the same as the North Star has rescued other people from the clutches of the law that it knew it could use. That girl’s one of us now and she’d go through hell-fire in the company’s interests if she was asked to. If you wasn’t blind you’d have seen that from the first. Beat it to your beanery and don’t let me ever hear you mention a word about this again.’

“Aye, he’s a queer, queer man, is Acey Smith,” concluded the cook. “Sometimes it seems to me something is eatin’ the heart out of him—something burnin’ inside him and fillin’ him up with hellery. Sometimes I think he’s a good man with a devil in him that won’t give him no rest.”

The cook’s story, like others he had heard, impressed Hammond even if it did increase the enigma that hung about the personality of the timber boss. “It is certain he has some fixed method in all this madness of his,” Hammond mused as much to himself as to his companion. “One object undoubtedly is to keep every one guessing what his real motives are. He has to keep himself pretty much a mystery in order to carry out the orders of his bosses.”

“Oh, but he ain’t carryin’ out their crooked work just for the money there’s in it,” spoke up Macdougal. “There’s something deeper’n that. I’ve been a-studyin’ the man too close and too long to believe that. It’s something inside the man himself that makes him carry on as he does.”

“I’ll quite agree with you there,” responded Hammond. “You call it a devil while I would call it an obsession of mind or a ruling mania: all of which are pretty much the one and the same thing, except that our forefathers called it a devil and let it go at that. If one could only get the key to that obsession they’d soon be able to clear up the whole mystery of this camp.”

“Aye, Hammond, if you could get the key,” observed the cook, “but Acey Smith is canny enough to keep that key locked up in a dark place that nobody knows but him.”