Artemus Duff, president and general manager of the Kam City Pulp and Paper Mills, paid his promised visit to the office of Hon. J. J. Slack, M.P., president of the North Star Towing and Contracting Company, about the same hour that Hammond went up to see Martin Winch, K.C..

The interview in most respects was inconsequential. As might be surmised, Slack’s quest was for any chance bit of information regarding the rival paper company’s plans that it might be to his advantage to know. His shrewd after-deductions were that Duff was not in the confidence of his own associates.

Duff, on the other hand, left the office of the wily politician no wiser than when he entered, but considerably reassured regarding the delivery of raw material to the mills from the Nannabijou Limits. Slack had a bland, big way of discussing a thing that put others off their guard.

“There are enough poles boomed in Nannabijou Bay to keep your mill running the better part of the coming year,” he told Duff.

“So our inspectors report,” agreed the other.

“The poles being there, we are bound to deliver them on time,” reminded Slack.

“But the contract time for the opening of our mill is drawing near,” complained the Kam City Company’s president, “and delivery hasn’t even been started. Even the absence of Norman Gildersleeve wouldn’t bother me so much if it were under way.”

“There is little for you to lose sleep over on that point, Mr. Duff,” Slack assured him. “Once our present dredging contracts are completed, which I expect will be in a few days’ time, our full complement of tugs, carriers and loading scows will be on the job. Only an act of Providence could prevent the delivery of those poles on contract time.”

“An act of Providence—only an act of Providence?” Duff repeated as he prepared to depart. Just what did Slack mean by dragging that reference in? However, he had tittered it quite casually, Duff remembered, and probably it had no special significance.

Slack had uttered it casually; but at that moment, even the president of the North Star Towing and Contracting Company had no idea of the real cards to be played.

Something of a revelation came to him that very afternoon.

II

Shortly after the departure of Artemus Duff, a dark, striking-looking young woman was ushered into Slack’s private office. She closed the door cautiously behind her.

“Well, well, if it isn’t Yvonne,” greeted Slack. “I thought you were on business west of here.”

“I was, J.J.,” she replied as familiarly. “But I hurried back yesterday. I have just come over from the limits to deliver this special message to you.”

She tossed a sealed official envelope on the desk.

Slack tore open the envelope, and, as he studied the contents, a worried frown gathered on his brow. “Won’t you be seated a moment, Miss Kovenay?” he requested absently.Slack worked with a pencil on a pad of paper deciphering the letter, which, as was usual with orders from the same source, was in the North Star’s private code. It contained bald instructions, skeletonised of every spare word:—

Instruct North Star newspapers, east and west, drop conjectures re disappearance Gildersleeve. Print nil unless actually found dead or alive; then only barest details on inside pages, without display headings.

Put on double or triple shift, if necessary, on wireless ready any moment for emergency calls from limits station. File for wireless every day weather probabilities for east and west and full predictions Coster’s Weather Bureau soon as same come in.

IMPORTANT. Make no promises re Tugmen’s Union demand for increases and shorter hours, unless advised. Have papers print articles calculated to foment general seamen’s strike on our own and other great lakes vessels. Hire more socialist agitators to help stir up discontent. Strike MUST materialise before day that dredging contracts are completed.

Sending A. C. Smith to Montreal, special business. If time, his instructions are to call on you before leaving to confer on matters above mentioned.

(Sgd.) J. C. X.

It literally took the breath out of Slack.

That second last paragraph regarding the tugmen’s strike smote him like a club. The carrying out of these instructions, he felt, meant personal calamity for him—his political doom.

With cold sweat breaking at his temples he looked up to meet the questioning stare of Yvonne Kovenay’s dark eyes.

“You know who this is from?” He asked it absently like one who scarcely expects a reply.

“Yes,” she answered. Then leaning forward over the desk she said it in a whisper scarcely more than audible: “It is from J.C.X.”

“Yvonne, tell me, have you ever met him?”“No!” There was a suppressed shudder in the emphasis. “I hope I never do meet him. If I did—” Her voice trailed off to incoherency.

Hon. J. J. Slack shrugged his heavy shoulders. “Oh, I know what you think, Yvonne. I know what you think—it’s what they all think.” But Slack’s indifferent shrug merely disguised the goose-flesh shiver that ran through his own frame.

“Was there anything else, Yvonne?”

“Yes—a personal favour.” She pulled nervously at the fingers of her gloves. “Tell me, what is that girl doing out at Amethyst Island?”

“Good heavens, how should I know? Is there a girl stopping at Amethyst Island?”

“You didn’t know she was there?”

“It’s all news to me, Yvonne. Doesn’t Acey Smith know?”

“She—she seems to be a friend of his.” The woman’s voice bore traces of deep agitation. “He spends a lot of time in her company.”

Yvonne Kovenay had risen. She bade Slack a hurried good-day and whisked out of his office.

Slack, staring speculatively at the door through which she had vanished, muttered to himself: “So Acey Smith has a flame, and that Kovenay girl he employs as head of his intelligence bureau is wild with jealousy. H’m, there’s real breakers ahead for Smith, or I miss my guess—and, if there’s a nasty fuss at this particular time I can see where I get a crisp order from J.C.X. to forthwith dispense with the services of a certain crafty superintendent. I can see that.”

But it was not possible pitfalls for Acey Smith which weighed heavily on the self-centred J. J. Slack—it was the nightmare of the coming strike of North Shore seamen that hung like a black cloud over him—the strike that he would have to precipitate and take the blame for. Until now he had understood the company’s stand-pat attitude was meant to be a temporary bluff only, and that the grievances of the men would be met before the strike actually came off. The orders he had just received dissipated all such fond illusions. His part in it would validate the total labour vote in his constituency. Good heavens, it meant ruin—complete ruin!

For a long period Slack paced the floor of his office. Futilely he tried to devise a way out. Five-thirty passed and the clerks in the outer office departed. Still he walked the floor. Yes—there was one way open. He would fight—bluff it through against this insane policy. Suddenly he came to a mental decision. He flung himself into his swivel chair and buried his face in his hands.

“I won’t do it! I won’t do it!” he spat out savagely. “I’ll see J.C.X. in hell first!”

“Why—in hell?”

III

At the mocking tones Slack looked up and into a face whose black, commanding eyes rivetted his very soul; whose straight, firm-set mouth was drawn to a hair-line in its wisp of a smile.

“Acey Smith!”

The visitor ignored the startled salutation. “I’m not so sure,” he ruminated, “that if you did meet J.C.X. in the regions you mentioned that you would not change your mind.”

“But Smith, you are aware of the instructions forwarded to me to-day?”

“I have a pretty fair idea of the gist of those instructions.”

“Don’t you think J.C.X. could be prevailed upon to modify them?”“Modify them? In what way?”

“With regard to precipitating a strike of the tugmen. Such a move would be folly—downright folly.”

“I am certain no such modification could be obtained,” declared Acey Smith. “You know quite as well as I that an order from J.C.X. is a command, and—well, you know what has happened to those that have failed in carrying on for the North Star.”

“But the North Star has never had a strike in its history. It has been known for its fair and generous treatment of its men,” argued Slack. “Its policy has always been to pay employÉs the highest wages and a bonus.”

“Correct. But for this once J.C.X. has seen fit to change the policy of the North Star, with the North Star’s own particular ends in view.”

“It spells disaster.”

“For whom?”

“For the North Star Company—for all of us. Why—”

“That’s not the point that’s worrying you, Mr. Slack!”

The challenge came swift and sharp like the crack of a whip. Though nominally his subordinate, there were crises in the history of the North Star Company when Slack had to mentally acknowledge a master in Acey Smith’s presence. That was perhaps because he knew Smith in some way held the confidence of the directing mind of the firm, and—there was another reason that was not as tangible.

A wan remnant of what was meant to be a patient smile broke over the politician’s fat face. “We’ll be absolutely candid then,” he agreed. “There’s a Dominion election coming—the House may go to the country at any time. Smith, this proposed strike, with us refusing a settlement, would alienate every solitary labour vote in the North. Why, man, I couldn’t run against a yellow dog and win; it would ruin my political future.”Acey Smith approached the other deliberately. He leaned forward until the tips of his inordinately long, tapering white fingers supported him on the edge of the desk.

“Slack,” he pronounced with cold insolence, “you have no political future.”

“One moment!” He raised a detaining hand, as Slack, ashen to the throat, opened his mouth in a sort of sickly gasp. “I am merely uttering the judgment of J.C.X., whose spokesman I am for the time being. Your future, as mine, belongs utterly to the North Star. The day you took over the president’s desk you became a pawn, body and soul. You knew that; it was put coldly to you. You accepted in the knowledge that the decisions of the anonymous head of the North Star Towing and Contracting Company must be absolute law, to be obeyed without equivocation of any kind.

“Slack, the North Star made you; picked you up when you were a hand-to-mouth, soap-box demagogue with about as much chance of carving a name in Canadian politics as a celluloid beetle has of cruising the drought-belts of hell. You were a brief-hunting, small-town lawyer in those days, dependent on the political crumbs the big fellows brushed off the table. If it hadn’t been for a mean portion of party patronage you would have had to tackle honest toil or starve.

“Let me refresh your mind on what happened. You got into the political game in a small way. The North Star backed you with its money, its influence and its strategy. You won out against a stronger man—a victory that surprised no one more than yourself.

“You had the front, were a hail fellow and well met. The North Star needed a man of that very type with the open sesame to inner political circles. In a single day it elevated you from hopeless penury and insignificance to the highest office in its gift as nominal head of the North Star and its coterie of subsidiary companies. You were made the master of millions, with precedence over many of us who had served the company faithfully since its earliest beginnings. What did you promise in return for all these things?

“Come here!”

Acey Smith, a strange, smouldering glow in his coal-black eyes that held the trembling Slack transfixed, took the other by the arm and led him to the south side of the office, to a window that overlooked the city, its smoked-smudged waterfront, the great lake and the rugged sweep of the North Shore.

“Don’t you remember, John J.?” Acey Smith’s voice was low and vibrant. “It was on this very hill, on the very site of this office, that I stood with my arm linked in yours as I stand now. You confessed to me your ruling passion was for power. You intimated you would sell your very soul to be great, to be mighty.

“I, as the representative of the powerful J.C.X., came to offer you the thing you craved most. I asked you to look to the South, to the East and to the West. As far as you could see and beyond would be your absolute domain. The North Star was prepared to make you ruler of the whole North Shore and the Upper Lakes, and a mighty force in the woods beyond and across the prairie West. You were to have power of a kind—a figurehead ’tis true—but executive power patently greater than any other one individual in this whole Dominion of Canada—and that was what your heart yearned for.

“There was a price named for this prize—you remember? It was your unquestioning obedience at all times to the will of J.C.X. None was to know whence your instructions came. This was all laid down very definitely to you—and, you accepted gladly, without reservation.”

Slack stood dumb, his gaze averted from the accusing blaze of the other man’s. His relentless inquisitor went on:

“I need not here dilate on how the North Star has lived up to its covenant with you. Your family’s social prominence here and at the Capital, the political honours that have been showered upon you all attest the might that was loaned you. The North Star has demanded only service in return and cared not whether it had your gratitude or not.

“Think you, Slack, that the power that made you a leader among men has not the will to cast you down again into the depths from which you came—that the unseen arm that reached out and lifted you to wealth and affluence has not the strength to unmake you and brush you from its path into the discard?

“Listen.” The voice beside Slack was terrible in its cold intensity. “The zero hour in the history of the North Star is about to strike. Strong men alone can guide its destinies through that critical hour; the North Star will brook no vacillating weakling at its helm when it heads out into the teeth of the tempest.

“I am authorised to bring you this message: The fiat of J.C.X. is that you accept his recent instructions and carry them out to the letter or immediately vacate the presidency of the North Star.”

IV

All the smug self-confidence had gone out of Slack, leaving him a towering mass of perspiring flabbiness. But there was a mulish streak in him that prevailed in the face of his trepidation.He started to hark back to his primal grievance. “If it wasn’t for this strike—”

“Forget the strike!” cut in Acey Smith. “The strike of the tugmen is a side-issue that will be forgotten long before a general election can be got under way. It will last only so long as it serves the ends of the North Star—a couple of weeks at the very most. But it must last until word comes from J.C.X. to settle it. The men will then be reinstated on their own terms with full back pay for the time they have been idle. The North Star wants no hardship to come to its men out of this incident. And, if the Hon. J. J. Slack, M.P., is then still president of the company, he shall have the full credit for making the magnanimous settlement.”

Slack’s face brightened. “I begin to see the light,” he acknowledged.

“And the object?”

“Yes. This strike will preclude delivery of the poles at Nannabijou Bay to the Kam City Company’s mills in time for them to live up to their agreement with the government.”

“And they’d thus automatically forfeit their rights on the Nannabijou Limits,” added Acey Smith, but the queer, half-pitying ghost of a smile that flickered at the corners of his mouth escaped the politician.

“I see, I see,” reiterated Slack, “and, by virtue of that rider in the government contract, the limits would be returned to us on the terms of our old tender with an extension of time for the completion of our mill. Great Scott, that would mean too that the Kam City people would have a useless mill on their hands they’d be forced to turn over to the North Star at its own price. That’s strategy for you, with a vengeance!”

“Good!” Acey Smith’s approval came with a sardonic chuckle. “It is to be hoped the International Investment Corporation and the Kam City Pulp and Paper Mills Company make the same wild deductions that you do, Slack.”

Slack blanched under the rebuff. “Why, what do you mean?” he cried.

“Just this,” replied the other. “Do you think the North Star would allow this tremendous issue to depend on such an obvious and clumsy piece of trickery? Why, man, the Kam City Company would have legal redress whereby they could force us to settle the strike and live up to our delivery contract in less than a week’s time.”

“Then what on earth is the object of the strike?”

“It’s a blind—to hide the real coup.”

“And the real coup?”

“One individual could answer that question—J.C.X.”

Slack was silent a moment, then he blurted rather than asked: “Tell me as man to man, Smith, are you J.C.X.?”

“I have wondered that you did not ask me that before,” returned the superintendent quietly. “I can inform you, as man to man, I am not J.C.X.

“But come, Mr. Slack,” he urged next moment. “We’re wasting time, and I have yet some things to attend to before I catch the train east. What answer do I send from you to J.C.X. regarding those last instructions?”

“Tell him they will be carried out to the letter,” admonished the president.

Acey Smith extended his hand. “I congratulate you, J. J.,” he offered.

“Hold on, Smith,” called Slack as the other turned to leave. “Wait till I get my coat and hat, and I’ll be with you.”

He went to a locker for the articles of wear. “We’ll slip over to the club and have dinner together,” he suggested. “You’ll have lots of time to—”There was an eerie emptiness to the ring of his voice in the room. He whirled with the sentence uncompleted.

Acey Smith was gone.

Slack shrugged uncomfortably. “Vanished,” he muttered. “I can almost fancy a faint smell of brimstone fumes hangs about the place.”