Josephine Stone sat a rapt listener to this, the first relation of the inner story of the North Star Towing and Contracting Company’s operations. She had only grasped in a dazed way the tremendous significance it had to her personally. The magnetic nearness of the master mind that had created and developed the huge enterprise and its subsidiaries single-handed diverted her thoughts for the time being from her own personal interest in the matter. Here close to her was that rare type, a man of dreams with the will and initiative to weave reality from the gossamer skeins of his picturesque imagination—a genius and a man of purpose.

The thought that struck her was: What must this man have gone through in all those years! He had not referred to that. His stress had been on the might and achievements of the North Star. But the North Star was Acey Smith; a man’s greatest achievements in life are no more than the expression and embodiment of the hidden emotions that rule his being. These things must have come, not alone from the desire for revenge on his usurper, but from the irresistible urge of a great protagonist soul for self-expression—the consciousness of power—the restless fire that consumes a conqueror. What might this man not have been under other circumstances?

She glanced shyly at his face as he proceeded in low, musical tones with the tale. The bitter, sinister lines were gone from it now, and in their place there sat the tragedy of it all; the lonely years he struggled and fought and pitted himself against the giants of his time—anonymously, because of his terrible affliction, that loon-cry, and the calamitous circumstances of his birth. About those unhappy features, she intuitively knew, he was extremely sensitive—secret sorrows that until now had been sealed books. He had dared have no sympathetic confidante and no solace in his periods of relaxation but the voice of his violin up in the solitary confines of this Cup of Nannabijou. Now—now she understood that terrible heart-hunger that had wailed to her on the notes of the number he played last night.

But there was that yet that she had not learned.

“When war broke out and Canada offered her all in the cause of civilisation,” he was saying, “I experienced the thrill that gripped the manhood of British nations round the world. I wanted to get in on a bit of the fighting, and I wanted to fight under my father’s name. I found a way.

“Instructions went out to the executives of the North Star that the directing heads of the company were called away temporarily on war duty, and Hon. J. J. Slack was put in absolute charge in the interim. A. C. Smith, superintendent, it was announced, was being despatched on confidential business and would be absent from his duties for an indefinite period, his chief assistant taking care of his work in the meantime. This all looked plausible enough because two of the North Star’s most powerful tugs had been sent overseas when the first call for boats of their type went out.

“Before I enlisted I left a sealed envelope containing explicit instructions as to the disposition of the affairs of the North Star, in case I did not return, with Sir David Edwards-Jones, president of the Regal Bank of Canada, a man I had grown to estimate as the soul of thoroughness and honour. Those instructions were to be returned to me with the seals unbroken if I did come back. Then one night, unnoticed, I took a midnight train for the West.

“I stained my skin the copper tint it had been before old Joseph Stone bleached it with his formula, and in Vancouver enlisted as Private Alexander Carlstone. None that knew me as Acey Smith knew my name, number or battalion except Yvonne Kovenay, a rather wonderful young woman who was head of the North Star’s intelligence department. I confided that much to her, under pledges of strictest secrecy, in order that I might be kept in touch with the affairs of the North Star while I was at the front.

“From what you told me that day on Amethyst Island, Miss Stone, I gather that you have heard most there was to know about the record of Alexander Carlstone with the Canadian army; except that the story as it was passed on by others gives me much more credit for deeds of valour than is coming to me. How I slipped away unnoticed from the base hospital and reverted to the role of Acey Smith is a little story in itself, but we have no time for those details now. The fighting was almost over and I wanted to get back to Canada as quickly as possible, lest in the process of demobilisation my identity should be learned.

“Incidentally, news had come to me that Gildersleeve was organising a new company to enter into competition with the North Star’s pulpwood activities along the North Shore.”

II

“Before the war, the North Star had succeeded in acquiring all the larger and more valuable timber concessions on the upper reaches of Lake Superior, with the exception of the block known as the Nannabijou Limits. This vast area of pulpwood was considered the most desirable of all, and the cutting rights there meant the domination of the pulp and paper industry in Northern Ontario.

“The government had withheld the Nannabijou Limits from being thrown on the market in deference to a pledge made to the people by a former premier that it would never be leased until the company tendering for it erected a mill at Kam City capable of manufacturing into paper every stick of wood taken from it.

“The North Star until then had been an exporter, sending most of its pulpwood to mills in eastern Canada in which it held stock and to customers in United States. I had early conceived that to make the North Star hold its place it must by one means or another acquire the Nannabijou Limits. Before the war, plans were all completed for the building of a pulp and paper mill at Kam City to comply with the government stipulation. The outbreak of hostilities, however, brought about such chaos in the business world that the project had to be abandoned.

“My absence at the war and the consequent inactivity of the North Star in the matter of expansion had given Gildersleeve the opportunity he had been quietly watching for. When I returned I discovered that he was organising international capital on a large scale with the express purpose of securing the rights on the Nannabijou. If he succeeded I knew too well what it meant, and that would be the ultimate elimination of the North Star as a factor on the upper lakes.

“The North Star immediately purchased a site for a plant in Kam City, let a contract for the erection of a pulp and paper mill building and placed an order for the necessary machinery and equipment. With these proofs of our good intentions we went to the provincial government and put in our application for cutting rights on the Nannabijou. The Kam City Pulp and Paper Company, subsidiary of the International Investment Corporation, of which Gildersleeve had been made president, simultaneously made a bid for the limits. They too bought a site in Kam City and made preparations for the erection of a mill.

“As an established Canadian company employing hundreds of workmen the year round, not to mention the lever we had in political affairs, the advantage, at the start, was with us; but parliament, as is the wont of parliaments, haggled over the matter for many weary months. Finally, they awarded the lease to the North Star, on a year to year basis, with a particular stipulation that our mills be grinding wood from the Nannabijou Limits at full capacity on October twenty-third of this year. That would give us plenty of leeway, for we expected to commence the installation of our machinery in June.

“Strange as it appeared at the time, the Kam City Pulp and Paper Company continued their building operations with no apparent prospect of limits to draw a raw supply from. I suspected Gildersleeve had a card up his sleeve, but was at a loss to determine what trickery he planned until the announcement reached us that the company in the States which was building the North Star’s pulp and paper manufacturing machinery had gone into liquidation and could not make delivery.

“This was indeed a calamity, for the construction of certain of the machines used in paper-making cannot be completed in less than twenty-seven months’ time. Nowhere else could we secure equipment anywhere within the time limit set by the government. The full meaning of the coup that had been put over the North Star by its unscrupulous rival was realised when we learned that the failure of the pulp and paper machinery manufacturers with whom the North Star had its order was brought about by money-market manipulators in Gildersleeve’s syndicate. By this underhand method the Kam City Pulp and Paper Mills had actually gained possession of the plant the North Star had on order.

“The North Star was faced with cancellation of its rights on the limits and possible financial difficulties through the immense amount of money it had invested in a mill that would now be a white elephant on its hands. The Kam City Pulp and Paper Company lost no time in drawing the attention of the government to the fact that the North Star was installing no machinery to grind the pulp poles it was booming at the limits; and further that we had no machinery nor any prospect of securing any. The Kam City Company applied for an order to restrain the North Star from further cutting operations and again applied for the lease under the former terms of offer.

“The order of restraint was not issued, but the government, after investigation, issued a fiat that in case the Kam City Company were in a position to manufacture paper to the full capacity demanded in the North Star’s agreement, and the North Star were not in that position, the rights of the North Star on the Nannabijou Limits were to be cancelled and turned over to the Kam City Company on October twenty-third. Furthermore, the fiat ordained that the North Star could continue cutting and booming poles at the limits until that date, if it so desired; but it must make delivery of all poles cut in time and in sufficient quantities to start the Kam City Company’s mills on contract time, and to keep them running full capacity until the opening of navigation the following year.

“To their own surprise, as well as that of every one else who had been following the news, the North Star’s legal representatives appearing before the legislature received definite orders not to apply for an extension of time in the matter of the North Star’s agreement, nor to attempt to protest the Kam City Company’s right to the lease. They were instructed instead to concentrate their efforts for the inclusion of a clause in the government’s agreement with the Kam City Company specifying that, should the latter company fail to make good to the letter in their contract by the date named, from any cause whatsoever, the order giving them access to the limits should be cancelled and the North Star should remain in peaceful possession with the privilege of acquiring and installing the necessary machinery at its mills as expeditiously as might be within the bounds of reason.

“That famous ‘Act of God’ clause, as it has since been nicknamed, was fought out for days on the floor of the House; but the North Star finally won, its representatives stressing the fact that the North Star had been arbitrarily dealt with by the government because it had been debarred from fulfilling its agreement through circumstances over which it had no control, and, what was fair for an established company already in possession, should be fair enough for an outside company which was seeking to take its right away from it. The law-makers at Toronto were sportsmen enough to see the point, though they could not possibly see how we could benefit from it.

“The public was quite as much at sea, and it was freely conceded that the directing heads of the North Star were madmen, though people who knew the North Star intimately were contented to wait and see what came out of it all.”

“With the approach of the greatest crisis in the history of the North Star, another important matter claimed immediate attention. Your twenty-first birthday, Miss Stone, fell one week before cancellation of the North Star’s rights on the limits must be prevented. I’ll confess that when I sent you for in the name of ‘J.C.X.’ I saw an opportunity of thus mixing in a little more mystery to keep our rivals guessing just what we were about.

“By an odd coincidence, Norman T. Gildersleeve and your friend, Mr. Hammond, were bound for Kam City on the same train that brought you from the West. The North Star’s intelligence department had been keeping close tab on Gildersleeve. So far as I can gather, he must have gained some vague notion as to the truth of the North Star’s direction and control. He had been filling our camps with cheap private detectives of the transom and keyhole peeking type, some of whom were entertained to exciting adventures but gained no knowledge worth while. Gildersleeve was growing certain the North Star had some trump card to play, and he thought to take a leaf out of the North Star’s book of methods to get at the bottom of it and frustrate it. He concocted a wild scheme of appearing to disappear personally and gain admission to the limits in the disguise of a preacher. He was egotistic enough to believe that what his detectives had failed in he could accomplish himself.

“Our agents kept me apprised of his every move, even to his inveigling young Hammond to undertake a seemingly mysterious mission to the limits to divert attention from his own operations. In many respects it appealed to me as a nice bit of comedy, but Gildersleeve and Hammond were shadowed day and night; the former for obvious reasons and the latter to see that no harm befell him. Our newspapers meanwhile published all sorts of conflicting news stories of Gildersleeve’s disappearance; much to the discomfiture of Gildersleeve’s one confidante, a Kam City lawyer named Winch. Just by way of adding to the gaiety of nations, I wrote an editorial on the subject of aphasia, inferring that it was this trouble that had suddenly afflicted. Mr. Gildersleeve and had it published in our string of dailies.

“Gildersleeve might have been allowed to play out his little fiasco to his heart’s content for all the interference it would have proved to the North Star’s plans had he not been rash enough to think he could spirit you away from Amethyst Island right under our eyes. The plot was to get Hammond to cultivate your acquaintance and thus unwittingly lead you into the hands of a gang of low-brows who were to carry you off in a yacht and keep you on the lake until after the twenty-third of October.”

“But why should Mr. Gildersleeve have desired to carry me off?” cried Josephine Stone in perplexity.

“Because,” replied Acey Smith, “he believed you were in some way essential to the plans the North Star had on foot. His first and only attempt to seize you was staged in the woods that day you made the trip up to the cliffs with Louis Hammond. It was nipped in the bud, without either you or Hammond knowing about it, by the North Star’s faithful Indian trackers.

“There was no second attempt because I took no further chances. When I could not induce you to voluntarily leave the island at once, I had you carried off by Ogima Bush, the only man I could trust to handle so delicate an undertaking. A ruse used simultaneously to implicate Gildersleeve in his disguise as the camp preacher worked so successfully that he was arrested by the Mounted Police, and his company had to forfeit a thousand dollars bail in order to get him out of jail and an extremely embarrassing situation.

“That was the beginning of the end. I went to Montreal while the Gildersleeve crowd were frantically concentrating their nimble brains to force a settlement of a strike among the North Star’s tugmen. In Montreal I made final arrangements for the transfer of the estate of Joseph Stone to his rightful heiress, Josephine Stone, after having had the loan of it for the nineteen years it was left in my trust.

“There were just two little details left for me to complete when I returned. The one was to give you an account of the manner in which I managed your property while it was held in trust and the other was to see that there were no poles for the Kam City Pulp and Paper Mills to grind on the twenty-third.

“Come look!”

He led her to the edge of the cliff, pointing to the empty bay in front of the camp below.

“Oh,” cried Josephine Stone, “the booms are gone. What became of them?”

“They went out last night in the freshet caused by the breaking of the beaver-dam in Solomon Creek during the storm.”

“But those poles,” questioned the girl, “weren’t they very valuable?”

“They had not yet been paid for by the Kam City Company and they were still the North Star’s property,” he told her. “And they can be salvaged—but by no effort could they be salvaged to start the Kam City Company’s mills on time, much less to keep them in continuous supply all winter. They will be salvaged to be ground and manufactured into paper at the North Star’s own mills next year.”

“Still the storm last night was an accident. If it had not happened—”

“I did not say it was the storm,” he reminded her. “Just what made the beaver-dam go out will always remain a mystery. Ogima Bush the Medicine Man, who had led his Indians to believe the dam contained an evil spirit that was bringing misfortune to them, held some sort of a pagan incantation down there last night which might or might not explain a lot.”

“The Indians told Mrs. Johnson he was killed in the storm.”

“Who—Ogima? Not much. Ogima Bush has as many lives as a cat. But the chances are he’ll never be seen in this locality again.”

Josephine Stone turned to him. “But what about yourself?” she asked. “In your account of the North Star’s operations and the final disposition of the property you have not said one word as to the provisions made for the man who engineered it all.”

“Oh, that too has been taken care of,” he replied. “During my trusteeship of the estate I drew a salary quite commensurate with the services I rendered. I made a few investments also that are turning out well.”

“But your plans for the future?”

“I had not thought of that,” Acey Smith answered, his eyes fixing in that peculiar abstraction that made him an enigma among men. “Always I have had the gift of visualising the future; of seeing clearly what was ahead of me until now. But beyond what is now accomplished, beyond to-day, everything appears like a void—a nothingness. To put it that way, I feel like one who peruses the last chapters of an exciting tale and knows, though he has not yet seen the author’s finis, that the end is near.”

Something tragically prophetic in his tones, a detachedness of his manner and a realisation of his terrible loneliness of spirit smote Josephine Stone. Her lips trembled and her eyes filled.

“Come, come, little girl,” he chided banteringly, “you must not cry on this of all your birthdays.”

But she had turned from him. “I was thinking,” she murmured, “of Captain Alexander Carlstone, the Man That Might Have Been.”

Her shoulders were quivering. The man’s arms went out as though to sweep her exquisite little form to him, but by a tremendous effort of will he desisted and they dropped to his side. A paroxysm went through his frame and his hands went cupping to his mouth to muffle and strangle the cursed cry of the loon that was rising in his throat.

When she turned his face was the old grim, sinister mask. “Let’s go,” he urged almost gruffly. “I had planned to have you reach Amethyst Island early this afternoon and go over on a special tug to Kam City as soon as you could get ready. The Indians are waiting with a sedan in the bush just a few hundred yards below the water-gate.”

He paused suddenly in their progress toward the pathway leading down from the summit. “My pack-sack!” he exclaimed staring at the empty place where it had hung on the little jackpine.

He strode over to the rim of the cliff and looked down. “Might have had better sense than to have hung it there,” he ruminated. “Wind shook it loose and it has fallen down to the gully below. Oh, well, I’ll come back up for it after I see you down to the island. I’ll have to remember that.”