THE TIMBER PIRATE

BY CHARLES CHRISTOPHER JENKINS

McCLELLAND AND STEWART PUBLISHERS : : TORONTO

p. ivCOPYRIGHT, 1922, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

THE TIMBER PIRATE. II

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

p. vTO MY WIFE

p. viiCONTENTS

CHAPTER

PAGE

Prologue

11

I

Acey Smith

16

II

A Strange Pact on a Train

23

III

“Honour Sinks Where Commerce Long Prevails”

33

IV

“A Stoic of the woods—A Man Without a Tear”

44

V

The Way of a Woman

56

VI

A Millionaire Vanishes

65

VII

The Hill of Lurking Death

76

VIII

A Master Mind

87

IX

The Wonder Girl

99

X

The White Monster of Nannabijou

109

XI

Captain Carlstone, V.C.

119

XII

“When All the World is Young, Lad!”

131

XIII

“Them Was Roaring Days!”

143

XIV

“A Beautiful, Pale Devil”

161

XV

The Fiat of J.C.X.

168

XVI

A Hoax That Proved a Boomerang

180

XVII

Ogima Bush

193

XVIII

In the Cup!

204

XIX

“Devil He May Be—But a Man!”

212

XX

Preparing to Beard the Lion

223

XXI

A Viper Bites at a File

234

p. viiiXXII

The Night of the Tempest

246

XXIII

J.C.X!

258

XXIV

In Which a Fool Experiments

268

XXV

“The Man That Might Have Been”

278

XXVI

“The Man That Was”

289

XXVII

At the Meeting of the Trails

303

XXVIII

The Judgment of the Lowly

315

p. 11PROLOGUE

Night’s sable curtain was soon to fall on the short-lived drama of a Winter day in the Laurentians. The departing sub-arctic sun, in its last pale glory, sent up from the omnipresent whiteness myriads of glistening beams that stabbed the eyes like leaping darts of fire. Of sounds there was oppressive absence. Not even a vagrant breeze sighed in the tree-tops; but at irregular intervals the intense stillness was smitten by the lugubrious “Spon-n-n-n-g!” of some aged tree splitting open to the heart where freezing moisture expanded in its crevices. All life and warmth seemed utterly exterminated in the pre-twilight calm save for the distant Monarch of Day slowly receding from his stark white world of desolation.

Yet even in these desolate wastes Man moved and had his being; for on the trail that wound down from the heights to the northwest there was the ribbonlike tracing of a dog sled and beside it the oval imprints of snowshoes. At a small cleared area in the scrub timber, just above where the trail dipped into a mighty, spruce-bearded ravine, the sled marks and the snowshoe patterns ceased.

On this spot, by a camp fire in the snow, hunched an elderly white man wrapped to his throat in blankets, beard and eyebrows thickly frosted from the vapour of his breath. His face, the wasted face of one who had p. 12endured intense physical suffering, was bereft of tangible expression; his eyes fixed dully on the slow-leaping, soundless flames from which there ascended into the zero-freighted air a wispy, hairlike strand of smoke. Roundabout him were scattered canvas packsacks, rolls of bright coloured woollen blankets, fire-blackened pots and pans, two light chopping axes and a short-barrelled repeating rifle. Nearby, on the trail, a spent and footsore string of sled dogs lay flattened in the snow. Noses stretched to the fire, eyes closed and limbs inert, they might be mistaken for dead and frozen things but for the occasional faint heave of their flanks as their trained lungs drew sparingly of the biting ozone.

Of a sudden the deathlike calm was shattered by the whining crack of a high-power rifle. Closer by there was a swish and flap of clumsy wings, and a dowdy, slate-coloured wesse-ke-jak circled the camp uttering dismal cries of “Meat—meat—meat!”

Every canine head came to life with a start. The figure in the blankets winced as though struck from behind by an unseen icy fist, doubling forward in a racking fit of coughing that reverberated through the solitudes in listless, unsympathetic echoes. The man desisted with a choking gasp, his frame shaking in a palsy. Weakly he slumped back against a nearby packsack, hands clutching at his heart.

“Laddie,” he called in a voice that was pitifully faint, “Laddie—oh, Laddie!”

His arms sagged and went limp by his sides, his breath coming and going in the swift, sibilant gasps of a life flickering out from exhaustion.

A wolf-dog in the sled pack pricked up his pointed ears, and, straining away from his fellows, sniffed weirdly in the direction of the stricken man. The treacherous huskie leaped savagely against his p. 13restraining harness, a low, ominous growl issuing from the ugly curve of his long, trembling jaws. A woolly black-and-tan of the faithful Collie strain gave a snarl of warning; then, with bristles rising on his thick, powerful neck, leaped at the throat of the traitor. That was the signal for a general release of pentup canine irritation. In a trice the whole sled pack was engaged in a furious free-for-all of flying fur and white-flashing fangs.

“Lie down!”

The command came low, deep and vibrant with a faint click of teeth. In electric unison the pack flattened, cowering silent in their places—all but the loyal Collie, which turned with slow-wagging tail and crouching rump to express its fealty as the scrub of the trail parted and a tall youth of spare but powerful build strode into the camp with the carcass of a young buck deer on his shoulder.

The newcomer flung the deer and his rifle to the snow and rushed to the side of the dying man, applying a pocket flask to his lips while he raised him on an arm with the tenderness of a woman. But the elder one was sinking fast—was beyond human aid.

For a few moments he rallied. “Laddie—thank God—you came,” he murmured weakly. “It is the end—the end of the trail—for me. There is so much—so much left undone, Laddie—so much wrong—an erring old man should undo—but you—you, Alexander, my boy—you won’t forget—the mine—the gold mine—goes to—”

The young man bent close to catch the whispered name.

Suddenly the invalid straightened as though galvanised in a last brief lease of life, eyes fixed on some vision above and beyond his companion.

“Black Jack! Black Jack Carlstone!” He cried it as one who cries from the wells of the heart. “Black Jack, p. 14my one true friend—you—you will see that the boy—you will see that he carries out my will—”

His torso sagged and his head dropped limply on his chest before he finished.

With reverent touch the young man closed the tired old eyes, while his own welled up and there was a suggestion of a stifled sob in his throat. Mutely for some moments he remained on one knee in the snow, stoically still, looking into the face of the dead man as though questioning the cruel vagaries of Fate.

But as quickly his expression changed. Presently, when he arose and strode over to the fire, a hard, uncanny light flickered over his face—a face whose intense pallor accentuated the blackness of his extraordinary eyes. Framed in the close-fitting muskrat cap, it was a face that bespoke undeveloped power, strikingly handsome in its mephistophelian mould and portending a sagacity beyond its years.

He stood with arms outstretched to the setting sun, for the moment transformed to a pagan chieftain, and from his lips there issued the single word, “Kee-am!” which in the Indian means: “Nothing matters!”

“The gold mine goes to—” Slowly he repeated the dead man’s injunction. The lids of his black eyes narrowed until they became slits of flame and the lines of his mouth set close-pressed and cruel.

But when he turned and addressed the corpse his features relaxed and his voice was gutturally soft and musical: “It shall be as you willed, my kindest friend—but, for the present, the mine is lent to me.”

The sun, now a great, boiling globe under a fanlike glaze of scarlet, eased down upon the bleak western ranges, bordering their purple-shrouded crests with a narrow edging of brightest gold; hesitated one brief second in fiery farewell, then plunged behind the ragged p. 15rim of the northern world. Night swept with swift stealth across the wilderness, transforming it to a realm of spectrelike shadows.

A solemn hush, like a requiem of Nature for the day that was dead, fell over the forests.

The lone figure by the camp fire bent forward strangely as though gripped by an inward paroxysm.

As he did so, the deeps of the woods vibrated with a long-drawn, unearthly cry that echoed and re-echoed its fearsome notes far in the hills. It had seemed to rise from nowhere, a howl neither human nor bestial, but a demoniac blending of both; half anguished wail, half mocking laughter.

No prowling timber wolf broke the succeeding silence with an answering call. Even the wolf-dog in the sled pack cowered deeper in his snowy bed in whimpering fear.

p. 16CHAPTER I ACEY SMITH

I

Louis Hammond, picking his way in the rapidly-failing twilight, dodged a pot-hole in the pulp camp’s “main street,” looked up at the unexpected sound of a woman’s voice, and, misplacing a foot, went sprawling into another. He arose bespattered and with ice-cold ooze seeping to his ankles over the tops of his city shoes.

The young man barely checked the exclamation more forceful than polite that rose to his tongue when a lithe, girlish form, close-wrapped to the throat in a light fall coat, stepped out to the road from the shadowy verandah of the building that had been pointed out to him as the office of the superintendent.

A big man in a reefer and high boots laced to the knees followed, but before he gained her side, the woman turned.

“No, I thank you,” Hammond heard her decline in a bright voice. “It is only a step down to the dock.”

The man bowed deferentially, lifted his narrow-brimmed stetson with a courtliness oddly at variance with his rough garb, followed her with his eyes for a moment, then wheeled and returned to the building.

On the Nannabijou Limits, in the farthest reaches of Lake Superior’s wild North Shore, was about the last place on earth Hammond expected to encounter a white woman, especially one whose voice and every movement betokened long association in refined environment. Her p. 17verve and grace were the more apparent to him as she came tripping sure-footedly down through the half-light toward the water-front.

She passed him on the other side of the road, and just then the door of a camp to his right was flung open emitting a widening flood of yellow lamplight that threw them both in relief.

Hammond caught a fleeting glimpse of an oval little face, fascinating in its contour; of a daintily-moulded mouth and chin and fine, high-arched eyebrows traced as with the delicate brush of an artist. He looked into great darkened blue eyes that held startled recognition; saw her lips open in a suppressed gasp, then she hurried on as though fearful he might accost her.

The time, the place and the extremely odd circumstances under which he had last felt the magnetic sway of those eyes beneath the unforgettable brows recurred to him as, with wildly-beating pulse, he stood wiping the mud from his hands and clothes with his pocket-handkerchief.

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 p. 18damp, 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 p. 19cheek-bones, with a sensitive mouth that could compress thin-lipped with a flicker in its half-smile that was cruel as sin.

The superintendent arose and walked slowly over to a desk and tossed down the limp-covered encyclopedia volume he had been perusing, then he turned and studied Hammond queerly, quite as one might study an inanimate object while in the depths of a mental problem, only this man’s eyes held a ghostly, diabolical light.

“Mr. Hammond, what do you know about aphasia?” was his startling first question.

“Not a great deal,” replied Hammond seeking to retain an unsurprised outwardness. “Refers to loss of identity or something of that sort. That encyclopedia ought to—”

“That being so,” cut in the other, seeming to return to actual surroundings, “will you please be seated and tell me what’s on your mind. Smoke?”

Hammond lifted a cigarette from the other’s case. “You are Mr. A. C. Smith, the superintendent?”

“Acey Smith will do out here.”

“As you seem to already know, my name is Hammond. I came looking for a job.”

“A job?” He swept Hammond’s raiment with his scornful eyes. “What’s so suddenly gone wrong with the world of white collars and derby hats?”

“I brought this letter of introduction from Hon. J. J. Slack, M.P.”

“Well.” Acey Smith grunted amusedly, tore open the envelope and merely glanced at the contents. He turned to Hammond with a trace of a sneer playing about his mouth. “Indicates I’m not to bother trying to find out what you’re wanted for and to slap you on the pay-roll at a hundred a month and found.”

Hammond stifled indignant surprise. “I suppose you have something I can do?”

p. 20“Do?” There was something like a hiss in Acey Smith’s half-laugh. “Take in the scenery, I’d suggest. There’s a devil of a lot of it going to waste hereabouts.”

“There’s a mistake somewhere, Mr. Smith. I didn’t come out here to loaf, but to tackle a job and earn the money.”

The other smiled in better-natured scorn. “Say, Hammond,” he derided, “what are you trying to put over on a poor, benighted bush superintendent? You know as well as the scribe angel knows that Old Man J.J. isn’t forking you out the North Star’s good money for what you’re going to do, but for what you’ve done.”

Hammond, remembering a warning, became cautious. “Nevertheless,” he persisted, “I would at least like to make a show of earning the money.”

“That’s better,” approved Acey Smith. “Tell me what you did for a living before J.J. tucked you out here.”

Again Hammond felt the need of being guarded before those black, soul-searching eyes. “Lawyer,” he prevaricated.

“Full-fledged?”

“No, student.”

“H’m, hard-boiled is the only kind I could use. Oh, well, if you find it hard to keep your mind occupied you might camouflage as an extra check with the pole-counting squad. But your principal business, young man, will be doing as you damned well please, except when you get explicit orders to do otherwise.

“By the way,” in a more friendly tone, “how was J.J. looking when you last saw him?”

“Pretty fit, though he seemed worried.”

“Politics is a hell of a game, isn’t it?” pronounced Acey Smith. “But you had better be turning in; you look mussed up and tired. You bunk with the head cook in the little shack next door up. First thing in the morning p. 21slip over to the camp store and get a bush outfit. Those parlour duds of yours are high-sign invitations to the ‘flu,’ and we don’t encourage funerals.”

Hammond thanked him, said good-night and turned to leave the room. His hand was on the door-latch when Acey Smith seemed to glide through the air to his side. He felt his wrist seized in a grip of steel.

“Spy!”

It came a hissing accusation that sent Hammond’s hot blood to his head. He flung the other free of him. “No, damn you,” he answered fiercely, “and I’m not a timber wolf either!”

He could not have explained what inspired him to say that, but at the words, Acey Smith cowered back as one might from the clinging clout of a logging whip. Hammond did not know that a man’s face could at one moment hold so much of evil as leaped at him from Smith’s. His head jerked back and the eyes that darted fire at Hammond were no longer the eyes of a human being. The taut lips bared back from the even white teeth in a hateful snarl; then Acey Smith’s hands went up to his face convulsively, the palms cupping his lower features.

He whirled on a heel like an Objibway in a war dance. Next instant when he faced Hammond he was laughing quietly. “We’ll drop the play-acting,” he said, “and I’ll take you up and introduce you to your shack-mate, Sandy Macdougal, the cook.”

“You are sure I am not a spy?”

“I am satisfied you are not what I feared for your own welfare you might have been. Let’s go.”

But the cook had turned in and was snoring raucously when they reached his quarters, a substantial log shack that stood directly opposite the huge dining-camp. Four bunks were built into the further wall of the one-room interior, each equipped with a mattress and any amount p. 22of dark-grey blankets. The place was dimly illuminated by a sullen fire that gave out fitful, subdued cracklings in the little sheet-iron heater banked for the night with green wood.

Acey Smith lighted a wall lamp. Only one of the bunks was occupied, so Acey Smith directed Hammond to the other lower, bade him good-night and left abruptly.

III

The young man did not immediately retire in spite of his fatigue. Instead, he sat down by the stove, lit his pipe and tried mentally to propound something tangible out of the hodge-podge of mystery that had surrounded him since the night of September the twenty-third when he had allowed himself to be pitch-forked into a commission without definite instructions as to how he was to act or whom he was to accept as friends or enemies. Surely the whole world had not gone mad since that hour; there must be a sane method in the whole thing somewhere, but try as he could, cudgel his imagination as he might, he could build up no theory that was at all satisfying.

Then, after he retired, came memory of the fearsome visage of Acey Smith when he had flung him off over there at the door of his office. That was no “play-acting” as Smith had tried to pass it off. For the moment the man had been in deadly earnest, Hammond was sure of that.