The distant crack of a dry stick checked her. The next instant she picked up his rifle, seized his arm, and fairly dragged him into a spruce thicket.
"Do you want to get my father into trouble!" she said fiercely.
The rocky flank of Star Peak bordered the marsh here.
"Come on," she whispered, jerking him along through the thicket and up the rocks to a cleft – a hole in the sheer rock overhung by shaggy hemlock.
"Get in there," she said breathlessly.
"Whoever comes," he protested, "will see the buck yonder, and will certainly look in here – "
"Not if I go down there and take your medicine. Creep into that cave and lie down."
"What do you intend to do?" he demanded, interested and amused.
"If it's one of Harrod's game-keepers," said the girl drily, "it only means a summons and a fine for me. And if it's a State Trooper, who is prowling in the woods yonder hunting crooks, he'll find nobody here but a trespasser. Keep quiet. I'll stand him off."
IVWhen State Trooper Stormont came out on the edge of Owl Marsh, the girl was kneeling by the water, washing deer blood from her slender, sun-tanned fingers.
"What are you doing here?" she enquired, looking up over her shoulder with a slight smile.
"Just having a look around," he said pleasantly. "That's a nice fat buck you have there."
"Yes, he's nice."
"You shot him?" asked Stormont.
"Who else do you suppose shot him?" she enquired, smilingly. She rinsed her fingers again and stood up, swinging her arms to dry her hands, – a lithe, grey-shirted figure in her boyish garments, straight, supple, and strong.
"I saw you hurrying into the woods," said Stormont.
"Yes, I was in a hurry. We need meat."
"I didn't notice that you carried a rifle when I saw you leave the house – by the back door."
"No; it was in the woods," she said indifferently.
"You have a hiding place for your rifle?"
"For other things, also," she said, letting her eyes of gentian-blue rest on the young man.
"You seem to be very secretive."
"Is a girl more so than a man?" she asked smilingly.
Stormont smiled too, then became grave.
"Who else was here with you?" he asked quietly.
She seemed surprised. "Did you see anybody else?"
He hesitated, flushed, pointed down at the wet sphagnum. Smith's foot-prints were there in damning contrast to her own. Worse than that, Smith's pipe lay on an embedded log, and a rubber tobacco pouch beside it.
She said with a slight catch in her breath: "It seems that somebody has been here… Some hunter, perhaps, – or a game warden…"
"Or Hal Smith," said Stormont.
A painful colour swept the girl's face and throat. The man, sorry for her, looked away.
After a silence: "I know something about you," he said gently. "And now that I've seen you – heard you speak – met your eyes – I know enough about you to form an opinion… So I don't ask you to turn informer. But the law won't stand for what Clinch is doing – whatever provocation he has had. And he must not aid or abet any criminal, or harbour any malefactor."
The girl's features were expressionless. The passive, sullen beauty of her troubled the trooper.
"Trouble for Clinch means sorrow for you," he said. "I don't want you to be unhappy. I bear Clinch no ill will. For this reason I ask him, and I ask you too, to stand clear of this affair.
"Hal Smith is wanted. I'm here to take him."
As she said nothing, he looked down at the foot-print in the sphagnum. Then his eyes moved to the next imprint; to the next. Then he moved slowly along the water's edge, tracking the course of the man he was following.
The girl watched him in silence until the plain trail led him to the spruce thicket.
"Don't go in there!" she said sharply, with an odd tremor in her voice.
He turned and looked at her, then stepped calmly into the thicket. And the next instant she was among the spruces, too, confronting him with her rifle.
"Get out of these woods!" she said.
He looked into the girl's deathly white face.
"Eve," he said, "it will go hard with you if you kill me. I don't want you to live out your life in prison."
"I can't help it. If you send my father to prison he'll die. I'd rather die myself. Let us alone, I tell you! The man you're after is nothing to us. We didn't know he had stuck up anybody!"
"If he's nothing to you, why do you point that rifle at me?"
"I tell you he is nothing to us. But my father wouldn't betray a dog. And I won't. That's all. Now get out of these woods and come back to-morrow. Nobody'll interfere with you then."
Stormont smiled: "Eve," he said, "do you really think me as yellow as that?"
Her blue eyes flashed a terrible warning, but, in the same instant, he had caught her rifle, twisting it out of her grasp as it exploded.
The detonation dazed her; then, as he flung the rifle into the water, she caught him by neck and belt and flung him bodily into the spruces.
But she fell with him; he held her twisting and struggling with all her superb and supple strength; staggered to his feet, still mastering her; and, as she struggled, sobbing, locked hot and panting in his arms, he snapped a pair of handcuffs on her wrists and flung her aside.
She fell on both knees, got up, shoulder deep in spruce, blood running from her lip over her chin.
The trooper took her by the arm. She was trembling all over. He took a thin steel chain and padlock from his pocket, passed the links around her steel-bound wrists, and fastened her to a young birch tree.
Then, drawing his pistol from its holster, he went swiftly forward through the spruces.
When he saw the cleft in the rocky flank of Star Peak, he walked straight to the black hole which confronted him.
"Come out of there," he said distinctly.
After a few seconds Smith came out.
"Good God!" said Stormont in a low voice. "What are you doing here, Darragh?"
Darragh came close and rested one hand on Stormont's shoulder:
"Don't crab my game, Stormont. I never dreamed you were in the Constabulary or I'd have let you know."
"Are you Hal Smith?"
"I sure am. Where's that girl?"
"Handcuffed out yonder."
"Then for God's sake go back and act as if you hadn't found me. Tell Mayor Chandler that I'm after bigger game than he is."
"Clinch?"
"Stormont, I'm here to protect Mike Clinch. Tell the Mayor not to touch him. The men I'm after are going to try to rob him. I don't want them to because – well, I'm going to rob him myself."
Stormont stared.
"You must stand by me," said Darragh. "So must the Mayor. He knows me through and through. Tell him to forget that hold-up. I stopped that man Sard. I frisked him. Tell the Mayor. I'll keep in touch with him."
"Of course," said Stormont, "that settles it."
"Thanks, old chap. Now go back to that girl and let her believe that you never found me."
A slight smile touched their eyes. Both instinctively saluted. Then they shook hands; Darragh, alias Hal Smith, went back into the hemlock-shaded hole in the rocks; Trooper Stormont walked slowly down through the spruces.
When Eve saw him returning empty handed, something flashed in her pallid face like sunlight across snow.
Stormont passed her, went to the water's edge, soaked a spicy handful of sphagnum moss in the icy water, came back and wiped the blood from her face.
The girl seemed astounded; her face surged in vivid colour as he unlocked the handcuffs and pocketed them and the little steel chain.
Her lip was bleeding again. He washed it with wet moss, took a clean handkerchief from the breast of his tunic and laid it against her mouth.
"Hold it there," he said.
Mechanically she raised her hand to support the compress. Stormont went back to the shore, recovered her rifle from the shallow water, and returned with it.
As she made no motion to take it, he stood it against the tree to which he had tied her.
Then he came close to her where she stood holding his handkerchief against her mouth and looking at him out of steady eyes as deeply blue as gentian blossoms.
"Eve," he said, "you win. But you won't forgive me… I wish we could be friends, some day… We never can, now… Good-bye."
Neither spoke again. Then, of a sudden, the girl's eyes filled; and Trooper Stormont caught her free hand and kissed it; – kissed it again and again, – dropped it and went striding away through the underbrush which was now all rosy with the rays of sunset.
After he had disappeared, the girl, Eve, went to the cleft in the rocks above.
"Come out," she said contemptuously. "It's a good thing you hid, because there was a real man after you; and God help you if he ever finds you!"
Hal Smith came out.
"Pack in your meat," said the girl curtly, and flung his rifle across her shoulder.
Through the ruddy afterglow she led the way homeward, a man's handkerchief pressed to her wounded mouth, her eyes preoccupied with the strangest thoughts that ever had stirred her virgin mind.
Behind her walked Darragh with his load of venison and his alias, – and his tongue in his cheek.
Thus began the preliminaries toward the ultimate undoing of Mike Clinch. Fate, Chance, and Destiny had undertaken the job in earnest.
Episode Two
THE RULING PASSION
INOBODY understood how José Quintana had slipped through the Secret Service net spread for him at every port.
The United States authorities did not know why Quintana had come to America. They realised merely that he arrived for no good purpose; and they had meant to arrest and hold him for extradition if requested; for deportation as an undesirable alien anyway.
Only two men in America knew that Quintana had come to the United States for the purpose of recovering the famous "Flaming Jewel," stolen by him from the Grand Duchess Theodorica of Esthonia; and stolen from Quintana, in turn, by a private soldier in an American Forestry Regiment, on leave in Paris. This soldier's name, probably, was Michael Clinch.
One of the men who knew why Quintana might come to America was James Darragh, recently of the Military Intelligence, but now passing as a hold-up man under the name of Hal Smith, and actually in the employment of Clinch at his disreputable "hotel" at Star Pond in the North Woods.
The other man who knew why Quintana had come to America was Emanuel Sard, a Levantine diamond broker of New York, Quintana's agent in America.
Now, as the October days passed without any report of Quintana's detention, Darragh, known as Hal Smith at Clinch's dump, began to suspect that Quintana had already slid into America through the meshes of the police.
If so, this desperate international criminal could be expected at Clinch's under some guise or other, piloted thither by Emanuel Sard.
So Hal Smith, whose duty was to wash dishes, do chores, and also to supply Clinch's with "mountain beef" – or deer taken illegally – made it convenient to prowl every day in the vicinity of the Ghost Lake road.
He was perfectly familiar with Emanuel Sard's squat features and parrot nose, having robbed Mr. Sard of Quintana's cipher and of $4,000 at pistol point. And one morning, while roving around the guide's quarters at Ghost Lake Inn, Smith beheld Sard himself on the hotel veranda, in company with five strangers of foreign aspect.
During the midday dinner Smith, on pretense of enquiring for a guide's license, got a look at the Inn ledger. Sard's signature was on it, followed by the names of Henri Picquet, Nicolas Salzar, Victor Georgiades, Harry Beck, and José Sanchez. And Smith went back through the wilderness to Star Pond, convinced that one of these gentlemen was Quintana, and the remainder, Quintana's gang; and that they were here to do murder if necessary in their remorseless quest of "The Flaming Jewel." Two million dollars once had been offered for the Flaming Jewel; and had been refused.
Clinch probably possessed it. Smith was now convinced of that. But he was there to rob Clinch of it himself. For he had promised the little Grand Duchess to help recover her Erosite jewel; and now that he had finally traced its probable possession to Clinch, he was wondering how this recovery was to be accomplished.
To arrest Clinch meant ruin to Eve Strayer. Besides he knew now that Clinch would die in prison before revealing the hiding place of the Flaming Jewel.
Also, how could it be proven that Clinch had the Erosite gem? The cipher from Quintana was not sufficient evidence.
No; the only way was to watch Clinch, prevent any robbery by Quintana's gang, somehow discover where the Flaming Jewel had been concealed, take it, and restore it to the beggared young girl whose only financial resource now lay in the possible recovery of this almost priceless gem.
Toward evening Hal Smith shot two deer near Owl Marsh. To poach on his own property appealed to his sense of humour. And Clinch, never dreaming that Hal Smith was the James Darragh who had inherited Harrod's vast preserve, damned all millionaires for every buck brought in, and became friendlier to Smith.
IIClinch's dump was the disposal plant in which collected the human sewage of the wilderness.
It being Saturday, the scum of the North Woods was gathering at the Star Pond resort. A venison and chicken supper was promised – and a dance if any women appeared.
Jake Kloon had run in some Canadian hooch; Darragh, alias Hal Smith, contributed two fat deer and Clinch cooked them. By ten o'clock that morning many of the men were growing noisy; some were already drunk by noon. Shortly after midday dinner the first fight started – extinguished only after Clinch had beaten several of the backwoods aristocracy insensible.
Towering amid the wreck of battle, his light grey eyes a-glitter, Clinch dominated, swinging his iron fists.
When the combat ended and the fallen lay starkly where they fell, Clinch said in his pleasant, level voice:
"Take them out and stick their heads in the pond. And don't go for to get me mad, boys, or I'm liable to act up rough."
They bore forth the sleepers for immersion in Star Pond. Clinch relighted his cigar and repeated the rulings which had caused the fracas:
"You gotta play square cards here or you don't play none in my house. No living thumb-nail can nick no cards in my place and get away with it. Three kings and two trays is better than three chickens and two eggs. If you don't like it, g'wan home."
He went out in his shirt sleeves to see how the knock-outs were reviving, and met Hal Smith returning from the pond, who reported progress toward consciousness. They walked back to the "hotel" together.
"Say, young fella," said Clinch in his soft, agreeable way, "you want to keep your eye peeled to-night."
"Why?" inquired Smith.
"Well, there'll be a lot o' folks here. There'll be strangers, too… Don't forget the State Troopers are looking for you."
"Do the State Troopers ever play detective?" asked Smith, smiling.
"Sure. They've been in here rigged out like peddlers and lumber-jacks and timber lookers."
"Did they ever get anything on you?"
"Not a thing."
"Can you always spot them, Mike?"
"No. But when a stranger shows up here who don't know nobody, he never sees nothing and he don't never learn nothing. He gets no hootch outa me. No, nor no craps and no cards. He gets his supper; that's what he gets … and a dance, if there's ladies – and if any girl favours him. That's all the change any stranger gets out of Mike Clinch."
They had paused on the rough veranda in the hot October sunshine.
"Mike," suggested Smith carelessly, "wouldn't it pay you better to go straight?"
Clinch's small grey eyes, which had been roaming over the prospect of lake and forest, focussed on Smith's smiling features.
"What's that to you?" he asked.
"I'll be out of a job," remarked Smith, laughing, "if they ever land you."
Clinch's level gaze measured him; his mind was busy measuring him, too.
"Who the hell are you, anyway?" he asked. "I don't know. You stick up a man on the Ghost Lake Road and hide out here when the State Troopers come after you. And now you ask me if it pays better to go straight. Why didn't you go straight if you think it pays?"
"I haven't got a daughter to worry about," explained Smith. "If they get me it won't hurt anybody else."
A dull red tinge came out under Clinch's tan:
"Who asked you to worry about Eve?"
"She's a fine girl: that's all."
Clinch's steely glare measured the young man:
"You trying to make up to her?" he enquired gently.
"No. She has no use for me."
Clinch reflected, his cold tiger-gaze still fastened on Smith.
"You're right," he said after a moment. "Eve is a good girl. Some day I'll make a lady of her."
"She is one, Clinch."
At that Clinch reddened heavily – the first finer emotion ever betrayed before Smith. He did not say anything for a few moments, but his grim mouth worked. Finally:
"I guess you was a gentleman once before you went crooked, Hal," he said. "You act up like you once was… Say; there's only one thing on God's earth I care about. You've guessed it, too." He was off again upon his ruling passion.
"Eve," nodded Smith.
"Sure. She isn't my flesh and blood. But it seems like she's more, even. I want she should be a lady. It's all I want. That damned millionaire Harrod bust me. But he couldn't stop me giving Eve her schooling. And now all I'm livin' for is to be fixed so's to give her money to go to the city like a lady. I don't care how I make money; all I want is to make it. And I'm a-going to."
Smith nodded again.
Clinch, now obsessed by his monomania, went on with an oath:
"I can't make no money on the level after what Harrod done to me. And I gotta fix up Eve. What the hell do you mean by asking me would it pay me to travel straight I dunno."
"I was only thinking of Eve. A lady isn't supposed to have a crook for a father."
Clinch's grey eyes blazed for a moment, then their menacing glare dulled, died out into wintry fixity.
"I wan't born a crook," he said. "I ain't got no choice. And don't worry, young fella; they ain't a-going to get me."
"You can't go on beating the game forever, Clinch."
"I'm beating it – " he hesitated – "and it won't be so long, neither, before I turn over enough to let Eve live in the city like any lady, with her autymobile and her own butler and all her swell friends, in a big house like she is educated for – "
He broke off abruptly as a procession approached from the lake, escorting the battered gentry who now were able to wabble about a little.
One of them, a fox-faced trap thief named Earl Leverett, slunk hastily by as though expecting another kick from Clinch.
"G'wan inside, Earl, and act up right," said Clinch pleasantly. "You oughter have more sense than to start a fight in my place – you and Sid Hone and Harvey Chase. G'wan in and behave."
He and Smith followed the procession of damaged ones into the house.
The big unpainted room where a bar had once been was blue with cheap cigar smoke; the air reeked with the stench of beer and spirits. A score or more shambling forest louts in their dingy Saturday finery were gathered there playing cards, shooting craps, lolling around tables and tilting slopping glasses at one another.
Heavy pleasantries were exchanged with the victims of Clinch's ponderous fists as they re-entered the room from which they had been borne so recently, feet first.
"Now, boys," said Clinch kindly, "act up like swell gents and behave friendly. And if any ladies come in for the chicken supper, why, gol dang it, we'll have a dance!"
IIIToward sundown the first woodland nymph appeared – a half-shy, half-bold, willowy thing in the rosy light of the clearing.
Hal Smith, washing glasses and dishes on the back porch for Eve Strayer to dry, asked who the rustic beauty might be.
"Harvey Chase's sister," said Eve. "She shouldn't come here, but I can't keep her away and her brother doesn't care. She's only a child, too."
"Is there any harm in a chicken supper and a dance?"
Eve looked gravely at young Smith without replying.
Other girlish shapes loomed in the evening light. Some were met by gallants, some arrived at the veranda unescorted.
"Where do they all come from? Do they live in trees like dryads?" asked Smith.
"There are always squatters in the woods," she replied indifferently.
"Some of these girls come from Ghost Lake, I suppose."
"Yes; waitresses at the Inn."
"What music is there?"
"Jim Hastings plays a fiddle. I play the melodeon if they need me."
"What do you do when there's a fight?" he asked, with a side glance at her pure profile.
"What do you suppose I do? Fight, too?"
He laughed – mirthlessly – conscious always of his secret pity for this girl.
"Well," he said, "when your father makes enough to quit, he'll take you out of this. It's a vile hole for a young girl – "
"See here," she said, flushing; "you're rather particular for a young man who stuck up a tourist and robbed him of four thousand dollars."
"I'm not complaining on my own account," returned Smith, laughing; "Clinch's suits me."
"Well, don't concern yourself on my account, Hal Smith. And you'd better keep out of the dance, too, if there are any strangers there."
"You think a State Trooper may happen in?"
"It's likely. A lot of people come and go. We don't always know them." She opened a sliding wooden shutter and looked into the bar room. After a moment she beckoned him to her side.
"There are strangers there now," she said, " – that thin, dark man who looks like a Kanuk. And those two men shaking dice. I don't know who they are. I never before saw them."
But Smith had seen them at Ghost Lake Inn. One of them was Sard. Quintana's gang had arrived at Clinch's dump.
A moment later Clinch came through the pantry and kitchen and out onto the rear porch where Smith was washing glasses in a tub filled from an ever-flowing spring.
"I'm a-going to get supper," he said to Eve. "There'll be twenty-three plates." And to Smith: "Hal – you help Eve wait on the table. And if anybody acts up rough you slam him on the jaw – don't argue, don't wait – just slam him good, and I'll come on the hop."
"Who are the strangers, dad?" asked Eve.
"Don't nobody know 'em none, girlie. But they ain't State Troopers. They talk like they was foreign. One of 'em's English – the big, bony one with yellow hair and mustache."
"Did they give any names?" asked Smith.
"You bet. The stout, dark man calls himself Hongri Picket. French, I guess. The fat beak is a fella named Sard. Sanchez is the guy with a face like a Canada priest – José Sanchez – or something on that style. And then the yellow skinned young man is Nicole Salzar; the Britisher, Harry Beck; and that good lookin' dark gent with a little black Charlie Chaplin, he's Victor Georgiades."
"What are those foreigners doing in the North Woods, Clinch?" enquired Smith.
"Oh, they all give the same spiel – hire out in a lumber camp. But they ain't no lumberjacks," added Clinch contemptuously. "I don't know what they be – hootch runners maybe – or booze bandits – or they done something crooked som'ers r'other. It's safe to serve 'em drinks."
Clinch himself had been drinking. He always drank when preparing to cook.
He turned and went into the kitchen now, rolling up his shirt sleeves and relighting his clay pipe.
IVBy nine o'clock the noisy chicken supper had ended; the table had been cleared; Jim Hastings was tuning his fiddle in the big room; Eve had seated herself before the battered melodeon.
"Ladies and gents," said Clinch in his clear, pleasant voice, which carried through the hubbub, "we're a-going to have a dance – thanks and beholden to Jim Hastings and my daughter Eve. Eve, she don't drink and she don't dance, so no use askin' and no hard feelin' toward nobody.
"So act up pleasant to one and all and have a good time and no rough stuff in no form, shape or manner, but behave like gents all and swell dames, like you was to a swarry on Fifth Avenue. Let's go!"
He went back to the pantry, taking no notice of the cheering. The fiddler scraped a fox trot, and Eve's melodeon joined in. A vast scuffling of heavily shod feet filled the momentary silence, accented by the shrill giggle of young girls.
