“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.”
“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.”