“Alexander Carlstone fled from the haunts of civilisation, filled with a consuming bitterness of spirit, an atheist so far as garbled Justice and revamped Christianity were concerned and nursing an undying hatred for the usurper, Norman T. Gildersleeve.
“In his soul had been sown the self-same germs that have bred history’s bloodiest revolutions.”
“JOSEPH STONE, your grandfather, was one of those vitally interested in the fate of young Carlstone,” continued Acey Smith. “The old scientist and prospector had been a personal cronie of John Carlstone; in fact, the latter had been of financial assistance to him in some of his early ventures. But in his eerie out here in the Cup of Nannabijou, where he lived to himself, Joseph Stone did not learn of his friend’s death and the disappearance of his son until he made one of his periodical visits to the city for supplies. The old man was deeply grieved and made diligent inquiry for the whereabouts of Alexander Carlstone, but the young man had then been away several weeks and none knew whither he had gone.
“Joseph Stone was himself a heart-hungry old man, his own only son having left him during an altercation in which the younger Stone had insisted on their leaving the wilderness for the western prairies where he saw a more prosperous future for both. The upshot of it all was that the son left for the West, swearing that he would never darken his father’s door again. And he never did.
“It must be stated that your grandfather, though a learned and open-hearted man, was extremely eccentric in some respects. He had invested almost all of his modest fortune in equipping a laboratory in this faraway fastness. He managed somehow to eke out a living by engaging in trapping in the cold months and occasionally doing exploring and investigating work in the then little known interior for the government. His passion, however, was for scientific research, and his one ruling hobby was to discover the answer to the riddle of pigmentation whereby the colour is transmitted to the bodies and faces of the dark-skinned races of men. His theory was that black, red, brown and yellow men were so because of the prevalence of a tiny germ secreted in the intricacies of the cuticle, and that this germ while alive resisted the bleaching effects of the actinic rays of the sun’s light. He not only pursued his research in this matter to a successful conclusion, but actually produced a formula for a solution, which, when applied to the skin, killed the active colour germs, so that only a few moments of exposure to the sunlight, after treatment, would turn dark men or red men white. Fortunately or unfortunately, as the case may have been, his secret died with him.