“Then he packs us back on the next tug with orders where she was to look for the job. It wasn’t in a North Star office, but one of the other factories in town that people say is run with North Star money.
“But don’t you think there wasn’t a curtain-call for me when I got back to camp for givin’ away to the girl and her mother as to the man whackin’ up for her lawyer. The Big Boss nearly fired me.
“‘You don’t know me, Macdougal,’ he grits. ‘I ain’t a movin’ picture hero such as you seem to think. Didn’t I tell you we were in on this thing just for the fun of cheatin’ the law? Besides, it wasn’t my money but the North Star’s that paid for her lawyer, and it was the North Star’s influence that got her that job, just the same as the North Star has rescued other people from the clutches of the law that it knew it could use. That girl’s one of us now and she’d go through hell-fire in the company’s interests if she was asked to. If you wasn’t blind you’d have seen that from the first. Beat it to your beanery and don’t let me ever hear you mention a word about this again.’
“Aye, he’s a queer, queer man, is Acey Smith,” concluded the cook. “Sometimes it seems to me something is eatin’ the heart out of him—something burnin’ inside him and fillin’ him up with hellery. Sometimes I think he’s a good man with a devil in him that won’t give him no rest.”
The cook’s story, like others he had heard, impressed Hammond even if it did increase the enigma that hung about the personality of the timber boss. “It is certain he has some fixed method in all this madness of his,” Hammond mused as much to himself as to his companion. “One object undoubtedly is to keep every one guessing what his real motives are. He has to keep himself pretty much a mystery in order to carry out the orders of his bosses.”
“Oh, but he ain’t carryin’ out their crooked work just for the money there’s in it,” spoke up Macdougal. “There’s something deeper’n that. I’ve been a-studyin’ the man too close and too long to believe that. It’s something inside the man himself that makes him carry on as he does.”
“I’ll quite agree with you there,” responded Hammond. “You call it a devil while I would call it an obsession of mind or a ruling mania: all of which are pretty much the one and the same thing, except that our forefathers called it a devil and let it go at that. If one could only get the key to that obsession they’d soon be able to clear up the whole mystery of this camp.”