She could not bear to return to the interior of the cottage. An overpowering sense of an intangible something out there in the woods had taken such a hold on her she quaked at times as with the cold. It was as if unseen eyes watched her every movement from the fastnesses; as though a designing, hating presence prowled out there, always watching—waiting. She could not entirely account for the sensation. So far, she had never been afraid, alone as she and Mrs. Johnson had been so far as white company was concerned. Partly, of course, it came of her fright at the unexpected meeting with Ogima Bush on the trail, the unexplained departure of Mrs. Johnson and the urgent demand of Acey Smith that she leave the island, because of an unnamed danger, until the appointed time for meeting J.C.X.
The very name now seemed to fill her with dread. Previously she had pictured a dashing czar of the bush camps, handsome as he was poetic by nature. At one time she had even suspected that J.C.X. was none other than Acey Smith himself. Now she knew that could not be the fact; she knew now that the timber boss of the Nannabijou Limits, iron man though he was in other respects, bent abjectly to the sinister influence and will of some powerful factor he lived in constant dread of and dare not explain. The remorse that had been in his tones when yesterday he had spoken of “the Man That Might Have Been” had uttered volumes as to the mental and spiritual shackles he had allowed to be placed upon his better self. Why had he so contemptuously referred to the tragic ending of the career of Captain Carlstone? Had the gallant soldier also been vassal to the grim J.C.X. and killed himself to escape his despair?
She now heartily wished she had never come to Amethyst Island—that she had not pressed on Acey Smith to bring about a meeting with J.C.X. If J.C.X. were a presentable human being of sane and upright character, why was it not possible for Acey Smith to induce him to come to meet her, instead of asking her, an unprotected stranger, to journey she knew not where to gain the information referred to in his letter? True, she trusted Acey Smith so far as her personal safety was concerned; her woman’s intuition told her that, away from the weird outside influence that seemed to dominate him body and soul, he possessed the born instincts of a gentleman—but, under its sway, it was problematical what he might not be capable of doing.