At the door of the diner stood a weird figure. His face was swarthy, almost black, with livid red scars on the cheek-bones below each eye. Straight black hair, coarse as a horse’s mane, fell in glossy strands to his shoulders from his uncovered head, where a single eagle’s feather was fastened at the back with a band of purple bound round the temples and the brow. He wore a much-beaded, close-fitting costume of brightly-coloured blanket-cloth, shoepack moccasins and string upon string of glistening white wolves’ teeth around his neck.
His was a face of deep sagacity, features aquiline and regular as a white man’s but possessing that solemn majesty of the headmen of Northern tribes. It was made the more forbidding by the self-inflicted wounds in the cheeks, and the whites of his eyes showed garishly as he leisurely surveyed the room.
“Ogima Bush,” he announced in a deep voice that commanded respect in spite of his bizarre appearance. “Ogima Bush look to find Big Boss.”
“_Un-n-n-n_—Smid. Maybe you know where me find?”
“Gone,” informed Macdougal, throwing out his arms expressively. “Gone away out on lake early. Maybe not be back for long time.”
The Indian grunted. “Maybe you tell him Big Boss Ogima Bush come to see him? Tell him big Medicine Man.”
The Indian turned and strode out, but not before he fixed Hammond for one fleeting instant with an uncanny flash from his fierce black eyes, a glint in them that seemed to pierce the young man through and through.
“Some motion picture get-up that,” Hammond observed when the door closed behind him. “An Indian chief, I suppose?”
“No, worse than that,” sniffed the cook. “He’s what they call a medicine man; even the whites out here step out of the trail to let that bird pass. Besides, one’s got to be civil to them red-skinned loafers,” he explained, “because the super. is in some way cahoots with them and their pagan deviltry. Some say he’s really one of them only he happened to be born white.”
Hammond had to laugh over the other’s rueful seriousness. “But is Smith really out?” he questioned. “I saw a lady come off the tug this morning and go into his office.”
“A pretty little devil with dark eyes and a flashy set of furs?”
“That’s Yvonne,” said Sandy the Cook. “Yes, and maybe she wasn’t rearin’ mad when she found the Big Boss was out. She’s got to go back on the tug this morning, and nobody here, not even Mooney, the assistant super., knows where Smith’s gone or when he’ll be back.”