“But I understood I was to meet him here.”
“You have misinterpreted the letter, Miss Stone. Nowhere does it refer to such a meeting.”
The girl bit her nether lip. Her eyes flashed dangerously. “If that’s the answer,” she said coldly, “we may as well end this farce at once. I will return to Calgary to-morrow.”
Genuine alarm came into Acey Smith’s face. “But, Miss Stone,” he cried, “you don’t know how much it is in your own interests that you stay—how greatly you would jeopardise matters by leaving!”
“That is just it—I don’t know! I feel I have a right to know if I am to be asked to remain.”
There could be no mistaking the determination in her voice and manner. Plainly she was poignantly disappointed. The superintendent gazed fixedly into space for a silent period. “Give me time,” he requested. “Give me time to find out what I may tell you. Will you do that?”
“No. I will go to the island—with your permission.”
“Thank you, Mr. Smith. I will look for you at 10.30.”
He accompanied her, hat in hand, to the door. She softly declined his offer of escort to the dock, a declination that left no hurt. She was a Western girl with a Western girl’s notions of independence in such matters.
Acey Smith had reluctantly applied himself to another pressing matter with thoughts of her forcing themselves uppermost. Then Hammond had come. Hammond—oh, well, he wanted to forget Hammond and those other things for just now.
In spite of the predicament the girl’s ultimatum had apparently placed him in, Acey Smith had pleasure in anticipating the keeping of that appointment at Amethyst Island on the following day. Before retiring he took from a wardrobe in his private quarters a neatly pressed dark suit of tailor-made clothes and laid it out in his room with fine shoes and immaculate white linen.
Awakening the following morning he sat up in bed, and, gazing at the city garments, laughed a harsh, soulless laugh.
“Fool,” he syllabled grimly. “Fool—double-fool!” He garbed himself in his bush clothes and placed the fine raiment back in the wardrobe.
An hour later that morning, in the cook’s quarters, Louis Hammond came out of a dreamless sleep and for some moments sat blinkingly trying to adjust himself to his new surroundings. He wasn’t so sure now he was going to like his new job or its environment. Used to an active routine, he would many times rather have had some set schedule of duties to perform than be left to find his own means of occupying his time. There was something highly unsatisfactory about the whole thing, and had it not been for the element of mystery that challenged his patience, he would have felt like dropping the assignment and leaving by the first tug for the city.