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Chapter VI—Nathaniel Hellbeam

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The room was furnished with extreme modern luxury. The man standing over against the window with his broad back turned, somehow looked to be in perfect keeping with the setting his personal tastes had inspired. He was broad, squat, fat. His head and neck were set low upon his shoulders, and the hair oil was obvious on the longish dark hair which seemed to grow low down under his shirt collar.

The other man, seated in one of the many easy chairs, was in strong contrast. His was the familiar face of the agent, Idepski, dark, keen, watchful. He was smoking the cigarette to which he had helped himself from the gold box standing near him on the ornate desk.

"You seem to have made a bad mess of things."

Nathaniel Hellbeam turned from the window and came back to his desk with quick, short, energetic strides.

He presented a picture of inflamed wrath. His fleshy, square face was flushed and almost purple. His small eyes were hot with anger. They snapped as he launched his harshly spoken verdict. His whole manner bristled with merciless intolerance.

He was enormously fat, and breathed heavily through clean shaven lips that protruded sensually. His age was doubtful, but suggested something under middle life. It was the gross bulk of the man that made it almost impossible to estimate closely. The only real youth about him was his dark, well oiled hair which possessed not a sign of greying in it.

He flung himself into the wide chair which gaped to receive him, and glared at the dark face of his visitor.

"What in the hell do I pay you for?" he cried brutally, lapsing, in his anger, into that gutteral Teutonic accent which it was his life's object to avoid. "A wild cat's scheme it was I tell you from the first. You go to this Sachigo with your men. You think to get this 'sharp' asleep, or what? You find him wide awake waiting for you to arrive. What then? He jumps quick. So quick you can't think. You a prisoner are. You go where he sends you. You live like a swine in the woods. You are made to work for your food. And a year is gone. A year! Serve you darn right. Oh, yes. Bah! You quit. You understand? I pay you no more. You are a fool, a blundering fool. I wash my hands with you."

Idepski sat still, patient, as once before he had sat under the whip lash of a man's tongue. And he continued smoking till the great banker's last word was spoken.

Then he stirred, and removed his cigarette from his thin lips.

"That's all right, Mr. Hellbeam," he said coldly. "It seems like you've a right to all you've said. It seems, I said. But the 'fool' talk." He shook his head. "My best enemies don't reckon me that—generally. The game I'm playing has room enough for things that look like blunders. I allow that. It doesn't matter. You see, I know more of this feller Martin maybe than you do. I guess he's a mighty big coward, except when he's got the drop on a feller. I've given him the scare of a lifetime, and I've unshipped him from his safe anchorage on that darn Labrador coast. Do you know what's happened? I'll tell you. He's quit Sachigo. From what I can learn he's sold out his mill to that uncouth hoodlum, Harker, who was sort of his partner, and quit. Where? I don't know yet. Why has he quit? Why, because he knows we've located his hiding, and will get him if he remains. You reckon I've mussed things up." He shook his head. "He was well-nigh safe up there on Labrador—and I knew it. We had to get him out of it. Well, I've got him out. He's bolted like a gopher, and it's up to me to locate him. I shall locate him. I'm glad he's quit that hellish country. I've had a year of it, and it's put the fear of God into me. You needn't worry. I'm quite ready to quit your pay. But I'm going on with this thing, sure. You see, I owe him quite a piece for myself—now. I've been through the hell he intended me to go through when he sent me along up to be held prisoner by that skunk, Ole Porson. I'm going to pay him for that—good. I don't want your pay—now. One day I'll hand that feller over to you—and when you've doped him plenty—you'll have paid me." He rose leisurely from his comfortable chair. "May I take another of your good cigarettes?" he went on, with a half smile in his cold eyes. "You see, I won't get another, seeing I'm quitting you."

He deliberately helped himself without waiting for permission, while his eyes dwelt on the gold box containing them.

But the financier's mood had changed. The keen mind was busy behind his narrow eyes. Perhaps Idepski understood the man. Perhaps the coolness of the agent appealed to the implacable nature of the Swede. Whatever it was the hot eyes had cooled, and the fleshy cheeks had returned to their normal pasty hue. He raised a hand pointing.

"Sit down and smoke all you need," he said, in the sharp, autocratic fashion that was his habit. "We aren't through yet." Then, for a few moments, he regarded the slim figure as it lay back once more in the armchair. "Say," he began, abruptly, "you reckon to go on for—yourself? Yes? You're a good hater."

He went on as the other inclined his head.

"I like a good hater. Yes. Well, just cut out all I said. We'll go on. I guess you'll need to blunder some before we get this swine. You're bound to. But I want him. I want him bad. If it's good for you to go on for yourself, that's good for me. There's a lifetime ahead yet, and I don't care so I see him down—right down where I need him. Maybe I won't get the money, but we'll get him, and that'll do. Yes, cut out what I said, and go ahead. Tell me about it."

Idepski displayed neither enthusiasm nor added interest. He accepted the position with seeming indifference. Hellbeam to him was just an employer. A means to those ends which he had in view. If Hellbeam turned him down it would mean a setback, but not a disaster, and Idepski appraised setbacks at their simple value, without exaggeration. Besides, he knew that this Swede, powerful, wealthy as he was, could not afford to do without him in this matter. His intolerant, hectic temper mattered nothing at all. He paid for the privilege of its display, and he paid well. So—

"There's nothing much to tell," the agent returned, with a shrug. "I'm going to get him—that's all. See here, Mr. Hellbeam," he went on after a pause, with a sudden change to keen energy, "you're a mighty big power in the financial world, and to be that I guess you've had to be some judge of the other feller. That's so. You most generally know when he's beat before you begin. And when he squeals it don't come as a surprise. Well, that's how it is with me, only it's a bigger thing to me because it sometimes happens to mean the difference between life and death. Say, when you put up your bluff at a feller, and watch him square in the eyes, and you see 'em flicker and shift, do you reckon you've lit on the 'yellow streak,' that lies somewhere in most folk? I guess so. Well, that's how I know my man. I've seen it in this bum, Leslie Standing as he calls himself now. And when I saw it I knew he was beat, for all he'd the drop on me. Since then my notion's proved itself. He's lit out. He's cut from his gopher hole at Sachigo. An' when a gopher gets away from his hole, the man with the gun has him dead set. But say, that muss up you reckon I made doesn't look that way when you know the things it's taught me. While I was way up at that penitentiary camp on the Beaver River I kept all my ears and eyes wide, and I learned most of the things a feller's liable to learn in this world when he acts that way. I learned something of the notions lying back of this feller's work up there. Say, he hadn't finished with you when he took that ten millions out of you." An ironical smile lit the man's dark eyes as he thrust home his retaliation for the financier's insults. "Not by a lot," he went on, with a smiling display of teeth that conveyed nothing pleasant. "They've a slogan up there that means a whole heap, and it comes from him, and runs through the whole work going on, right down to the Chink camp cooks. Guess that mill is only beginning. It's the ground work of a mighty big notion. And the notion is to drive the Skandinavians out of Canada's pulp trade, and very particularly the Swedes, as represented by the interests of Nathaniel Hellbeam. Guess you sit right here in New York, but up there they've got you measured up to the last pant's button."

"They that think?"

The financier's bloated cheeks purpled as he put his clumsy interrogation.

"Oh, yes. This feller Standing reckons he's made a big start, and there are mighty big plans out. When he and that clownish partner of his, Harker, are through, Sachigo'll be the biggest proposition in the way of groundwood pulp in the world. They've forests such as you in Skandinavia dream about when your digestion's feeling good. They've a water power that leaves Niagara a summer trickle. They've got it all with a sea journey of less than eighteen hundred miles to Europe. But there's more than that. When Sachigo's complete it's to be the parent company of a mighty combine that's going to take in all the mills of Canada outside Nathaniel Hellbeam's group. And then—then, sir, the squeeze'll start right in. And it isn't going to stop till the sponge—that's Nathaniel Hellbeam—is wrung dry."

"You heard all this—when you were held prisoner and working like a swine in Martin's forests?"

The smile in Hellbeam's eyes was no less ironical than the agent's.

"When I was working like a swine."

"These lumber-jacks. They knew all that in Standing's mind is?"

"No. But I learned it all."

"How?"

The demand was instant, and a surge of force lay behind it.

"Because some I saw. Some I picked up from general talk. And the rest I pieced together because it's my job to think hard when the game's against me. But it don't matter. You know that the things I've told you are right. It's news to you, but you know it's right, because you're thinking hard, and the game's against—you."

"Yes."

The financier's admission was the act of a man who has no hesitation in looking facts in the face and acknowledging them. Idepski's deductions were irrefutable, because the Swede was a shrewd business man with a full appreciation of the man who had lightened his finances by ten million dollars.

For some moments the fleshy face was turned towards the window which yielded the hum of busy traffic many stories below them. His narrow eyes were earnestly reflective, but there was no concern in them. To the waiting man he was simply measuring the threat against him, and probing its possibilities for mischief.

"Yet this fellow. He on the run is—Yes?"

The eyes were smiling as they came back again to Idepski's face. The agent nodded, flinging his cigarette end into the porcelain cuspidore beside the desk.

"Which makes me all the more sure of the game," he said confidently. "He's rattled. He's so scared to death for himself, and for his purpose, he's getting out. It's as clear as daylight to me. He feels he's plumb against it if he stops around. He knows we've located him. He knows what he's done to me. He knows all he wants to know of you. Well, he reckons there's no sort of chance for him at Sachigo. And if he stops there's no sort of chance for this purpose of his. He reckons to call off the hounds on his own trail, while the feller Harker carries on the good work of squeezing the Swedes. That's how I see it. And I guess I'm right. Remember I had a year of hell up there to think in, and when I finally got clear away I had two months' solitary chasing of those woods to think in, and then, when I made the coast, I had the trip down with the folks on the boat to listen to. He's scared for his life, and of anything you hope to hand him. But he's more scared for the purpose that made him set up that mill at Sachigo."

Hellbeam leant back in his chair. His great paunch protruded invitingly and he clasped his hands over it.

"Maybe you're right," he said, with an air intended to conciliate. "Anyway you've picked up some pieces and set them together so they make a fancy shape. But—it isn't good. No. Here, I think, too. I see another, way from you. Without this fellow Sachigo is—nothing. See? I care nothing because of this Harker. No. The other—that's different. Yes. He the brain has. All this piece you make. He is capable of it. But he is on the run. Good. I still sleep well while he runs. Sachigo? Bah! It is nothing without Leslie Martin. Now, go you. Hunt this man. Maybe your year of the woods will help you," he said, with biting emphasis. "You know the woods? Well, don't quit his trail. Get him. Get him alive."

"Oh, I shall get him. Your urging ain't needed. I'll get him as you say—alive. And he knows it."

Idepski's cold eyes hardened with a frigid hatred as he spoke. He had only been paid for the work hitherto. Now he was implacable.

"But it's Sachigo I mean to watch," he went on, after a brief pause. "I mean to play in that direction. It's the home burrow where you lay your traps once your quarry's on the run."

Hellbeam nodded.

"That's good sense."

"Sure it is," retorted the agent. "I'm glad you see it that way," he added with a smile under which the financier grew restive once more.

"Yes. Well, see you get him. Money? It doesn't matter. Get him! Get him!" he reiterated fiercely. "You understand me? It doesn't matter how you get him. I can deal with the rest."

Suddenly he raised a clenched fist, fat, and strong, and white, and extended his thumb. He turned it downwards and pressed its extremity on the gold mounted blotting pad before him with a force that bent the knuckle backwards. "Get him so I can crush him—like that," he cried. "Get him alive. I want him alive. See?"

"I see. I'll get him—sure. You needn't worry a thing."

And as Walter Idepski rose to take his departure, for all his nerve, he felt glad that the passion of this Swede's hate was not directed against him.

The Man in the Twilight

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