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+Project Gutenberg's The La Chance Mine Mystery, by Susan Carleton Jones
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The La Chance Mine Mystery
+
+Author: Susan Carleton Jones
+
+Illustrator: George W. Gage
+
+Release Date: November 9, 2008 [EBook #27209]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LA CHANCE MINE MYSTERY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by D Alexander, Josephine Paolucci and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net. (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE LA CHANCE MINE MYSTERY
+
+BY
+
+S. CARLETON
+
+WITH FRONTISPIECE BY
+
+GEORGE W. GAGE
+
+BOSTON
+
+LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
+
+1920
+
+_Copyright, 1920_,
+BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.
+
+_All rights reserved_
+
+Published March, 1920
+
+[Illustration: "I STOOD UP AND DROVE FOR ALL I WAS WORTH, AND THE GIRL
+BESIDE ME SHOT,--AND HIT!" FRONTISPIECE. _See page 76._]
+
+
+
+
+THE LA CHANCE MINE MYSTERY
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER                                                 PAGE
+
+I. I COME HOME: AND THE WOLVES HOWL                        1
+
+II. MY DREAM: AND DUDLEY'S GIRL                           16
+
+III. DUDLEY'S MINE: AND DUDLEY'S GOLD                     30
+
+IV. THE MAN IN THE DARK                                   46
+
+V. THE CARAQUET ROAD: AND THE WOLVES HOWL ONCE MORE       56
+
+VI. MOSTLY WOLVES: AND A GIRL                             71
+
+VII. I FIND LITTLE ENOUGH ON THE CORDUROY ROAD,
+      AND LESS AT SKUNK'S MISERY                          86
+
+VIII. THOMPSON!                                          100
+
+IX. TATIANA PAULINA VALENKA!                             116
+
+X. I INTERFERE FOR THE LAST TIME                         134
+
+XI. MACARTNEY HEARS A NOISE: AND I FIND FOUR DEAD MEN    148
+
+XII. THOMPSON'S CARDS: AND SKUNK'S MISERY                164
+
+XIII. A DEAD MAN'S MESSENGER                             182
+
+XIV. WOLVES--AND DUDLEY                                  199
+
+XV. THE PLACE OF DEPARTED SPIRITS                        218
+
+XVI. IN COLLINS'S CARE                                   231
+
+XVII. HIGH EXPLOSIVE                                     247
+
+XVIII. LAC TREMBLANT                                     265
+
+XIX. SKUNK'S MISERY                                      283
+
+XX. THE END                                              293
+
+
+
+
+THE LA CHANCE MINE MYSTERY
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+I COME HOME: AND THE WOLVES HOWL
+
+    I am sick of the bitter wood-smoke,
+      And sick of the wind and rain:
+    I will leave the bush behind me,
+      And look for my love again.
+
+
+Little as I guessed it, this story really began at Skunk's Misery. But
+Skunk's Misery was the last thing in my head, though I had just come
+from the place.
+
+Hungry, dog-tired, cross with the crossness of a man in authority whose
+orders have been forgotten or disregarded, I drove Billy Jones's old
+canoe across Lac Tremblant on my way home to Dudley Wilbraham's gold
+mine at La Chance, after an absence of months. It was halfway to dark,
+and the bitter November wind blew dead in my teeth. Slaps of spray from
+flying wave-crests blinded me with gouts of lake water, that was oddly
+warm till the cutting wind froze it to a coating of solid ice on my
+bare hands and stinging face, that I had to keep dabbing on my paddling
+shoulder to get my eyes clear in order that I might stare in front of my
+leaky, borrowed canoe.
+
+To a stranger there might have seemed to be nothing particular to stare
+at, out on a lake where the world was all wind and lumpy seas and
+growing November twilight; but any one who had lived at La Chance knew
+better. By the map Lac Tremblant should have been our nearest gold route
+to civilization, but it was a lake that was no lake, as far as transport
+was concerned, and we never used it. The five-mile crossing I was making
+was just a fair sample of the forty miles of length Lac Tremblant
+stretched mockingly past the La Chance mine toward the main road from
+Caraquet--our nearest settlement--to railhead: and that was forty miles
+of queer water, sown with rocks that were sometimes visible as
+tombstones in a cemetery and sometimes hidden like rattlesnakes in a
+blanket. For the depth of Lac Tremblant, or its fairway, were two things
+no man might ever count on. It would fall in a night to shallows a child
+could wade through, among bristling needles of rocks no one had ever
+guessed at; and rise in a morning to the tops of the spruce scrub on its
+banks,--a sweet spread of water with not a rock to be seen. What hidden
+spring fed it was a mystery. But in the bitterest winter it was never
+cold enough to freeze, further than to form surging masses of frazil ice
+that would neither let a canoe push through them, nor yet support the
+weight of a man. Winter or summer, it was no thoroughfare--and neither
+was the ungodly jumble of swamp and mountains that stopped me from
+tapping the lower end of it--or I should not have spent the last three
+months in making fifty miles of road through untrodden bush to Caraquet,
+over which to transport the La Chance gold to a post-road and a railway:
+and it was no chosen return route of mine to La Chance now, either.
+
+If I could draw you a map I should not have to explain the country. But
+failing that I will be as clear as I can.
+
+The line of Lac Tremblant, and that of the road I had just made from
+Caraquet to La Chance, ran away from each other in two sides of a
+triangle,--except that the La Chance mine was five miles down the far
+side of the lake from Caraquet, and my road had to half-moon round the
+head of Lac Tremblant to get home--a lavish curve, too, by reason of
+swamps.
+
+But it was on that half-moon road that I should have been now, if my
+order to have a horse meet me at the Halfway stables I had built at the
+beginning of it had not been forgotten or disregarded by some one at La
+Chance.
+
+Getting drenched to the skin with lake water was no rattling good
+exchange for riding home on a fresh horse that felt like a warm stove
+under me, but a five-mile short cut across the apex of the road and lake
+triangle was better than walking twenty-two miles along the side of it
+on my own legs--which was the only choice I had had in the matter.
+
+I was obliged to get home, for reasons of my own; but when I walked in
+on Billy Jones, the foreman at the Halfway stables, that afternoon,
+after months of absence and road-making, there was not even a team horse
+in his stables, let alone my own saddle mare. There was not a soul about
+the place, either, but Billy himself, blandly idle and sprawling over a
+grubby old newspaper in front of the stove in his shack.
+
+His welcome was heartening, but his intelligence was not. No one had
+told him a word about me or my mare, he informed me profanely; also that
+it was quite impossible for me to ride over to La Chance that night.
+There were not any work horses at the Halfway, because he had doubled up
+the teams for some heavy hauling from Caraquet, according to my orders
+sent over from Caraquet the week before, and no horses had been sent
+back from La Chance since. He guessed affably that some one might be
+driving over from the mine in the morning, and that after tramping from
+Caraquet I had better stay where I was for the night.
+
+I hesitated. I was dog-tired for once in my life, but I had not done any
+tramp from Caraquet that day, if I had told the bald truth. Only I had
+no idea of telling it, nor any wish to explain to Billy Jones that I had
+been making a fool of myself elsewhere, doing a solid week of hospital
+nursing over a filthy boy I had found on my just-finished road the
+morning I had really left Caraquet. From the look of him I guessed he
+had got hurt cutting down a tree and not getting out of the way in time,
+though he was past telling me that or anything else. But I had also
+guessed where he lived, by the dirt on him, and was ass enough to carry
+him home to the squalid, half-French, half-Indian village the Caraquet
+people called Skunk's Misery.
+
+It lay in the bush, in a slanting line between Caraquet and Lac
+Tremblant: a nest of thriftless evil stuck in a hollow you might pass
+within twenty yards of, and never guess held a house. Once there I had
+no choice but to stay and nurse the boy's sickening pain, till his
+mother came home from some place where she was fishing eels for the
+winter; for none of the rest of the population of fat-faced,
+indifferent women--I never saw a man, whether they were away in the
+lumber woods or not--would lay a hand on him. I will say plainly that I
+was more than thankful to hand him over to his mother. I had spilt over
+myself a bottle of some nameless and abominable brew that I'd mistaken
+for liniment, and my clothes smelt like carrion; also the lean-to I had
+lived in was so dirty that I scratched from suspicion all day long,
+except when I was yawning from a week of hardly closing my eyes.
+Altogether, as I said, I was dog-tired, if it were not from walking, and
+I might have stayed at Billy Jones's if I had not been crazy to get rid
+of my dirt-infected clothes. The worst reek had gone from them, but even
+out in the open air they smelt. I saw Billy Jones wrinkle up his nose to
+sniff innocently while he talked to me, and that settled me.
+
+"I have to get home," I observed hastily. "Wilbraham expected me a week
+ago. But I don't walk any twenty-two miles! I'll take your old canoe and
+a short cut across the lake."
+
+I was the only man who ever used Lac Tremblant, and the foreman of the
+Halfway stables cast a glance on me. "If it was me, I'd walk," he
+remarked drily. "But take your choice. The lake's a short cut right
+enough, only I wouldn't say where _to_--in my crazy old birchbark this
+kind of a blowing-up evening!"
+
+That, and a few more things he said as he squinted a weather-wise eye on
+the lake, came back to me as I fought his old canoe through the water.
+And fighting it was, mind you, for the spray hid the rocks I knew, and
+the wind shoved me back on the ones I didn't know. Also the canoe was
+leaking till she was dead logy, and the gusts were so fierce I could not
+stop paddling to bail her. The short, vicious seas that snapped at me
+five ways at once were the color of lead and felt as heavy as cold
+molasses. But, for all that, crossing Lac Tremblant was saving me
+twenty-two miles on my feet, and I was not wasting any dissatisfaction
+on the traverse. Only, as I shoved the canoe forward, I was nearer to
+being played out, from one thing on top of another, than ever I was in
+my life. I pretended the paddle that began to hang in spite of me was
+only heavy with freezing spray and that the dead ache in my back was a
+kink. But I had to put every ounce there was in my six feet of weary
+bones into lightning-change wrenches to hold the old canoe head on to
+the splattering seas and keep her from swamping. I was very near to
+thinking I had been a fool not to have stayed with Billy Jones,--when I
+was suddenly aware of absolute, utter calm in the air that felt as warm
+on my face as if I'd gone into a house; of tranquil water under the
+forefoot of the canoe that had jumped forward under me as the resistance
+of the wind ceased; and of the lake shore--dark, featureless,
+silent--within twenty feet of me. I was across Lac Tremblant and in the
+shelter of the La Chance shore!
+
+There is no good in denying that for five minutes all I did was to sit
+back and breathe. Then I lit my pipe, that was dry because it was inside
+my shirt; bailed the unnecessary water out of the canoe and the
+immediate neighborhood of my legs; and, without meaning to, turned a
+casual eye on the shore at my right hand.
+
+It might have been because I was tired, but that shore struck me as if I
+had never seen it before; and on a November evening it was not an
+inviting prospect. Bush and bush, and more bush, grew down to the very
+verge of the water in a mass that spoke of heavy swamp and no landing.
+Behind that, I knew, was rising land, country rock, and again swamp and
+more swamp,--and all of it harsh, ugly, and inhospitable. But the queer
+thought that came over me was that it was more than inhospitable: it was
+forbidding. High over my head poured the bitter wind in a river of sound
+through the bare tree tops; close at hand it rustled with a flurry of
+dead leaves that was uncannily like the bustle of inimical businesses
+pursued insolently in the dark, at my very elbow; and suddenly, through
+and over all other sounds, there rose in the harsh gloom the long,
+ravening cry of a wolf.
+
+Heaven knows I was used to the bush, and no howling was much to me; but
+you know how things come over you sometimes. It came over me then that I
+was sick of my life at La Chance; sick of working with Wilbraham and
+sicker still of washing myself in brooks and sleeping on the
+ground,--for I had not been in a house since August. Before I knew it I
+was speaking out loud as men do in books, only it was something I had
+thought before, which in books it generally isn't: "Scott, I'm a fool to
+stay here. I'd sooner go and work on day's wages somewhere and have a
+place _to go home to!_" And then I felt my face get red in the dark, for
+I knew what I meant, if you do not.
+
+There was nothing to go home to at Wilbraham's, except a roof over my
+head, till circumstances sent me out into the bush again. In the daytime
+there were the mine and the mill. At night there was the bare living
+room of Wilbraham's shack, without a book, or a paper, or a decent
+chair; Wilbraham himself, fat, pig-headed, truculent, stumping the
+devil's sentry-go up and down the bare floor, talking eternally about
+himself and the mine, till a saint must have loathed the two of them;
+Thompson, the mine superintendent, silent, slow and stupid, playing
+ghastly solitaire games in a corner with a pack of dirty cards; and me,
+Nick Stretton, hunching myself irritably on a hard chair till I could
+decently go to bed. Even the bush was better than night after night of
+that,--and suddenly I felt my thoughts bursting out, even if I had sense
+enough to keep my mouth shut.
+
+I was as sick of the bush as I was of the shack. I wanted a place of my
+own and a life of my own: and I was going to have it. There was nothing
+but old friendship to tie me to Wilbraham's; I could do as well anywhere
+else, and I was going there--to-morrow; going somewhere, anyhow, so that
+when my day's work was over I could go home to a blazing fire on a wide
+hearth, instead of Wilbraham's smelly stove where no one ever cleaned
+the creosote out of the pipe,--and where the girl I had had in my head
+for ten years would be waiting for me.
+
+Don't imagine it was any girl I knew that I was thinking of; it was just
+a dream girl I meant to marry, when I found her. I'd never met such a
+girl anywhere, and it sounds like a fool to say I knew I was going to
+meet her: that she was waiting somewhere in the world for me, just as I
+was looking for her. I knew exactly what she must be like. She would
+have that waving bronze-gold hair that stands out in little separate,
+shining tendrils; eyes that startled you with their clear blue under
+dark, level eyebrows--I never look twice at a girl with arched
+brows--the rose-white, satin-smooth skin that goes with all of them, and
+she would move like----Well, you've seen Pavlova move! Her
+voice--somehow one of the most important things I knew about her seemed
+to be her voice--would be the clear, carrying kind that always sounds
+gay. I was certain I should know my dream girl--first--by that. And that
+was the girl--I forgot it was all made-up child's play--who somewhere in
+the world was waiting for me, Nick Stretton; a fool with nothing on
+earth but six feet of a passably good body, and a dark, high-nosed face
+like an Indian's, who was working in the bush for Wilbraham instead of
+sieving creation for her. Well, I would start to-morrow; and, where the
+clean heavens meant me to, I should find her!
+
+And with the words I came alive to the dark lake, and the leaky canoe I
+sat in, and the knowledge that all I had been thinking about a
+bronze-haired girl was just the cracked dream of a lonely man. Even if
+it had not been, and I could have started to look for a real girl
+to-morrow, I had to get back to Wilbraham's to-night. My drenched
+clothes were freezing on me, and I was hungrier than the wolf who had
+just howled again, as I picked up my slippery paddle and started for the
+La Chance landing.
+
+There was no light there, naturally, since no one ever used the lake
+except myself, and I had been away for months; but as I rounded the
+point between the canoe and the landing, and slipped into the dark of
+its shadow, the lamplight from Wilbraham's living room shone out on me
+in a narrow beam, like a moon path on the water. As I crossed it and
+beached the canoe I must have been in plain sight to any one on the
+shore, though all I saw was the dark shingle I stepped upon. I stooped
+to lift the canoe out of water,--and I did what you mean when you say
+you nearly jumped out of your skin.
+
+Touching my shoulder, her hand fiercely imperative in the dark, was a
+girl--at La Chance, where no girl had ever set foot!--and she was
+speaking to me with just that golden, carrying voice I knew would belong
+to my own dream girl, if she were keeping it down to a whisper.
+
+"So you're here," was what she said; and it would have fitted in with
+the fool's thoughts I had just come out of, if it had not been for her
+tone. That startled me, till all I could do was to nod in the dark I
+could just see her in. I could not discern what she looked like, for her
+head was muffled in a shawl; and I never realized that all she could see
+of me was my height and general make-up, since my face must have been
+invisible where I stood in the shadow.
+
+"You!" her golden voice stabbed like a dagger. "I won't have you staying
+here--where I am! I told you I'd speak to you when I could, and I'm
+speaking. You kept your word and disgraced me once, if I don't know how
+you did it; but I won't run the chance of _that_ again! I'm safe here,
+except for you; and you've got to let me alone. If you don't, I--I----"
+she stammered till I knew she was shaking, but she got hold of herself
+in the second. "You won't find it safe to play any tricks with the gold
+here--or me--if that's what you came for," she said superbly, "and
+you've given me a way to stop it. _That's_ why I've sneaked out to meet
+you: not because I care for you. You must go away, or--I'll tell that
+you're here! Do you hear? I don't care what promises you make me--they
+always came easily to you. If you want me to hold my tongue about you,
+you've got to go. Go and betray me, if you like--but _go_!"
+
+There was dead, cold hatred in it, the kind a woman has for a man she
+once cared for, and it staggered what wits I had left. I nodded like a
+fool, just as if I had known what she was talking about, and went on
+lifting the canoe ashore. Whether I really heard her give a terrified
+gasp I don't know; perhaps I only thought so. But as I put the canoe on
+the bank I heard a rustle, and when I looked up she was gone. There was
+nothing to tell me she had really even been there. It was just as
+probable that I was crazy, or walking in my sleep, as that a girl who
+talked like that--or even any kind of a girl--should be at La Chance.
+The cold, collected hatred in her voice still jarred me, since it was no
+way for even a dream girl to speak. But what jarred me worse was that
+the whole thing had been so quick I could not have sworn she had been
+there at all. I was honestly dazed as I walked up the rough path to
+Wilbraham's and my shack. I must have stood in front of it a good five
+minutes, with my wet clothes freezing as hard as a board, and the noise
+of the men in the bunk house down by the mine coming up to me on the
+night wind.
+
+"'If I be I, as I should be, I've a little dog at home, and he'll know
+me,'" I said to myself at last like the old woman in the storybook, only
+with a grin. For when I went into the house there would be the neglected
+living room with the smelly stove, and Wilbraham walking up and down
+there as usual; and Dudley Wilbraham's conversation would bring any man
+back to his senses, even if he needed it worse than I did. I opened the
+shack door and went in,--and in the bare passage I jerked up taut.
+
+The living room faced me,--and there was no stove in it. And no
+Wilbraham, walking up and down and talking to himself. There was a
+glowing, blazing log fire in a stone fireplace that must have been built
+while I was away; and, sitting alone before it, exactly as I had always
+thought of her, was my dream girl,--that I had meant to hunt the world
+for to welcome me home!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+MY DREAM: AND DUDLEY'S GIRL
+
+
+All I could do was to stand in the living room doorway and stare at her.
+
+There she sat by the fire, in a short blue skirt that showed her little
+feet in blue stockings and buckled shoes, and a blue sweater whose
+rolling collar fell away from the column of her soft throat. And she was
+just exactly what I had known she would be! There was a gold crest to
+every exquisite, warm wave of her bronze hair; her level eyebrows were
+about five shades darker, and her curled-up eye-lashes darker still,
+where she sat with her head bent over some sort of sewing. And even
+before she looked up and I saw her eyes, the beauty of her caught me at
+my heart. I had never thought even my dream girl could be as lovely as
+she was. But there was more to her face than beauty. It was so young and
+sweet and gay, and--when you looked hard at her--so sad, that I forgot I
+ought either to speak up or go away. Of who she was or how she came to
+be at La Chance, I had no earthly clue. I knew, of course, that it was
+she who had met me at the landing, and common sense told me she had
+taken me for some one else: but I had no desire to say so, or to go away
+either. And suddenly she looked up and saw me.
+
+Whoever she was she had good nerves, for she never even stared as women
+do at a strange man. I could have been no reassuring vision either,
+standing there in moccasined feet that had come in on her as silently as
+a wolf or an Indian; with dirty, frozen clothes; and a face that the
+Lord knows is dark and hard at its best, and must have been forbidding
+enough that night between dirt and fatigue. But that girl only glanced
+at me as quietly as if she had known I was there.
+
+"Did you----Were you looking for any one?" she asked. And the second I
+heard her voice I knew she guessed she had spoken to me a quarter of an
+hour ago in words she would probably have given all she possessed to
+prevent a stranger from knowing she had need to speak to any one.
+
+Only that was not the reason I half stammered, "Not exactly." It was
+because I could see her eyes,--and they were like sapphires, and the
+sea, and the night sky with the first stars in it. I snatched off my cap
+that I had forgotten, and bits of melting ice fell off it and tinkled
+on the floor. The sharp little sound brought my wits back to me. Perhaps
+I had never really thought my dream girl would come true, but once I had
+found her I never meant to lose her. And I knew, if I cared a straw for
+my life and the love that was to be in it, that I must meet her now _for
+the first time_; that nothing, not even if she told me so herself, must
+make me admit she had come to me at the lake by mistake, or that I had
+ever heard her voice before.
+
+I said, easily enough, "I'm afraid I startled you. I'm Stretton,
+Wilbraham's partner"--which I was to the extent of a thousand
+dollars--"I've just come home."
+
+And crazy as it sounds, I felt as if I had come home, for the first time
+in my life. For the girl of my dreams came to her feet with just that
+lovely, controlled ease you see in Pavlova, and with the prettiest
+little gesture of welcome.
+
+"Oh, you're frozen stiff," she said with a kind of dismayed sympathy.
+"And I heard Mr. Wilbraham say some one had forgotten to send out your
+horse for you, and that you'd probably walk--the whole way from
+Caraquet! You must be tired to death. Please come to the fire and get
+warm--now you've come home!"
+
+I thought of the queer smell that clung to my stained old coat and the
+company I had kept at Skunk's Misery--though if I had guessed what that
+wretched boy was going to mean to me I might have grudged my contact
+with him less--and I would not have gone near my dream girl for a
+fortune. "I think I'll get clean first," I began, and found myself
+laughing for the first time in a week. But as I turned away I glanced
+back from the dark passage where Charliet, the French-Canadian cook, was
+supposed to keep a lamp and never did, and saw the girl in the living
+room look after me,--with a look I had never seen in any girl's eyes, if
+I'd seen a hunted man have it.
+
+"Gad, she knows I know she met me--and she doesn't mean to say so," I
+thought vividly. What the reason was I couldn't see, or whom there could
+be at La Chance that such a girl should find it necessary to tell that
+she would not have him disgrace her, and that he must go away. It made
+me wrathy to think there could be any one she needed to hit out at like
+that. But we had a queer lot at the mine, including Dunn and Collins, a
+couple of educated boys who had not been educated enough to pass as
+mining engineers, and had been kicked out into the world by their
+families. It might have been either of those two star failures in the
+bunk house. The only person it could not have been was Dudley
+Wilbraham; since aside from the fact that she could easily speak to him
+in the shack she could not have told him he must go away from his own
+mine. Which reminded me I'd never even asked where Dudley was or one
+thing about the mine I'd been away from so long.
+
+But my dream girl, where no girl had ever been, was the only thing I
+could think of. I had meant to get some food and go to bed, but instead
+I threw my Skunk's Misery clothes out of the window, and got ready to go
+out to supper and see that girl again. Who under heaven she could be was
+past me, as well as how she came to be at La Chance. I would have been
+scared green lest she was the wife of some man at the mine, only she had
+no wedding ring on the slim left hand that had beckoned me to the fire.
+Yet, "She can't just be here alone, either, and I'm blessed if I see who
+she can have come with," I thought blankly. And I opened my room door
+straight on Marcia Wilbraham,--Wilbraham's sister!
+
+"_Well_," I said. It was the only thing that came to me. I knew
+immediately, of course, that the girl in the living room must have come
+out with Marcia; but it knocked me silly to see Marcia herself at La
+Chance. I had known Marcia Wilbraham, as I had known Dudley, ever since
+I wore blue serge knickerbockers trimmed with white braid. She never
+went anywhere with Dudley. She had money of her own, and she spent it
+on Horse Show horses, and traveling around to show them. But here she
+stood in front of me, in a forsaken backwoods mine that I should not
+have expected even Dudley himself to stay at if I had not known his
+reasons.
+
+"I don't wonder you say 'well,'" Marcia returned crisply. She was
+good-looking in a big way, if you did not mind brown eyes that were too
+small for her face and a smile that showed her gums. I had never liked
+or disliked her especially, any more than you do any girl about your own
+age whom you've always known. "I've been here for three months! I was
+very near going home a month ago--but I don't think I'll go now. I
+believe I'll try a winter here."
+
+"A winter!" I thought of Marcia "trying a winter," and I laughed.
+
+"Oh, you needn't throw back your handsome Indian head to grin at me,
+Nicky Stretton," said she crossly. "I'm tired of always doing the same
+thing. And anyhow, the stable lost money, and I had to sell out!"
+
+"But why stay here--with Dudley?" I let out. The two of them had always
+fought like cats.
+
+"I'm going to do some shooting--and wolf hunting," Marcia smiled the
+ugly smile I never could stand. "I'm going to stay, anyhow; so you'll
+have to bear it, Nicky!"
+
+"I'm--charmed!" I thought like lightning that my dream girl would do
+whatever Marcia did, and I blessed my stars she was staying; though I
+knew she would be all kinds of a nuisance if she insisted on turning out
+to hunt wolves. She was all but dressed for it even then, in a horrid
+green divided skirt that made her look like a fat old gentleman. But it
+was not Marcia I meant to talk about.
+
+"Have you brought the--other girl--to hunt wolves, too?" I inquired, as
+we moved on down the passage; there was no upstairs to the shack.
+
+"No," said Marcia quite carelessly, if I had not caught the snap in her
+eyes. "She's come to hunt Dudley! She's going to marry him."
+
+"She's _what_?" I was suddenly thankful we had left the light from my
+open door and that Charliet despised keeping a lamp in the passage. The
+bland idea that I had found my dream girl split to bits as if a half-ton
+rock had landed on it. For her to be going to marry any one was bad
+enough; but _Dudley_, with his temper, and his drink, and the drugs I
+was pretty sure he took! The thing was so unspeakable that I stopped
+short in the passage.
+
+Marcia Wilbraham stopped short too. "I don't wonder you're knocked
+silly," she said. "Here, come out of this; I want to speak to you, and
+I may as well do it now!" She pushed me into the office where Dudley did
+his accounts--which was his name for sitting drinking all day, and never
+speaking to any one--and shut the door. "Look here, Nicky, if you're
+thinking that girl is a friend of mine, she isn't! I don't know one
+thing about her. Except that this summer I had reason to oblige Dudley,
+and one day he came to me--you know he was in New York for nearly two
+months----"
+
+I nodded. I had not cared where he was, so that he was away from La
+Chance, where he and old Thompson would drive a tunnel just where I knew
+it was useless.
+
+"Well, he came to me in the first of August, and said he was going to
+marry a girl called Paulette Brown,--and he wanted me to bring her out
+here! Why he didn't marry her straight off and bring her out here
+himself, I don't know; he only hummed and hawed when I asked him. But
+anyhow, I met Paulette Brown, _for the first time_, at the station, when
+we started up here--she and I and Dudley. And she puzzled me from the
+second we got into the Pullman, and I saw her pull off the two veils
+she'd worn around her head in the station! And she puzzles me worse
+now."
+
+"Why?" I might have been puzzled myself, remembering Paulette Brown's
+speech to me in the dark, but it was none of Marcia's business.
+
+"Because I know I've seen her before," Marcia returned calmly, "only
+with no 'Paulette Brown' tacked on to her. I've seen her dance
+somewhere, but I can't think _where_--and that's the first thing that
+puzzles me."
+
+"I don't see why," I said disagreeably, "considering that every one
+dances somewhere all day long just now."
+
+"It wasn't that kind of dancing. It was rather--wonderful! And there was
+some story tacked on to it," Marcia frowned, "only I can't think what!
+And the second thing that puzzles me about Paulette Brown--I tell you,
+Nicky, I believe she can't _bear_ Dudley, and that she doesn't want to
+marry him!"
+
+It was the first decent thing I had heard from her, and I could have
+opened my mouth and cheered. But I said, "Then why's she here?"
+
+"Just because it suits her for some reason of her own," Marcia was
+earnest as I had never seen her. "Nicky, I don't think she's anything in
+the world but some sort of an adventuress--only what I can't understand
+about her is what she wants of Dudley! It isn't money, for I know he's
+tried to make her take it, and she wouldn't. Yet I know, too, that she
+hadn't a cent coming up here, and she hasn't now--or even any clothes
+but summer things, and a blue sweater she wears all the time. She never
+speaks about herself, or where she comes from----"
+
+"I don't see why there should be any mystery about that!" It was a lie,
+but I might not have seen, if she had not spoken to me incomprehensibly
+in the dark. "Dudley probably knows all about her people."
+
+"A girl called Paulette Brown doesn't have any people," scornfully.
+"Besides, her name isn't Brown, or Paulette--she used to forget to
+answer to either of them at first; and if Dudley knows what it really
+is, I'm going to know too--before I'm a month older! I tell you I've
+seen her before, and I know there was some kind of an ugly story tacked
+on to her and her dancing. That, and her real name, are up in the attic
+of my brain somewhere, and some day they'll come down!"
+
+"Well, they won't concern me," I cut in stolidly. Whoever Paulette Brown
+was, if she were going to marry Dudley Wilbraham ten times over, she was
+the one girl in the world who belonged to me,--and I was not going to
+have her discussed by Marcia behind a shut door.
+
+But Marcia's retort was too quick for me. "They may interest you, all
+the same, if that girl's what I think she is! Don't make any mistake,
+Nicky; she's no chorus girl out of work. She's a lady. Only--she's been
+something else, too! You watch how she uses a perfectly trained body."
+
+I all but started. I had seen it already, when I thought she moved like
+Pavlova. "Anything else?" I inquired disagreeably.
+
+"Yes," said Marcia quietly. "She's afraid for her life, or Dudley's--I
+can't make out which. Wait, and you'll see. Come on; we'll be late for
+supper. It would have been over hours ago if Dudley and I hadn't been
+out shooting this afternoon. We've only just come in."
+
+But I was not thinking about supper. The Wilbrahams had been out, and
+Paulette Brown, left alone, had taken her chance to speak to some one.
+That she had happened to mistake her man and spoken to me made no
+difference in the fact, and it came too aptly on Marcia's suspicions
+about her. But "My good heavens, I won't care what she did," I thought
+fiercely. My dream girl's eyes were honest, if they were deep blue lakes
+a man might drown his soul in, too. If she were Dudley's twice over I
+was going to stand by her, because by all my dreams of her she was more
+mine. "I haven't time, or chances, to be watching pretty ladies," I said
+drily, "and I wouldn't bother over it myself if I were you. I'd let it
+go at plain Paulette Brown!"
+
+"If you could," said Marcia, just as drily. And over her words, close
+outside the window, a wolf howled.
+
+It startled me, as it had startled me once before that evening, only
+this time I knew the reason. "Scott, I never knew the wolves to be
+coming out so early in the season!" I was thankful to be back to things
+I could exclaim about. "And down here, beside the house, I never saw
+any!"
+
+"No; so Dudley said," Marcia returned almost absently. She opened the
+door for herself, because I had forgotten it, and stood looking at the
+lighted living room at the end of the passage by the front door. "But
+the wolves have been round for a week--that was what I meant when I said
+I was going to have some wolf hunts! The mine superintendent's going to
+take me."
+
+"Thompson!" I let out. Then I chuckled. Marcia was likely to have a
+great wolf hunt with Thompson, who knew no difference between a shotgun
+and a rifle, and would have legged it from a fox if he had met it alone.
+"Marcia Wilbraham, I'll pay you five dollars if you ever get out wolf
+hunting with Thompson. Why, the only thing he _can_ do for diversion is
+to play solitaire!"
+
+"Oh, him--yes," said Marcia carelessly and without grammar. "But I
+didn't mean old Thompson. He's been gone for a month, and we've a new
+man. His name's Macartney, and he's been here two weeks."
+
+It was news to me, if it was also an example of the way Dudley Wilbraham
+ran his mine. But before I could speak Marcia nodded significantly down
+the passage to the living room door. I had been looking into the room
+myself, as you do at the lighted stage in a theatre, and I had seen only
+one thing in it: my dream girl--whose name might or might not be
+Paulette Brown, whom Dudley Wilbraham had more right to than I
+had--sitting by the fire as I had left her, that fire I had dreamed I
+should come home to, just myself alone, and talking to Dudley. But
+Marcia had been looking at something else, and now my gaze followed
+hers.
+
+A tall, lean, hard, capable-looking man stood on the other side of the
+fire. He was taking no share in the conversation between Dudley and the
+girl who had only lived in my dreams till to-night. He was watching the
+living room door, quite palpably, and it struck me abruptly that I had
+not far to seek for Marcia Wilbraham's reason for staying the winter at
+La Chance. But I might have taken more interest in that and in
+Macartney, the new mine superintendent, too, if the girl sitting by the
+fire had not seen Marcia in the doorway and risen to her feet.
+
+For she floated up, effortlessly, unconsciously, to the very tips of her
+toes, and stood so--like Pavlova!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+DUDLEY'S MINE: AND DUDLEY'S GOLD
+
+    I have stared my eyes blind for her,
+      Bridled my body alive for her,
+    Starved my soul to the rind for her--
+      Do I lose all?
+
+    _The Lost Lover._
+
+
+I could feel Marcia's satisfied, significant smile through the back of
+my neck as I shook hands with Dudley, and was introduced in turn to Miss
+Brown--the last name for her, even without the affected Paulette, though
+I might not have thought of it but for Marcia--and to Macartney, the new
+incumbent of Thompson's shoes. Dudley, little and fat, in the dirty
+boots he had worn all day, and just a little loaded, told me to wait
+till the morning or go to the devil, when I asked about the mine.
+Charliet banged the food on the table for supper--Marcia despised
+housekeeping, and if the living room had been reformed nothing else
+had--and I sat down in silence and ate. At least I shovelled food into
+my famished stomach. My attention was elsewhere.
+
+Paulette Brown sat beside Dudley. She was just twice as pretty as I had
+realized, even when the first sight of her struck me dumb. Her eyes were
+as dark as indigo, in the lamplight, and a marvellous rose color flitted
+in her cheeks as she spoke or was silent. She had wonderful hands, too,
+slim and white, without a sign of a bone at the wrists; but I had a
+curious feeling that they were the very strongest hands I had ever seen
+on a girl. Remembering Dudley, it hurt me to look at her; and suddenly
+something else hurt me worse, that I had been a fool not to have thought
+of before. Macartney, the mine superintendent, was new there; I knew no
+more of him than I did of Paulette Brown--not so much, perhaps, thanks
+to Marcia--and it came over me that he might have been the man for whom
+she had taken me to-night, and that it was he she had crept out into the
+dark to speak to in secret. I looked at him over my coffee cup, and
+there was something about him I did not like.
+
+He was a tall man, very capable-looking, as I said; extremely fair and
+rather handsome, with hard, grayish eyes that looked straight at you
+when he spoke. He had a charming laugh--yet when he laughed I saw
+suddenly what it was that I did not like about him; and it was nothing
+more nor less than a certain set look about his eye muscles. Some
+gamblers have it, and it did not strike my fancy in the new mine
+superintendent at La Chance. But watch as I might, I saw no sign of an
+understanding between him and my dream girl. It was impossible to be
+sure, of course, but I was nearly sure. She spoke to him as she spoke to
+Marcia and Dudley--she never addressed one word to me--just easily and
+simply, as people do who live in the same house. Macartney himself
+talked mostly to Marcia, which was no business of mine. Only I was
+somehow curiously thankful that it had not been Macartney whom Paulette
+had meant to meet in the dark. There was something about his eyes that
+said he was no safe customer for any girl to speak to with
+hatred,--especially a girl whom another girl was watching, as Marcia was
+watching Paulette Brown. I decided it must have been either Dunn or
+Collins--our two worthless Yale boys at the mine--whom she had wanted to
+get rid of, and I felt better; for it would be easy enough to save her
+trouble by doing that myself. They might just have come back to La
+Chance like me, for all I knew, because Dudley had a trick of sending
+the men heaven knew where to prospect.
+
+It was rot, anyhow, to be taking a girl's affairs so seriously. I looked
+at my dream girl's clear eyes, and thought that if she knew what Marcia
+and I were thinking about her she might have good reason to be angry.
+Also that Dudley probably knew all about her evening stroll and what she
+was doing at La Chance, if Marcia did not. And Dudley's self-important
+voice cut through my thoughts like a knife:
+
+"Where on earth were you this evening, Paulette?" he was demanding
+irritably. "I couldn't see a sign of you when Marcia and I went out, and
+you weren't anywhere when we came in!"
+
+"I don't know"--the girl began--and I saw the color go out of her face,
+and it made me angry.
+
+"I can tell you where Miss Brown was," I said deliberately, "if she's
+ashamed to own it. She was good and settled by this fire."
+
+Why I lied for her I could not say. But the glance she turned on me gave
+me a flat sort of feeling, as if Marcia might be right and she was there
+for reasons of her own that I had all but stumbled on by accident. I was
+a fool to care; but then I had been a fool all day with my silly
+thoughts of leaving La Chance to chase the world for an imaginary girl,
+and more fool still to think I had found her there waiting for me. I
+said something about being tired and went off to bed. I was tired, right
+enough, but I was something else too. All that business about the girl I
+meant to find and marry may sound like a child's silly game to you, but
+it had been more than a game to me. It had been a solid prop to hold to
+in ugly places where a man might slip if he had not clean love and a
+girl in his head. And now, at seven-and-twenty, I wanted my child's game
+to come true: just my own fire, and my own girl, and a life that held
+more than mere slaving for money. And it had come true, as far as the
+fire and the welcome home; only the girl was another man's.
+
+I knew what I ought to do was to get out of La Chance, but I could not
+screw myself up to the acceptance of the obvious fact that there were
+other girls in the world than Paulette Brown. I told myself I was too
+dead tired to care. I stumbled to my window to open it--Charliet's lamp
+had burned out while I was at supper and the room was stifling--and a
+sudden queer sense that some one or something was under my window made
+me stand there without raising it. And there was some _thing_, anyway.
+The windows in the shack were about a yard above the ground. There was a
+glimpse of the moon through the wind-tortured clouds, now on the rough
+clearing, now on the thick spruces round the edge of it,--for my window
+looked on the bush, not toward the bunk house and the mine. And as the
+moonlight flickered back on the clearing I saw my clothes I had worn at
+Skunk's Misery and tossed out for Charliet to burn because they
+smelled,--and something else that made me stare in pure surprise.
+
+There was a wolf--gaunt, gray, fantastic in the moonlight--rolling on my
+clothes; regardless of the human eyes on him and within ten feet of the
+house. It was so crazy that I almost forgot the girl Marcia had said was
+only "called" Paulette Brown. I jerked up the window and stood waiting
+for the wolf to run. And it did not take the least notice of me. I could
+have shot it ten times over, but the thing was so incredible that I only
+stood staring; and suddenly my chance was gone. The beast picked up my
+coat, as a dog does a bone, and disappeared with it like a streak into
+the black bush.
+
+"Scott, I never saw a wolf behave like that!" I thought. But one more
+impossibility in an impossible day did not matter. I left the window
+open and tumbled into bed.
+
+I would have forgotten the thing in the morning, only that when I got up
+_all_ my Skunk's Misery clothes had disappeared, and Charliet had not
+taken them, because I asked him. I did not mention last night's wolf to
+him, because I was in a hurry to catch Dudley and tell him I meant to
+leave La Chance. But I did not tell him, for when I thought of leaving
+my dream girl to him it would not come to my tongue. An obstinate,
+matter-of-fact devil got up in my heart instead and prompted me to stay
+just where I was. I looked at Dudley--little, fat, pompous, and so
+self-opinionated that it fairly stuck out of him--and thought that if I
+had a fair chance I could take my dream girl from him. I might be dark
+as an Indian and without a cent to my name except the few dollars I had
+sunk in the mine, but I did not drink or eat drugs; and I knew Dudley
+did one and guessed he did the other. Interfering with him was out of
+the question, of course; it was not a thing any man could do to his
+friend, deliberately. I supposed he would be good to the girl, according
+to his lights. But, all the same, I decided to stay at La Chance. I saw
+Dudley was brimming over with something secret, and I hoped to heaven it
+was not his engagement, and that I should not have to stand my own
+thoughts of a girl translated into Dudley's. But he did not mention her.
+He hooked his fat wrist into my elbow and trotted me down to the mine.
+
+It was an amateur sort of mine, as you may have gathered. Dudley had no
+use for expert assistance or for advice. And it was a simple looking
+place. The shore of Lac Tremblant there ran back flat to a hill, a
+quarter of a mile from the water, with a solid rock face like a cliff.
+Along that cliff face came first Dudley's shack, then Thompson's tunnel,
+then--a good way farther down--the bunk house, the mill, and a shanty
+Dudley called the assay office. But I stared at a new hole in the cliff,
+farther down even than the assay office.
+
+"Why, you've driven a new tunnel," I exclaimed.
+
+"Yes, my young son," said Dudley; and then he burst out with things.
+Macartney had run that new tunnel as soon as he came and struck quartz
+that was solid for heaven knew how far, and carrying thick, free gold
+that assayed incredibly to the ton. The La Chance mine, whose name had
+been more truth than poetry--for when I made fifty miles of road that
+cost like the devil, to haul in machinery and a mill it was pitch and
+toss if we should ever need it--had turned out a certainty while I was
+away.
+
+I stood silent. It meant plenty to me, who had only a trifle in the
+thing, but I was the only soul in the world who knew what it meant to
+Dudley. Stocks, carelessness, but chiefly bull-headed extravagance, had
+run through every cent he had, and La Chance had saved him from having
+to live on Marcia's charity,--if she had any. There was no fear, either,
+of his being interfered with in the bonanza he had struck; for leaving
+out my infinitesimal share, Dudley was sole owner,--and he had bought a
+thousand acres mining concession from the Government for ten dollars an
+acre, which is the law when a potential mining district in unsurveyed
+territory is more than twenty miles by a wagon road from a railway. All
+he had to do with would-be prospectors was to chuck them out. He had got
+in ten stamps for his mill over the road I had built from Caraquet,
+and--since Macartney arrived--was milling stuff whose net result made me
+stare, after the miserable, two-dollar ore old Thompson had broken my
+heart with.
+
+"So you see, we're made," Dudley finished simply. "Macartney struck his
+vein first go off, and we'll be able to work it all winter. You'd better
+start in to-day and get some snowsheds built along the face of the
+workings--they ought to have been started a week ago. Why in the
+devil"--drink and drugs do not make a man easy to work with, and you
+never knew when Dudley might turn on you with a face like a
+fiend--"didn't you get back from Caraquet before? You'd nothing to keep
+you away this last week!"
+
+"I'd plenty," I returned drily. "And I may remind you that I didn't
+propose to have to walk back!" It was the first time I had mentioned my
+missing horse. I did not mention my stay in Skunk's Misery: it was a
+side show of my own, to my mind, and unconnected with Dudley,--though I
+ought to have known that nothing in life is ever a side show, even if
+you can't see the door from the big tent.
+
+"Oh, your horse," said Dudley more civilly. "I didn't think I'd
+forgotten about it, but I suppose I must have. I was a good deal put out
+getting Thompson off."
+
+"What happened about him?" I had had no chance to ask before.
+
+"Oh, I never could stand him," and I knew it was true. "Sitting all the
+evening playing cards like a performing dog! And he wasn't fit for his
+work, either. I told him so, and he said he'd go. He went out to
+Caraquet nearly a month ago--I thought you knew. D'ye mean you didn't
+see him going through?"
+
+I shook my head. It was a wonder I had not, for I had spent most of last
+month fussing over some bad places on the road, by the turn where I had
+found my boy from Skunk's Misery, and I ought to have seen Thompson go
+by. But the solution was simple. There was one Monday and Tuesday I had
+my road gang off in the bush, on the opposite side from the Skunk's
+Misery valley, getting stuff to finish a bit of corduroy. In those two
+days I could have missed seeing Thompson, and I said so.
+
+"You didn't miss much," Dudley returned carelessly. "This Macartney's a
+long sight better man."
+
+"Where'd you get him?" I was pretty sure it was not Macartney for whom
+my dream girl had mistaken me in the dark, but there was no harm in
+knowing all I could about him.
+
+Dudley knocked the wind straight out of my half suspicion.
+
+"Thompson sent him," he returned with a grin. "I told him to get
+somebody. Oh, we parted friends all right, old Thompson and I! He saw,
+just as I did, that he wasn't the man for the place. Macartney struck
+that vein first go off, and that was recommendation enough for me. But
+here's Thompson's, if you want to see it!" He extracted a folded letter
+from a case.
+
+It was written in Thompson's careful, back-number copperplate, perhaps
+not so careful as usual, but his unmistakably. And once and for all I
+dismissed all idea that it could have been Macartney who was tangled up
+with Paulette Brown. Old Thompson's friends were not that sort, and he
+vouched for knowing Macartney all his life. He was a well-known man,
+according to Thompson, with a long string of letters after his name.
+Thompson had come on him by accident, and sent him up at once, before he
+was snapped up elsewhere.
+
+"Thompson seems to have got a move on in sending up his successor,"
+said I idly. "When did he write this?" For there was no envelope, and
+only Montreal, with no date, on the letter.
+
+"Dunno--first day he got to Montreal, it says," carelessly. "Come along
+and have a look at the workings. I want you to get log shelters built as
+quick as you can build them--we don't want to have to dig out the new
+tunnel mouth every time it snows. After that you can go to Caraquet with
+what gold we've got out and be gone as long as you please. Now, we may
+have snow any day."
+
+I nodded. The winter arrives for good at La Chance in November, and
+besides the exposed tunnel mouth, there was no shelter over the ore
+platform at the mill. This year the snow was late, but there was no
+counting on that. And I blinked as I went out of the white November
+sunshine into Macartney's new tunnel, and the candlelight of his humming
+stope. One glance around told me Dudley was right, and the man knew his
+business; and it was the same over at the mill. It seemed to me
+superintendent was a mild name for Macartney, and general manager would
+have fitted better. But I said nothing, for Dudley considered he was
+general manager himself. Another thing that pleased me about the new man
+was that he seemed to be doing nothing, till you saw how his men jumped
+for him, while Thompson had never been able to keep his hands off the
+men's work. There was none of that in Macartney; and if he had struck me
+as capable the night before he looked ten times more so now, as he
+placidly ran four jobs at once.
+
+He was a good-looking figure of a man, too, in his brown duck working
+clothes, and I did not wonder Marcia Wilbraham had taken a fancy to him.
+Dudley would probably be blazing if he caught her philandering with his
+superintendent, but it was no business of mine. And anyhow, Macartney
+had my blessing since it could not be he to whom Paulette Brown had
+meant to speak the night before. That ought to have been none of my
+business either, and to get it out of my head I turned to Dudley,
+fussing round and talking about tailings. And one omission in all he and
+Macartney had shown me hopped up in my head. "Where's your gold?" I
+demanded.
+
+"That's one thing we don't keep loose on the doorsteps," Macartney
+returned drily, and I rather liked him for it, since he knew nothing of
+my share in the mine.
+
+But Dudley snapped at him: "Why can't you say it's in the house--in my
+office? Stretton's going to take it into Caraquet; there's no sense in
+making a mystery to him. Come on, Stretton, and have a look at it now!"
+He stuck his fat little arm through mine, and we went back to the house
+by the back door and Charliet's untidy kitchen. It was the shortest way,
+and it was not till afterwards that I remembered it was not commanded by
+the window in his office, like the front way. I was not keen on going;
+later I had a sickly feeling that it was because I had a presentiment of
+seeing something I did not want to see. Then all I thought was that I
+had a hundred other things to do, and though I went unwillingly, I went.
+
+"The gold's in my safe, in boxes," Dudley said on the way, "and that I'm
+not going to undo. But I've a lump or two in my desk I can show you."
+
+"Lying round loose?" I shrugged my shoulders.
+
+"No, it's locked up. But no one ever comes in here but me, and"--he gave
+a shove at the office door that seemed to have stuck,--"and Miss Brown!"
+
+But I was speechless where I stood behind him. There was the bare
+office; Dudley's locked desk; Dudley's safe against the wall. And
+turning away from the safe, in her blue sweater and blue skirt and
+stockings and little buckled shoes, was my dream girl!
+
+Something in my heart turned over as I looked at her. It was not that
+she had started, for she had not. She just stood in front of us, poised
+and serene, and some sort of a letter she had been writing lay half
+finished on Dudley's desk. But something totally outside me told me she
+had been writing no letter while we were out; that she knew the
+combination of the safe; had opened it; had but just shut it; and--_that
+she had been doing something to the boxes of gold inside it_.
+
+There was nothing in her face to say so, though, and my thought never
+struck Dudley. He gave her a nod and a patronizing: "Well, nice girl,"
+without the least surprise at seeing her there. But I had seen a pin dot
+of blue sealing wax on the glimpse of white blouse that showed through
+the open front of her sweater, and something else. I stooped, while
+Dudley was fussing with the lock of his desk, and picked up a curious
+little gold seal that lay on the floor by the safe.
+
+Whether I meant to speak of it or not I don't know; for quick as light,
+the girl held out her hand for it. I said nothing as I gave it to her.
+Dudley did not see me do it; and, of course, it might have been a seal
+of his own. But, if it were, why did not Paulette Brown say so,--or say
+something--instead of standing dead white and silent till I turned away?
+
+I knew--as I said "Oh" over Dudley's gold, and my dream girl slipped out
+of the room--that I had helped her to keep some kind of a secret for
+the second time. And that if she had any mysterious business at La
+Chance it was something fishy about Dudley's gold!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE MAN IN THE DARK
+
+
+It sounded crazy, for what could a girl like that do to gold that was
+securely packed? But women had been mixed up in ugly work about gold
+before, and somehow the vision of my dream girl standing by the safe
+stuck to me all that day. Suppose I had helped her to cover up a theft
+from Dudley! It was funny; but the ludicrous side of it did not strike
+me. What did was that I must see her alone and get rid of the poisonous
+distrust of her that she, or Marcia, had put into my head. But that day
+went by, and two more on top of it, and I had no chance to speak to
+Paulette Brown.
+
+Part of the reason was that I had not a second to call my own. La Chance
+had been an amateur mine when we began it, and it was one still. There
+was only Dudley--who did nothing, and was celebrating himself stupid
+with drugs, or I was much mistaken--Macartney, and myself to run it;
+with not enough men even to get out the ore, without working the mill
+and the amalgam plates. It had been no particular matter while the whole
+mine was only a tentative business, and I had been having half a fit at
+Dudley's mad extravagance in putting up a ten-stamp mill when we had
+nothing particular to crush in it. But now, with ore that ran over a
+hundred to the ton being fed into the mill, and Macartney and I doing
+the work of six men instead of two, I agreed with Dudley when he
+announced in a sober interval that we required a double shift of men and
+the mill to crush day and night, instead of stopping at dark,--besides a
+cyanide plant and a man to run it.
+
+But Macartney unexpectedly jibbed at the idea. He returned bluntly that
+he could attend to the cyanide business himself, when it was really
+needed; while as to extra men he could not watch a night shift at the
+plates as well as a day one, and he would have to be pretty sure of the
+honesty of his new amalgam man before he started in to get one.
+Also--and it struck me as a sentiment I had never heard from a mine
+superintendent before--that if we sent out for men half of those we got
+might be riffraff and make trouble for us, without so much as a sheriff
+within a hundred miles. "I'd sooner pick up new men one at a time," he
+concluded, "even if it takes a month. We've ladies here, and if we got
+in a gang of tramps----" he gave a shrug and a significant glance at
+Dudley.
+
+"Why, we've some devils out of purgatory now," I began scornfully, and
+stopped,--because Dudley suddenly agreed with Macartney. But the waste
+of time in making the mine pay for itself and the stopping of the mill
+at night galled me; and so did the work I had to do from dawn to dark,
+because any two-dollar-a-day man could have done it instead.
+
+Macartney seemed to be made of iron, for he took longer hours than I
+did. But he could talk to Marcia Wilbraham in the evenings, while Dudley
+stood between me and the dream girl I thought had come true for me when
+first I came to La Chance.
+
+I watched her, though; I couldn't help it. There were times when I could
+have sworn her soul matched her body and she was honest all through; and
+times when a devil rose up in me and bade me doubt her; till between
+work and worry I was no nearer finding out the kind she really was than
+to discovering the man she had meant to speak to in the dark the night
+she blundered on me. Yet I had some sort of a clue there, if it were not
+much of one. Dunn and Collins, our two slackers who had been kicked out
+of Yale to land in our bunk house, evidently had some game on. Dunn I
+was not much bothered about: he was just a plain good-for-nothing, with
+a perennial chuckle. But Collins was a different story. Tall, pale,
+long-eyelashed, his _blasé_ young face barely veiled a mind that was an
+encyclopædia of sin,--or I was much mistaken. And he and Dunn had
+suddenly ceased to raise Hades in the bunk house every night and
+developed a taste for going to bed with the hens. At least, the snoring
+bunk house thought so. If they went abroad instead on whatever they were
+up to, I never caught them at it; but I did catch them watching _me_,
+like lynxes, whenever they were off shift. I never saw either of them
+speak to Miss Brown, but I got a good growing idea it was just Collins
+she had meant to interview the night she spoke to me: and it fitted in
+well enough with my doubts about her and Dudley's gold, for I would have
+put no gold stealing past Collins. As for Paulette Brown herself, I
+could see no earthly sense in Marcia's silly statement that "she was
+afraid for her life--or Dudley's." She was afraid _of_ Dudley, I could
+see that; for she shrank from him quite often. But on the other hand, I
+saw her follow him into his office one night, when he was fit for no
+girl to tackle, and try to get him to listen to something. From outside
+I heard her beg him to "please listen and try to understand"--and I made
+her a sign from the doorway to come away before he flew at her. I asked
+her if there were anything I could do, and she said no; it was only
+something she wanted to tell Dudley. But suddenly she looked at me with
+those clear eyes of hers. "You're very--good to me," she said rather
+piteously.
+
+I shook my head, and that minute I believed in her utterly. But the next
+night I had a jar. I was starting for Caraquet the morning after, with
+the gold Dudley had in his office, so I was late in the stable, putting
+washers on my light wagon, and came home by a short cut through the
+bush, long after dark. If I moved Indian-silent in my moccasins it was
+because I always did. But--halfway to the shack clearing--I stopped
+short, wolf-silent; which is different. Close by, invisible in the dark
+spruces, I heard Paulette Brown speaking; and knew that once more she
+was meeting a man in the dark, and, this time, the right one! I could
+not see him any more than I could hear him, for he did not speak; but I
+knew he was there. I crouched to make a blind jump for him--and my dream
+girl's voice held me still.
+
+"I don't care how you threaten me: you've got to _go_," she said
+doggedly. "I know I've my own safety to look after, but I'll chance
+that. I'll give you one week more. Then, if you dare to stay on here,
+and interfere with me or the gold or anything else, I'll confess
+everything to Dudley Wilbraham. I nearly did it last night. I _won't_
+trust you--even if it means your giving away my hiding place to the
+police!"
+
+Whoever she spoke to moved infinitesimally in the dark. He must have
+muttered something I could not hear, for the girl answered sharply: "As
+for that, I'm done with you! Whether you go or don't go, this is the
+last time I'll ever sneak out to meet you. When you dare to say you love
+me"--and once more the collected hatred in her voice staggered me, only
+this time I was thankful for it--"I could die! I won't hear of what you
+say, remember, but I'll give you one week's chance. Then--or if you try
+anything on with me and the gold--I'll tell!"
+
+There was no answer. But my blood jumped in me with sheer fury, for
+answer or no answer, I knew who the man beside her was. Close by me I
+heard Dunn's unmistakable chuckle: and where Dunn was Collins was too. I
+behaved like a fool. I should have bounced through the bush and grabbed
+Dunn at least, which might have stopped some of the awful work that was
+to come. But I stood still, till a sixth sense told me Collins was gone,
+just as I could have gone myself, without sound or warning. Yet even
+then I paused instead of going after him. First, because I had no
+desire to give my reason for dismissing him next morning; second,
+because I had a startling, ghastly thought that I'd heard Macartney's
+quiet, characteristic footstep moving away,--and if a hard, set-eyed man
+like our capable superintendent had been out listening to what a girl
+said to Collins, as I had, I didn't know how in the devil I was to make
+him hold his tongue about it. And in the middle of that pleasant thought
+my dream girl spoke again, to herself this time: "Oh, I can't trust him!
+I'll have to get hold of the gold myself--at least all I've marked."
+
+On the top of her words a wolf howled startlingly, close by. It was
+evidently the last touch on what must have been a cheerful evening, for
+Paulette Brown gave one appalled spring and was gone, fleeing for the
+kitchen door. I am not slow on my feet. I was in the front way before
+she struck the back one. From the front door I observed the living room,
+and what I saw inside it before I strolled in there made me catch my
+breath with relief and comforting security for the first time that
+night. Macartney could not have been out listening in the dark, if I
+had. He sat lazily in the living room, talking to Marcia, with his feet
+in old patent leather shoes he could never have run in, even if it had
+not been plain he had not been out-of-doors at all. Marcia had
+evidently not been spying either, which was a comfort; and Dudley was
+out of the question, for he dozed by the fire, palpably half asleep. But
+suddenly I had a fright. The girl who entered the living room five
+minutes behind me had very plainly been out; and I was terrified that
+Marcia would notice her wind-blown hair. I spoke to her as she passed
+me. "You're losing a hairpin on the left side of your head," was all I
+said. And much I got for it. My dream girl tucked in her wildly flying
+curl with that sleight of hand women use and never even looked at me.
+But the thing was done, and I had covered up her tracks for the third
+time.
+
+I decided to fire Collins before breakfast the next morning and get off
+to Caraquet straight after. But I didn't; and I did not fire Collins,
+either. When I went to the bunk house and then to the mine, where he was
+a rock man, he had apparently fired himself, as Paulette had told him
+to. He was nowhere to be found, anyhow, or Dunn either. I wasted an hour
+hunting for him, and after that Macartney wanted me, so that it was late
+afternoon before I could load up my gold and get off. And as I opened
+the safe in Dudley's office I swore.
+
+There were four boxes of the stuff; small, for easy handling; and if I
+had had time I would have opened every hanged one of them. Even as it
+was, I determined to do no forwarding from Caraquet till I knew what
+something on them meant. For on each box, just as I had expected even
+before I heard Paulette Brown say she had marked them, was a tiny seal
+in blue wax!
+
+The reason for any seal knocked me utterly, but I couldn't wait to worry
+over it. No one else saw it, for I loaded the boxes into my wagon
+myself, and there was nobody about to see me off. Dudley was dead to the
+world, as I'd known he was getting ready to be for a week past; Marcia,
+to her fury, had had to retire to bed with a swelled face; and Macartney
+was the only other person who knew my light wagon and pair of horses was
+taking our clean-up into Caraquet,--except Paulette Brown!
+
+And there was no sign of her anywhere. I had not expected there would
+be, but I was sore all the same. I had helped her out of difficulties
+three times, and all I'd got for it was--nothing! I saw Macartney coming
+up from the mill, and yelled to him to come and hold my horses, while I
+went back to my room for a revolver. This was from sheer habit. The snow
+still held off, and before me was nothing more exciting than a cold
+drive over a bad road that was frozen hard as a board, a halt at the
+Halfway stables to change horses, and perhaps the society of Billy
+Jones as far as Caraquet,--if he wanted to go there. The only other
+human being I could possibly meet might be some one from Skunk's Misery,
+though that was unlikely; the denizens of Skunk's Misery had few errands
+that took them out on roads. So I pocketed my gun mechanically. But as I
+went out again I stopped short in the shack door.
+
+My dream girl, whom I'd never been alone with for ten minutes, sat in my
+wagon, with my reins in her hands. "My soul," I thought, galvanized,
+"she can't be--she must be--coming with me to Caraquet!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE CARAQUET ROAD: AND THE WOLVES HOWL ONCE MORE
+
+    Why comest thou to ride with me?
+      "The road, this night, is dark."
+    Dost thou and thine then side with me?
+      "Ride on, ride on and hark!"
+
+    _The Night Ride._
+
+
+There she sat, anyhow, alone except for Macartney, who stood at the
+horses' heads. Wherever she was going, I had an idea he was as surprised
+about it as I was, and that he had been expostulating with her about her
+expedition. But, if he had, he shut up as I appeared. I could only
+stammer as I stared at Paulette, "You--you're not coming!"
+
+"I seem to be," she returned placidly. And Macartney gave me the
+despairing glance of a sensible man who had tried his best to head off a
+girl's silly whim, and failed.
+
+"It's as you like," he said--to her, not to me. "But you understand you
+can't get back to-night, if you go to Caraquet. And--Good heavens--you
+ought _not_ to go, if you want the truth of it! There's nothing to
+see--and you'll get half frozen--and you mayn't get back for days, if it
+snows!"
+
+Paulette Brown looked at him as if he were not there. Then she laughed.
+"I didn't say I was going to Caraquet! If you want to know all about my
+taking a chance for a drive behind a pair of good horses, Miss Wilbraham
+wants Billy Jones's wife to come over for a week and work for her. I'm
+going to stay all night with Mrs. Jones and bring her back in the
+morning. She'll never leave Billy unless she's fetched. So I really
+think you needn't worry, Mr. Macartney," she paused, and I thought I saw
+him wince. "I'm not going to be a nuisance either to you or Mr.
+Stretton," and before he had a chance to answer she started up the
+horses. I had just time to take a flying jump and land in the wagon
+beside her as she drove off.
+
+Macartney exclaimed sharply, and I didn't wonder. If he had not jumped
+clear the near wheels must have struck him. I lost the angry, startled
+sentence he snapped out. But it could have been nothing in particular,
+for my dream girl only turned in her seat and smiled at him.
+
+I had no smile as I took the reins from her. I had wanted a chance to be
+alone with her, and I had it: but I knew better than to think she was
+going to Billy Jones's for the sake of a drive with me. The only real
+thought I had was that behind me, in the back of the wagon, were the
+boxes of gold she had marked inexplicably with her blue seal, and that I
+had heard her say the night before that she "would have to get that
+gold!"
+
+How she meant to do it was beyond me; and it was folly to think she ever
+_could_ do it, with six feet of a man's strength beside her. But
+nevertheless, when you loved a girl for no other earthly reason than
+that she was your dream of a girl come true, and even though she
+belonged to another man, it was no thought with which to start on a
+lonely drive with her. I set my teeth on it and never opened them for a
+solid mile over the hummocky road through the endless spruce bush,
+behind which the sun had already sunk. I could feel my dream girl's
+shoulder where she sat beside me, muffled in a sable-lined coat of
+Dudley's: and the sweet warmth of her, the faint scent of her
+gold-bronze hair, made me afraid to speak, even if I had known what I
+wanted to say.
+
+But suddenly she spoke to me. "Mr. Stretton, you're not angry with me
+for coming with you?"
+
+"You know I'm not." But I did not know what I was. Any one who has read
+as far as this will know that if ever a plain, stupid fool walked this
+world, it was I,--Nicholas Dane Stretton. Put me in the bush, or with
+horses, and I'm useful enough,--but with men and women I seem to go
+blind and dumb. I know I never could read a detective story; the clues
+and complications always made me feel dizzy. I was pretty well dazed
+where I sat beside that girl I knew I ought to find out about, and her
+nearness did not help me to ask her ugly questions. If she had not been
+Dudley's,--but I broke the thought short off. I said to myself
+impersonally that it was impossible for a girl to do any monkey tricks
+about the La Chance gold with a man like me. Yet I wondered if she meant
+to try!
+
+But she showed no sign of it. "I had to come," she said gently. "Marcia
+really wants Billy Jones's wife: she won't let me wait on her, and of
+course Charliet can't do it. You believe me, don't you? I didn't come
+just for a drive with you!"
+
+I believed that well enough, and I nodded.
+
+"Then," said my dream girl quietly, "will you please stop the horses?"
+
+I looked round. We were miles from the mine, around a turn where the
+spruce bush ceased for a long stretch of swamp,--bare, featureless, and
+frozen. Then, for the first time, I looked at Dudley's girl that I was
+fool enough to love.
+
+"What for?" I demanded. "I mean, of course, if you like," for I saw she
+was white to the lips, though her eyes met mine steadily, like a man's.
+"Do you mean you want to go back?"
+
+She shook her head almost absently. "No: I think there's something
+bumping around in the back of the wagon. I"--there was a sharp, nervous
+catch in her voice--"want to find out what it is."
+
+I had packed the wagon, and I knew there was nothing in it to bump. But
+I stopped the horses. I wondered if the girl beside me had some sort of
+baby revolver and thought she could hold me up with it, if I let her get
+out; and I knew just what I would do if she tried it. I smiled as I
+waited. But she did not get out. She turned in her seat and reached
+backwards into the back of the wagon, as if she had neither bones nor
+joints in her lovely body. Marcia was right when she said it was
+perfectly educated and trained. For a moment I could think of nothing
+but the marvellous grace of her movement as she slid her hand under the
+tarpaulin that covered the gold; then I thought I heard her catch her
+breath with surprise. But she turned back with an exquisite lithe grace
+that made me catch mine, and slid down in her seat as if she had never
+slid out of it.
+
+"It's a bottle," she said lightly. But it was with a kind of startled
+puzzle too, as if she had sooner expected dynamite. "I can't think why;
+I mean, I wonder what's in it!"
+
+"A bottle!" I jerked around to stare at a whisky bottle in her hands. It
+was tightly sealed and full of something colorless that looked like gin.
+I was just going to say I could not see where it had come from, seeing I
+had packed the wagon myself, and I would have gone bail there was no
+bottle in it. But it came over me that she might be pretending
+astonishment and have put the thing there herself while I was in my room
+getting my revolver; since there had been no one else near my wagon but
+Macartney, and he could not have left the horses' heads. It flashed on
+me that the baby beside me, being used to Dudley, might have drugged a
+little gin, thinking I would take various drinks on the way; and I
+nearly laughed out. But I said: "Back there was no place for a bottle.
+It's a wonder it didn't smash on the first bump!"
+
+"Yes," said Paulette slowly. "Only I wonder--I mean I can't see----" and
+she paused, staring at the bottle with a thoughtful sort of frown. "I
+believe I'll hold it on my lap."
+
+I was looking at the bottle too, where she held it with both fur-gloved
+hands; and I forgot to wonder if she were lying about it or not. For
+the gloves she wore were Dudley Wilbraham's, as well as the coat,--and
+that any of Dudley's things should be on my dream girl put me in a
+black, senseless fury. I wanted to take them straight off her and wrap
+her up in my own belongings. I grabbed at anything to say that would
+keep my tongue from telling her to change coats with me that instant,
+and the bottle in her hand was the only thing that occurred to me. It
+brought a sudden recollection back to me anyhow, and I opened my lips
+quite easily.
+
+"Scott, that looks like some of the brew I spilled over my clothes at
+Skunk's Misery!"
+
+"Skunk's Misery!" Paulette exclaimed sharply. "What on earth is Skunk's
+Misery?"
+
+"A village--at least, a den--of dirt, chiefly; off this road, between
+Caraquet and Lac Tremblant." I was thankful to have something to think
+about that was neither her, or me, or Dudley. I made as long a story as
+I could of my stay in Skunk's Misery when I took home the half-killed
+boy; of the filthy stuff I had spilled on my clothes, and how I had seen
+a wolf carry them off. "By George, I believe he _liked_ the
+smell--though I never thought of that till now!"
+
+"What?" Paulette gave a curious start that might have been wonder, or
+enlightenment. "And you got the stuff at Skunk's Misery, out of a
+bottle like this? Oh, I ought to have guessed"--but she either checked
+herself, or her pause was absolutely natural--"I should have guessed
+you'd had some sort of a horrible time that night you came home. You
+looked so tired. But what I meant to say was I don't see how such poor
+people would have a bottle of _anything_. Didn't they say what it was?"
+
+"Didn't ask! It looked like gin, and it smelt like a sulphide factory
+when it got on my clothes. They certainly had that bottle."
+
+"Well, Skunk's Misery hasn't got _this_ bottle, anyhow!" I could see no
+reason for the look on her face. It was not gay any more; it was stern,
+if a girl's face can be stern, and it was white with angry suspicion.
+Suddenly she laughed, rather fiercely. "I'm glad I thought of it before
+the jolting broke it in the wagon! I want to get it safely to Billy
+Jones's."
+
+The reason why beat me, since she had pretended to know nothing of it,
+so I said nothing. After a long silence Paulette sighed.
+
+"You've been very kind to me, Mr. Stretton," she said, as if she had
+been thinking. "I wish you could see your way to--trusting me!"
+
+"I don't know how I've been kind," I left out the trusting part. "I
+have hardly seen you to speak to till to-night, except," and I said it
+deliberately, "the first time I ever saw you, sitting by the fire at La
+Chance. You did speak to me then."
+
+"Was that--the first time you saw me?" It might have been forgetfulness,
+or a challenge to repeat what she had said to me by the lake in the
+dark. But I was not going to repeat that. Something told me, as it had
+told me when I came on her by Dudley's fire--though it was for a
+different reason, now that I knew she was his and not mine--that I would
+be a fool to fight my own thoughts of her with explanations, even if she
+chose to make any. I looked directly into her face instead. All I could
+see was her eyes, that were just dark pools in the dusk, and her mouth,
+oddly grave and unsmiling. But then and there--and any one who thinks me
+a fool is welcome to--my ugly suspicions of her died. And I could have
+died of shame myself to think I had ever harbored them. If she had done
+things I could not understand--and she had--I knew there must be a good
+reason for them. For the rest, in spite of Marcia and her silly
+mysteries, and even though she belonged to Dudley, she was my dream
+girl, and I meant to stand by her.
+
+"That was the first time I spoke to you," I said, as if there had been
+no pause. "After that, I picked up a seal for you, and I told you your
+hair was untidy before Marcia could. I think those are all the
+enormously kind things I've ever done for you. But, if you want
+kindness, you know where to come!"
+
+"Without telling you things--and when you don't trust me!"
+
+"Telling things never made a man trust any one," said I. "And besides,"
+it was so dark now, as we crawled along the side of the long rocky hill
+that followed the swamp, that I had to look hard to see her face, "I
+never said I didn't trust you. And there isn't anything you could tell
+me that I want to know!"
+
+"Oh," Paulette cried as sharply as if I had struck her, "do you mean
+you're taking me on trust--in spite of everything?"
+
+"In spite of nothing." I laughed. I was not going to have her think I
+knew about Collins, much more all the stuff Marcia had said. But she
+turned her head and looked at me with a curious intentness.
+
+"I'll try," she began in a smothered sort of voice, "I mean I'm not all
+you've been thinking I was, Mr. Stretton! Only," passionately, and it
+was the last thing I had expected her to say, "I wish we were at Billy
+Jones's with all this gold!"
+
+I did not, whether she had astonished me or not. I could have driven all
+night with her beside me, and her arm touching mine when the wagon
+bumped over the rocks.
+
+"We're halfway," I returned rather cheerlessly. "Why? You're not afraid
+we'll be held up, are you? No human being ever uses this road."
+
+"I wasn't thinking of human beings," she returned simply. "I was
+thinking of wolves."
+
+"Wolves?" I honestly gasped it. Then I laughed straight out. "I can't
+feel particularly agitated about wolves. I know we had some at La
+Chance, but we probably left them there, nosing round the bunk-house
+rubbish heap. And anyhow, a wolf or two wouldn't trouble us. They're
+cowardly things, unless they're in packs." I felt exactly as if I were
+comforting Red Riding Hood or some one in a fairy tale, for the Lord
+knows it had never occurred to me to be afraid of wolves. "What on earth
+put wolves in your head?"
+
+"I--don't know! They seemed to be about, lately."
+
+"Well, I never saw any on this road! I've a revolver, anyhow."
+
+"I'm g-glad," said Paulette; and the word jerked out of her, and my arms
+jerked nearly out of me. In the dark the wagon had hit something that
+felt like nothing but a boulder in the middle of my decent road. The
+wagon stopped dead, with an up-ending lurch, and nothing holding it to
+the horses but the reins. Why on earth they held I don't know. For with
+one almighty bound my two young horses tried to get away from me,--and
+they would have, if the reins had not been new ones. As it was I had a
+minute's hard fighting before I got them under. When they stood still
+the girl beside me peered over the front of the wagon into the dark.
+"It's the whiffletree, I think," she said, as if she were used to
+wagons.
+
+I peered over myself and hoped so. "Mercy if it is," said I. "If it's a
+wheel we're stuck here. Scott, I wonder if I've a bit of rope!"
+
+Paulette Brown pulled out ten feet of spun yarn from under her coat; and
+if you come to think of it, it was a funny thing for a girl to have. It
+struck me, rather oddly, that she must have come prepared for accidents.
+"There," she said, "I expect you can patch us up if I hold the horses.
+Here's a knife, too, and"--I turned hot all over, for she was putting
+something else into my hand, just as if she knew I had been wondering
+about it since first we started; but she went on without a
+break--"here's my revolver. Put it in your pocket. I'd sooner you kept
+it."
+
+I was thankful I had had the decency to trust her before she gave the
+weapon to me. But I was blazingly angry with myself when I got out of
+the wagon and saw just what had happened. Fair in the middle of my new
+road was a boulder that the frost must have loosened from the steep
+hillside that towered over us; and the front of the wagon had hit it
+square,--which it would not have done if I had been looking at the road
+instead of talking to a girl who was no business of mine, now or ever. I
+got the horses out of the traces and the pole straps, and let Paulette
+hold them while I levered the boulder out of the way, down the hillside.
+I was scared to do it, too, for fear they would get away from her, but
+she was evidently as used to horses as to wagons: Bob and Danny stood
+for her like lambs, while I set to work to repair damages. The pole was
+snapped, and the whiffletree smashed, so that the traces were useless. I
+did some fair jury work with a lucky bit of spruce wood, the
+whiffletree, and the axle, and got the pole spliced. It struck me that
+even so we should have to do the rest of the way to Billy Jones's at a
+walk, but I saw no sense in saying so. I got the horses back on the
+pole, and Paulette in the wagon holding the reins, still talking to the
+horses quietly and by name. But as I jumped up beside her the quiet flew
+out of her voice.
+
+"The _bottle_," she all but shrieked at me. "_Mind the bottle!_"
+
+But I had not noticed she had put it on my seat when she got out to
+hold the horses. I knocked it flying across her, and it smashed to
+flinders on the near fore wheel, drenching it and splashing over Danny's
+hind legs. I grabbed the reins from Paulette, and I thought of skunks,
+and a sulphide factory,--and dead skunks and rotten sulphide at that.
+Even in the freezing evening air the smell that came from that smashed
+bottle was beyond anything on earth or purgatory, excepting the stuff I
+had spilt over myself at Skunk's Misery. "What on earth," I began
+stupidly. "Why, that's that Skunk's Misery filth again!"
+
+Paulette's hand came down on my arm with a grip that could not have been
+wilder if she had thought the awful smell meant our deaths. "Drive on,
+will you?" she said in a voice that matched it. "Let the horses _go_, I
+tell you! If there's anything left in that bottle it may save us for
+a--I mean," she caught herself up furiously, "it may save me from being
+sick. I don't know how you feel. But for heaven's sake get me out of
+that smell! Oh, why didn't I throw the thing away into the woods, long
+ago?"
+
+I wished she had. The stuff was on Danny as well as on the wheel, and we
+smelt like a procession of dead whales. For after the first choking
+explosion of the thing it reeked of nothing but corruption. It was the
+Skunk's Misery brew all right, only a thousand times stronger.
+
+"How on earth did Skunk's Misery filth get in my wagon?" I gasped. And
+if I had been alone I would have spat.
+
+"I--can't tell you," said Paulette shortly. "Mr. Stretton, can't you
+hurry the horses? I----Oh, hurry them, please!"
+
+I saw no particular reason why; we could not get away from the smell of
+the wheel, or of Danny. But I did wind them up as much as I dared with
+our kind of a pole,--and suddenly both of them wound themselves up, with
+a jerk to try any pole. I had all I could do to keep them from a dead
+run, and if I knew the reason I trusted the girl beside me did not. It
+had hardly been a sound, more the ghost of a sound. But as I thought it
+she flung up her head.
+
+"What's that?" she said sharply. "Mr. Stretton, what's that?"
+
+"Nothing," I began; and changed it. "Just a wolf or two somewhere."
+
+For behind us, in two, three, four quarters at once rose a long wailing
+howl.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+MOSTLY WOLVES: AND A GIRL
+
+    Oh, what was that drew screaming breath?
+      "A wolf that slashed at me!"
+    Oh, who was that cried out in death?
+      "A man who struck at thee!"
+
+    _The Night Ride._
+
+
+The sound might have come from a country hound or two baying for sheer
+melancholy, or after a cat: only there were neither hounds nor cats on
+the Caraquet road. I felt Paulette stiffen through all her supple body.
+She whispered to herself sharply, as if she were swearing--only
+afterwards I knew better, and put the word she used where it belonged:
+"The devil! Oh, the devil!"
+
+I made no answer. I had enough business holding in the horses,
+remembering that spliced pole. Paulette remembered it too, for she spoke
+abruptly. "How fast do you dare go?"
+
+"Oh, not too fast," my thoughts were still on the pole. "They're not
+after us, if you're worrying about those wolves."
+
+But she took no notice. "How far are we from Billy Jones's?"
+
+We were a good way. But I said, "Oh, a few miles!"
+
+"Well, we've got to make it!" I could still feel her queerly rigid
+against my arm; perhaps it was only because she was listening.
+But--quick, like life, or death, or anything else sudden as
+lightning--she had no need to listen; nor had I. A burst of ravening
+yells, gathering up from all sides of us except in front, came from the
+dark bush. And I yelled myself, at Bob and Danny, to keep them off the
+dead run.
+
+It was rot, of course, but I had a queer feeling that wolves _were_
+after us, and that it was just that Skunk's Misery stuff that had
+started them, as it had drawn the wolf that had taken my clothes. I
+could hear the yelping of one after another grow into the full-throated
+chorus of a pack. The woods were full of them.
+
+"I didn't think he'd dare," Paulette exclaimed, as if she came out of
+her secret thoughts.
+
+But it did not bring me out of mine, even to remember that young devil
+Collins. I had pulled out my gun to scare the wolves with a shot or
+two,--and there were no cartridges in it! I could not honestly visualize
+myself filling it up the night before, but I was sure I had filled it,
+just as I was sure I had never troubled to look at it since. But of
+course I could not have, or it would not have been empty now. I inquired
+absently, because I was rummaging my pockets for cartridges, "Who'd
+dare? _Whoa_, Bob! What he?"
+
+"They," Paulette corrected sharply. "I meant the wolves. I thought they
+were cowards, but--they don't sound cowardly! I--Mr. Stretton, I believe
+I'm worried!"
+
+So was I, with a girl to take care of, a tied-on pole and whiffletree,
+and practically no gun; for there was not a single loose cartridge in my
+pockets. I had been so mighty secure about the Caraquet road I had never
+thought of them. I cursed inside while I said disjointedly, "Quiet, Bob,
+will you?--There's nothing to be afraid of; you'll laugh over this
+to-night!" Because I suddenly hoped so--if the pole held to the
+Halfway--for the infernal clamor behind us had dropped abruptly to what
+might have been a distant dog fight. But at a sudden note in it the
+sweat jumped to my upper lip.
+
+"Dunn and Collins!" I thought. They had been missing when we left.
+Paulette had said she did not trust Collins, and since he had had the
+_nous_ to get hold of the Skunk's Misery wolf dope, he or Dunn could
+easily have stowed it in my wagon in the night, and been caught by it
+themselves where they had started out to waylay us by the boulder they
+put in my road. But all I said was, "The wolves have stopped!"
+
+"Not they," Paulette retorted, and suddenly knocked me silly with
+surprise. "Oh, I haven't done you a bit of good by coming, Mr. Stretton!
+I thought if I were with you I might be some use, and I'm not."
+
+I stared stupidly. "D'ye mean you came to fight wolves?"
+
+"No! I came----" but she stopped. "I was afraid--I mean I hated your
+going alone with all that gold, and Marcia really wanted Mrs. Jones."
+
+Any other time I would have rounded on her and found out what she was
+keeping back, but I was too busy thinking. The horses had calmed to a
+flying trot up the long hill along whose side we had been crawling when
+the pole went. Once over the crest of it we should have done two miles
+since we heard the first wolf howl; which meant we were nearer to Billy
+Jones's than I had remembered. If the pole held to get us down the other
+side of the long hill there was nothing before us but a mile of corduroy
+road through a jungle-thick swamp of hemlock, and then the one bit of
+really excellent going my road could boast,--three clear miles, level as
+a die, straight to the Halfway stables.
+
+"We haven't far now," said I shortly. "And it doesn't matter why you
+came; you've been useful enough! I couldn't have held the horses and
+patched the wagon too." I omitted to say I could have tied them to a
+wheel. "But if you're nervous now, there's one thing we could do. Can
+you ride?"
+
+"_Ride?_" I thought she laughed. "Yes! Why?"
+
+"We could cut the horses loose and ride them in to the Halfway."
+
+"What? And leave the gold out here, as we were m----" I knew she cut off
+"meant to." "I won't do it!"
+
+"Wolves wouldn't eat it--and there's no one to steal it," I returned
+matter-of-factly--because if Collins had meant to, the sinister flurry
+behind us had decided me his career was closed. "However, it would be
+wasting trouble to leave the stuff; there's no sign of any pack after us
+now." And a ravening yell cut the words off my tongue.
+
+The brutes must have scoured after us in silence, hunting us in the dark
+for the last mile. For as we stood out, a black blot on the hilltop
+against the night sky, they broke out in chorus just behind us, for all
+the world like a pack of hounds who had treed a wildcat; and too close
+for any fool lying to occur to me.
+
+"Paulette," I blurted, "there's not a cartridge in my gun! Yours is so
+little I'm afraid of it. But it may scare them. Take these reins!"
+
+But she turned in her seat and knelt there, looking behind us. If I
+could have got her on Danny's back and let her run clear five minutes
+ago it was impossible now. No human being could have pulled up Bob or
+him.
+
+"See them?" I snapped. "By heaven, I wish the brutes would stop that
+yelling; they're driving the horses crazy! See them?"
+
+"No. But--yes, yes," her voice flashed out sharp as a knife. "They're on
+us! Give me the revolver, quick! I can shoot; and I've cartridges. You
+couldn't do any good with it: it throws low--and it's too small for your
+hand. And I wouldn't dare drive. I might get off the road, and we'd be
+done."
+
+It was so true that I did not even turn my head as I shoved over her
+little gun. I had no particular faith in her shooting; my trust was in
+the horses' speed. We were getting down the hill like a Niagara of
+galloping hoofs and wheels over a road I had all I could do to see; with
+that crazy pole I dared not check the horses to put an ounce on. I stood
+up and drove for all I was worth, and the girl beside me shot,--and hit!
+For a yell and a screaming flurry rose with every report of her
+revolver. It was a beastly noise, but it rejoiced me; till suddenly I
+heard her pant out a sickened sentence that made me gasp, because it was
+such a funny thing to say.
+
+"My heavens, I never thought I could be cruel to animals--like this. But
+I've got to do it. I"--her voice rose in sudden disjointed triumph--"Mr.
+Stretton, I believe I've stopped them!"
+
+"I believe you have," I swore blankly,--and one leapt out of the dark by
+the fore wheel as I spoke, and she shot it.
+
+But it was the last; she _had_ stopped them. And if I had not known that
+to have turned even one eye from my horses as we tore down that hill
+would have meant we were smashed up on one side of it, I would have been
+more ashamed than I was of being fought for by a girl. "You're a
+wonder--just a marvellous wonder," I got out thickly. "We're clear--and
+it's thanks to you!" And ahead of us, in the jungle-thick hemlock that
+crowded the sides of the narrow road I had corduroyed through the swamp
+for a ricketty mile, a single wolf howled.
+
+It had a different, curious note, a dying note, if I had known it; but I
+did not realize it then. I thought, "We're done! They've headed us!" I
+said, "Look out ahead for all you're worth. If we can keep going, we'll
+be through this thicket in a minute."
+
+But Paulette cut out my thought. "We _are_ done, if they throw the
+horses!" And instantly, amazingly, she stood up in the bumping, swaying
+wagon as if she were on a dancing floor and shed Dudley Wilbraham's
+coat. She leaned toward me, and I felt rather than saw that she was in
+shirt and knickerbockers like a boy. "Keep the horses going as steady as
+you can, and whatever you do, don't try to stop them. I'm going to do
+something. Mind, keep them _galloping_!"
+
+I would have grabbed her; only before I knew what she was going to do
+she was past me, out over the dashboard, and running along the smashed
+pole between Bob and Danny in the dark.
+
+It was nothing to do in daylight. I've done it myself before now, and so
+have most men. But for a girl, in the dark and on a broken pole, with
+wolves heading the horses,--I was so furiously afraid for her that the
+blood stopped running in my legs, and it was a minute before I saw what
+she was after. She had not slipped; she was astride Danny--ducking under
+his rein neatly, for I had not felt the sign of a jerk--but only God
+knew what might happen to her if he fell. And suddenly I knew what she
+had run out there to do. She was shooting ahead of the horses, down the
+road; then to one side and the other of it impartially, covering them.
+Only what knocked me was that there was no sign of a wolf either before
+or beside us on the narrow, black-dark highway,--and that she was
+shooting into the jungle-thick swamp hemlocks on each side of it at the
+breast height of a man!
+
+And at a single ghastly, smothered cry I burst out, "By gad, it _is_
+men!" For I knew she had shot one. I listened, over the rattling roll of
+the wheels on the corduroy, but there was no second cry. There was only
+what seemed dead silence after the thunder of the wheels on the uneven
+logs, as we swept out on the level road that led straight to the Halfway
+stable. It was light, too, after the dead blackness of the narrow swamp
+road. I saw the girl turn on Danny carelessly, as if she were in a
+saddle, and wave her hand forward for me to keep going. But the only
+thought I had was to get her back into the wagon. Not because I was
+afraid of a smash, for if the mended pole had held in that crazy,
+tearing gallop from the top of the hill it would hold till the Halfway.
+I just wanted her safe beside me. I had had enough of seeing a girl do
+stunts that stopped my blood. "Come back out of that," I shouted at her;
+"I'm going to stop the horses--and you come _here_!"
+
+She motioned forward, crying out something unintelligible. But before I
+could pull up the horses, before I even guessed what she meant to do, I
+saw her stand up on Danny's back, spring from his rump, and,--land
+lightly in the wagon!
+
+It may be true that I damned her up in heaps from sheer fright; I know I
+asked fiercely if she wanted to kill herself. She said no, quite coolly.
+Only that that pole would not bear any more running on it, or the jerk
+of a sudden stop either: it was that she had called out to me.
+
+"Neither can I bear any more--of tricks that might lose your life to
+save me and my miserable gold," I said angrily. "Sit down this minute
+and wrap that coat round you." I had ceased to care that it was
+Dudley's. "It's bitter cold. And there's the light at the Halfway!"
+
+"What I did wasn't anything--for me," my dream girl retorted oddly. "And
+I don't know that it was altogether to save you, Mr. Stretton, or your
+gold either, that you thought I meant to steal. I was pretty afraid for
+myself, with those wolves!"
+
+I was too raging with myself to answer. Of course it had not been she
+who had meant to steal my gold; and no matter how she had known some one
+meant to get at me, with wolves or anything else. It had been just
+Collins--and the sheer gall of it jammed my teeth--Collins and Dunn,
+two ne'er-do-well brats in our own mine. I had realized already that
+they had been missing from La Chance quite early enough for me to thank
+them for the boulder on my good road, and Collins----But I hastily
+revised my conviction that it was Collins I had heard the wolves chop in
+the bush as hounds chop a fox: Collins had too much sense. It had more
+likely been Dunn; he was the kind to get eaten! Collins must have legged
+it early for my corduroy road, where Paulette had expected him enough to
+shoot at him; while Dunn stayed round La Chance to put the wolf bait in
+my wagon and got caught by it himself on his way to join Collins.
+
+As for the genesis of the wolf dope, its history came to me coherently
+as letters spelling a word, beginning with the bottle of mixed filth I
+had spilt on myself at Skunk's Misery. The second I and my smelly
+clothes reached shore the night I returned to La Chance, a wolf had
+scented me and howled; had followed me to the shack and howled again
+while I was talking to Marcia about Paulette Brown; and another had
+carried off those very clothes under my own eyes where I stood by my
+window, as if the smell on them had been some kind of bait it could not
+resist. Wherever Dunn and Collins had got it, the smell from the broken
+bottle had been exactly the same, only twenty times stronger: and it
+had been meant to smash at the boulder on my road and turn me into a
+living bait for wolves!
+
+The theory may sound crazy, but it happens to be sane. There is a wolf
+dope, made of heaven knows what, except that it contains certain
+ingredients that have to be put in bottles and ripened in the sun for a
+month. Two Frenchmen were jailed this last June in Quebec province for
+using it around a fish and game club, and endangering people's lives.
+That same wolf bait had been put in my wagon by somebody,--and the human
+cry out of the swamp at Paulette's shot suddenly repeated itself in my
+ears. I was biting my lip, or I would have grinned. Paulette had hit the
+man who was to have put me out of business, if the wolves failed when
+that bottle smashed and the boulder crippled my wagon. Collins, who,
+laid up in the swamp, was to have reaped my gold and me if I got
+through! The cheek of him made me blaze again, and I turned on Paulette
+abruptly.
+
+"Look here, do you know you shot a man in the swamp?"
+
+"I hope I killed him," returned that same girl who had disliked being
+cruel to wolves,--and instantly saw what I was after. "That's nonsense,
+though! There couldn't have been any man there, Mr. Stretton. The
+wolves would have eaten him!"
+
+"Only one wolf got by you," I suggested drily.
+
+She shrugged her shoulders. "They'd have shot at us--men, I mean!"
+
+I made no answer. It struck me forcibly that Collins certainly would
+have; unless he was not out for shooting, but merely waiting to remove
+the gold from my wagon as soon as the wolves had disposed of my horses
+and me. Even then I did not see why he had held his fire, unless he had
+no gun. But the whole thing was a snarl it was no good thinking about
+till the girl beside me owned how much she knew about it. I wondered
+sharply if it had been just that knowledge she was trying to give Dudley
+the night I stopped her. The lights at the Halfway were very close as I
+turned to her.
+
+"If I've helped you at all, why can't you tell me all the trouble,
+instead of Dudley?" I asked, very low.
+
+"I don't know anything," but I thought she checked a sob, "that I--can
+tell. I just thought there might be trouble to-night, but I imagined it
+would happen before you started. That was why I marked that gold. Don't
+take any, _ever_, out of the safe, if it hasn't my seal on it."
+
+"You can't prevent Collins from changing the boxes--forever," I said
+deliberately; because, unless he were dead, as I hoped, she couldn't.
+But Paulette stared at me, open-lipped, as we drove into the Halfway
+yard, and Billy Jones ran out with a lantern.
+
+"Collins?" she repeated, as if she had never heard his name, much less
+met him secretly in the dark. "I don't know anything about any Collins,
+nor any one I could--put a name to! I tell you I don't know who was in
+the swamp!"
+
+She had not said she did not know who was responsible for the bottle in
+my wagon. But if I am Indian-dark I can be Indian-silent too. I said
+nothing about that. "Well, it doesn't matter who did anything," I
+exclaimed suddenly, "so long as there's trust between you and me!"
+Because I forgot Dudley and everything but my dream girl who had fought
+for me, and I suddenly wondered if she had not forgotten Dudley, too.
+For Bob and Danny stood still, played out and sweating, and Paulette
+Brown sat staring at me with great eyes, instead of moving.
+
+But she had forgotten nothing. "You're very kind--to me, and Dudley,"
+she said quietly, and slipped out of the wagon before I could lift her
+down. A sudden voice kept me from jumping after her.
+
+"By golly," said Billy Jones, sniffing at my fore wheel. "Have you run
+over a hundred skunks?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+I FIND LITTLE ENOUGH ON THE CORDUROY ROAD, AND LESS AT SKUNK'S MISERY
+
+
+I told Billy Jones as much as I thought fit of the evening's
+work,--which included no mention of wolf dope, or shooting on the
+corduroy road.
+
+If he listened incredulously to my tale of a wolf pack one look at Bob
+and Danny told him it was true. They had had all they wanted, and we
+spent an hour working over them. The wagon was a wreck; why the spliced
+pole had hung together to the Halfway I don't know, but it had; and I
+let the smell on it go as a skunk. I lifted the gold into the locked
+cupboard where Billy kept his stores. It had to be put in another wagon
+for Caraquet, anyhow; and besides, I was not going on to Caraquet in the
+morning. The gold was safe with Billy, and there were other places that
+needed visiting first. There was no hope of getting at the ugly business
+that had brewed up at La Chance through Paulette Brown, or Collins
+either; since one would never tell how much or how little she knew, and
+the other would lie, if he ever reappeared. But the wolf bait end I
+could get at, and I meant to. Which was the reason I sat on one of the
+horses I had sent over to the Halfway--after my one experience when it
+held none--when my dream girl and Mrs. Jones came out of Billy's shack
+in the cold of a November dawn.
+
+"I'm riding some of the way back with you," I observed casually.
+
+Paulette stopped short. She was lovelier than I had ever seen her, with
+her gold-bronze hair shining over the sable collar of Dudley's coat. I
+fancied her eyes shone, too, for one second, at seeing me. But there I
+was wrong.
+
+"I thought you'd started for Caraquet," she exclaimed hastily. "You
+needn't come with us. There won't be any wolves in the daytime, and--you
+know there's no need for you to come!"
+
+There was not. Even if her voice had not so significantly conveyed the
+fact that there was no bottle in her wagon this time, Mrs. Billy
+Jones--to put a hard fact politely--was about the most capable lady I
+had ever met. She was big-boned, hard-faced and profane; and usually
+left Billy to look after the house while she attended to a line of
+traps, or hunted bears for their skins. No wolves would worry the
+intrepid and thoroughly armed Mrs. Jones. But all the same I was riding
+some of the way back to La Chance.
+
+There was not a thing to be seen on the corduroy road through the swamp,
+or on the hill we had come down at the dead run; and I had not expected
+there would be. But on the top of the hill I bade good-by to my dream
+girl,--who was not mine, and was going back to Dudley. It was all I
+could manage to do it, too. I did not know I was biting my lip until it
+hurt; then I stopped watching her out of sight and turned back on the
+business that had brought me.
+
+You could ride a horse down the hill into the swamp if you knew how; and
+I did. I tied him to a tree and went over each side of the corduroy road
+on my feet. It was silent as death there in the cold gray morning, with
+the frost-fog clinging in the somber hemlocks, and the swamp frozen so
+solid that my moccasins never left a mark. No one else's feet had left a
+mark there, either, and I would have given up the idea that a man had
+been cached by the road the night before, if it had not been for two
+things.
+
+One was a dead wolf, with a gash in his throat in which the knife had
+been left till he was cold; you could tell by the blood clots round the
+wound: the other I did not find at once. But wolves do not stab
+themselves, and I remembered that the lone wolf cry ahead of us on that
+road had been a dying cry, not a hunting one. If Collins had killed the
+beast he had waited there long enough to let an hour pass before he took
+his knife out of its throat: so he had been there when we raced
+by,--which was all I wanted to know, except where he had gone since. As
+for the other thing I found, it was behind the hemlocks when I quartered
+the sides of the road in the silence and the frost-fog: and it was
+nothing but a patch of shell ice. But the flimsy, crackling stuff was
+crushed into two cup-like marks, as plainly telltale as if I had seen a
+man fall on his knees in them. And by them, frozen there, were a dozen
+drops of blood.
+
+I knew angrily that if it were Collins's blood he had not missed it
+particularly, for he had moved away without leaving a sign of a trail.
+Where to I had no means of knowing, till five minutes later I found
+another spatter of blood on my corduroy road,--and as I looked at it my
+own blood boiled. There was not only no one but that young devil Collins
+who could have lain in wait for me; but he had had the nerve to walk
+away on my own road! Where to, beat me; but considering what I knew of
+his easy deviltry it was probably back to La Chance and a girl who was
+daring to fight him.
+
+If I were worried for that girl I could not go back to her. I had to get
+my gold to Caraquet. Besides, I had a feeling it might be useful to do a
+little still hunting round Skunk's Misery. If Collins had had that
+bottle of devil's brew at La Chance he had got it from Skunk's Misery:
+probably out of the very hut where I had once nursed a filthy boy. And I
+had a feeling that the first thing I needed to do was to prove it.
+
+As I rode back to Billy Jones's I would have given a deal for any kind
+of a motor car that would have reduced the twenty-seven miles to
+Caraquet into nothing, instead of an all-day job,--which it proved to
+be.
+
+Not that I met a soul on the road. I didn't. But it took my wagon four
+hours to reach Caraquet over the frozen ruts of that same road; and
+another hour to hand over Dudley's gold to Randall, a man of my own who
+was to carry it on the mail coach to the distant railway.
+
+I had no worry about the gold, once Randall had charge of it: no one was
+likely to trouble him or the coach on the open post road, even if they
+had guessed what he convoyed. I was turning away, whistling at being rid
+of the stuff, when he called me back to hand over a bundle of letters
+for La Chance. There were three for Marcia, and one--in old Thompson's
+back-number copperplate--for Dudley. There were no letters for Paulette
+Brown or myself, but perhaps neither of us had expected any. I know I
+hadn't. I gave the Wilbraham family's correspondence the careless glance
+you always bestow on other people's letters and shoved it into my inside
+pocket. After which I left my horses and wagon safe in Randall's stable
+and started to walk back to Skunk's Misery and the Halfway stables.
+
+It seemed a fool thing to do, and I had no particular use for walking
+all that way; but there was no other means of accomplishing the twenty
+miles through the bush from Caraquet to Skunk's Misery. Aside from the
+fact that I had no desire to advertise my arrival, there was no wagon
+road to Skunk's Misery. Its inhabitants did not possess wagons,--or
+horses to put in them.
+
+It was black dark when I reached the place, and for a moment I stood and
+considered it. I had never really visualized it before, any more than
+you do any place that you take for granted as outside your scheme of
+existence. I was not so sure that it was, now. Anyhow, I stood in the
+gap of a desolate hill and looked into the hollow before me that--added
+to the dirt no skunk could stand--had earned the place its name. It was
+all stones: gravel stones, little stones, stones as big as cabs and as
+big as houses; and, hunched up among them like lean-tos, hidden away
+among the rocks and the pine trees growing up from among the rocks
+wherever they could find root-hold, were the houses of the Skunk's
+Misery people. There was no pretense of a street or a village: there
+were just houses,--if they deserved even that name. How many there were
+I could not tell. I had never had the curiosity to explore the place.
+But if it sounds as though a narrow, stone-choked valley were no citadel
+for a man or men to have hidden themselves, or for any one to conduct an
+industry like making a secret scent to attract wolves, the person who
+said so would be mistaken. There was never in the world a better place
+for secret dwelling and villainy and all the rest than Skunk's Misery.
+
+In the first place, you could not see the houses among the rocks. The
+valley was just like a porcupine warren. No rock stood out alone: they
+were all jumbled up together, big and little, with pine trees growing on
+the tops of them and in between them, up from the earth that was twelve,
+twenty, or sometimes forty feet below. The whole hollow was a maze of
+narrow, winding tracks, between rocks and under them, sometimes a foot
+wide and sometimes six, that Skunk's Misery used for roads. What its
+citizens lived on, I had never been able to guess. Caraquet said it was
+on wolf bounties,--which was another thing that had set me thinking
+about the bottle I had spilt on my clothes. If Collins or Dunn had got a
+similar bottle there I meant to find out about it: and I had the more
+heart for doing it since Paulette Brown knew nothing of Skunk's Misery.
+You can tell when a girl has never heard of a place, and I knew she had
+never heard of that one. I settled down the revolver I had filled up at
+Billy Jones's, and trod softly down the nearest of the winding alleys,
+over the worn pine needles, in the dark.
+
+There were just twenty houses, when I had counted all I could find.
+There might have been twenty more, under rocks and behind rocks I could
+not make my way around; but I was no porcupine, and in the dark I could
+not stumble on them. There was not a sign of a stranger in the place, or
+a soul about. And judging from the darkness and the quiet, all the
+fat-faced, indifferent women were in bed and asleep, and the shiftless
+rats of men were still away. There were no dogs to bark at me: I had
+learned that in my previous sojourn there. Dogs required food, and
+Skunk's Misery had none to spare. I went back through the one winding
+alley that was familiar to me, found the hut where I had nursed the boy,
+and walked in.
+
+There was not any Collins there, anyhow. The boy and his mother were in
+bed, or what went for being in bed. But at the sound of my voice the
+woman fairly flung herself at me, saying that her son was recovered
+again, and it was I who had saved him for her. She piled wood on the
+fire that was built up against the face of the rock that formed two
+sides of her house, and jabbered gratitude as I had never thought any
+Skunk's Misery woman could jabber. And she did not look like one,
+either; she was handsome, in a haggard, vicious way, and she was not
+old. I did not think myself that her son looked particularly recovered.
+He lay like a log on his spruce-bough bed, awake and conscious but
+wholly speechless, though his mother seemed satisfied. But I had not
+come to talk about any sick boys. I asked casually where I could find
+the stranger who had been in Skunk's Misery lately. But the woman only
+stared at me, as if the idea would not filter into her head. Presently
+she said dully that there had been no stranger there; I was the only one
+she had ever seen.
+
+It was likely enough; a Skunk's Misery messenger had more probably taken
+the wolf dope to Collins. I asked casually if she had any more of the
+stuff I had spilt on my clothes, and where she had got it,--and once
+more I ran bang up against a stone wall. The woman explained
+matter-of-factly that she had not got it from any one. She had found it
+standing in the sun beside one of the rocks, and stolen it, supposing it
+was gin. When she found it was not she took it for some sort of
+liniment; and put it where I had knocked it over on myself. She had
+never seen nor heard of any more of it. But of course it might have
+belonged to any one in the place, only I could understand she could not
+ask about it: which I did, knowing how precious a whole bottle of
+anything was in those surroundings. As to where she had found it, she
+could not be sure. She thought it was by the new house the Frenchwoman's
+son had built that autumn and never lived in!
+
+I pricked up my ears. The Frenchwoman's son was one of the men arrested
+in Quebec province for using wolf dope: a handsome, elusive devil who
+sometimes haunted the lumber woods at the lower end of Lac Tremblant,
+trapping or robbing traps as seemed good to him, and paying back
+interruptions with such interest that no one was keen to interfere with
+him. If the Frenchwoman's son were in with Collins in trying to hold up
+the La Chance gold, and was at Skunk's Misery now, I saw
+daylight,--anyhow about the wolf dope.
+
+But the woman by the fire knocked that idea out of me, half-made. The
+Frenchwoman's son had not been there for two months past and had only
+come there at all to build a house. It was empty now, but no one had
+dared to go into it. She could show it to me, but she was sure he had
+had nothing to do with that liniment, if I wanted any more. After which
+she relapsed into indifference, or I thought so, till I showed her what
+little money I had in my pocket. She rose then, abruptly, and led the
+way out of her hut to the deserted house the Frenchwoman's son had built
+for caprice and never lived in.
+
+It was deserted enough, in all conscience. The door was open, and the
+November wind free to play through the place as it liked. I stood on the
+threshold, thinking. I had found out nothing about any wolf-bait,
+excepting the one bottle the Frenchwoman's son might or might not have
+left there; certainly nothing about Collins ever having got hold of any;
+and if I had meant to spend the rest of the night in Skunk's Misery I
+saw no particular sense in doing it. I had a solid conviction that the
+boy's mother would not mention I had ever been there, for fear she might
+have to share what little I had given her--which, as it fell out, was
+true--and turned to go.
+
+But when the woman had left me to creep home in the dark, while I made
+my own way out of the village, I altered my mind about going. I cut
+down enough pine boughs to make a bed under me, shut the door of the
+deserted house--that I knew enough of the Frenchwoman's son to know
+would have no visitors--had a drink from my flask, and slept the sleep
+of the hunting dog till it should be daylight.
+
+And, like the hunting dog, I went on with my business in my dreams; till
+my legs jerked and woke me, to see a waning moon peering in from the
+west, through the hole that served the hut for a chimney, and I rose to
+go back to Billy Jones. For I dreamed there was a gang of men in a
+cellar under the very hut I slept in, with a business-like row of
+wolf-bait bottles at their feet, where they sat squabbling over a poker
+game. But as I said, it was the waning morning moon that woke me, and
+the hut was silent as the grave. I picked up the pine-bough bed I had
+slept on and carried it into the bush with me far enough to throw it
+down where it would tell no tales--I did not know why I did it, but I
+was to be glad--tightened up my belt, and took a short cut through the
+thick bush to Billy Jones's stables, with nothing to show for my day's
+and night's work but a dead wolf, a stained bit of shell ice, and a few
+drops of blood on the logs of my corduroy road. I was starving, and it
+was noonday, when I came out of the bush and tramped into the Halfway,
+much as I had done that first time I came from Skunk's Misery and went
+home to La Chance. Only to-day Billy Jones was not sitting by his stove
+reading his ancient newspaper. He was standing in the kitchen with two
+teamsters from La Chance, looking down at a dead man.
+
+As I opened the door and stood staring, the teamsters jumped as if they
+had been shot. But Billy only turned a stolid white face on me.
+
+"My God, Mr. Stretton," he said, stolidly too, "what do you make of
+this?"
+
+All I could see from where I stood was a rigid hand, that had said death
+to me the second I opened the door. I gave a sort of spring forward.
+What I thought was that here was the man who had left the blood in the
+swamp when Paulette's bullet hit him, and that I had got Collins. I had
+nearly burst out that he had what he deserved. But instead I stopped,
+paralyzed, where my spring had left me.
+
+"My God," I said in my turn, "I don't know!"
+
+For the man who lay in front of me, stone dead in water-soaked clothes
+that were frozen to his stark body, was Thompson, our old
+superintendent, who only six weeks ago had left the La Chance mine;
+whose letter to Dudley, with its careful, back-number copperplate
+address, lay in my pocket now.
+
+"It's Thompson!" was the only thing I could say.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THOMPSON!
+
+
+Thompson it was, if it seemed incredible. And Billy Jones exclaimed, as
+he pointed to him, "He can't have been dead longer than since last
+night! And I can't understand this thing, Mr. Stretton! It's but six
+weeks since Thompson _left_ here; and from what he said he didn't mean
+to come back. He told me he was in a hurry to get away, because he was
+taking a position in a copper mine in the West. I remember I warned him
+you hadn't got all your swamps corduroyed, and likely he couldn't drive
+clear into Caraquet; so he left his wagon here and borrowed a saddle
+from me to ride over. And a boy brought his horse back next day, or day
+after,--I forget which. I remember Thompson forgot to send me a tin of
+tobacco he promised to get me off Randall, at Caraquet!"
+
+"D'ye mean you think he never went to Caraquet?" It was a stupid
+question, for, of course, I knew he had gone there, and farther, or he
+could not have sent Macartney to La Chance, or a letter to Dudley now.
+But what I was really thinking of was that I had been right about the
+date old Thompson left the mine, and that he had gone over my road on
+one of the two days I was away with all my road men, getting logs out of
+the bush.
+
+Billy Jones scattered my thoughts impatiently: "Oh, he went there all
+right. It's his--coming back--that beats me!"
+
+It beat me too, for reasons Billy knew nothing about. Why Thompson had
+come back was his own business; but it was plain he had been dead a
+scant twenty-four hours, and the only place I could think of where he
+was likely to have been killed was on my corduroy road the night before.
+Only I did not see how Thompson's clothes could have got water-soaked in
+a frozen swamp; and I did not see, either, what a decent man like
+Thompson could have been doing out there like a wolf, with wolves. I had
+more sense than to think he could have had any truck with Collins about
+our gold. I nodded back at the teamsters: "Where did they find him?"
+
+"They didn't find him," returned Billy simply, "it was my hound dog. He
+was yelling down at the lake shore this morning, like he'd treed a
+wildcat, and when I went down it was Thompson he'd found,--lying right
+on shore in the daylight! You know how that fool Lac Tremblant behaves;
+the water in it had gone down to nothing this morning, and on the bare
+stones it had left was Thompson. Only I don't see how he ever _got_
+there unless he was coming back, from wherever he'd been outside, by Lac
+Tremblant instead of your road!"
+
+"Where was his canoe?"
+
+"He didn't have any! But you know that lake--it might have smashed his
+canoe on him like an egg, and then--just by chance--put him ashore!" I
+did know: I had had all I wanted to keep from being smashed myself the
+night I crossed to La Chance. I nodded, and Billy choked. "It--it kind
+of sickened me this morning; I _liked_ Thompson, Mr. Stretton!"
+
+So had I, if I had laughed at his eternal solitaire. Billy and I laid
+him on the bed, decently, after we had done what we could for him. And I
+was ashamed to have even wondered if he had been the man Paulette had
+shot at on the La Chance road; for there was not a mark on him, and a
+fool could have told he had just been drowned in Lac Tremblant. There
+was nothing in his pockets to tell how he had got there: only a single
+two-dollar bill and a damp pack of cards in a wet leather case.
+Thompson's solitaire cards! Somehow the things gave me a lump in my
+throat; I wished I had talked more to Thompson in the long evenings.
+The letter in my pocket from him was Dudley's, and I did not mention it
+to Billy. I said I would try to find out where the dead man had come
+from, and anything else I could, before he buried him. And with that I
+left old Thompson lying on Billy's bed with his face covered, and rode
+home to La Chance.
+
+When I got in, Dudley and Macartney were in the living room, talking.
+Any other time I might have wondered why Dudley looked so jumpy and
+bad-tempered, but all I was thinking of then was my ugly news. But
+before I could tell it, Dudley flew at me. "Where the devil have you
+been all day? And what's happened to my gold?"
+
+I don't know why, but I had a furious, cold qualm that either Dudley or
+Macartney had _found out_,--I don't mean about Collins so much as about
+Paulette having been mixed up with him. Till I knew I was damned if I'd
+mention him.
+
+"I don't understand," I said shortly. "The gold's in Caraquet. But the
+reason I didn't get home this morning is that Thompson's back!"
+
+"What?" Macartney never spoke loud, yet it cracked out.
+
+I nodded. "I mean he's dead, poor chap! They found his body in Lac
+Tremblant this morning." And suddenly I knew I was staring at
+Macartney. His capable face was always pale, but in one second it had
+gone ghastly. It came over me that he had known old Thompson all his
+life, and I blurted involuntarily, "I'm sorry, Macartney!"
+
+But he took no notice.
+
+"They found Thompson's body," he said heavily, as a man does when he is
+sick with shock. "Who found it? Why,--he wasn't _here_! What in hell do
+you mean?"
+
+I told him. Dudley sat and goggled at the two of us, but Macartney
+stared at the floor, his face still ghastly. "I beg your pardon,
+Stretton," he muttered as if he were dizzy. "Only Thompson was about the
+oldest friend I had. I thought----" But he checked himself and exclaimed
+with a sudden sharp doubt, "It can't be old Thompson, Stretton; you must
+be mistaken! He couldn't be here--he was going out West. I was expecting
+a letter from him any day, to say he'd started."
+
+"It's here. At least, I mean there's _a_ letter from him, that I got in
+Caraquet, only it's for Mr. Wilbraham. And I wasn't mistaken, Macartney.
+I wish I were!"
+
+Macartney could not speak. I was surprised; I had not suspected him of
+much of a heart. I pulled out the letter, and Dudley opened it.
+
+"Down and out--the poor old devil," said he slowly, staring at it, "and
+came back. Well, poor Thompson!" He read the thing again and handed it
+to Macartney. But Macartney only gave one silent, comprehensive stare at
+it, in the set-eyed way that was the only thing I had never liked about
+him, and pushed the letter across the table to me.
+
+It was dated and postmarked Montreal. There was no street address, which
+was not like Thompson. But its precise phrases, which _were_ like him,
+sounded down and out all right.
+
+     "DEAR MR. WILBRAHAM: I write to inquire if you will take me
+     back at La Chance. There is no work here, or anywhere, and
+     the British Columbia copper mine, where I intended to go,
+     has shut down. I have nothing else in view, and I am
+     stranded. If by to-morrow I cannot obtain work here I see
+     nothing between me and starvation but to return to La
+     Chance. I trust you can see your way to taking me back, in
+     no matter how subordinate a position, at least till I can
+     hear of something else. If I am obliged to chance coming to
+     you I will take the shortest route, avoiding Caraquet, and
+     coming by Lac Tremblant.
+
+    "Yours truly,
+
+        "WILLIAM D. THOMPSON."
+
+"That's funny," I let out involuntarily. And Dudley snapped at me that
+it wasn't; it was ghastly.
+
+"I don't mean the letter," I said absently. "It's that about Lac
+Tremblant. Thompson was scared blue of that lake; he used to beg me not
+to go out on it. And by gad, Dudley, I don't see how he could have come
+that way! He couldn't paddle a canoe!"
+
+"What?" Macartney started, staring at me. "You're right: he couldn't,"
+he said slowly. "That does make it queer--except that we don't know he
+meant to paddle up the lake. He might have intended to walk here along
+its shore, and strayed or slipped in or something, in the dark. But what
+troubles me is--can't you see he'd gone crazy? This letter"--he put a
+finger on it, eloquently--"isn't sane, from a self-contained man like
+Thompson! He must have been off his head with worry before he wrote it,
+or started back to a place he'd left for----"
+
+"Incompetency, if you want the brutal truth," Dudley broke in not
+unkindly. "He was too old-fashioned to make good elsewhere, I expect;
+and if he found it out, I don't wonder if he did go off his head."
+
+I glanced over Dudley's shoulder at the letter he and Macartney were
+studying. It did not look crazy, with its Gaskell's Compendium
+copperplate and its careful signature. I don't know why I picked up the
+envelope from where it lay unnoticed on the table by Dudley and fiddled
+with it scrutinizingly, but I did. The outside of it looked all right,
+with its address in Thompson's neat copperplate. But it wasn't well
+glued or something, for as I shoved my fingers inside, the whole thing
+opened out flat, like a lily. I looked down mechanically as I felt it
+go, and--by gad, the inside of it _didn't_ look right! There was nothing
+on the glued-down top flap, but the inside back of the envelope wasn't
+blank, as it should have been. It wasn't written on in Thompson's neat
+copperplate or in his neat phrases, either. A pencil scrawl stared at
+me, upside down, as I gripped the lower flap of the envelope
+unconsciously, under the ball of my big thumb. "Why, here's some more,"
+I exclaimed like an ass, glaring at the envelope's inside back. "'Take
+care--something----' What's this? What on earth did the old man mean?"
+
+Macartney caught the splayed-out envelope from my hand, so sharply that
+the flap I didn't know I held tore away, and stayed in my fist as he
+gazed on the rest of the reversed envelope with his set-eyed stare.
+"'Take care, Macartney! Gold, life, everything--in danger!'" he read out
+blankly. "Why, it's some kind of a crazy warning to _me_! Only--nobody
+wants my life, and I've no gold--if that's what he means! I----" but he
+broke down completely. "Old Thompson must have gone stark mad," he
+muttered. "I--it makes me heartsick!"
+
+"I don't know," Dudley snapped unexpectedly. "It fits about the gold,
+perhaps. Thompson might have suspected something before he left here!"
+
+He looked at Macartney significantly, and I remembered the question he
+had rapped at me when I came in. Something inside me told me to hold my
+tongue concerning my adventures on the Caraquet road till I knew what
+Paulette had said about them,--which I was pretty certain was mighty
+little. But once again I had that cold fear that Macartney might have
+found out something about the seal she had put on all our gold, or her
+talking to Collins in the dark, for the question Dudley flung at me was
+just what I had been expecting:
+
+"You didn't see anything of Dunn or Collins between here and
+Caraquet--or hear from Billy Jones that they'd gone by the Halfway?"
+
+"No," I fenced with a bland, lying truth. "I saw two of our teamsters at
+the Halfway!"
+
+Dudley shook his head. "Not them--I knew about them! But Dunn and
+Collins cleared out the day you left, and I thought----" he broke off
+irrelevantly. "What the dickens possessed you to take Paulette with you
+that night? She might have been killed--I heard you'd the dog's own
+trouble on the road!"
+
+That something inside me stiffened up. Whatever he'd heard, I was pretty
+certain was not all; and I was hanged if I were coming out with the full
+story of that crazy drive till I knew whether Paulette came into it. I
+had no desire to talk before Macartney either, in spite of what he might
+have found out, or guessed; no matter what Paulette might have been
+mixed up in I was not going to have a stern-faced, set-eyed Macartney
+put her through a catechism about it. Or Dudley either, for that matter.
+I had no real voucher for the terms he and Paulette were on, except
+Marcia's word; and Dudley was no man to trust not to turn on a girl.
+
+"We shot a few wolves, if that's what you mean," I said roughly. "I
+don't see why that should have worried you about Miss Paulette--or what
+it has to do with Dunn and Collins!"--which was a plain lie.
+
+"Few wolves! I know all about them!" Dudley retorted viciously. "Billy
+Jones's wife came out with the plain truth--that you'd been chased by a
+pack! And as for what Dunn and Collins had to do with my worrying about
+the gold you carried, it's simple enough. They----" but he stopped,
+chewing two fingers with a disgusting trick he had. "By gad," he looked
+up suddenly, "I believe it was them the wolves were after to begin with,
+Stretton--before they got started on you! And it wasn't what they left
+La Chance for!"
+
+"What d'ye mean?"
+
+Dudley was chewing his fingers again, but Macartney answered with his
+usual set-eyed openness. "The gold," he supplied. "I got an idea those
+two deserters might have laid up beside the Caraquet road somewhere, to
+wait for you and get it. I had trouble with them over some drilling the
+morning you left; and when I went back to the stope after seeing you and
+Miss Paulette off, they'd cleared out. They must have gone a couple of
+hours before you did. They let out something about hold-ups while I was
+having the trouble with them, and Wilbraham and I got worried they might
+have managed to get over the road before you, and be lying up for you
+somewhere."
+
+"They only left--two hours before I did," said I, with flat irrelevance.
+I must have stared at Macartney like a fool, but he had knocked the wind
+clean out of me as to Collins having been the man in the swamp. With
+only two hours' start neither he nor Dunn, nor any man, for matter of
+that, could have legged it over my road in time to lie up in the only
+place I knew some one had laid up,--on the corduroy road.
+
+"Well, they didn't get me, and I never saw them," I began,--and suddenly
+remembered that ghastly noise, like the last flurry of a dog fight, that
+had halted the wolves on my track. My first thought of it, and of Dunn
+and Collins, had been right. "By gad, I believe I heard them though," I
+exclaimed, "and if they were on that road they're killed and eaten! But
+I didn't have any trouble about the gold."
+
+It was true to the letter, for my side had attended to all the trouble,
+if my side was only a girl who would not have shot without need. But
+when I explained the noise that might have accounted for Dunn and
+Collins, Dudley shook his head.
+
+"They didn't get eaten; not they! And your having no trouble with the
+gold isn't saying you won't have any. If no one saw Dunn and Collins
+going out to Caraquet I bet they're laid up somewhere on your road yet,
+waiting for your next trip! And as if that wasn't worry enough, poor old
+Thompson has to go out of his mind and come back here to be found
+dead--and I mean to find out how!" He was working himself up into one of
+his senseless rages, and he turned on Macartney furiously. "You knew
+him before I did! Write to his people and find out how he got here,
+anyhow. I'm not going to have any man come back, and just be found dead
+like a dog, if it is only old Thompson! I'm going to have him traced
+from the time he left Montreal."
+
+"He had no people," said Macartney blankly. "As far as I know, he was
+just a bit of driftwood. And as for finding out anything about his
+journey here, I don't suppose we ever can! All we'll get at was that he
+came back--and was found dead." And something made me look past him and
+Dudley, sitting with their backs to the living-room door, and the blood
+jumped into my face.
+
+Paulette Brown stood in the doorway, motionless, as if she had been
+there some time. I didn't know if she were merely knocked flat about the
+wolves and Collins, or scared Macartney might have found out something
+about her. But she was staring at Macartney's unconscious back as you
+look at a chair or anything, without seeing it, and if he were pale she
+was dead white,--except her mouth that was arched to a piteous crimson
+bow, and her eyes that looked dark as pools of blue ink. But she did not
+speak of Dunn or Collins.
+
+"Do you mean Thompson's been found dead?--the quiet man who was here
+when I came?" she stammered, as if it choked her. And I had an ungodly
+fright she was going to say she must have shot him on the corduroy road!
+
+"Billy Jones found him drowned in Lac Tremblant; it was an accident," I
+exclaimed sharply, before she could come out with more about shooting
+and wolf bait, and perhaps herself, than I chose any one to know,--till
+I knew it first. And I saw the blood flash into her face as it had
+flashed into mine at the sight of her.
+
+"Oh, I thought Mr. Macartney meant he'd been--murdered," she returned
+faintly. "I'm glad--he wasn't. But if he had been, I suppose it would be
+sure to come out!"
+
+"Crime doesn't always come out, Miss Paulette," said Macartney.
+
+But Paulette only answered listlessly that she was not sure, one never
+could tell; and moved to her usual seat by the fire.
+
+I was knocked endways about Collins; for who could have been on the
+corduroy road if he had not. I would have given most of the world for
+ten minutes alone with my dream girl and explanations. But Dudley began
+the whole story of Thompson over again, and Macartney stood there, and
+Marcia--whom I had not seen since she went to bed with a swollen
+face--came in, dressed in her hideous green tweed, and stood on tiptoe
+to chuck me under the chin, with a "Hullo, Nicky, you're back again!"
+
+There was no earthly hope of speaking to my dream girl alone. I shoved
+the mystery of Collins into the back of my head and went off to my room
+before I remembered I was still unconsciously holding that torn-off flap
+of poor old Thompson's envelope in my shut fist. I dropped it on my
+floor,--and grabbed it up again, to stare at it for a full minute.
+Because there was writing on _it_, too.
+
+"For God's sake, search my cards--my cards--my cards," Thompson had
+scrawled across the three-cornered envelope flap Macartney's grab had
+left in my hand: and, knowing Thompson, it was pitiful. He was the sort
+who must have been crazy indeed before he spoke of the Almighty and
+cards in the same breath.
+
+I remembered taking his measly solitaire pack out of his pocket at the
+Halfway, and wished I had brought them along with me. But it was simple
+enough to go and get them from Billy Jones. Meantime I had no desire to
+speak to Macartney of them or the scrawled, torn-off flap from
+Thompson's envelope: he was sick enough already about old Thompson's
+aberration, without any more proofs of it. It hurt even me to remember I
+had always laughed at the poor devil and his forlorn cards. I had no
+heart to burn the scrap of his envelope either, while old Thompson lay
+unburied. I put it away in my letter case, and locked it up.
+
+Which seemed a tame ending; I had not sense enough to know it was not
+tame at all!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+TATIANA PAULINA VALENKA!
+
+
+Poor old Thompson seemed a closed incident. There was nothing to be
+found out about him, even regarding his departure from La Chance. Nobody
+remembered his going through Caraquet, or even the last time he had been
+there. He was not a man any one would remember, anyhow, or one who had
+made friends. We put a notice of his death and the circumstances in a
+Montreal paper, and I thought that was the end of it all, till Dudley,
+to my surprise, stuck obstinately to his idea of tracing Thompson from
+Montreal. He told Macartney and me that he had written to a detective
+about it, and I think we both thought it was silly. I know I did; and I
+saw Macartney close his lips as though he kept back the same thought.
+But we gave old Thompson the best funeral we could, over at the Halfway,
+with a good grave and a wooden cross. All of us went except Marcia. She
+said she had never cared about the poor old thing, and she wasn't going
+to pretend it.
+
+It was a bitter day, with no snow come yet. Macartney looked sick and
+drawn about the mouth as he stood by the grave, while Dudley read the
+prayers out of Paulette's prayer book. I saw her notice Macartney when I
+did, and I think neither of us had guessed he had so much feeling. I
+stayed a minute or two behind the others, because I'd ridden over,
+instead of driving with them; and just before I started for La Chance I
+remembered that torn scrap of paper in my room there. I turned hastily
+to Billy Jones.
+
+"Those solitaire cards of Thompson's," said I, from no reason on earth
+but that to find them had been the last request of the dead man, even if
+it did sound crazy. "I'd like them!"
+
+Billy nodded and went into his shack. Presently he came out and said the
+cards were gone. He thought he'd put them away somewhere, but they
+weren't to be found. It was queer, too, because he remembered replacing
+them in their prayer-book sort of case after he'd spread them by the
+stove to dry with Thompson's clothes. But his wife said she would find
+them and send them over. Which she never did, and I forgot them.
+Goodness knows I had reason to.
+
+I did an errand instead of going straight home from Thompson's funeral
+that took me into the bush not far from where the boulder had been
+placed on my road. It was there or near by I had heard wolves pull down
+a man or men; and after I'd tied my horse and done a little looking
+around, I found the spot. It was not the scattered bones of two men that
+sickened me, or even that the long thighs and shanks of one of them were
+the measure of Collins. It was the top of a skull, with the hair still
+on it. I did not need the face that was missing. Dunn, with his eternal
+chuckle, had had stubbly fair hair without a part in it, clipped close
+till it stood on end,--and the same fair hair was on the top of the
+skull that lay like a round stone in the frozen bush. Whether the two
+had set out to rob me I didn't know. I did know they had not done it,
+and that the man Paulette had shot at in the swamp was more of a mystery
+than ever.
+
+The ground was too hard to do any burying. I made the bones into a
+decent heap and piled rocks into a cairn over them. If I said a kind of
+a prayer, too, it was no one's business but that of the God who heard
+me; the boys had been young, and they were dead while I lived, which was
+enough to make a man pray. I felt better when I had done it.
+
+But when I got home to La Chance the bald story I told Dudley was
+wasted. He swore I was a fool, first, for burying two skulls with no
+faces and imagining they belonged to Dunn and Collins; and next that
+they were still alive and meaning to run a hold-up on us. From where, or
+how, he couldn't say. But he kept on at the thing; and the minute he had
+half a drink in him--which was usually the first thing in the
+morning--he began to worry me to go out and find where they were cached
+and hike them out of it; and he kept at it all day. That would not have
+worried me much since it was only Dudley, and Macartney and the others
+believed my story; but everything else at La Chance began to go crooked,
+and every one's nerves got edgy. Marcia was unpleasantly silent, except
+when Macartney was there, when she sat in his pocket and they talked low
+like lovers,--only that I was always idiotically nervous they might be
+talking about Paulette Brown. That was seldom enough though, for half
+the time Macartney never showed up, even for meals. He was working like
+ten men over the mine, and good, solid, capable work at that. Whatever
+had made poor Thompson send him to us he was worth his weight in the
+gold he was getting out of La Chance in----Well, in chunks! Which was
+one of the reasons he had to work so hard, and brings me to the naked
+trouble at La Chance.
+
+We were deadly short of men. Not only were Dunn and Collins dead, but
+their grisly end seemed to have scared the others. Not a day went by
+that three or four of them did not come for their time, chiefly rockmen
+and teamsters,--for we had no ore chute at La Chance. Macartney thought
+it was Dudley's fault, for nagging around all the time, and was sore
+over it. Dudley said it was Macartney's, though when I pressed him he
+said, too, that he did not know why. The men I spoke to before they left
+just said they'd had enough of La Chance, but I could feel a sulky
+underhand rebellion in the bunk house. I ran the ore hauling as best I
+could, and Macartney doubled up the work in the mill. The ore-feeder
+acted as crusher-man, too, the engineer was his own fireman, which, with
+the battery man and the amalgamator, brought the mill staff down to
+four,--but they were the best of our men. The others Macartney turned to
+with the rockmen, and in the course of a fortnight he got a few more men
+from somewhere he wrote to outside. They were a rough lot; not
+troublesome, but the kind of rough that saves itself backache and elbow
+grease. Personally, I think they would not have worked at all, if
+Macartney had not put the fear of death in them. I caught him at it, and
+though I did not hear what he said in that competent low voice of his,
+there was no more lounging around and grinning from our new men. But the
+trouble among the old men kept on till we had none of them left except
+the four in the mill. It did not concern me particularly, except that I
+had to work on odd jobs that should not have concerned me either, and I
+did not think much about it. What I really did think about--and it put
+me out of gear more than anything else at La Chance--was Paulette Brown!
+
+It had been all very well to call her my dream girl and to think I'd got
+to heaven because she'd taken the trouble to drive to the Halfway with
+me and fight wolves. But she had hardly spoken to me since. And--well,
+not only the bones and skull I'd buried had smashed up my theory that it
+was only Collins who'd meant to hold up my gold, but I'd smashed it up,
+for myself, for a reason that made me wild: Paulette Brown, whose real
+name Marcia swore was something else, was still meeting a man in the
+dark! Where, I couldn't tell, but I knew she did meet him; and naturally
+I knew the man was not Collins, or ever had been. I did my best to get a
+talk with her, but she ran from me like a rabbit. I was worried good and
+hard. For from what I'd picked up, I knew the man she met could be
+nobody at La Chance,--and any outsider who followed a girl there likely
+had a gang with him and meant business, not child's play like Collins.
+
+The thing was serious, and I had no right to be trusting my dream girl
+and keeping silence to Dudley, but I went on doing it. There is no sense
+in keeping things back. I was mad with love for her, and if she had
+given me a chance I would have brushed Dudley out of my way like a
+straw. I had to grip all the decency I had not to do it, anyway. But if
+you think I just made an easy resignation of her and sat back meekly,
+you're wrong. I sat back because I was helpless and too stupid to
+formulate any way to deal with the situation. I don't know that I was
+any more silent than I always am, though Marcia said so. I did get into
+the way of pretending to write letters in the evenings, while Marcia and
+Macartney talked low, and Dudley went up and down the room in his
+eternal trudge of nervousness, throwing a word now and then to Paulette
+seated sewing by the fire,--that I kept my back to so that the others
+could not see my face.
+
+But one night, nearly a month after Thompson was buried, I came in after
+supper, and Paulette was in my usual place. She was writing a letter or
+something, and Dudley was preaching to Macartney about the shortage of
+men in the bunk house. Marcia, cross as two sticks because she was only
+there to talk to Macartney herself, had Paulette's seat by the fire. I
+sat down by the table where Paulette was writing, more sideways than
+behind her.
+
+If I had chosen to look I could have read every word she was writing.
+But naturally I was not choosing to, for one thing, and for another my
+eyes were glued to her face. Something in the look of her gave me a sick
+shock. She was deadly pale, and under the light of Charliet's
+half-trimmed lamp I saw the blue marks under her eyes, and the tight
+look round the nostrils that only come to a woman's face when she is
+fighting something that is pretty nearly past her, and is next door to
+despair. She looked hunted; that was the only word there was for it. It
+struck me that look must stop. If I had to march her out into the bush
+with me by force next morning, I meant to get a solitary talk with her;
+find out what her mysterious business was at La Chance with a man who
+had laid up for our gold; and, with any luck, transfer the hunted look
+to the face of the man who was hounding her,--for I felt certain he was
+still hanging around La Chance.
+
+After that--but there could be no after that to matter to me, with a
+dream girl who scooted to Dudley every time I tried to speak to her! I
+took a half-glance at him, and it was plain enough he would be no good
+to her in the kind of trouble that was on now. If I couldn't have
+her--since she didn't want me--I was the only person who could help
+her. She was angel-sweet to Dudley, heaven knows, and he was charming to
+her when he was himself. When he was not, he had a patronizing,
+half-threatening way of speaking to her, as if he knew something ugly
+about her, as Marcia had insinuated, that made me boil. She never
+resented it either, and that made me boil too. If I had ever seen her
+even shrink from him, I don't know that the curb bit I had on myself
+would have held. I wished to heaven she _would_ shrink and give me a
+chance to step in between her and a man who might love her, as Marcia
+said, but who loved drink and drugs better, or he would not have been
+talking between silliness and sobriety, as he was that night. And I was
+so busy wishing it that Marcia spoke to me three times before I heard
+her.
+
+"Nicky, do make Dudley shut up," she repeated, "he won't let any one
+else speak! He's been preaching the whole evening that Collins and Dunn
+aren't dead, only laid up somewhere round and making the other men
+desert, and you ought to go and find them--and now he's worrying us
+about that old idiot Thompson, who got himself drowned! For heaven's
+sake tell him no one would have bothered to murder the old wretch!"
+
+"Nobody ever thought he was murdered, and I buried Dunn and Collins
+right enough," said I absently, with my thoughts still on Paulette. But
+Dudley whisked around on me.
+
+"Marcia's talking rot," he exclaimed, his little pig's eyes soberer than
+I expected. "I don't mean about those two boys, for I bet they're no
+more dead than I am, and it would be just like them to lie low and set
+up a smothered strike among the men as soon as you were ass enough to be
+taken in by some stray bones! But I do mean it about Thompson. There's
+no sense in saying there was nothing queer about the way he came back
+and was found dead--because there was! It was natural enough that the
+police couldn't trace him in Montreal, for I hadn't a sign of data to
+give them: but it's darned unnatural that _I_ can't trace him in
+Caraquet. I've sieved the whole place upside down, and nobody ever saw
+Thompson after he left Billy Jones's that morning on his way to
+Caraquet!"
+
+Macartney stared at him for a minute; then he put down the pipe he was
+smoking. "If I thought that, I'd sieve the whole place upside down,
+too," he said so quietly that I remembered Thompson had been his best
+friend, and that he had looked deadly sick beside his grave. "But I
+don't. What it comes to with me is that no one remembers seeing Thompson
+in Caraquet that particular time, but no one says he wasn't there!"
+
+"Then where's the----" But Dudley checked himself quick as light. If I
+had been quite sure he was himself I should have been curious about what
+he had meant to say. But all he substituted was: "Well, nobody remembers
+seeing him that day, anyway, except Billy Jones!"
+
+"Seems to me that narrows poor Thompson's potential murderers down to
+Billy Jones," said Macartney ironically, since Billy Jones would not
+have murdered the meanest yellow pup that ever walked, and Macartney
+knew it as well as I did. But Dudley made the two of us sit up.
+
+"Who's to say he didn't?" he demanded. "What darned thing do we know
+about him to say that he mightn't have waylaid poor old Thompson for
+what money he had on him, and kept him shut up till he had a chance to
+say he found him drowned?"
+
+Macartney and I stared at each other. The very thought was so monstrous
+that it must have struck him, as it did me, that it was born of Dudley's
+drugs and not his intelligence. But it had to be stopped, or heaven knew
+whom Dudley would be accusing next.
+
+"For God's sake, Wilbraham, shut up," said Macartney curtly. "You make
+me sick. Isn't it enough to have the old man dead, without saying
+innocent people killed him!"
+
+"Yes, if they are innocent," Dudley returned so quietly that it
+surprised both of us. "But I tell you this, Macartney, and Stretton
+too--if any one within a hundred miles of this mine did murder Thompson,
+Billy Jones or any one else, it'll come out!" and he jerked his head
+around. "Don't you think so, Paulette?"
+
+"I? I never thought of poor old Thompson having been murdered!" She
+answered as if she were startled, but she did not turn. "If he was
+murdered I pray God it will be found out," she added unexpectedly. She
+had made two false starts at her letter and torn them up, but she had
+evidently finished it to her liking now, for she sat with the pen poised
+over the blank end of the sheet to sign her name. Yet she did not sign
+it. She only sat there abstractedly, with her hand lifted from the
+wrist.
+
+"There, you see," Dudley crowed triumphantly. "Paulette's no fool: it's
+facts she and I are after, Macartney. Why, you take the history of
+crimes generally--murders--jewel robberies--kidnapping for money--half
+of them with not nearly so much to them as this thing about
+Thompson--they're always found out!"
+
+"If you're going to talk this rubbish, I'm going to bed," Marcia burst
+out wrathfully. I saw her pause to catch Macartney's eye, but for once
+his set gaze was on the floor. She got up, which I don't think she had
+meant to do, and flounced out of the room. I had no idea I was going to
+be deadly thankful.
+
+Macartney answered Dudley as the door shut behind her. "I don't know
+that crimes are always found out, in spite of your faith--and Miss
+Paulette's," he argued half crossly. "I could remind you of one or two
+that weren't. What about the Mappin murder, way back in nineteen-five?
+And that emerald business at the Houstons' country house this spring,
+with that dancing and circus-riding girl who used to be at the
+Hippodrome--the Russian, who did Russian dancing on her horse's back?
+What was her name? I ought to remember. I knew a poor devil of a cousin
+of hers out in British Columbia who was engaged to her when it happened,
+and he talked about her enough. Oh, yes, Valenka! She had a funny
+Christian name too, sort of half Russian, only I forget it. But when
+that Valenka girl got away with an emerald necklace from the Houstons'
+house no one ever found out how it was done! You must have heard about
+her, Stretton?"
+
+I had. Every one had: Macartney need not have troubled to hunt his
+memory for her Christian name, though it had only reached me in the
+wilderness through a stray New York paper. But before I could say so
+Dudley burst out with the same truculence he had used about Billy Jones:
+
+"What d'ye mean Stretton must have heard?"
+
+"Only that Mrs. Houston took a fancy to Valenka and had her down to ride
+and dance at a week-end party at her house in Long Island; that on
+Sunday morning, Jimmy Van Ruyne, one of the guests, was found in
+Valenka's room, soaked with morphine and robbed--not only of the cash in
+his pocket in the good old way, but of an emerald necklace he had just
+bought at Tiffany's; and that, to this day, no one has ever laid eyes on
+that necklace nor on Valenka. She's free and red-handed somewhere, if no
+one ever found out who railroaded her and Van Ruyne's emeralds out of
+the United States!"
+
+What sent Dudley into a blazing rage was beyond me. But he fairly yelled
+at Macartney.
+
+"Free she may be, but when you say 'red-handed' you say a lie! If Jimmy
+Van Ruyne was fool enough to think so, it was because no Van Ruyne ever
+could see a. b. spelled ab. D'ye know him? Well," as Macartney shook his
+head, "he's a rotter, if ever there was one! Got more money than he
+knows what to do with and always chasing after women. As for Valenka,
+if you think she came out of a circus and was fair game, that's a lie,
+too! She was a lady, born and bred. Her mother was American, a Miss
+Bocqueraz; and her father was one of the best known men in Petrograd,
+and _persona grata_ with one of the Grand Dukes till he got into some
+sort of political disgrace and died of it. His daughter came to America
+and danced and rode for her living. First because she was beggared; and
+second because she'd been taught dancing in the Imperial School at
+Petrograd and riding in the Grand Duchess Tatiana's private ring for
+_haute manége_; and was a corker at both. She called herself plain
+Valenka, and Jimmy Van Ruyne went crazy about her--though Mrs. Houston
+didn't know it, or she never would have asked the nasty little cad to a
+spring week-end party."
+
+"To lose an emerald necklace and be stabbed and drugged," commented
+Macartney drily. "Oh, I'm not saying the Valenka girl wasn't a
+marvellous sight on a horse! But what Van Ruyne told the police was that
+he gave his string of emeralds to her on the Saturday afternoon, and got
+a note from her just after dinner saying that she returned them; only
+the case--in the time-honored method this time--was empty when he opened
+it! He was blazing. He went straight up to Valenka's room when he found
+it out, which was at two in the morning, and said he wanted his
+emeralds; and she flew at him with a dagger. After which he knew nothing
+at all till a servant came in at eight and found him lying unconscious
+in her empty room that she'd just walked out of with his emeralds in her
+pocket. And no one's ever laid eyes on her, or on Van Ruyne's emeralds
+ever since."
+
+"That's what Van Ruyne says," Dudley began hotly--and went on in a
+different voice. "The Valenka girl never stole his emeralds! She may
+have cut him across the wrist with one of those knife-things women will
+use for paper cutters; I don't say she didn't. Any girl would have been
+justified when a man forced his way into her bedroom--for I bet Van
+Ruyne didn't let out the whole story of that, if he did let out that he
+bullied her when he found her alone! And he didn't lay any stress,
+either, on the fact that he was found with the cut artery in his
+wrist--that was all the stabbing that ailed him--bound up as a surgeon
+would have done it; or that he'd been given just enough morphine to keep
+him from wriggling off his bandage and bleeding to death before anybody
+came: not Van Ruyne!"
+
+"All that doesn't explain how Valenka got away--or what became of her,"
+said Macartney obstinately. "That's the mystery I began on."
+
+I was bored stiff with the whole thing. And whether she had Van Ruyne's
+emeralds or not I saw no particular mystery in the Valenka girl's
+disappearance: she had probably had some one outside who had taken her
+clear away in a motor car. I said so, more because Dudley was glaring at
+Macartney like a maniac than anything else. And Dudley caught me up
+short. "I won't have either of you say one more word about Valenka in my
+house. She was as good as she was pretty; and if some one helped her
+away she--deserved it!"
+
+There was something so like honest passion in the break in his voice
+that involuntarily I glanced at Paulette, to see if by any chance she
+was startled at Dudley's evidently intimate knowledge of a girl none of
+us had even heard him speak of--and it took every bit of Indian quiet I
+owned not to stare at her so hard that Dudley and Macartney must have
+noticed. She was listening, as motionless as if she were a statue. Her
+lifted hand still held her pen poised over her unfinished letter; but it
+was rigid, as the rest of her was rigid. Whether it was from anger,
+surprise, or jealousy of Dudley, I had no idea, but she sat as if she
+had been struck dumb. And suddenly I was not sure if she were perfectly
+collected,--or absolutely abstracted. For--without even a glance to
+show she felt my eyes on her--the carved lines of her poised hand fell
+to the level of her wrist that lay flat on the table, and she began to
+write the signature to her unfinished letter. I could see every separate
+character as she shaped it; and with the blazing enlightenment of what
+she set down on paper only a merciful heaven kept my wits in my skull
+and my tongue quiet in my head.
+
+For the signature she wrote as plainly as I write it now was not
+Paulette Brown. It was Tatiana Paulina--that "queer Christian name, half
+Russian too," of the dancing circus-rider, that no one had ever
+mentioned,--_Tatiana Paulina Valenka_!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+I INTERFERE FOR THE LAST TIME
+
+    "Must I go now--in the moonlight clear?
+      Would God that it were dark,
+    That I might pass like a homeless hound
+      Men neither miss nor mark."
+
+    _The Ransom._
+
+
+TATIANA PAULINA VALENKA!
+
+I sat as still as if I had been stabbed. It was no wonder she had
+laughed when I asked her if she could ride, no wonder I had thought she
+moved like Pavlova. Paulette Brown, whom Dudley had brought to La
+Chance, was Tatiana Paulina Valenka, who had or had not stolen Van
+Ruyne's emeralds! But the blood sprang into my face at the knowledge,
+for--by all the holy souls and my dead mother's name--she was my dream
+girl too! And I believed in her.
+
+All the same, I was thankful Marcia had flounced out of the room before
+Dudley let loose. It was no wonder she had thought she had seen Paulette
+Brown before. The wonder was that she had ever forgotten how she had
+seen her--dancing at the Hippodrome on her four horses as no girl ever
+had danced--or forgotten the story about her that she had said was
+"queer"! If Marcia's eyes had fallen on the signature mine were on now,
+I knew her first act would have been to write to Jimmy Van Ruyne; that
+even if she had only heard Dudley defending an ostensibly absent Valenka
+she would have written--for Marcia was no fool. Then and there I made up
+my mind that Marcia should never guess the whole of what she already
+half-guessed about Paulette Brown; there were ways I could stop _that_.
+
+As for Dudley----But a sudden tide of respect for Dudley, in spite of
+his drink and all his queerness, rose flood-high in me. It had been
+Dudley, of course, who had got Paulette away,--for I could not think of
+her as Tatiana Paulina. How, I did not know; I knew he had not been one
+of the Houstons' week-end party; but he had done it somehow, and
+spirited Paulette out to La Chance. As for the rest, a fool could have
+told that he respected and believed in her. If it had been risky
+bringing Marcia out into the wilderness with her, it had been clever
+too, because it was so bold that Marcia had never suspected it. Even I
+never would have, if Macartney had not brought up Miss Valenka's name. I
+knew he had done it merely to get Dudley off his cracked idea that
+Billy Jones might have murdered Thompson, but I was suddenly nervous
+that Dudley's fool vehemence over a missing girl might have set
+Macartney on the track of things,--and heaven knows that, except he was
+a competent mine superintendent, I knew little enough how far it would
+be safe to trust Macartney. But suddenly one thing I did know flashed
+over me. Macartney and Marcia were a firm, or going to be; and I was
+instantly scared blue that he might turn around and see that name
+Paulette Brown had signed to her letter, lying plain under the
+living-room lamp! I knew I had to wake Paulette up to what she had done
+and shut up Dudley before he let out any more intimate details the
+public had never known, like Van Ruyne's bandaged wrist. I yawned and
+got up, with one hand on the table, and my forefinger pointing straight
+to that black signature of Tatiana Paulina Valenka that ought to have
+been Paulette Brown.
+
+"I'm like Marcia, Miss Paulette; I'm going to bed unless you can turn
+off Dudley's eloquence. Oh, I'm so sorry--I'm afraid I've blotted your
+letter," I said. I tapped my finger on it soundlessly--and she looked
+down,--and saw!
+
+I said once before that my dream girl had good nerves; she had iron
+ones. I need not have been afraid she would exclaim. She said quite
+naturally: "No, it's all right. And it wasn't a letter, anyhow. It was
+only something I wanted to make clear." She picked it up, folded it
+small, gathered up the bits of paper she had written on and torn up, and
+turned round to Dudley. "What are you talking about all this time?"
+
+But if her glance warned him to hold his tongue, as heaven knows her
+mere presence would have warned me, Dudley was too roused to care. "I
+was talking about that liar, Van Ruyne," he said, glaring at Macartney.
+
+"He may be a liar, all right," said Macartney rather unpleasantly.
+"Only, if that Valenka girl didn't steal his emeralds, Mr. Wilbraham,
+who did?"
+
+"That cousin of hers you said you knew; Hutton, or whatever you said his
+name was," Dudley retorted, like a fool, for Macartney had never
+mentioned the man's name. "How, I don't know, but I'm certain of it. He
+was more in love with her than Van Ruyne, and more dangerous, for all
+you say he was a good sort. Why, he was the kind to stick at nothing.
+Miss Valenka had had the sense to turn him down hard; and I believe he
+stole that necklace of Van Ruyne's from her during the short time she
+had it--either just to get her into trouble and be revenged on her, or
+to get her into his power. Whichever it was--to blackmail her--for he'd
+cadged on her for money before her father died--or to scare her into
+going to him for help--I'd like to hunt the worthless hound down for it.
+And I'd never stop till I got him!"
+
+"Like poor old Thompson's murderer," Macartney commented rather drily,
+"and with no more foundation." But the thought of Thompson seemed to
+have brought his self-command back to him; he tried to smooth Dudley
+down. "I don't honestly believe old Thompson could have been murdered,"
+he said gently, "or that Miss Valenka's cousin could have stolen those
+jewels, for any reason. He seemed a pretty good sort when I knew him in
+British Columbia. He was a clever mining engineer, too."
+
+"He might have been the devil for all I care! Only if ever I come across
+him I'll get those emeralds out of his skin," Dudley exploded. Paulette
+gave one glance at him. It would have killed me; but even Dudley saw how
+he was giving himself away to a stranger.
+
+"Why under heaven do you work me up about abstract justice, Macartney?"
+he growled. "You know how I lose my temper. Talk about something else,
+for goodness sake!"
+
+"Not I--I'm going to bed," Macartney returned casually. Dudley always
+did work himself up over things that were none of his business, and the
+Valenka argument evidently had not struck his superintendent as anything
+out of the ordinary. He nodded and went out. Paulette strayed to the
+fireplace, and I saw her handful of papers blaze up before she moved
+away. I was thankful when that signature of Tatiana Paulina Valenka was
+off the earth, even if Macartney had gone out of the room. Paulette said
+good night, and went out on his heels.
+
+I heard Macartney ask her something as she passed him where he stood in
+the passage, getting on his coat to go over to the assay office, where
+he slept. I thought it was about Marcia, from the tone of his voice, and
+from Paulette's answer, cursory and indistinct through the closed door:
+"I know. I'm going to." She added something I could not hear at all, but
+I heard Macartney say sharply that to-morrow would be too late.
+
+Paulette said "yes," and then "yes" again, as though he gave her a
+message. Then she spoke out clearly: "There's nothing else to say. I'll
+do it now." I heard her move away, I thought to Marcia's door. Macartney
+went out the front door, banging it.
+
+I had no desire to go to bed. I felt as if I had walked from Dan to
+Beersheba and been knocked down and robbed on the way. I knew my dream
+girl was not mine, now or ever, because she was Dudley's, but I had
+never thought of her being anything like Tatiana Paulina Valenka. It was
+not the jewel story that hit me: I knew she had not stolen Van Ruyne's
+old necklace, no matter how things looked. It was that she must care for
+Dudley, or she would never have let him bring her out here. And another
+thing hit me harder still, and that was Hutton,--the cousin Macartney
+said was engaged to her, and Dudley said cadged on her, till he ended by
+branding her as a thief and getting away with the spoils. And the crazy
+thought that jumped into my head, without any earthly reason, was that
+it was just Hutton who had been hounding her at La Chance; that, while I
+had been addling my brains with suspecting Collins, it was Hutton that
+Paulette Brown--whose real name was Valenka--had stolen out to meet in
+the dark!
+
+Once I thought of it, I was dead sure Hutton had followed her to La
+Chance. I knew from my own ears that she hated and distrusted the man
+for whom she had once mistaken me, that it was he from whom she had
+tried to protect my gold; and I wondered with a horror that made me too
+sick to swear, if it were Hutton himself, and not Dunn nor Collins, who
+had cached that wolf dope in my wagon! If it were, he had not cared
+about wolves killing the girl who drove with me, so long as he got my
+gold. But there I saw I was making a fool of myself, for he could not
+have known she was going. I steadied my mind on the thing, like you
+steady a machine.
+
+If Hutton had been hanging around La Chance, either from so-called love,
+or to get Paulette into a mess with our gold, as Dudley swore he had
+with Van Ruyne's emeralds, he could not have been seen about the
+mine,--for Macartney would have recognized him and given him away. He
+must be cached in the bush somewhere, waiting his chance to grab our
+gold and incriminate Paulette, as common sense told me she expected. I
+was sure as death he had a gang somewhere, for no outsider would try to
+run that business alone; Collins and Dunn might have been on their way
+to join it the night they got scuppered, very likely: they were just
+devils enough. But if they had started out to meet Hutton at my corduroy
+road they had never got there, and I was pretty sure the rest of the
+gang hadn't either, and Hutton--alone--had been scared to shoot at us
+and give himself away.
+
+That thought assured me of two things. It was Dunn and Collins who had
+hidden the wolf bait in my wagon, for Hutton could never have done it
+and reached the corduroy road before us; and Paulette must really hate
+Hutton savagely, for she must have known whom she was shooting at on my
+swamp road! That made me feel better--a little--but there was something
+I wanted to know. I turned on Dudley for it.
+
+"Look here, I never heard anything about Valenka but newspapers'
+stories, till to-night. But, if you know the inside of the business, how
+did that cousin Macartney was talking of ever get hold of that emerald
+necklace? Didn't Macartney imply he was in British Columbia?"
+
+"He was more likely anywhere than where he'd have to work--if he could
+get money out of a girl," Dudley snapped. "What I think is that he was
+masquerading as a servant in the Houstons' house--a chauffeur,
+perhaps--anything, that would let him hang round and drive a girl half
+wild. He was a plain skunk. I don't know how he managed the thing, but I
+know he was there in the Houstons' house, somehow, if Paulette doesn't
+think so"--he forgot all about the Valenka--"and that he took those
+emeralds; left the girl powerless even to think so; and disappeared. I
+never saw him; don't even know what he looks like. But if ever I get a
+chance I'll hand him over to the law as I'd hand a man I caught throwing
+a bomb at a child!"
+
+I said involuntarily: "Shut up!" I knew it was silly, but I felt as if
+walls might have ears in a house that sheltered Paulette Brown,--though
+I knew Marcia was in bed and asleep, and there was no one else who could
+hear. "You're never likely to see him here, anyhow," I added, since I
+meant to see him myself first, somehow; after which I trusted he was not
+likely to matter. And I thought of something to change the subject.
+"What were you going to say to-night about no one having seen poor old
+Thompson--when you cut yourself off?"
+
+"Oh, that," Dudley replied almost carelessly. "It mayn't amount to
+anything, and I only shut up because I didn't want Macartney to take the
+wind out of my sails by saying so. It was just that if Thompson ever
+went to Caraquet it ought to be simple enough to find the boy who took
+his horse back to Billy Jones, and--there's apparently no such boy in
+Caraquet! What set me on Billy Jones first was that he stammered and
+stuttered about not knowing him, till I don't believe there ever was any
+such boy. He's never been heard of since, any more than if he'd gone
+into the ground. And what I want to know is _why_?--if it's all straight
+about Thompson and Billy Jones!"
+
+I was silent, remembering--I don't know why--the half-dead boy I had
+carried home to Skunk's Misery. There was no cause to connect him with
+the return of Thompson's horse to the Halfway, yet somehow my mind did
+connect him with it, obstinately. I had never really discovered how he
+had been hurt by a falling tree, and without reason some animal instinct
+told me the two things belonged together and that they were queer. But
+before I could say so, Dudley burst into unexpected speech, his little
+pig's eyes as fierce as a tiger's: "Look here, Stretton! I'm going to
+find out who drowned Thompson, and who took Van Ruyne's emeralds--and
+hand them both over to the law, if I die for it. And when I say that you
+know I mean it!"
+
+I did. But once more I made no answer, for I thought I heard Marcia in
+the passage. I am quick on my feet, and I was outside the door before I
+finished thinking it. But it was not Marcia outside; it was only
+Macartney. Yet I stopped short and stared at him, for it was a Macartney
+I had never seen. He was close to the living-room door, just as if he
+had been listening to Dudley, and his face was the face of a devil. I
+never want to see set eyes like his again. But all the effect they had
+on me was to make me furiously angry, and I swore at him.
+
+"What the devil's the matter with you, Macartney? What do you want?"
+
+"My keys," roughly. "I left them somewhere around this passage and I had
+to come back for them; I couldn't get into my office. As for what's the
+matter"--he lowered his voice and motioned me some feet away, out of the
+light from the living-room door--"I heard all Wilbraham said just now,
+and by gad, the man's crazy! We've got to get him off all that rot about
+Billy Jones, or any one else, murdering Thompson; it's stark madness.
+Both of us know Billy wouldn't murder a cat! And there's another thing,
+too! I heard all Wilbraham said about that Valenka girl's cousin, and I
+wish you'd tell him to go slow on it. I was in too much of a rage, or
+I'd have gone in and told him myself. Dick Hutton was a friend of mine;
+no matter how much he was in love with a girl who'd got sick of him for
+Van Ruyne, he wasn't the kind to sneak round the Houstons' house as a
+servant. I won't let any one say that with impunity. It's no use my
+telling Wilbraham so in the state he's in to-night, but you might gently
+hint it when you've a chance. I wish to heaven he'd give up drink and
+drugs and being an amateur detective!" He shrugged his shoulders with a
+complete return to his ordinary manner. "I'm sorry I startled you just
+now, but I was too cursed angry to say I was here. Oh, there are my
+keys!" He stooped, picked them up off the floor, and went out with a
+careless good night.
+
+"Was that Macartney?" Dudley inquired as I went back to him. "I thought
+he'd gone!"
+
+"Forgot the office key and came back for it." I felt no call to enter on
+Macartney's embassy regarding Hutton. "Going to bed?"
+
+Dudley gulped down a horn of whisky that would have settled any two men
+in the bunk house, nodded, and shut the door behind him. I put out the
+light and sat on in the living room alone, how long I don't know. I had
+nothing pleasant to think of, either. It was no use my trying to imagine
+that Tatiana Paulina Valenka was not going to marry Dudley, whatever I
+had hoped about Paulette Brown. As far as any chance of her loving me
+was concerned, I had lost my dream girl forever. She was none of my
+business any more, except that--"By gad, she _is_ my business," I
+thought in a sudden bitter fury, "as far as Hutton and our gold! If I'm
+right, and he's hiding round here, I'll put a stopper on any more
+hold-ups. And I'll make good and sure she never goes out to meet him
+again, too!"
+
+As I swore it I turned away from the dead fire and the dark room, that
+looked as if we'd all deserted it hours ago, and went Indian-silent
+into the hallway. And my heart contracted in a hard, tight lump.
+
+The passage was light as day, with the moon full on the window at the
+end of it. And wrapped in a shawl, with her back to me, stood my dream
+girl, undoing the front door as noiselessly as I had come into the
+passage.
+
+I let her do it. The hallway on which Marcia's bedroom door opened, let
+alone Dudley's, was no place for Paulette Brown and myself to talk. But
+I was just three feet behind her as she slid around the corner of the
+shack, toward the bush that lay dark against the cold winter moon. And I
+rustled with my feet on purpose, so that she turned and saw me, with the
+moon full on my face.
+
+"You sha'n't do it," I said. I did not know I had made a stride to her
+till I felt her arm under my hand. "You sha'n't go!"
+
+My dream girl, who had two names and belonged to Dudley anyhow, said
+nothing at all. She and I, who had really nothing to do with one
+another, if I would have laid my soul under her little feet, stood still
+in the cold moonlight, looking inimically into one another's eyes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+MACARTNEY HEARS A NOISE: AND I FIND FOUR DEAD MEN
+
+
+We must have stood silent for a good three minutes. I think I was
+furious because Paulette did not speak to me. I said, "You're not to
+go--you're _never_ to go and meet Hutton again, as long as you live!"
+And for the first time I saw my dream girl flinch from me.
+
+"What?" she gasped so low I could hardly hear. "You know that? What am I
+going to do? My God, what am I going to do?"
+
+"You're coming back into the shack with me!" We were on the blind side
+of the house for Marcia and Dudley, but we were in plain view from
+Charliet's window, and I was not going to have even a cook look out and
+see Paulette talking to a man in the middle of the night. Her despair
+cut me; I had never seen her anything but valiant before, and I had a
+lump in my throat. But I spoke roughly enough. "I didn't know the whole
+of things till to-night, but now I do, you'll have to trust me. Can't
+you see I mean to do all I can to help you--and Dudley?" If it were
+tough to have to add Dudley I did it. But I felt her start furiously.
+
+"Dudley?" she repeated almost scornfully. "Nobody can help Dudley but
+me--and there's only one way! Mr. Stretton, I promise you I'll never ask
+again, but--for God's sake let me go to meet Dick Hutton to-night!"
+
+"Not blindly," said I brutally. "If you tell me why, perhaps--but we
+can't talk here. If you'll come into the house and trust me about what
+you want to do, I may let you go--just this once--if I think it's the
+right way!"
+
+"I've only half an hour before it's too late--for any way!" But she
+turned under the hand I had never lifted from her arm.
+
+I led her noiselessly into the office. I was afraid of the living room.
+Marcia might come back to it for a book or something. No one but Dudley
+ever went near the office, and he was safely dead to the world, judging
+from the horn of whisky he had gone to bed on. The place was freezing,
+for the inside sash was up, leaving only the double window between us
+and the night; and it was black-dark too, with the moon on the other
+side of the house. But there were more things than love to talk about in
+the dark,--to a dream girl you would give your soul to call your own,
+and know you never will. And I began bluntly, "You've never had any
+reason to distrust me. I've helped you----"
+
+"Three times," sharply. "I know. I've been--grateful."
+
+It was four, counting to-night when I had warned her to hide her
+signature from Macartney; but I was not picking at trifles. I said:
+"Well, I've trusted you, too! I knew the first night I came back here
+that you were meeting some man secretly, in the dark. But it was none of
+my business and I held my tongue about it; then, and when you met him
+again--when it was my business."
+
+"Again?" I heard the little start she gave, if I could not see it.
+
+"The night before you and I took the gold out," I answered practically,
+"when I told you your hair was untidy. I suppose you only thought I knew
+you had been out of doors, but I heard the man you met leave you and
+heard you say to yourself that you'd have to get hold of the gold. I
+didn't know whether you were honest or not then, or when I gave you back
+your little seal; and not even when you started for Billy Jones's with
+me. I knew by the time I got there, if I was fool enough to believe it
+was Collins you were fighting instead of helping. But any fool must see
+now that Hutton was the only man likely to have followed you out here! I
+suppose he told you some lie about giving you up for Van Ruyne's
+necklace, unless you made silence worth while with Dudley's gold?" and
+her assent made me angry clear through.
+
+"My soul, girl," I burst out, "you balked him about that, even when you
+knew he'd put that wolf dope in my wagon, and you were risking your
+life--you put a bullet in him in the swamp--I can't see why you should
+be worrying to conciliate him by meeting him to-night!"
+
+But she caught me up almost stupidly. "Put a bullet in him? I
+didn't--you must know I didn't!"
+
+"There was blood in the swamp and on the road!"
+
+I felt her staring at me in the dark. "It wasn't Dick's," she said
+almost inaudibly. "It must have been some one else's. And--he doesn't
+know it was he I shot at that night!"
+
+"It might do him good if he did!" I felt like shaking her, if I had not
+wanted to take her in my arms more. "Can't you see you've no reason to
+worry about Hutton? If Dudley told the truth to-night, and he stole
+those emeralds and shifted the crime on to you, it's you who have the
+whip hand of him!"
+
+"But he didn't," Paulette exclaimed wildly. "He wasn't near the
+Houstons' house! It's mad of Dudley to think so. I know he believes it,
+but--oh, it's mad all the same! And even if Dick did take those
+emeralds--though I can't see how it was possible--it wouldn't clear me!
+It would only mean he was able to drag me into it, somehow."
+
+"But you never touched the necklace!" For I knew that.
+
+"No," simply, "but I'm afraid of Dick all the more. If he did take it,
+to get me into his power"--she caught my arm in her slim hands I had
+always known were so strong--"can't you see he's _got_ me?" she said
+between her teeth, "and that, next thing, he'll get the La Chance gold?
+If you don't let me meet him to-night I'll be helpless. I----Oh, can't
+you see I'll be like a rat in a trap?--not able to do anything? I can
+make him go away, if I meet him! Otherwise"--the passion in her voice
+kept it down to a whisper--"it's not only that I'm afraid he can make
+things look as if I stole from Dudley as well as from Van Ruyne: I'm
+afraid--_for Dudley_!"
+
+The two last words gave me a jar. I would have given most of the world
+to ask if she loved Dudley, but I didn't dare: I suppose a girl could
+love a man with a face like an egg, if she owed him enough. But whether
+she cared for him or not, "By gad, you've got to tell Dudley that
+Hutton's here," I said roughly, because I was sick with the knowledge
+that anyhow she did not love me.
+
+"Tell him?" Paulette gasped through the dark that was like a curtain
+between us. "I've told him twenty times--all I dared. And he wouldn't
+listen to a word I said. Ask him: he'll tell you that's true!"
+
+I had no doubt it was. Even on business Dudley's brain ran on lines of
+its own; you might tell him a thing till you were black in the face, and
+he would never believe it. Lately, between drugs and drink, he was past
+assimilating any impersonal ideas at all. Macartney was so worried about
+him that he'd told off Baker, one of his new men, to go wherever Dudley
+went. I had no use for the man: he was a black and white looking devil
+and slim as they make them, in my opinion, though Dudley took to him as
+though he were a long-lost brother luckily,--how luckily I couldn't
+know. But I wasn't thinking about Baker that night.
+
+"We can't worry over Dudley," I said shortly, "he'll have to take care
+of himself. But you won't be helpless with Hutton, if I meet him
+to-night--in your place!"
+
+"You? I couldn't bear you to be in it!" so sharply that I winced.
+
+"It won't hurt you to take that much from me!" It wasn't till long
+afterwards that I knew I'd been a fool not to have said it with my arms
+round her, while I told her why--but since I didn't do it there's no
+sense in talking about it. I went on baldly: "I've got to be in it! I'm
+not concerned with post-mortems and your past. All I know, personally,
+is that Hutton's hiding somewhere round this mine to hold up our gold
+shipments and get even with Dudley; and if you'll tell me where to meet
+him to-night I can stop both--and be saved the trouble of looking for
+him from here to Caraquet, let alone getting you some peace of mind
+instead of the hell you're living in."
+
+"Oh, my God," said Paulette, exactly as if she were in church. "I can't
+take peace of mind like blood-money--I can't tell you where to find
+Dick, if you don't know now," and I should have known why if I had had
+any sense, but I had none. "It's no use, Mr. Stretton, I must go to
+Dick, alone. I----" But suddenly she blazed out at me: "I won't let you
+see him! And I'm going to him--now. Take your hand off me!"
+
+I tightened it. "You'll stay here! _Please!_ And you can't go on
+preventing me from meeting Hutton, either. What about the first time I
+take any gold out over the Caraquet road--and he and his gang try a
+hold-up on me?"
+
+I said gang without thinking, for I was naturally dead sure he had one.
+But I was not prepared to have the cork come straight out of the bottle.
+Paulette clutched me till I bit my lip to keep steady.
+
+"His gang's what I'm afraid of--for Dudley," she gasped, which certainly
+steadied me--like a bucket of ice. "Look here, when first I met Dick, he
+told me things, to frighten me--that he'd eighteen or twenty men laid up
+between here and Caraquet--enough to raid us here, even, if he chose. It
+was because I knew they were waiting somewhere on the road that night
+that I drove to Billy Jones's with you. It was one of them I shot when
+we tore through the swamp. But something went wrong with them; either
+they'd no guns, or they didn't want to give themselves away by shooting
+when they saw we were ready--I don't know. But anyhow, something went
+wrong. And Dick was black angry. He--the last time I spoke to him--he
+wouldn't even tell me what he'd done with his gang; just said he had
+them somewhere safe, in the last place you or Dudley would ever look for
+them. Oh, you needn't hold me any more; I've given in; I'm not going to
+meet Dick to-night. But I had to tell you about his gang, if I can't
+about him. And listen, Mr. Stretton. I've tried every possible way to
+get it out of him, but Dick won't even answer when I taunt him for a
+coward who has to be backed up. I know he has men somewhere, but he
+won't tell me where they are, or who they are--now. I believe----" but
+her voice changed sharply. "Those two boys, Dunn and Collins! You don't
+think Dudley can be right and they _are_ still alive--and have joined
+Dick's gang?"
+
+"They're dead!" I was about sick of Dunn and Collins, and anyhow I was
+wondering where the devil Hutton's gang could have gone after their
+fiasco in the swamp. "They may have meant to join Hutton. But I found
+what the wolves left--and that was dead, right enough!"
+
+"I don't believe they're dead," said Paulette quietly.
+
+I shrugged my shoulders. But I never even asked her why. For
+suddenly--with that flat knowledge you get when you realize you should
+have put two and two together long ago--I knew where Hutton's gang was
+now and always had been. "Skunk's Misery," I thought dumbfounded. "By
+gad, Skunk's Misery!" For the thing I should have added to the Skunk's
+Misery wolf dope was my dream of men talking and playing cards under the
+very floor where I slept in the new hut the Frenchwoman's son had built
+and gone away from,--because it had been no dream at all. I had actually
+heard real men under the bare lean-to where I lay; and knowing the
+burrows and runways under the Skunk's Misery houses, I knew where--and
+that was just in some hidden den under the rocks the new house had been
+built on--that house left with the door open, ostentatiously, for all
+the world to see!
+
+I was blazing, as you always are blazing when you have been a fool. But
+I could start for Skunk's Misery the first thing in the morning and
+start alone, with my mouth shut. None of our four old men could be
+spared from the mill, and I had no use for any of Macartney's new ones;
+or for Macartney either, for he was no good in the bush. As for Dudley,
+nerves and a loose tongue would do him less harm at home. Besides, any
+ticklish job is a one-man job and I was best alone: once I got hold of
+Hutton there would be no trouble with his followers. But I had no
+intention of mentioning Skunk's Misery to the girl beside me; she was as
+capable of following me there as of fighting wolves for me, and with no
+more reason.
+
+"It's late, and neither you nor I are going to meet Hutton to-night," I
+said rather cheerlessly. "You'd better go to bed."
+
+"I want to say something first," slowly, as if she had been thinking.
+"What Macartney said to-night--that I was engaged to Dick Hutton when
+Mr. Van Ruyne said I took those emeralds--wasn't true! I never was
+engaged to Dick. I was sorry for him once, because I knew he did--care
+for me. But I always hated him--I can't tell you how I hated him! I
+didn't think I could ever love any man till--just lately."
+
+It made me sick to know she meant Dudley. I would have blurted out that
+shrinking from the mere touch of his hand was a queer way to show it;
+only I was afraid to speak at all, for fear I begged her for God's sake
+not to speak of love and Dudley to me! And suddenly something banged
+even that out of my head. "Listen," I heard my own whisper. "Somebody's
+awake--walking round!"
+
+It was only the faintest noise, more like a rustle than a footstep, but
+it sounded like Gabriel's trumpet to a man alone in the middle of the
+night with a girl he had no shadow of right to. If it were Marcia,--but
+I knew that second it was not Marcia, or even Dudley; though I would
+rather have had his just fury than Marcia's evil thoughts and tongue.
+
+"By gad, it's outside," I breathed. "Look out!" But suddenly I changed
+my mind on it. There was only one person who could be outside, and that
+was Hutton, sick of waiting for Paulette and come to look for her. I had
+no desire for her to see how I met him instead, and my hands found her
+shoulders in the dark. "Get back, in the corner--and don't stir!" As
+she moved under my hands the faint sweet scent of her hair made me catch
+my breath with a sort of fierce elation. The gold and silk of it were
+not for me, I knew well enough, but at least I could keep Hutton's hands
+off it. I slipped to the side of the window and stared out into the dark
+shadow of the house, that lay black and square in the white moonlight.
+On the edge of it was a man--and the silly elation left my heart as the
+gas leaves a toy balloon when you stick a pin in it. It was not Hutton
+outside. It was--for the second time that night--only Macartney!
+
+I stood and stared at him like a fool. It was a good half minute before
+I even wondered what had brought Macartney out of his bed in the assay
+office. I watched him stupidly, and he moved; hesitated; and then turned
+to the house door. My heart gave a jump Hutton never could have brought
+there. Macartney in the house with a light, coming into the office for
+something, for all I knew, and finding Paulette and me, would be merely
+a living telephone to Marcia! I tapped at the office window.
+
+Macartney had good ears, I praised the Lord. He turned, not startled,
+but looking round him searchingly, and I stuck my head out of the hinged
+pane of the double window, thanking the Lord again that I had not to
+shove up a squeaking inside sash. "What's brought you back again?" I
+kept my voice down, remembering Marcia. "Anything gone wrong?"
+
+"What?" said Macartney rather sharply. He came close and stared at me.
+"Oh, it's you, Stretton? I thought it was Wilbraham, and he wouldn't be
+any good. It was you I wanted. I've got a feeling there's some one
+hanging round outside here."
+
+I hoped to heaven he had not seen Hutton, waiting for an appointment a
+girl was not going to keep, and I half lied: "I haven't seen any one.
+D'ye mean you thought you did?"
+
+Macartney nodded. "Couldn't swear to it, but I thought so. And I'd too
+much gold in my safe to go to bed; I cleaned up this afternoon. I was
+certain I glimpsed a strange man slipping behind the bunk house when I
+went down an hour ago, and I've been hunting him ever since. I half
+thought I saw him again just now. But, if I did, he's gone!"
+
+"I'll come out!"
+
+But Macartney shook his head sententiously. "I'm enough. I've guns for
+the four mill men who sleep in the shack off the assay office, and
+you've a whack of gold in that room you're standing in; you'd better not
+leave it. Though I don't believe there's any real need for either of us
+to worry: if there was any one around I've scared him. I only thought
+I'd better come up and warn you I'd seen some one. 'Night," and he was
+gone.
+
+I had a sudden idea that he might be a better man in the woods than I
+had thought he was, for he slid out of the house shadow into the bush
+without ever showing up in the moonlight. And as I thought it I felt
+Paulette clutch me, shivering from head to foot. It shocked me, somehow.
+I put my arm straight around her, like you do around a child, and spoke
+deliberately, "Steady, sweet, steady! It's all right. Hutton's gone by
+now. Anyhow, Macartney and I'll take care of you!"
+
+"Oh, my heavens," said Paulette: it sounded half as if she were sick
+with despair, and half as if I were hopelessly stupid. "Take care of
+me--you can't take care of me! You should have let me go. It's too late
+now." She pushed my arm from her as if she hated me and was gone down
+the passage to her room before I could speak.
+
+I shut the office window, with the inside sash down this time, and took
+a scout around outside. But Macartney was right; if any one had been
+waiting about he was gone. I could not find hide or hoof of him
+anywhere, and the moon went down, and I went in and went to bed. In two
+minutes I must have been asleep like a log,--and the first way I knew it
+was that I found myself out of bed, dragging on my clothes and grabbing
+up my gun.
+
+Whatever the row was about it was in the assay office. I heard Macartney
+yell my name through a volley of shots and knew we had both been made
+fools of. I had stopped Paulette meeting Hutton, and Hutton had dropped
+on Macartney and the assay office gold! I shook Dudley till he sat up,
+sober as I never could have been in his shoes, saw him light out in his
+pyjamas to keep guard in his own office that Paulette and I had only
+just left, and legged it for the assay office and Macartney.
+
+I didn't see a soul on the way, except the men who were piling out of
+the bunk house at the sound of a row, as I had piled out of bed; and I
+thought Macartney had raised a false alarm. But inside his office door I
+knew better. The four mill men who slept in the shack just off it were
+all on the office floor, dead, or next door to it. Their guns were on
+the floor too, and Macartney stood towering over the mess.
+
+"Get those staring bunk-house fools out of here," he howled, as the men
+crowded in after me. "I haven't lost any gold, only somebody tried to
+raid me. Why didn't you come and cut them off when I yelled for you?
+They--they got away!"
+
+And suddenly, before I even saw he was swaying, he keeled over on the
+floor.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THOMPSON'S CARDS: AND SKUNK'S MISERY
+
+
+For that second I thought Macartney was dead. But as I jumped to him I
+saw he had only fainted, and that nothing ailed him but a bullet that
+had glanced off his upper arm and left more of a gouge than a wound. Why
+it made him faint I couldn't see, but it had. I left him where he had
+dropped and turned to the four men he had been standing over. But they
+were past helping. They were decent men too, for they were the last of
+our own lot,--and it smote me like a hammer that they might have been
+alive still if I had not interfered with Paulette that night and kept
+her from meeting Hutton.
+
+I knew as I knew there was a roof over my head that it was he who had
+fallen on Macartney, and I would have chased straight after him if
+common sense had not told me he would be lying up in the bush for just
+that, and all I should get for my pains would be a bullet out of the
+dark that would end all chance of me personally ever catching Hutton. I
+took stock of things where I stood, instead. Whether he had a gang or
+not, I knew he had been alone in the thing to-night, and he had done a
+capable job. Our four men had been surprised, for they were all shot in
+the back, as if they had been caught coming in the office door.
+
+Whether Macartney had been surprised or not I could not tell. The
+revolver he had dropped as he fainted lay beside him empty, and there
+were slivers out of the doorpost behind the dead men. None of them
+seemed to have been much help to him. Three had not fired a shot; the
+fourth had just one cartridge missing from his revolver, where he lay
+with his face to the door--and I saw it accounted for by a tearing slash
+in a blue print stuck on the wall to the left of the doorway. I turned
+to the inside wall to see where the bullet that had glanced off
+Macartney had landed, and as I swung round he sat up.
+
+"You may well look--it was one of our own men got me," he said thickly,
+and his curse turned my stomach; I never knew any good come of cursing
+the dead. I told him to shut up and tell how the thing had happened. And
+he grinned with sheer rage.
+
+"It was plain damn foolery! I told you I believed I'd seen some one
+spying around the mine, and after I'd left you I didn't feel so sure
+that I'd cleared him out. I woke those fools up," his glance at the dead
+matched his curse at them, "and said if they heard any one prowling
+round my door they were to lie low in their own shack, let him get in at
+me here, and then bundle out and cut him off from behind. And what they
+did was to lose their heads. They heard some one or they didn't--I don't
+know. But the crazy fools piled out of their shack and ran in to me; and
+a man behind them--_behind_ them, mind you--came on their heels and
+plugged every son of them before they were more than inside my door! It
+was then I yelled for you."
+
+"D'ye mean you saw him--when he shot them?"
+
+"I didn't see what he _looked_ like," scornfully, "with four yelling,
+tumbling men between him and me. But I guess he was the man I'd been
+looking for. I fired and missed him, and when I lit for him over the men
+he'd killed he was gone. I emptied my gun into the dark on chance and
+yelled some more for you, and it was then I got it myself. As I turned
+around in the doorway, Sullivan," he pointed to the only man whose gun
+had been fired, "that I thought was _dead_, sat up and let me have it in
+the arm." He pointed to the ripped blue print. "You see what I'd have
+got if it had caught me straight! And that's all there was to it."
+
+"D'ye mean"--I bit back Hutton's name. I had no time to hatch up a lie
+about him, and I was not going to drag in Paulette--"that--whoever was
+there, never even fired at you?"
+
+"How do I know who he fired at?--I couldn't see inside of his head! I
+know he _hit_ those chumps who could have got him if they had obeyed
+orders--let alone that if they'd stayed out I'd have got him clean
+myself when he came in. As it was, he cleared out before I could do it,"
+said Macartney blackly, but the excitement had gone from his voice.
+"Call a couple of the bunk-house men to carry these four back to their
+shack and clean up this mess, will you? And come into my room while I
+tie up this cut. It's no good going after whoever was here now."
+
+I knew that: also that I could get after him better single-handed at
+Skunk's Misery, where he would not expect me; or I would have been gone
+already. But I didn't air that to Macartney as I followed him into the
+partitioned-off corner he called his room. He had the last two clean-ups
+in his safe there, and he nodded to it as he hauled off his shirt for me
+to bind up his arm.
+
+"With what's there, and what you and Wilbraham have in his office, we've
+too much around to be healthy," he observed succinctly, "and I guess
+some one's got wind of it. I don't know that it'll be any healthier for
+you to try running it out to Caraquet and get held up on the road! But I
+suppose it's got to go."
+
+I nodded. I knew it was hand to mouth with Dudley: he had no cash to
+call on but the mine output, and immediate payments had to be made on
+the machinery we were using. But I was not excited about being held up
+on the Caraquet road,--after I'd once been to Skunk's Misery. I was not
+red-hot about hurrying there, either; I wanted to give Hutton time to
+get back to his lair and feel easy about pursuit after his abortive
+raid. "I expect we'll worry along," I said idly. "Gimme that clean rag
+for your arm!"
+
+But Macartney cast down the handkerchief in his hand. "This fool thing's
+too short! Open that box, will you? There's a roll of bandage just
+inside."
+
+There was. But there was something else just inside, too. I stared at a
+worn leather case, that pretended to be a prayer-book with a brass clasp
+and tarnished gilt edges, a case I had seen too often to make any
+mistake about. "By gad," I cried blankly. "Why, you've got old
+Thompson's cards!"
+
+Macartney was poking at his wounded arm, and he winced. "Hurry up, will
+you? I can't stop this silly blood. Of course I have Thompson's cards;
+I can't help it if you think I'm an ass. I liked the old man, and I
+didn't fancy the Billy Joneses playing cribbage with the only thing in
+the world he cared for. I took the cards the day we buried him--saw them
+lying in the kitchen."
+
+"I expect you needn't have worried about Billy," I commented absently.
+"He was going to give those cards to me, only he and I couldn't find
+them."
+
+"Do come on," snapped Macartney. He was set-eyed as usual, but I guessed
+he was ashamed to have had me find him out in a sentimental weakness.
+"I'd have told you I had them if I'd known you cared. You can take the
+things now, if you want them."
+
+It was not till that minute that I remembered Macartney could not know
+why I wanted them, nor anything about the sort of codicil I'd torn off
+the envelope of Thompson's letter to Dudley: for there had been nothing
+about cards in what he'd read in it, or in the letter itself. But as the
+remembrance of both things shot up in me, I didn't confide them to
+Macartney, any more than I had to Dudley himself. I had a queer sort of
+idea that if Thompson's pencilled scrawl had meant anything more than
+the wanderings of a distressed mind, I'd better get hold of it myself
+first. I said: "All right," and pocketed Thompson's cards. Then I did
+up Macartney's arm, and the two of us went up the road to Dudley. He and
+his dry nurse, Baker, who'd promptly arrived from the bunk house,
+stumped straight back to the assay office with Macartney to fuss over
+the men who'd been killed. I was making for my own room, to see if
+Thompson's resurrected cards would shed any light on his crazy scrawls,
+when I heard a poker drop in the living room. Somebody was in there,
+raking up the fire.
+
+Charliet had gone after Macartney, with Dudley and Baker. I guessed
+Paulette had got up and was trying to start the fire,--for she was
+always working to keep things comfortable--if I haven't mentioned
+it--even for me. I once caught her darning my rags of socks and crying
+over them--the Lord knew why! I went in to stop her now--and it was I
+who stopped dead in the doorway. It was not Paulette inside: it was
+Marcia! Marcia in a velvet dressing gown, poking the ashes all over the
+hearth. I could have sworn I had seen Paulette burn the letter she had
+signed with Tatiana Paulina Valenka's name, but all the same the look of
+Marcia's back turned me sick. And her face turned me sicker as she flung
+around on me, with her fingers all ashes,--and Paulette's letter in her
+hand!
+
+I kept back a curse at the raw fool that was me. I might have seen it
+was not a tightly folded wad of stiff paper I had watched burn up, but
+just the light torn scraps Paulette had thrown in with it. What was
+more, I had been alone with the thing under my very nose in the light
+ashes into which it must have sunk and never had the sense to burrow for
+it. It was too late even to snatch for it: Marcia had read it! She held
+it up to me now,--and Tatiana Paulina Valenka, black on the yellow of
+the scorched paper, hit me on the eyes.
+
+"Who was right, Nicky Stretton?" she demanded triumphantly. "I told you
+I'd seen _Paulette Brown_ before! Only I never thought of the Houston
+business. I could kill Dudley; how dare he bring me out here with a
+thief! I won't have her here another day."
+
+"What thief?" I snapped. "I don't know what you mean! Why on earth are
+you poking in the ashes? What are you up for?"
+
+"Only a Paulette Brown could stay asleep, with Dudley yelling at you and
+Macartney," scornfully. "But if you want to know what I was poking in
+the ashes for, I had no matches, and my fire was out, so I came in here
+for a log to light it up. And I found this!"
+
+"Well, burn it," said I furiously. But she had begun to read it out, and
+I would have been a fool to stop her, for what Marcia knew I had to
+know. But it knocked me silly. The something Paulette had "wanted to
+make clear" was just a letter to Hutton! And the Lord knows it made me
+more set than ever on getting to Skunk's Misery before Hutton could know
+that Tatiana Paulina Valenka had given in! Because she had. She was not
+only going to meet him; she was going away with him, Marcia's hard voice
+read out baldly, if only he would give up the plan in his head. But it
+was the last sentence that bit into me:
+
+"Oh, Dick, have some mercy! I know you hate me now, but have some
+mercy; don't do what I'm afraid of. I'll give you all you
+want--myself--everything--if only you'll let that be. Go away, as I
+begged you, and I'll leave Dudley for you, and go too." And it was
+signed, as I knew Paulette Brown had not meant to sign anything,
+"Tatiana Paulina Valenka."
+
+I never even wondered how she had meant to get it to Hutton, if she had
+not supposed she burned it. Every drop of my blood boiled in me with the
+determination that she should never pay Hutton's price with her lips
+against his that she hated, and his cheek on her soft hair I had never
+touched; all the gold Dudley Wilbraham could ever mine was not worth
+that. But I kept a cold eye on Marcia. "A half-burnt letter--that
+wasn't going to be sent--isn't anything but girl's nonsense," I swore
+contemptuously.
+
+"Isn't it? We'll see--when Dudley reads it!" Marcia looked like a devil
+hunched up in her dressing gown, with her gums showing as she grinned.
+"I told you she never meant to marry him. Now we'll see if he marries
+her--when she writes letters like this!"
+
+"I won't let you show it to Dudley!"
+
+"You are like--everybody: cracked about a Paulette Brown!" Marcia
+retorted; and if I had only known what the "everybody" was going to mean
+I think I could have managed her, even then, by coming out with it. But
+I didn't know, and I did the best I could.
+
+"Marcia Wilbraham, if you dare to show that thing to Dudley, or so much
+as speak of it, I'll pay you out,--so help me," I said; and if it was in
+a voice no decent woman knows a man can use, I meant it to be. It scared
+Marcia, anyhow, though heaven knew I didn't see how I could ever pay her
+out, no matter what she did. She let go of the letter, which she had to,
+for I had her by the wrist. I would have burnt it up, only I had no
+match. Marcia leaned forward suddenly, electrically, and tapped the "Oh,
+Dick" in the last sentence, that was the only name in the letter.
+
+"Well, I'm damned," said she coolly. "Why, the thing's to you! Do you
+mean you're going to run away with that--that girl?"
+
+"No," I said furiously and then saw I was an ass, "I mean, not now!"
+
+"Since I know about you," Marcia cut me off sweetly. But she stared at
+me calculatingly. "H--m," said she, "I beg your pardon for mistaking
+your N for a big, big D, Nicky darling, but you see I never heard any
+one call you plain, short Nick! I don't exactly see why she had to write
+with you in the house, either, but you needn't be nervous. I'm not going
+to use my cinch on you--not now, anyway! I've changed my mind about
+telling Dudley. It won't do me any harm to keep something up my sleeve
+against you, if ever I want to do anything you don't admire. It wasn't
+the least bit of use for you to snatch that letter; I learned it off by
+heart before you came in on me. And I can always threaten Dudley now
+that I'll tell who Paulette Brown really is, if he tries to bully me
+about any one I have a fancy for!"
+
+Of course I knew she was thinking of Macartney. I didn't believe Dudley
+would have cared if she had married him ten times over. But he might
+have been making some unreasonable objection to Macartney, at that, for
+all I knew.
+
+"I don't care one straw about your knowing I was going to take Paulette
+Brown out of this. But if you don't hold your tongue on it, I'll know
+it, so you mind that," I observed with some heat. Yet I was easier. She
+could not talk that night, anyhow, and she was welcome to come out with
+her crazy lie about Paulette and myself, once Hutton was dead,--because
+he and a snake would be all one to me, once I got my hands on him. After
+that I had no qualms about being able to make Dudley see the truth
+concerning that letter, and that it had been written to save his
+gold,--and his life, likely enough! I let Marcia believe the name in the
+letter was mine, and that Paulette had been going off with me. All I
+wished was that she had been. I went off to my room and left Marcia
+sitting over the dead fire,--not so triumphant as she'd meant to be, for
+all the good face she put on it.
+
+Paulette's letter had pretty well knocked out all the interest I had in
+old Thompson's cards, but I got out the torn scrap of paper I'd put
+away. There was nothing on it but what I'd read before: "For God's sake
+search my cards--_my cards!_"--and it looked crazier than ever with the
+things in my hand. The cards had been water-soaked and were bumpy and
+blistery where Billy Jones had dried them, even though they were
+flattened out again by the pressure of their tight case; but there was
+nothing _to_ them, except that they were old Thompson's beyond a doubt.
+If I had thought there might be writing on them there was not so much as
+the scratch of a pencil. There seemed to be a card missing. I thought it
+was the deuce of hearts; but I was too sick over Marcia's discovery
+about Paulette to really examine the things and make sure. I shoved them
+into my coat pocket beside what was there already, just as Dudley came
+into my room.
+
+He had enough to worry him without hearing that Marcia had found out
+about Paulette. He sat on my bed, biting his nails; and said--what
+Macartney had said--that we had too much gold at La Chance to run the
+risk of losing it by a better organized raid on it: and--what I had
+known for myself--that the mine output represented his only ready money
+for notes that were past renewing, and that it had to go out to
+Caraquet. When I said why not, he bit his nails some more, and said he
+was afraid of a hold-up: what he wanted me to do was to ride over to the
+Halfway and scout around from there to clear the Caraquet road, before I
+started out from La Chance with an ounce of gold.
+
+The idea suited me well enough. It would cover my expedition to Skunk's
+Misery. But I did not mention that, or Hutton, to Dudley; and never
+guessed I was a criminal fool! I did not mean to waste any time in
+scouting around the road, either, when I knew just where my man would be
+sitting, with the half dozen wastrels he had probably scraped up. But
+first I wanted five minutes, even two minutes, with Paulette, to warn
+her of what Marcia knew. So I said the afternoon would be time enough to
+start.
+
+But Dudley would not hear of it and blazed out till I had to give up all
+idea of warning Paulette, and get out. And as I rode away from La Chance
+the last person I saw was Macartney, though I might not have remembered
+it, if I had not turned my head after I passed and caught the same grin
+on his face he had worn there the night his own man shot him. I rode
+back and asked him what the mischief he was grinning at.
+
+"Grinning--because I'm angry," Macartney returned with his usual set
+stare. "I'd sooner go with you than stay here, burying men and talking
+to Wilbraham. I'm sick of La Chance, if you'd like to know. I came here
+to mine, not to play in moving pictures. But I guess I've got to stick,
+unless I can hurry up my job here. So long--but I don't expect you'll
+see anything of last night's man on the Caraquet road!"
+
+Neither did I, nor of any one else. But I was not prepared to find the
+Halfway stable empty, when I rode in there just at dark. The house was
+as deserted as the stable, though the fire was alive in the stove, and
+taking both things together, I decided Billy and his wife had taken a
+four-horse team into Caraquet for a load. I had meant to borrow one of
+his horses to go on to Skunk's Misery,--for this time I intended to ride
+there. But with no horse to borrow, there was nothing to do but to ride
+my own, and it was toward ten that night when I left him to wait for me
+in a spruce thicket, within half a mile of the porcupine burrows that
+Skunk's Misery called houses.
+
+As I turned away, the cold bit a hundred times worse for the lack of
+snow in the woods, and the bare ground made the pat of my moccasins
+sound louder than I liked; but on the other hand I should leave no track
+back to my waiting horse, if I had to clear out without getting Hutton.
+The thought made me grin, for I had no fear of it.
+
+Hutton would be asleep, judging from the look of things; for as I got
+fairly into Skunk's Misery, it lay still as the dead. The winding tracks
+through it were deserted; silent between and under the great rocks and
+boulders; slippery in the open with droppings from the pine trees that
+grew in and on the masses of huddled rocks. The wind rose a little,
+too, and soughed in the pine branches, to die wailing among the stones.
+It did not strike me as a cheerful wind for a man in Hutton's shoes, for
+it covered the light sound of my feet as I went past the hut of the boy
+I had nursed and through the maze of tracks his mother had shown me, to
+the new log lean-to the Frenchwoman's son had built and never used. But,
+as I reached it, I was suddenly not so sure Hutton was there!
+
+The lean-to looked all right. The door was open, just as I had left it.
+But, as I crossed the threshold, I knew I was too late, and there was
+nobody inside, or in the cave underneath it where men had been when I
+slept there. The place had that empty feeling of desertion, or late
+occupancy and a cold lair, that even a worse fool than I could not
+mistake now. I shut the door on myself without sound, all the same;
+snapped my pocket lantern; and stared,--at just what I had known I was
+going to find.
+
+There was nothing in the place now but the bare lean-to walls and the
+rock they backed on; but twenty men had been living there since I left
+it. The black mark of their fire was plain against the rock face; the
+log floor was splintered by heavy boots with nails in them--which did
+not speak of the moccasined return of the Frenchwoman's son--and in the
+place where I had once made a bed of pine boughs and carried it away
+with me there lay a flurry of litter that spoke volumes: for among it
+was a corned-beef can that was no product of Skunk's Misery, where meat
+meant squirrels and rabbits, and--a corked bottle of wolf dope! That I
+laid gingerly aside till I had poked around in the rest of the mess, but
+there was not much else there besides kindling. I got up to leg it for
+the underground cave, blazing that I had missed Hutton and half hoping
+he might be there,--but I dropped flump on my knees again, dumbfounded.
+
+Underneath the displaced litter, stuck sideways in a crack of the log
+floor, was a shiny, dirty white playing card. I pulled it out. And in
+the narrow white beam of my electric lantern I saw the missing two of
+hearts out of Thompson's pack!
+
+I saw more, too, before I even wondered how one of Thompson's cards had
+ever got to Skunk's Misery. The deuce of hearts was written on--closely,
+finely and legibly--with indelible pencil. And as I read the short
+sentences, word by word, I knew Thompson had never got to Caraquet,
+never got anywhere but to the cave under the very lean-to I knelt
+in--till he had been brought up from it, here--to be taken away and
+drowned in Lac Tremblant, as a decent man would not drown a dog! And I
+knew--at last--where Hutton and his gang were, and who Hutton was!
+
+But I made no move to go underground to the cave to look for them. And
+the only word that came to my tongue was: "_Macartney!_"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+A DEAD MAN'S MESSENGER
+
+
+For the written message on Thompson's lost card was plain. Macartney
+was--Hutton! And Hutton's gang were just the new, rough men Macartney
+had dribbled in to the La Chance mine!
+
+It was Macartney--our capable, hard-working superintendent--for whom
+Paulette had mistaken me in the dark, that first night I came home to La
+Chance and the dream girl, who was no nearer me now than she was then;
+Macartney from whom she had sealed the boxes of gold, to prevent him
+substituting others and sending me off to Caraquet with worthless
+dummies; Macartney I had heard her tell herself she could not trust;
+Macartney who had put that wolf dope--that there was no longer any doubt
+he had brought from Skunk's Misery--in my wagon; Macartney who had had
+that boulder stuck in the road to smash my pole, by the same men who
+were posted by the corduroy road through the swamp to cut me off there
+if the wolves and the broken wagon failed; and Macartney who had been
+balked by a girl I had left at La Chance to fight him alone now!
+
+The thing seemed to jump at me from six places at once, now that I knew
+enough to see it was there at all. But what sickened me at my own utter
+blindness was not the nerve of the man, but just the risk he had let
+Paulette run on the Caraquet road, and--old Thompson! For Thompson had
+never sent Macartney to La Chance, and Macartney had had him murdered in
+cold blood!
+
+If my eyes fogged as I stared at the dead man's two of hearts, it was
+only half with fury. Old Thompson had been decent, harmless, happy with
+his unintelligent work and his sad solitaire,--and he had been through
+seven hells before he wrote what I read now:
+
+     "Wilbraham--Stretton--pray God one of you saw all I could
+     put inside envelope of last letter Macartney forced me to
+     write. I never sent him to La Chance. I never saw the man
+     till he waylaid me between Halfway and Caraquet, and brought
+     me here. Do not know where it is, am prisoner underground.
+     Wrote you two letters to save my miserable life; know now I
+     have not saved it. Your lives--gold--everything--in danger
+     too. For any sake get Macartney before he gets you. No use
+     to look for me. Tried to warn you inside envelope, but
+     suppose was no use. Good-by. _Take care, take care!_ There
+     was a boy Macartney sent off with my horse; was kind; said
+     he would come back. When he does, takes this to you----He
+     has not come. Been brought up into lean-to, am gagged, feel
+     death near. Forgive treachery--life was dear--get Macar----"
+
+But the scrawl broke off in a long pencil line, where death had jerked
+Thompson's elbow, and his card had fallen from his hand.
+
+I sat on the floor and saw the thing. Macartney, hidden in Skunk's
+Misery, making plans to get openly and with decent excuse to La Chance,
+had fallen on Thompson and used him. And for Thompson, writing lying
+letters in Skunk's Misery in fear of the death that had come to him in
+the end, there had been no rescue. His scribbled envelope, even if
+Dudley or I had understood it, had come too late. The boy who took his
+horse to Billy--whoever he was--had never come back. Thompson had not
+even had time, in the end, to slip his written-over card into the cased
+pack I had found in his almost empty pockets, before Macartney's
+men--for of course Macartney himself had never been near the place since
+he got his wolf dope there and left it for good--had taken him off and
+made away with him. Once his last letter was written and posted under
+cover from Caraquet to be reposted to Dudley from Montreal by some
+unknown hand, Macartney had no more use for Thompson, and a screen
+against betrayal on two sides: either by his own men, or that chance
+finding of Thompson's body that had actually happened; for Thompson's
+own letter would clear his murderer.
+
+As for Thompson's envelope! It's an easy enough thing to do if you just
+slip your pencil inside an envelope and write blindly, but it made me
+sick to think of poor old Thompson scrawling in the inside of his
+envelope, furiously, furtively, while the ink of his neat copperplate
+dried on the outside, and Macartney likely stood by poring over the
+actual letter, wondering if there was any flaw in it that could show out
+and damn him. And the desperate scrawl in the envelope had been _no
+good_, thanks to the fool brain and tongue of myself, Nicky Stretton! It
+had done more to warn Macartney than either Dudley or me, since if
+Thompson had written in the reverse of the envelope he was also likely
+to have written on anything that would take a pencil.
+
+It was no wonder Macartney had stood stunned over that envelope, till
+Dudley and I believed him heartsick for his friend, for it must have
+been then that he remembered Thompson's cards,--that I guessed the old
+man had just sat and played with, day in and day out, while he was a
+prisoner and about to die. Thompson could have written on them; and
+Macartney must have feared it, or he never would have stolen them from
+Billy Jones. I hoped grimly that he had been good and worried before he
+got his chance to do it and set his mind at ease. And at ease it must
+have been, for he had actually known nothing about the cards; he could
+only have taken them on chance, from sheer terror, and found them
+harmless. He had probably never even noticed one was missing--and
+whatever Thompson had not been wise about he had been wise when he took
+out a deuce, and not one of the four aces the most casual eye must
+miss--or he would never have let me have them, contemptuously, as one
+lets a child play with a knife without a blade.
+
+Only I was not so sure this particular knife had no blade,--for
+Macartney!
+
+He knew nothing of the desperate scrawl on the bottom flap of that
+envelope that his own hasty grab had jerked off and left in my fist;
+nothing of the deuce of hearts that made its crazy inscription pitifully
+sane to me now; and nothing in particular about me, Nicky Stretton. But
+when I came to think of all I knew about Macartney, that was no
+remarkable consolation; for--except his never noticing that the bottom
+flap of Thompson's envelope was missing, and taking it for granted it
+had been blank like the top one--he had made a fool of me all along the
+line!
+
+I had stopped Paulette from going away with him the night before, after
+she thought she had burned the note she had meant to slip into his hand;
+but he must have told her, outside in the passage, when I thought he was
+sending a message to Marcia, that if she did not go with him then--in
+the next hour--he would begin trouble that very night for Dudley and La
+Chance.
+
+And he had! It was Paulette he was waiting for, when he lied to me about
+a strange man. And he had gone straight down to the assay office, done
+his own alarm of a robber, and killed four men to give it artistic
+truth. It was no wonder he had said he was sick of playing in moving
+pictures and grinned at me when I left La Chance to search the Caraquet
+road for nobody else but himself.
+
+As for his gang, the very bunk-house men he had told me to order out of
+the assay office, were just Macartney's own gang from Skunk's Misery,
+come over when they had silenced Thompson forever; at Macartney's elbow
+whenever he chose to murder the lot of us and commandeer the La Chance
+mine. I wished, irrelevantly, that Dunn and Collins _had_ got to
+Macartney, instead of being killed on the way; they might have been
+chancy young devils about stealing gold, but they would never have stood
+for murdering old Thompson! It was no good thinking of that, though.
+
+I stowed away Thompson's deuce of hearts, that no boy had ever come for,
+in the case with those other pitiful cards he had told me to search, and
+got on my feet with only one thought in my head,--to get back to La
+Chance and my dream girl that Macartney was alone with, except for
+Dudley,--Dudley whom he hated, who had threatened him for Paulette
+Valenka, for Thompson, till it was no wonder I had found him with the
+face of a devil where he lurked eavesdropping in the shack hall. And
+there something else hit me whack. Baker, Dudley's jackal, was one of
+Macartney's gang: told off, for all I knew, to put him out of the way! I
+wheeled to get out of that damn lean-to quicker than I had got in; and
+instead I stood rooted to the floor. _Below me, somewhere underground,
+somebody was moving!_
+
+Naturally, I knew it could not be Macartney, because he could not have
+got there, even if he had not had other fish to fry at home. But one of
+his gang might have been left at Skunk's Misery and could have the life
+choked out of him. There was no way leading underground directly from
+the lean-to, or I would have been caught the night I slept there and
+believed real voices were a dream. I slid out of the door, around the
+boulder that backed the place, and was afraid of my lantern. I went down
+on my hands and knees to feel for a track and found one, down a gully
+that ran in under a blind rock. I crawled down it, all but flat, as I
+burrowed like a rabbit, with my back scraping against the living rock
+between me and the sky, and my head turned to the place where I knew the
+lean-to stood. I was under it with no warning whatever; in a natural,
+man-high cellar I could stand up in, with half a dozen bolt holes
+running off it: and I had no need to flash up my lantern to see them.
+There was a light in the place already from a candle-end Macartney's men
+must have left behind; and beside it, not looking at me, not even
+hearing my step, because he was sobbing his heart out, lay the boy I had
+carried home from the Caraquet road!
+
+"Thompson's boy, who took his horse to Billy--who never came back!" I
+said to myself. God knows I touched him gently, but he screamed like a
+shot rabbit till he saw my face.
+
+"You?" said I. "What's the matter with you? Brace up; it's only me!"
+
+Brace up was just what he did not do. He sank back with every muscle of
+him relaxed. "Bon Dieu, I thought you was him come back," he gasped in
+his bastard French Indian, "that man that half killed me on the Caraquet
+road! But it wasn't him I was crying about. It was the other man--that
+promised me two dollars for something."
+
+"To come back and take a letter--where you had taken his horse?"
+
+The boy--I did not even know his name--nodded, with a torrent of sullen
+patois. He had never come for his two dollars, and now the man was gone
+and he would never get it. But it was not his fault. The first man--the
+one who had sent him to the Halfway with the horse--had caught him
+crawling back for the letter, had told him the man who was going to pay
+him had gone away long ago, and had taken him out to chop firewood and
+let a tree fall on him. How the lad had ever crawled out to the Caraquet
+road I did not ask. I think the thing that stabbed me was that I had
+been within five hundred yards of Thompson all the time I was nursing
+this very boy, that the knowledge of it had lain behind unconscious lips
+within a hand's breadth of me, that I had gone away ignorant, leaving
+Thompson robbed of the only help he could ever have had.
+
+"Why didn't you tell me all that--the night I came over to your
+mother's?" I groaned.
+
+The boy said shortly that his mother would have gone straight off and
+told I'd been there, if he had come out with the truth. It was all lies
+she had told me about the Frenchwoman's son; he had never been near the
+place. It was the man who had half killed him who had built the lean-to,
+and his mother had said she would finish the business if ever he opened
+his mouth about it, or let out the truth about the same man sending him
+to the Halfway with a horse, or the smelling stuff she had helped him
+make.
+
+"You're sure she didn't go and tell that man about me, anyway?" I
+remembered Macartney's grin.
+
+But the boy shook his head. "She didn't worry; she said you were too big
+a fool to matter!" After which wholesome truth he announced listlessly
+that he was done with his mother. She had turned him out of her house
+now, anyway. She said he was no good to her, now that he could only
+crawl, and could not even trap enough rabbits to live on, and she had
+another man living in her house who would do it for her. So he had come
+here to find the man who had promised him two dollars--that solitary
+bill that had been all the money in Thompson's pockets--and when he
+found him gone and the place empty he had stayed there to hide, and
+because he had nowhere else to go.
+
+I thought of his mother's haggard, handsome face and hard mouth.
+Macartney had certainly found a good ally while he was laid up in
+Skunk's Misery waiting for his chance to fall on Paulette. But all that
+did not matter now. What did matter was that I had found the missing
+link between Thompson's cards and Macartney in the boy who had taken
+Thompson's horse back to the Halfway. I had no mind to produce him now
+though; for there were other things to be looked to than showing up old
+Thompson's murder. And the boy was safe where he was, for one glance at
+him had told me he could not walk half a mile.
+
+"Are you safe from your mother here--and can you get food for yourself?"
+I demanded abruptly, and the boy nodded the head I knew would never be
+other than a cripple's. "Well, you stay here," I told him, because if
+ever I needed the poor little devil for a witness against Macartney he
+would be no good lying dead somewhere in the bush, "and I'll come back
+and pay you ten times two dollars for just waiting here till I come. But
+you'll have to hide if that man comes back who sent you out with the
+horse!" I knew Macartney would kill him in good earnest, if he came back
+and found him with a living tongue in his head. "Don't you trust any one
+but me--or some one who comes and gives you twenty dollars," I added
+emphatically, just because that was the only absolutely unlikely event I
+could think of. "And even then, you stay here till you see me!
+Understand?"
+
+He said he did; it was easy enough to creep out after dark and rob
+rabbit traps; he was doing it now. And from the greed a fortune of
+twenty dollars had lit in his wretched eyes, I knew he would go on doing
+it till I came back. Of what wildly unexpected use he was to be to me in
+his waiting, heaven knows I had no thought. I crept out of his burrow as
+I had crept in, got back to my half-frozen horse, and rode hell for
+leather back to the Halfway. And just there was where I slumped.
+
+My horse had to be fed and rested; he was dead beat when I led him into
+the unlocked stable, and when I had seen to him I meant to rouse up
+Billy Jones and tell him all the ugly stuff I had unearthed--and seen
+too--for the killing of four innocent men was hot in my mind. But I did
+not, for the excellent reason that Billy was not back. His house was
+dark, and his four horses still away from their vacant stalls. I sat
+down on a heap of clean straw to wait for him, and I said I slumped. I
+went sound, dead asleep. If I was hunting for excuses I might say it was
+two in the morning, and I had been up most of the night before. But
+anyhow, I did it. And I sat up, dazed, to see a lantern held in front
+of my eyes and one of Macartney's men from La Chance staring at me.
+
+It struck me even then that it was not he who was surprised; and the
+sleep jerked out of me like wine out of a glass. "What are you doing
+here? And where the devil's Billy?" I snapped, without thinking.
+
+I saw the man grin. "Billy's fired," he returned coolly. "Him and his
+wife got it in a note from Wilbraham, day before yesterday, when your
+teamsters stopped here on their way to Caraquet. They doubled up their
+teams with Billy's and took him and his wife along, and all their stuff.
+And I guess they'd been fired too, for they ain't come back. Mr.
+Macartney sent me over to see. Anything I can do for you?"
+
+"Take that lantern out of my eyes, and hustle me up some breakfast.
+I--I'm sorry about Billy!" I was not; I was startled,--and worse. It had
+not been Dudley who had dismissed him, asinine as he had been about
+Billy and old Thompson, or he would have told me. It had been Macartney,
+getting rid of him and my teamsters under my very nose; and--as
+Macartney's parting grin recurred to me--if his man had any one with him
+in Billy's vacant shack they had been put there to get rid of _me_.
+
+"Get me a bucket of water and make coffee, if you haven't done it," I
+said, yawning. "I'll come in--as soon as I've fed my horse."
+
+But I did neither. I stopped yawning, too. Through the frosty window, as
+the man disappeared for the shack, I saw a light in its doorway and two
+more of Macartney's men standing in it, black between the lamp and the
+gray morning glimmer. I stirred some meal into the water Macartney's man
+had brought, drank a mouthful before I let my horse have just enough to
+rinse his throat with, and threw on his saddle. It was flat on his neck
+that I came out the stable door, and what Macartney's men meant to have
+done I don't know, for I was down the road toward La Chance like a
+rocket. And before I had made a mile I knew I had got off none too soon,
+for we were going to have snow at last, and have it hard.
+
+Before I cleared the corduroy road it cut my face in fine stinging
+flakes, and by the time I was halfway to La Chance it was blinding me.
+It came on a wind, too, and I cursed it as I faced it, with my horse
+toiling through the heavy, sandy stuff that was too cold and dry to
+pack. The twenty-two miles home took me most of the day. It was close on
+dusk when I fumbled through drifting, hissing snow and choking wind, to
+the door of the La Chance stable. And the second I got inside I knew
+Macartney's man had told the truth, and Macartney had fired my
+teamsters with Billy Jones. There was not a soul about the place, and
+ten hungry horses yelled at me at once as I stamped my half-frozen feet
+on the floor. I would have shouted for Charliet if it had not seemed
+quicker to feed them myself. I yanked down a forkful of hay for each of
+them, after I saw to my own horse. And if you think I was a fool to
+worry over dumb beasts, just that small delay made a difference in my
+immediate future that likely saved my life. If I had raced off for the
+house at once I might have met with----Well, an accident! But that comes
+in later.
+
+As it was I was a good twenty minutes in that stable. When I waded out
+into the swirling white dusk of snow and wind between me and the shack I
+was just cautious enough, after the Halfway business, to stare hard
+through the blinding storm at the house I was making for, though I did
+not think Macartney was ripe to dare anything open against me at La
+Chance. But with that stare I knew abruptly that he was! Massed just
+inside the open door of Dudley's shack, that was black dark but for one
+light in the living-room window, were a crowd of men that looked like
+nothing in the world but our own miners, that I knew now for
+Hutton's--or Macartney's--gang! How he dared have them there, instead of
+in the bunk house, beat me,--but it was them, all right. The wind was
+clear of snow for one second, and I saw them plainly. And they saw me.
+Without one sound the whole gang jumped for me. I had my gun out, and I
+could have stopped the leaders before I had to get back against the
+stable door; but there was no need.
+
+There was a shout behind me. The men checked, sprawling over each other
+in the snow--ludicrously, if I had been seeing much humor in things--and
+it was then it struck me that I should have had an accident if I had
+bolted straight into a dark house, instead of delaying in the stable
+till Macartney's gang got tired of waiting for me and bundled out
+themselves to see where I was. But I only wheeled, with my gun in my
+fist, to Macartney's voice.
+
+What I had expected to see I don't know. What I did see, stumbling
+through the drifts to me, was an indistinguishable figure that turned
+out to be two. For it was Macartney, carrying Marcia Wilbraham. And
+behind him, short-skirted to her knees, and with no coat but her
+miserable little blue sweater, came my dream girl.
+
+I forgot Macartney could not know I knew he was Hutton, or all the rest
+that I did know. I said, "What hell's trick are you up to now?"
+
+But Macartney only turned a played-out face to me. "Take her from me,
+will you?" he snapped. "I'm done." He let Marcia slip down into the
+snow. "Wilbraham's killed!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+WOLVES--AND DUDLEY
+
+
+It was cleverly done. So was the desperate gesture of Macartney's hand
+across his blood-shot, congested eyes. If I had not had Thompson's deuce
+of hearts in my pocket I might have doubted if Macartney really were
+Hutton, or had had any hand in the long tale of tragedy at La Chance.
+But as it was I knew, in my inside soul, bleakly, that if Dudley were
+dead Macartney had killed him,--as only luck had kept him from killing
+me.
+
+I saw him give a quick, flicking sign to his men with the fingers of the
+hand that still covered his eyes, and I knew I was right in the last
+thing, anyhow, for the men straggled back from us, as to an order. They
+were to do nothing now, before Paulette and Marcia, if their first
+instructions had been to ambush inside the shack to dispose of me when I
+got back from the Halfway,--which I had not been meant to do. I did not
+drop my gun hand, or fling the truth at Macartney. But I made no move
+to pick up Marcia. I said, "How d'ye mean Dudley's killed? Who killed
+him?"
+
+"Wolves!" If Macartney meant me to think he was too sick to answer
+properly he was not, for he spoke suddenly to the bunk-house men. "There
+is no good in your waiting round, or looking any more. They've got Mr.
+Wilbraham, and"--he turned his head to me again--"they damn nearly got
+me!"
+
+Later, I wished sincerely that they had, for it would have saved me some
+trouble. At that minute all I wanted was to get even with Macartney
+myself. I said, "Pick up Marcia and get into the house. You can talk
+there!"
+
+Macartney glanced at me. Secretly, perhaps, neither of us wanted to give
+the other a chance by stooping for a heavy girl; I knew I was not going
+to do it. But Paulette must have feared I was. She sprang past me and
+lifted Marcia with smooth, effortless strength, as if she were nothing.
+
+Macartney started, as though he realized he had been a fool not to have
+done it himself, and wheeled to walk into the house before us, where he
+could have slipped cartridges into his gun; I knew afterwards that it
+was empty. But Paulette had moved off with Marcia and a peremptory
+gesture of her back-flung head that kept Macartney behind her. I came
+behind him. And because he had no idea of all I knew about him, he took
+things as they looked on the surface. With Paulette leading, and me on
+Macartney's heels, we filed into the living room. There was a light
+there, but the fire was out. I guessed Charliet was hiding under his
+bed,--in which I wronged him. But I was not worrying about Charliet or
+cold rooms then. Paulette laid Marcia down on the floor, and I stood in
+the doorway. I did not believe the bunk-house men would come back till
+an open row suited Macartney's book, but there was no harm in commanding
+the outside doors of the shack, all the same. And the sudden thought
+that we were all in the living room but Dudley, and that he would never
+come back to it, gripped my soul between fury and anguish. "Get it
+out--about Dudley," I said; and I did not care if my voice were thick.
+
+Macartney looked over at me just as an honest, capable superintendent
+ought to have looked. "I can't; because I don't know it. All I do know's
+this. After you went off yesterday Wilbraham got to drinking; the wolves
+began to howl round the place after dark, and he said they drove him
+mad. He got a gun and went out after them--and he never came back. I
+didn't even know he was gone till midnight. I thought he'd shut himself
+in his office as he often does, till I heard shots outside, and found
+he wasn't in the house. I turned out the bunk-house men to look for him
+that instant, and when the lot you saw waiting in the shack for me came
+home toward morning, and said they couldn't find a sign of Wilbraham,
+and the bush was so full of wolves they were scared to go on looking, I
+went myself----"
+
+"And took _girls_"--I remembered the reek of my wolf-doped clothes till
+I fancied I could smell the stuff there in the room, thought of a half
+drunk man walking out on a like baited track, and two girls taken over
+it to look for him--"into bush like that!"
+
+"They followed me," curtly. "I didn't know it till it was too late to
+turn them back! I couldn't have sent Miss Wilbraham back, anyhow; she
+was nearly crazy. And if you're thinking of wolves, it was getting
+daylight, and----" he hesitated, and I could have filled in the pause
+for myself, remembering how that wolf dope acted: two lambs could have
+moved in the bush with safety, so long as they kept away from where it
+was smeared on the ground. But Macartney filled it in differently. "And,
+anyhow, it was well they did come. It was Marcia--found Wilbraham!"
+
+I don't think I had really believed Dudley was dead till then. I stared
+at Marcia, lying on the floor as purple in the face from over-exertion
+and fright as if she had had an apoplectic fit, and at Paulette stooping
+over her, silent, and white around the mouth. She looked up at me, and
+her eyes gave me fierce warning, if I had needed it.
+
+"Marcia got afraid and bolted for home--the wrong way," she spoke up
+sharply. "When I ran after her she was standing in some spruces,
+screaming and pointing in front of her. I saw the blood on the ground,
+and----Here's Dudley's cap! I found it, all chewed, close by." She
+pulled out a rag of fur from under her snow-caked sweater; and as the
+stale reek of the Skunk's Misery wolf dope rose from the thing, I knew
+the smell in the room had been no fancy, and how Dudley Wilbraham had
+died. I wheeled and saw Macartney's face,--the face of a man who took me
+for a fool whose nose would tell him nothing.
+
+"D'ye mean _that_ was all you found?" I got out.
+
+"No! The rest was there. But it was--unrecognizable! Even I couldn't
+look at it. It was--pretty tough, for girls. I shot one wolf we scared
+off it, but I couldn't do anything more. I couldn't lift--it;
+but--Dudley's coat was on it." He had turned so white that I remembered
+his faint in the assay office, like you do remember things that don't
+matter. I would have thought him chicken-hearted for a wholesale
+murderer, if it had not been for the cold hate in his eyes.
+
+"D'ye mean you left Dudley--out there in the bush? Where the devil was
+Baker, that black and white weasel you set to look after him? I'll bet
+he saved _his_ skin! Where is he?"
+
+"Baker's missing, too," simply; and I did not believe it. "And I don't
+see what else I could have done but leave Dudley. None of the men were
+with me to carry him in; it had begun to snow; and in another hour I
+couldn't have kept the track back to La Chance. As it was, Miss Marcia
+played out; I had to carry her most of the way. And that's all there is
+to it," with sudden impatience, "except that Wilbraham's dead and
+Baker's missing. If he wasn't, he would have brought Dudley in."
+
+"Yes," I said. I saw Charliet's head poke around the corner of the
+kitchen door and called to him to carry Marcia to her room, and to get
+fires going and something to eat; for the queer part of it was that
+there seemed to be two of me, and one of them was thinking it was
+starving. It saw Charliet and my dream girl take Marcia out, and the
+other me turned on Macartney.
+
+"By gad, there's one thing more," I said slowly. "You don't have to go
+on playing moving pictures, Dick Hutton, or using an alias either!
+You've killed Dudley and Thompson, and for a good guess Dunn and
+Collins, if I can't be sure--and you'd have had me first of all, if your
+boulder and your wolf dope hadn't failed you on the Caraquet road!"
+
+Macartney's furious, surprised oath was real. "I don't know what you
+mean! Who on earth"--but he stammered on it--"Who d'ye mean by Hutton?"
+
+"You," said I. "And if you're not he, I don't know why! There's no one
+else who would have followed Paulette Valenka out here. I don't believe
+what you've done's been all revenge on the girl you tried to get into
+trouble about Van Ruyne's emeralds, or scare that Dudley would worm out
+the truth about that, either: but if it was to jump the La Chance mine
+too, you're busted! Your accident serial story won't go down. I knew
+about your wolf dope business long ago, and do you suppose _this_," I
+shoved Dudley's cap under his nose, "doesn't tell me how you limed the
+trap you set for Dudley last night, or what you smeared on his clothes
+when he was too drunk to smell it? I know what brought the wolves to
+howl around this house, if I don't know how you shoved Dudley out to
+them. I know it was a home-made raid you had down at the assay office,
+and--I've been to Skunk's Misery!"
+
+"Well?" said Macartney thickly.
+
+"Well enough! I have Thompson's deuce of hearts you didn't see was
+missing, when you gave me back his pack! With any luck I'll pay you out
+for that, and our four mill men, _and_ Dudley; not here, where you can
+fight and die quick, but outside--where they've things like gallows! Oh,
+you would, would you?"
+
+For his empty gun just missed me as he made a lightning jump to bring it
+down on my head, and my left hand stopped him up just under the ear. I
+ought to have shot him. I don't know why I held back. I was so mad with
+rage when he dropped that I could have jumped on him like a lumberman
+and tramped the heart out of him. But I only lit for the kitchen, and
+Charliet's clothesline. As I got back and knelt down by the man who had
+called himself Macartney, Thompson rose up before me, as he had sat in
+that very room, playing his lonely solitaire; and the four dead men in
+the assay office; and Dudley--only I had no grief for Dudley, because it
+was drowned in rage. I bound Macartney round and round with the
+clothesline, whether he was really Hutton or not,--and I meant to have
+the truth out of him about that and everything else before I was done.
+But when I had him gagged with kitchen towels while he was still knocked
+out, I sat back on my heels to think; and I damned myself up and down
+because I had not shot Macartney out of hand.
+
+I had Macartney all right; but I had next door to nothing else, unless I
+could find a safe place to jail him while I disposed of his men. Now, if
+they chose to rush me, I could not hold the eight shack windows against
+them, if Paulette and I might each hold a door. If I took to the bush
+with Paulette and Marcia, _and_ Macartney, I had nowhere on earth to go.
+There could be no piling that ill-assorted company on horses and putting
+out for Caraquet, with the road choked with snow, even if I could have
+got by Macartney's garrison at the Halfway. Crossing Lac Tremblant, that
+by to-morrow would be lying sweetly level under a treacherous scum of
+lolly and drifted snow, ready to drown us all like Thompson,--I cursed
+and put that out of the question. That lake that was no lake offered
+about as good a thoroughfare as rats get in a rain-barrel. Whereas, to
+hold Macartney at La Chance till I downed his gang----
+
+"By gad," I flashed out, "I can do it--in Thompson's abandoned stope!"
+It was not so crazy as it sounds. Thompson's measly entrance tunnel
+would only admit one man at a time, and I could hold it alone till
+doomsday. Macartney could be safely jailed inside the stope till I had
+wiped out his men; Paulette would be safe; and there remained no
+doubtful quantities but Marcia and Charliet the cook. I guessed I could
+scare Marcia and that Charliet would probably be on my side, anyway. If
+he were and sneaked down now to provision the stope, the thing would be
+dead easy, even to firewood, for Thompson had yanked in a couple of
+loads of mine props and left them there. I lit out into the passage to
+hunt Charliet and find out where the bunk-house men had gone to. But
+there was no sign of either in the wind and snow outside the shack. I
+bolted the door on the storm, turned for the kitchen, and saw my dream
+girl standing outside Marcia's room.
+
+She was dead white in the dim candlelight that shone through Marcia's
+half-open door. I thought of that as I jumped to her, and I would have
+done better to have thought of Marcia. I could see her from the passage,
+lying on her bed, purple-faced still, and with her eyes shut. But one
+glance was all I gave to Marcia. I said:
+
+"For heaven's sake, Paulette, don't look like that! I'm top-sides with
+Macartney now. Got him tied up. Come into the kitchen till I speak to
+you. I want Charliet----" But as I pushed Paulette before me, into the
+kitchen just across the passage from Marcia's room, I stopped speaking.
+She was holding out Thompson's case of cards,--open, with that scrawled
+two of hearts on the top!
+
+"Charliet's gone--run away somewhere." Her chest labored as if she were
+making herself go on breathing, "and you dropped--this! I ran out from
+Marcia to see what you were doing with Macartney," she hesitated on the
+name, "and you'd dropped this. I----You know Macartney killed Dudley,
+really. Does this mean he killed _Thompson_, too?"
+
+"You can say Macartney's real name," I snapped bitterly. "I've known he
+was Dick Hutton ever since last night."
+
+But Paulette only gasped, as if she did not care whether I knew it or
+not, "Where--how--did you get these cards?"
+
+I told her, and she gave a queer low moan. "Dudley's dead, and I'm past
+crying." Her voice never rose when she was moved; it went down, to D
+below the line on a violin. "I'm past everything, but wishing I was
+dead, too, for I'm the reason that brought Dick Hutton here as
+Macartney. Oh, you should have let me meet him that night! I wasn't only
+going to meet him; I meant to go away with him before morning. It would
+have been too late for poor, innocent old Thompson, but it would have
+saved the four mill men--and Dudley!" She had said she was past crying,
+but her voice thrilled through me worse than tears; and it might have
+thrilled Marcia in her room across the passage, if I'd remembered
+Marcia. "God knows Dudley was good to me--but it's no use talking of
+that now. What have you done with Macart--with Dick Hutton--that you
+said you had him safe for now?"
+
+"Knocked him out; and tied him up with the clothesline, in the living
+room--till I can take him out to Caraquet to be hanged!"
+
+"You ought to have killed him," Paulette answered very slowly. "I would
+have, when we found Dudley, only he'd taken my gun. At least, I believe
+he had: he said I'd lost it. And I'm afraid, without it--while Dick
+Hutton's alive!"
+
+I looked at her ghastly face and behaved like a fool for the hundredth
+time in this history; for I shoved my own gun into her hand and told her
+to keep it, that I'd get another. I would have caught her in my arms if
+it had not been for remembering Dudley, who was dead because the two of
+us had held our tongues to him. "Look here," I said irrelevantly. "D'ye
+know Marcia thinks Macartney wants to marry her?"
+
+"He doesn't want to marry any one--except me," Paulette retorted
+scornfully; and once more I should have remembered Marcia across the
+passage, only I didn't. "He's made love to Marcia, of course, for a
+blind, like he did everything else. If we could make her realize that
+and that he killed Dudley as surely as if he'd lifted his own hand to
+him----"
+
+But I cut her off. "By gad, Paulette, what sticks me is what Macartney
+did all this _for_!"
+
+"Me," said Paulette very bitterly. "At least, at first; I'm not so sure
+about it now. When I first met Dick we were in Russia. He'd got into
+trouble over a copper mine--you've heard Macartney talk of the
+Urals?"--if we both spoke of him as though he were two different men
+neither of us noticed. "He came to me in Petrograd, penniless, and I
+helped him. But when I came to America, alone, I turned him out of my
+flat. He may have loved me, I don't know; but when I wouldn't marry him,
+he said he'd make me; that he'd hound me wherever I went and disgrace
+me, till I had to give in and come to him. And he _must_ have done it at
+the Houstons', if I don't know how; for the police would take me now for
+those emeralds I never stole, if they knew where I was. I can't see
+where Dick could have been or how he managed the thing, but all the rest
+Dudley told you and him about that night at the Houstons' was true. I
+did give Van Ruyne sleeping stuff to keep him quiet while I got away,
+but it was because it came over me--the second I knew those emeralds
+were gone--that Dick must be in that house!--that if I didn't run away,
+he'd come in and threaten me till I had to go with him. And I'd have
+died first. I slipped out of the house unseen; and it was just the
+Blessed Virgin," simply, "who made me find Dudley's car stalled outside
+the Houstons' gate!"
+
+"D'ye mean you'd known Dudley before?"
+
+She nodded. "I'd met him: and I liked him, because he never made love to
+me. He hadn't been at the Houstons' that night; he was only coming back
+from Southampton alone, without any chauffeur. I knew no one would ever
+think he'd helped me, so I just got into his car. But I never should
+have let him bring me here," bitterly; "I should have known Dick would
+find me, and play gold robberies here to pay Dudley out. He told me he
+would, unless I'd go away with him--that first night you heard me
+talking to him--but I didn't see how he could work it. I thought I could
+tire him out by always balking him--till that night I didn't meet him,
+and he killed those four men. Then I knew I couldn't fight him; and the
+reason was that Dick's a finished mining engineer who never ran straight
+in his life!"
+
+"What?" I knew both things, only I saw no connection with Paulette.
+
+But she nodded. "He could get good work anywhere, but he won't work
+honestly. All he cares for is the excitement of big things he can get
+at crookedly. That was why he tried a _coup_ with that copper mine in
+the Urals and had to clear out of Russia. And the La Chance mine that he
+came to contemptuously, and just to get hold of me, is a big thing too.
+No--listen! You don't know how big, for you've been kept in the dark.
+But Dick knows; and that's how I first knew I couldn't manage him any
+more, and why I don't think it is I he has done all he has for, nor that
+it was even to pay out Dudley. I believe it was to _get the mine_!"
+
+"Then why, in heaven's name, didn't you tell Dudley who he was?"
+
+"I couldn't make Dudley listen, at first. Then," very low, "I didn't
+dare; I knew it would mean that Dudley would get killed. I never thought
+that--would happen, anyway."
+
+"There was me." I was stung unbearably. "You must have known ever since
+the night I first came here that there was always me!"
+
+"Y-you," she stumbled oddly on it. "I couldn't tell _you_! Can't you see
+I was afraid, Nicky, that you might--get killed for me, too?"
+
+For the first time that night she looked at me as if she saw me--me,
+Nicky Stretton, dark, fierce and dirty--and not Dudley Wilbraham and the
+dead. My name in that voice of hers would have caught me at my heart,
+if I had dared to be thinking of her. But I was not. It had flashed
+through me that Marcia's door had been half open when we went into the
+kitchen,--and that now it was shut!
+
+It was a trifling thing to make my heart turn over; but it did. I
+covered the passage in two jumps to the living-room door. But as I flung
+it open, all I had time to see was that the window was open too; with
+Marcia standing by it in her horrible green shooting clothes, just as
+she had lain on her bed, and a crowd of bunk-house men swarming through
+the open sash behind her and Macartney,--Macartney, standing on his feet
+without any clothesline, with his gun in his hand!
+
+I saw, like you do see things, how it had all happened. I had misjudged
+Macartney's intellect about the bunk-house men; he had had them within
+call. But it was no one but Marcia who had let them in, and she had
+freed Macartney. She had overheard Paulette and me in the kitchen, had
+shut her door, slipped out of her own window and into the living room,
+and cut Macartney's rope. She had no earthly reason to connect him with
+Dudley's death, except the scraps of conversation she had overheard from
+Paulette and me; she knew nothing of the bottle of wolf dope that had
+been meant to smash in my wagon, or that Dudley--so full up with drink
+and drugs that he could not have smelled even that mixture of skunks and
+sulphide--could easily have been sent out reeking with it, into bush
+that reeked of it too. And that second she screamed at me: "You lie,
+Nicky Stretton; you, and that girl! He's not Hutton--he's Macartney!"
+
+But Macartney fired full in my face.
+
+It was Marcia's flying jump that made him miss me. Even though his very
+cartridge was one of hers that she always carried in her pockets, and
+must have been given to him the first thing, I don't think she had been
+prepared to see me killed. I didn't wait to see. I was down the passage
+to Paulette before Macartney could get in a second shot. As he, and some
+of the bunk-house men tore out of the living room after me, I fired into
+the brown mass of them with my own gun, that I snatched from Paulette. I
+thought it checked them, and lit out of the kitchen door, into the wind
+and the dark and the raving, swirling snow, with my dream girl's hand
+gripped in mine. We plunged knee-deep, waist-deep through the drifts,
+for our lives,--for mine, anyhow.
+
+"Thompson's stope," I gasped; and she said yes. I couldn't see an inch
+before me, but I think we would have made it, since Macartney could not
+see, either. I knew we were far ahead of him, but that was all I did
+know, till I heard myself shout to Paulette, "_Run!_"--and felt my legs
+double under me. If something hit me on the head like a ton of brick I
+had no sense of what had happened, as people have in books. I only
+realized I had been knocked out when I felt myself coming to. Somehow it
+felt quite natural to be deadly faint and sick, and lying flat, like a
+log,--till I put out my hand and touched hard rock.
+
+"I don't see how it's rock," I thought dully; "it ought to be snow!
+Something hit me--out in the snow with Paulette!" And with that sense
+came back to me, like a red-hot iron in my brain. I _had_ been out in
+the snow with Paulette; one of Macartney's men must have hit me a swipe
+on the head and got her from me. But--where in heaven's name was
+Paulette now? The awful, sickening thought made me so wild that I
+scrambled to my knees to find out in what ungodly hole I had been put
+myself. I had been carried somewhere, and the rock under me felt like
+the mine. But somehow the darkness round me did not smell like a mine,
+where men worked every day. It smelt cold, desolate, abandoned, like----
+
+And suddenly I knew where Macartney's men had carried me when I was
+knocked out! It was no comfort to me that it was to the very place where
+I had meant to jail Macartney and hide Paulette, where Charliet and I
+were to have stood off Macartney's men.
+
+"Thompson's stope," I gasped. "It's there Macartney's put me!" I
+crawled, sick and dizzy, to what ought to have been the tunnel and the
+tunnel entrance, opening on the storm out of doors. The tunnel was
+there, all right. But as I fumbled to what ought to have been the open
+entrance, stillness met me, instead of a rush of wind; piled rock met my
+groping hands, instead of piled snow. I was in Thompson's abandoned
+stope all right,--only Macartney had sealed up the only way I could ever
+get out! I shoved, and dug, and battered, as uselessly as a rat in a
+trap, and suddenly knew that was just what I was! Macartney had not even
+taken the trouble to kill me,--not to avoid visible murder at this stage
+of the game, when only the enemy was left, if you did not count a duped
+woman and a captured one; but for the sheer pleasure of realizing the
+long, slow death that must get me in the end.
+
+"Die here--I've got to die here," I heard my own voice in my ears.
+"While----My God, Paulette! Macartney's got Paulette!"
+
+And in the darkness behind me somebody slipped on a stone.
+
+I had not thought I could ever feel light and fierce again. I was both,
+as I swung round.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE PLACE OF DEPARTED SPIRITS
+
+    Every man carries his skull under his face, but
+    God alone knows the marks on it.
+
+    _Indian Proverb._
+
+
+For a man moved, silent and furtive, in the tunnel between me and the
+stope!
+
+At the knowledge something flared up in me that had been pretty well
+burnt out: and that was Hope. That any one was in the place showed
+Macartney had either put a guard on me--which meant Thompson's abandoned
+stope was not sealed so mighty securely as I thought--or else it was he
+himself facing me in the dark, and I might get even with him yet. I let
+out a string of curses at him on the chance. There was not one single
+thing he had done--to me, Paulette, or any one else--that I did not put
+a name to. And I trusted Macartney, or any man he had left in the
+ink-dark stope, would be fool enough to jump at me for what I said.
+
+But no one jumped. And out of the graveyard blackness in front of me
+came a muffled chuckle!
+
+It rooted me stone still, and I dare swear it would have you. For the
+chuckle was Dunn's: Dunn's,--who was dead and buried, and Collins with
+him! But suddenly I was blazing angry, for the chuckle came again,
+and--dead man's or not--it was mocking! I jumped to it and caught a live
+throat, hard. But before I could choke the breath out of it a voice that
+was not Dunn's shouted at me: "Hold your horses, for any sake, Stretton!
+It's us."
+
+A match rasped, flared in my eyes, and I saw Dunn and Collins! Saw
+Dunn's stubbly fair hair, clipped close till it stood on end, as it had
+on the skull I'd said a prayer over and buried; saw Collins standing on
+the long shank bones I knew I had buried in the bush!
+
+I stared, dazed, facing the two boys I could have sworn were dead and
+buried. And instead Dunn gasped wheezingly from the rock where I had let
+him drop, and Collins drawled as if we had met yesterday:
+
+"We heard we were dead! But it wasn't us you buried, or any of Hutton's
+men either, for he'd have missed 'em. I expect you'd better put your
+funeral down to two stray prospectors, and let it go at that!" He looked
+curiously into my face. "You don't seem to have got much yourself by
+playing the giddy goat with Hutton!"
+
+In the dying flicker of his match I saw his young, sneering eyes, as he
+called Macartney "Hutton," and realized furiously that Paulette had been
+right, not only that Dunn and Collins were alive, but that they were on
+Macartney's side. I blazed out at the two of them:
+
+"So you've been in with Hutton all along, you young swine! I've been a
+blank fool; I ought to have guessed Hutton had bought you!"
+
+Dunn let out a sharp oath, but Collins only threw down the glowing end
+of his match. "I wouldn't say we were on Hutton's pay roll exactly,
+since you seem to have found out Macartney's real name at last," he
+retorted scornfully. "We've been on our own, ever since we saw fit to
+disappear and bunk in here. Though by luck Hutton hasn't guessed it, or
+we wouldn't be here now!"
+
+"I don't know that it's any too clear why you are here," I flung out
+hotly. "D'ye mean to say you've been living here, _hiding_, ever since
+you cleared out, and I thought the wolves ate you? That you knew all
+along who Macartney was--and never told me?"
+
+"Not exactly here, if you mean Thompson's old stope you're corked up in;
+but of course we knew Macartney was Hutton," Collins returned
+categorically. "As for telling you about him--well, we weren't any too
+sure you weren't Hutton's man yourself--till to-night!"
+
+"_What?_" said I.
+
+But Collins apologized calmly. "We were asses, of course; but we
+couldn't tell we'd made a mistake. We didn't have as much fun as a bag
+of monkeys while we were making it, either, especially when there was
+that--trouble--in the assay office. We came in on the tail-end of that,
+only we'd no guns, and it was too late to help our poor chaps, anyway.
+Besides, we thought you----" but he checked abruptly. "It's too long to
+explain in this freezing hole. Let's get out! You're not corked up here
+so dead tight as Hutton-Macartney thinks," and in the dark I knew he
+grinned. "Only I imagine we'd better decide what we're going to do
+before he discovers that!"
+
+"Do? I've got to get Paulette!" But I lurched as I turned back to the
+blocked tunnel entrance, and Collins caught me by the shoulder.
+
+"You can't get her," said he succinctly, "unless we help you! Going to
+trust us?"
+
+It didn't seem to me that I had any choice; so I said yes. Then I gaped
+like a fool. Dunn and Collins had me by the arms and were marching me
+through the dark, not toward the tunnel where I'd been slung in, but
+back through Thompson's black, abandoned stope, as if it had been
+Broadway, till the side wall of it brought us up. "Over you go," said
+Collins gruffly. He gave me a boost against the smooth wall of the
+stope, and my clawing fingers caught on the edge of a sharp shelf of
+stone. I swung myself up on it, mechanically, and felt my feet go
+through the solid stope wall, into space. There was an opening in the
+living rock, and as Collins lit another match where he stood below me, I
+saw it: a practicable manhole, slanting down behind my shelf so sharply
+that it must have been invisible from Thompson's stope, even in
+candlelight. Collins and Dunn swarmed up beside me, and the next second
+we all three slid through the black slit behind our ledge, and
+out--somewhere else. Collins lit a candle-end, and I saw we were in a
+second tunnel, a remarkably amateur, unsafe tunnel, too, if I'd been
+worrying about trifles, but not Thompson's!
+
+The thing made me start, and Collins grinned. "More convenient exit than
+old Thompson's, only we don't live here! If you'll come on you'll see."
+He and his candle disappeared round a loose looking boulder into a dark
+hole in the tunnel side, and his voice continued blandly as I stumbled
+after. "Natural cave, this tunnel was, when we found it; this second
+cave leading out of it; and a passage from here to--outside!" He waved
+his hand around as I stood dumb. "Our little country home!"
+
+What I saw was a small round cave, the glow of a fire under a shaft that
+led all betraying smoke heaven knew where into the side of the hill, and
+two spruce beds with blankets. The permanent look of the place was the
+last straw on my own blind idiocy of never suspecting Macartney, and I
+burst out, "Why the deuce, with all you knew, couldn't you have brought
+Paulette here and hidden her?"
+
+"Charliet said we should have." Collins nodded when I stared. "Oh, yes,
+there's more to that French Canadian than just cook! He's been in the
+know about us here all this time, or we'd have been in a nice hole for
+grub. Mind, I don't say he's brave----"
+
+"He was under his bed when I wanted him to-night," I agreed with some
+bitterness.
+
+"Was he?" Collins exclaimed electrically. "He was here, giving us the
+office about you! He tore down and told us you'd got Hutton, and we'd
+better light out and help you: but when we turned out it looked more as
+if Hutton had got _you_! When you and Miss Paulette rushed out of the
+kitchen door you must have run straight into an ambush of his men, and
+I guess one of them landed you a swipe on the head. Anyhow, Dunn and I
+met a procession with you frog-marched in the middle of it, that was
+more than we could manage without guns. So we kind of retired and let
+the men cork you into Thompson's stope to die. And you bet they did it.
+Not six of us could have got you out, ever, if we hadn't known a private
+way."
+
+I cursed him. "My God, stop _talking_! It's not me I want to hear about.
+Where was Paulette? D'ye mean you followed me and left her--left a
+girl--to Macartney? I--I've got to go for her!"
+
+But Collins caught me as I turned. "Macartney hadn't got her--she wasn't
+there! We hoofed Charliet off to find her, first thing; he'll bring her
+here, as soon as it's safe to make a get-away. We'd have brought her
+ourselves, only the show would have been spoiled if Hutton had spotted
+us. And we had to hustle, too, to get back here and waltz you out of
+Thompson's mausoleum. It'll be time enough for you to go for Miss
+Paulette when she doesn't turn up. You're not fit now, anyway." I felt
+him staring into my face. "Had anything to eat all day, except a hard
+ride and a fight?" he demanded irrelevantly, in a voice that sounded
+oddly far off.
+
+I shook my head; and the smell of coffee smote my famished nostrils as
+he took a tin pot off the fire. I knew how nearly I had been done when
+the scalding stuff picked me up like brandy. But--"You're sure about
+Paulette?" I gasped. "Remember, Macartney was bound to get her!"
+
+"Well, he didn't," Collins returned composedly. "I bet he's looking for
+her right now, and I'm dead sure he won't find her. Charliet wasn't born
+yesterday: he'll bring her here all right."
+
+"I'll wait ten minutes," I gave in abruptly, and because I knew I
+couldn't do anything else till I had filled my empty stomach. But there
+was something I wanted to know. "What did you mean, just now, about not
+being sure of me--with Hutton?"
+
+Dunn spoke up for the first time. "It was Miss Paulette; we thought it
+was you we heard her talking to, two nights in the dark. So when she
+drove off to Caraquet with you and the gold, after we'd heard her say
+she couldn't trust you--at least, the man we thought was you--we didn't
+know whether you were in with Hutton or not, or what kind of a game you
+were playing."
+
+"Me?" I swore blankly. "I suppose it never struck you that _I_ believed
+the man playing the game was Collins--till you both disappeared, and I
+decided it must be some one who never was employed around this mine!"
+
+"Well, I'm hanged," said Collins, and suddenly knocked the wits out of
+me by muttering that at least we'd both had sense enough to know that
+Miss Valenka was square.
+
+"Valenka? D'ye mean you knew who she was, too?" I stuttered.
+
+"Dunn did," Collins nodded. "I only knew Hutton. But I knew more than my
+prayers about him, and Dunn told me about the girl. So we sort of kept
+guard for her and watched you and Hutton--till the day we had the row
+with him."
+
+"In the mine! He told me." Only half of me heard him. The rest was
+listening for the sound of footsteps. But the place was still.
+
+"In Thompson's stope," Collins corrected drily. "You see, we thought you
+and Macartney-Hutton were working together, and we didn't see our way to
+tackling the two of you at once. So when you went off to Caraquet with
+Miss Paulette, we thought we'd get Hutton cleared out of this before you
+got back again. We kind of let him see us leave work in the mine and
+sneak into the old stope. When he came after us, we dropped on him with
+what we knew about him; and between us we knew a deal. We gave him his
+choice about leaving the neighborhood that minute, or our going
+straight to Wilbraham and telling who he was and what he was there
+for--which was where we slipped up! He'd the gall to tell us to our
+faces that we'd no pull over him, because we were doing private work in
+Thompson's stope and stealing Wilbraham's gold out of it. And--that
+rather gave us the check."
+
+"But--why? There wasn't six cents' worth of gold there to steal!"
+
+Collins smiled with shameless simplicity. "I know. But stealing gold was
+exactly what we were doing, only it wasn't in Thompson's old stope. We'd
+have been caught with the goods on us though, if any one had fussed
+round there to investigate. We found our way in here," he jerked his
+head toward his amateur tunnel, "by accident, in Thompson's time, one
+day when the stope happened to be empty; and we burrowed on to what
+looked like the anticlinal, before we heard the stope shift coming and
+had to slide out. But we'd seen enough to keep us burrowing. We couldn't
+do much, even after Hutton ran the other tunnel half a mile down the
+cliff and caught gold there; but we kind of slipped in, evenings, when
+you missed us out of the bunk house"--he grinned again--"and got the
+bearings of that vein. And you bet we had to find a way to stay with it;
+it was too good to leave! We weren't going to work in Wilbraham's mine
+just for our health and days' wages, when we'd struck our own gold. So
+we reckoned we'd just--disappear. But we didn't get out as sharp as we
+did simply on account of our own private affairs. Macartney-Hutton drew
+a gun the day we had the row he lied to you about, and I guess we just
+legged it out of Thompson's stope--by the front way!--in time to make
+the bush with our lives on us. Macartney thought he'd scared us, and
+we'd lit for Caraquet; but we lit back again after dark. We crawled in
+here by our back entrance you haven't seen yet, and here we've been ever
+since! We didn't confide in you, because you seemed pretty thick with
+Macartney, if you come to think of it; and it seemed a hefty kind of a
+lie, too, when you told Charliet you'd buried us. I rather think that's
+all, till to-night----" his indifferent drawl stopped as if it were cut
+off with a knife. "My God, Stretton," he jerked, "I'd forgotten! Was it
+true--what Charliet told us to-night--about Dudley Wilbraham?"
+
+I was eating stuff the silent Dunn had supplied, but I put the meat
+down. "Wilbraham's killed," I heard my own voice say; and then told the
+rest of it. How Paulette had found Dudley's chewed, wolf-doped cap, and
+Marcia had found Dudley, silent in the silent bush, where the last wolf
+was sneaking away. I would not have known Collins's face as he asked
+what I meant about wolf dope now and when I thought I was swearing at
+Macartney in Thompson's stope.
+
+I told him, with my ears straining for Charliet and a girl creeping to
+us, through Collins's back way out. But all I heard was silence,--that
+thick, underground silence that fills the ears like wool. I had said I
+would wait ten minutes, and nine of them were gone. I don't think I
+spoke. Dunn muttered suddenly, "They're not coming!"
+
+Collins shook his head and coldly cursed himself and me for two fools
+who had lain low, when out in the open together we could have stopped
+Macartney from getting Dudley, if we couldn't have helped old Thompson.
+He never mentioned Paulette, or his trusted cook. But he rose, lit a
+second candle, and led the way out of his warm burrow by a dark hole
+opposite the one we had entered by, and into a cramped alley where we
+had to walk bent double. It felt as if it ran a mile before it turned in
+a sharp right angle. Collins pinched out his light and turned on me.
+"Just what--are you going to do?"
+
+"Get Paulette," said I.
+
+"M-m," said Collins. "Well, here's where we start. Get hold of my heels
+when I lie down and don't crowd me." And that was every word that came
+out of either of us as we dropped flat, and wormed head-first down a
+slope of smooth stone till cold, fresh air abruptly smote my face. In
+front of us was an opening, out of the bowels of the hill, into the
+night and the snow. Rooted juniper hung down over it in an impervious
+curtain, as it hung everywhere from the rocks at La Chance. Collins
+pushed it aside, and the two of us were out--out of Thompson's stope,
+where Macartney had meant me to lie till I died!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+IN COLLINS'S CARE
+
+
+For two breaths I did not know where I was. It was still snowing, and
+the night was wild, such a night as we might not have again for weeks.
+Any one could move in it as securely as behind a curtain, for I could
+not see a yard before my face, and not a track could lie five minutes.
+But suddenly the familiarity of the place hit me, till I could have
+laughed out, if I had been there on any other business. Collins's long
+passage had wormed behind Thompson's stope, behind the La Chance
+stables; and it was no wonder he had found it easy enough to get
+supplies from Charliet. All he had to do was to cross the clearing from
+the jutting rock that shielded his private entrance and walk into
+Charliet's kitchen door. I moved toward it, and Collins grabbed at me
+through the smothering snow.
+
+"Hang on--you don't know who's there! Wait till I ring up Charliet,
+number one Wolf!" He stood back from me, and far, far off, with a
+perfect illusion of distance broken by the wind, I heard a wolf howl,
+once, and then twice again. If he had not stood beside me, I could not
+have believed the cry came from Collins's throat. But, remembering
+Dudley, it had an ill-omened sound to me.
+
+"Shut up!" I breathed sharply.
+
+Collins might have remembered Dudley too. "I wasn't going to do it
+again," he muttered, "but I've had to use it for a signal. It's been a
+fashionable kind of a sound around here, if I hadn't sense enough to
+know Macartney brought the beasts that made it. But Charliet knows my
+howl. He'll come out, if he's----Drop, _quick_!"
+
+But both of us had dropped already. Some one had flung open the kitchen
+door and fired a charge of buckshot out into the night. I heard it
+scatter over my head, and a burst of uproar on its heels told me
+Charliet's kitchen was crowded with Macartney's men. Somebody--not
+Charliet--shouted over the noise, "What the devil's that for?" And
+another voice yelled something about wolves and firing to scare them.
+
+"The boss'll scare you--if you get to firing guns this night," the first
+voice swore; and a man laughed, insolently. Then the kitchen door
+banged, and Collins sprang up electrically.
+
+"I don't like this one bit," he muttered. "Macartney's not in the
+house, or his men wouldn't dare be yelling like that; and Charliet's not
+there, either, or he'd have been out. That devil must have got him
+somewhere--him and Miss Paulette! Can't you see there's not a light in
+the shack, bar the kitchen one? Come on!"
+
+But I was gone already, around the corner of the shack to Paulette's
+side of it, and I knew better. There was a light--in Paulette's
+room--shining through a hole in the heavy wooden shutters she had had
+made for her window, long before I guessed why she wanted them and their
+bars. It ran through me like fire that Macartney was in that room, deaf
+to any kind of yells from the kitchen, to everything but Paulette's
+voice; and nobody but a man who has had to think it can guess what that
+thought was like to me, out there in the snow. I made for my own window,
+but it was locked; and God knew who might be watching me out of it, as I
+had watched Macartney one night, before I knew he was Hutton. I thought:
+"By gad, Nick Stretton, you'll go in the front door!" For that--with me
+shut up to die in Thompson's stope, and not one other soul alive to
+interfere with him--was the last thing Macartney would think to lock!
+Nor had he. The latch lifted just as usual, and I walked in.
+
+The long passage through the shack was dark; and, after the storm
+outside, dead silent. It was empty, too, as the living room was empty;
+but what I thought of was my dream girl's door. That was open a
+foot-wide space, and somebody inside it sobbed sickeningly. But if
+Macartney were there he was not speaking. I daresay I forgot I had no
+gun to kill him with. I crept forward in the soundless moccasins I had
+reason to thank heaven were my only wear and suddenly felt Collins
+beside me, in his stocking feet.
+
+"Hang on," he breathed; "I tell you he isn't there! If he were, you
+couldn't get him. One shout, and he'd have the whole gang out on us!"
+
+I knew afterwards that he'd stubbed his toe on Marcia Wilbraham's little
+revolver she'd dropped on the passage floor, and was ready to keep my
+back if the gang did come; but then I hardly heard him. I stood rooted
+at Paulette's door, staring in; for Paulette was not there--Macartney
+was not there! What I saw was Marcia Wilbraham with her back to me,
+crying hysterically, as I might have known Paulette would never cry, and
+flinging out of a trunk, as if Paulette were dead or gone, every poor
+little bit of clothes and oddments that were my dream girl's own!
+
+I can't write what that made me feel. Ribbons, bits of laces, little
+blue stockings, shoes, grew into a heap. And I would have been fool
+enough to jump in on Marcia and shake out of her how she dared to touch
+them, whether Paulette were dead or alive, if Collins had not gripped me
+hard.
+
+"The emeralds," he muttered. "She's rooting for them!"
+
+I had pretty well forgotten there ever were any emeralds, and I stared
+at him like a fool.
+
+"Van Ruyne's emeralds--she thinks Miss Paulette has 'em," Collins's lips
+explained soundlessly. "And they're round Macartney's own neck--I saw
+them! Dunn and I were going to swipe them, only we couldn't."
+
+I damned the emeralds. What I wanted of Marcia was to find out what had
+become of Paulette. But Collins gripped me harder. "Let her see you, and
+you'll never know," he breathed fiercely. "She'd give one yell, and we'd
+be done. Macartney's either got the girl and Charliet, or they're lost
+in the snow and he's hunting for them. Let's get some guns and go see
+which; we're crazy to stay here!"
+
+I nodded mechanically. I knew what it meant for a girl to be lost in the
+snow on such a night as I had just closed the shack door on, even with
+Charliet beside her; how Collins and I might tramp, search--yes, and
+call, too--uselessly, beside the very drift where she lay smothered.
+And then I realized I was a fool. Macartney would not give Paulette a
+chance to get lost. He had her somewhere, her and Charliet, and Collins
+and I had to take her from him. But something inexplicable stopped me
+dead as I turned for the shack door. Macartney had never been a winter
+at La Chance; he had no snowshoes. Charliet had some, I didn't know
+where. But I had two pairs in my own room. That inexplicable suggestion
+told me I needed them badly, though I knew it was silly; if Macartney
+had Paulette he would not be marching her through the snow. All the
+places I had to search for her were the stable and the assay office. And
+yet----I backed Collins noiselessly past the room where Marcia was still
+pulling round Paulette's trunk, with a noise that covered any we could
+make, and the two of us ended up in my room in the black dark. I stood
+Collins at the door while I felt for my snowshoes. I knew it was crazy,
+and I was just obsessed, but I got them. I didn't get much else. I
+couldn't find my rifle I had hoped for, and only a couple of boxes of
+revolver cartridges were in my open trunk,--that I guessed Marcia had
+gone through too. I would have felt like wringing her neck, if it had
+not been for Paulette and Macartney. I had no room for outside emotions
+till I knew about those two. I slid back to my doorway to get Collins,
+and he was gone. Where to, I had no earthly idea. I looked to see if he
+had been cracked enough to tackle Marcia, and Marcia was alone on her
+knees, chucking all Paulette's things back into her trunk again. The
+place suddenly felt dead quiet. Marcia had stopped sobbing, and I
+believe she would have heard a mouse move,--there was that kind of a
+listening look about her. And it was that minute--that unsuitable,
+inimical minute--that _I_ heard some one move! Outside, on the doorstep,
+somebody stumbled. The latch lifted, the door swung in,--and I jumped to
+meet Macartney with not one thing on me but some fool snowshoes and a
+pocketful of useless cartridges. But I brought up dead still, and rigid.
+
+"Charliet--oh, Charliet, come _quick_," whispered Paulette. She was snow
+from head to foot where she stood in the shack door. "I couldn't
+find----" But she recoiled as she saw me, against the light Marcia had
+burning inside her own half-open door. "Oh, my God, _Nicky_!" she cried
+in a voice that brought my soul alive, that fool's soul that had lost
+her. She caught at me like a child, incredulously, wildly. "Oh, Nicky!"
+
+There was no time to ask where she'd been, nor even of Macartney. I
+think the unsuitable thing I said was "Marcia!" For I heard Marcia jump
+and fall over Paulette's open trunk, before she was out of her door like
+one of the wolves Macartney was so fond of. I didn't think she saw us,
+but she did see Collins. The thing that cut her off was his rush out of
+somewhere. I heard her scream with furious terror; heard Paulette's door
+bang on her; and Collins was beside me with a rifle and some dunnage I
+scarcely saw in the sudden dark of the passage after that banged door.
+
+"Run," said he, through his teeth. "Gimme that stuff! Run!" he stuffed
+my snowshoes under the arm that held the rifle. "No, not that way! This
+way." He cut across the clearing in the opposite direction from the hole
+that led to his underground den, and it was time. Half of Macartney's
+men were tearing through the passage toward Marcia's screams, and the
+rest were pouring out of the kitchen door. In the storm we could only
+hear them. I was carrying Paulette like a baby, and with her head
+against me I could not see her face. All I could see was swirling,
+stinging snow in my eyes, and the sudden dark of the bush we brought up
+in. I kept along the edge of it, circling the clearing, and all but fell
+over the end of Collins's jutting rock. And this time I thanked God for
+the furious snow; in ten minutes there would be no sign of our tracks
+from the front door to the hold the rock shielded, and there was no
+earthly chance of Macartney's men picking them up before we were safe.
+
+It felt like years before the three of us were inside the curtain of
+juniper, swarming up the smooth rock face, but Collins observed
+contrarily that he'd never done it so quickly. He led the way up to the
+passage angle where he had pinched out his light, put down the snowshoes
+and the rifle, laid something else on the ground with remarkable
+caution, and walked on some feet before he lit his candle.
+
+"Better travel light and get home. Dunn and I'll come back presently and
+bring up the dunnage," he observed as blandly as if the three of us had
+been for an evening stroll, and suddenly laughed as he saw me glance at
+his stockinged feet. "By golly, I've left my boots in the shack, and I
+haven't any others--but it was worth a pair of boots! I stubbed my toe
+on Miss Wilbraham's little revolver she must have dropped on the passage
+floor, and I've got it. Also, let alone her lost toy-dog gun, I got all
+her ammunition and her rifle, while she was grabbing in Miss Paulette's
+trunk.
+
+    "'Taffy went to my house,
+      Thought I was asleep.
+    I went to Taffy's house,
+      And stole a side of beef'
+
+--as I learned when I was young. Come on, Stretton; I bet we'll be
+top-sides with Macartney-Hutton yet!"
+
+"He's out, looking for me----" but Paulette's sentence broke in a gasp.
+"Why, it's Collins!" She stared incredulously in the candlelight.
+
+"Just that," imperturbably. "Stretton can tell you all about me
+presently, Miss Paulette. For now I imagine you'd sooner see a fire and
+something to eat. Put her in between us, Stretton, Indian file, and
+we'll take her down."
+
+Women are queer things. Tatiana Paulina Valenka had tramped the bush
+most of the day before looking for a dead man, had found him--a sight no
+girl should have looked on; had run for more than her life with me, and
+been through God knew what since; and she walked down that unknown, dark
+passage with Collins and me as if nothing had ever happened to her. She
+greeted Dunn, too; and then, as he and Collins disappeared to fetch down
+our snowshoes and rifle, went straight to pieces where she and I stood
+safe by their fire. "Oh, oh, oh, I thought you were dead! I saw them get
+you. I can't believe--can't believe----" she gasped out in jerks, as if
+she fought for her very breath, and suddenly dropped flat on Dunn's old
+blanket. "Oh, Nicky," she moaned, "don't let me faint--now. _Nicky!_"
+
+There was something in her voice--I don't know--but it made me dizzy
+with sheer, clear joy. She had said my name as if I were the one man in
+the world for her, as if I had risen from the dead. But I dared not say
+so. I knew better than even to lift her head where she lay with closed
+eyes on Dunn's blanket, but I got Collins's old tin cup to her lips
+somehow and made her drink his strong coffee till it set her blood
+running, as it had set mine. After a minute she sat up dizzily, but she
+pushed away my bread and meat. "Presently--I'd be sick now," she
+whispered. "How did you get--out of Thompson's stope? And where--I mean
+I can't understand, about Collins and Dunn!"
+
+"They got me out," said I, and explained about them. But there was no
+particular surprise on Paulette's face. She never made an earthly
+comment, either, when I told her they'd always known all about her and
+Hutton, except, "I never thought they were dead; I told you that. I'd an
+idea, too, that Charliet didn't think so either."
+
+I had one arm round her by that time, feeding her with my other hand
+like a child, with bits of bread soaked in black coffee. If I had any
+thoughts they were only fear that she might move from me as soon as she
+really came to herself. But Charliet's name brought me back from what
+was next door to heaven. "Charliet," said I blankly; "where in the
+world is he? D'ye mean he hadn't told you about Collins and Dunn? Why,
+he was to bring you to them--here--hours ago!"
+
+"Charliet was? But----" Suddenly, beyond belief, my dream girl turned
+and clung to me. God knows I knelt like a statue. I was afraid to stir.
+It was Dudley she loved: I was only a man who was trusted and a friend.
+"Oh, Nicky, you don't know," she cried, "you don't know! You and I ran
+straight _into_ some of Dick Hutton's men when we raced out of the
+shack. And you threw me--just picked me up like a puppy and threw
+me--out of their way, into the deep snow. I heard them get you, but I
+was half smothered; I couldn't either see or speak. But I heard Dick
+shout from somewhere to 'chuck Stretton into Thompson's old stope!' I
+thought it meant they'd killed you; that it was another man I'd let--be
+murdered!"
+
+She caught her breath as if something stabbed her, and I know it stabbed
+me to think I was just "another man" to her. But I knelt steady. I had
+been a fool to think it was I she cared for, personally, and whether she
+did or not she needed my arm. "Well?" I asked. "Next?"
+
+"I was scrambling out of the snow," I felt her shiver against me, "only
+before I could stand up Charliet raced up from somewhere and shoved me
+straight down in the drift again. He said Dick was looking for me, and
+to lie still, while he got him away; then to race for the shack and hide
+just outside the front door, till he came for me--but before he could
+finish Dick ran down on the two of us, with a lantern. He'd have fallen
+over me, if Charliet hadn't stopped him by yelling that I'd run for the
+bush. I think he grabbed the lantern--but anyhow, they both tore off. I
+got to the shack, but----Oh, Nicky, I couldn't wait there. I----"
+
+"Well?" It seemed to be the only word in my brain.
+
+"I went down to Thompson's stope. But I was too late. The men had walled
+you in with rocks, and I couldn't move them. I tried!" (I thought she
+must hear the leap my heart gave. I know I shut my jaws to keep my
+tongue between my teeth at the thought of her trying to dig her way in
+to me, the only friend she had in the world except a French-Canadian
+cook.) "I----Oh, I thought if I could find Charliet we might do
+something! I went back to look for him, and I found _you_----Oh, I found
+you!" Her arms were still on my shoulders as I knelt by her, and
+suddenly her voice turned low and anxious. "What do you suppose became
+of Charliet? He's so faithful. We can't leave him for Dick to turn on
+when he can't find me!"
+
+I was not thinking of Charliet. I couldn't honestly care what had become
+of him, with my dream girl in my arms. I may as well tell the truth; I
+forgot Dudley, too. I don't know what mad words would have come out of
+my mouth if Paulette had not pushed me away violently. What was left of
+her coffee upset; I got to my feet with the empty cup in my hand, just
+as Collins and Dunn and their candle emerged round the boulder. I
+remembered long afterwards that it was before I had answered Paulette
+one word about myself, Thompson's stope, anything. But then all I did
+was to stare at something Collins was carrying carefully in his two
+hands. "What's that?" I said--just to say something.
+
+"Some new kind of high explosive Wilbraham got to try and never did,"
+Collins returned casually. "Saw it in his office to-night and thought it
+was better with us than with Macartney. Don't know just how it works, so
+I'm treating it gingerly." He moved on into the darkness of his own
+tunnel and came back empty-handed. "What are we going to do--first?" he
+inquired calmly.
+
+I took a look at Paulette. Whether it was from Collins's casual mention
+of Dudley's name or not, she was ghastly. Who she was looking at I
+don't know; but it wasn't at me.
+
+"Sleep," said I grimly. "Two of us need it, if you and Dunn don't.
+Macartney can't get us to-night." Though of that I was none too sure.
+Charliet might get rattled any moment and give us away. But there was no
+good in sticking at trifles.
+
+But Collins was an astute devil. "He won't," he rejoined as calmly as if
+I had spoken of Charliet out loud. "He won't get hurt, either; you can
+bank on that. Make up that fire, Dunn, and we'll give Miss Paulette the
+blankets."
+
+We did, where she lay at one side. We three men dropped like dogs in a
+row in front of the fire. I was next Paulette, with the space of a foot
+or so between us. I had not known how dead weary I was till I stretched
+out flat. Collins and Dunn may have slept; I don't know; but Paulette
+certainly did, as soon as she got her head down. I thought I lay and
+watched the fire, but I must have slept, too. For I woke--with my heart
+drumming as if I'd heard the trump for the Last Judgment, and Paulette's
+hand in mine. I must have flung out my arm till I touched her, and her
+little fingers were tight round my hard, dirty hand, clinging to it. I
+lay in heaven, in the dark of a frowsy cave we might be hunted out of
+any minute, with the dying glow of the fire in my eyes and my dream
+girl's hand in mine. And suddenly, like a blow, I heard her whisper in
+her sleep, "Dudley! Oh, dear Dudley!"
+
+I was only Nicky Stretton, and a fool. I lay in the dark with a heart
+like a stone and a girl's warm, clinging hand in mine.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+HIGH EXPLOSIVE
+
+
+There was nothing to tell of any handclasp when I woke in the morning.
+Paulette lay in her blankets with her back to me, as if she had lain so
+all night; Dunn was making up the fire; Collins was absent, till he
+appeared out of his tunnel where he had put Dudley's high explosive the
+night before and nodded to me. None of us spoke: we all had that chilly
+sort of stiffness you get after sleeping with your clothes on. As we ate
+our breakfast I took one glance at Paulette and looked away again. She
+was absolutely white, almost stunned looking, and her eyes would not
+meet mine. I had an intuition she had waked in the night after I slept
+and discovered what she had been doing; but if she were ashamed there
+was no need. God knows I would not have reminded her of the thing. I
+knew the dark hollows and the tear marks under her eyes were for Dudley,
+not for me. But I had to take care of her now, and Collins glanced at me
+as I thought it.
+
+"I suppose you realize Charliet's our only line of communication, and
+that he and all the La Chance guns are in the hands of the enemy," he
+observed drily. "What do you think of doing about it?"
+
+"Get Charliet; all the guns and ammunition he can steal; hold this place
+and harry Macartney," I supposed. "What do _you_ think?"
+
+I had turned to Paulette, but she only shook her head with an, "I don't
+know, Mr. Stretton!" I had time to decide she had only called me Nicky
+by mistake six hours ago, before Collins disagreed with me flatly.
+
+"Stay here? Not much! Won't work--Macartney'd drop on us! Oh, I know he
+won't be able to find our real entrance to this place unless Charliet
+gives us away, and I'm not worrying about that! But, after he realizes
+Miss Valenka has vanished"--he said her real name perfectly
+casually--"and when Charliet and most of his guns vanish too, and his
+men begin to get picked off one by one, how long do you suppose it will
+be before Macartney connects the three things--and smells a rat? He'll
+sense Charliet and a girl can't be fighting him alone. For all we know
+he'll guess you must have got out of Thompson's stope somehow, and dig
+away his rock fence to see! And I imagine we'd look well in here if he
+did!"
+
+"It's just what we would look," said I. "You ass, Collins, with
+Macartney ignorant of the real way in on us, and he and his gang digging
+open Thompson's tunnel against the daylight, with you and me and Dunn in
+the dark on that shelf in Thompson's stope we came in here by, we'd have
+the drop on the lot. Except--Marcia!" Her name jerked out of me. We
+would have to count Marcia in with Macartney's gang; and, remembering
+she had known me all her life, it made me smart.
+
+"Oh, Miss Wilbraham--I should let _her_ rip!" Collins returned
+callously. "Listen, Stretton; what you say's all very well, only we
+can't count on holding this place when we're discovered, while it's a
+matter of _if_ Charliet can get guns! Miss Marcia's rifle and her toy
+popgun aren't going to save us, and I doubt if Charliet can swipe any
+more. What I say is let's cut some horses out of the stable after dark,
+all four of us clear out on them to Caraquet, and set the sheriff and
+his men after Macartney. Unless," he turned boldly to her, "you don't
+want that, Miss Valenka?"
+
+But if she had been going to answer, which I don't think she was, I cut
+her off. "We can't let Marcia rip--don't talk nonsense, Collins! She's
+Dudley's sister, if she and Macartney are a firm. We can't clear out and
+leave her with a man like that!"
+
+"We can't take her to Caraquet," Collins argued with some point. "You
+own she doesn't know anything about Macartney's wolf dope; you haven't
+any witnesses to prove he tried it on your wagon, or to set the wolves
+on Dudley. Miss Marcia would just up and swear your whole story was a
+lie--and all Caraquet would believe her! Nobody alive ever heard of such
+a thing as wolf dope!"
+
+"That's just where you're wrong!" I remembered the boy I'd left cached
+in Skunk's Misery--and something else, that had been in my head ever
+since wolves and the smell of a Skunk's Misery bottle seemed to go
+together. "Two Frenchmen were run in for using wolf dope in Quebec
+province last winter, for I've an account of their trial somewhere that
+I cut out of an Ottawa paper. And as for a witness, I've a boy cached at
+Skunk's Misery who can prove Macartney made the same stuff there. The
+only thing we might get stuck on in Caraquet is the _reason_ for all the
+murders he's done--with, and without it!"
+
+"I guess Miss Valenka knows the reason all right," Collins spoke as
+coolly as if she were not there, which may have been the wisest thing to
+do, for though she flushed sharply she said nothing. He went on with
+exactly what she had said herself. "But after Hutton came here to get
+her, he saw he'd be a fool not to grab the La Chance mine, too; and
+unless we can stop him you bet he and his gang have grabbed it! They've
+disposed of Thompson, of all our own men who might have stood by us, of
+Wilbraham," categorically; "they think they've disposed of Dunn
+and me and buried you alive, and--except for having lost Miss
+Valenka--Macartney's made his game! Nobody'll know there's anything
+wrong at the mine till the spring, because there's no one interested
+enough to ask questions till Wilbraham's bank payments have stopped long
+enough to look queer. And by that time Macartney and his gang will be
+gone, and the cream of Wilbraham's gold with them. As for us, we can't
+fight him by sitting in this burrow _with_ Miss Paulette, and without
+any guns, even if he doesn't end by nosing out Dunn's and my gold as
+well as Wilbraham's. Why, we depend on Charliet for our food, let alone
+anything else; and for all we know, Charliet may have squeaked on us by
+this time. I say again, let's get a sheriff and posse at Caraquet, and
+come back here and get Macartney! We could do it, if we took Miss
+Paulette and hit the trail to-night."
+
+"And Macartney'd get us, if we tried it!" I had thrashed all that out in
+my head before, while I was tying up Macartney with Charliet's
+clothesline. "We'd be stopped by his picket at the Halfway, if ever we
+got to the Halfway, for the Caraquet road's likely drifted solid and
+you don't make time digging out smothering horses. No; we'll fight
+Macartney where we are! And the way to do it is with Charliet and guns."
+
+"If you'll tell me how we're to connect with either!" Collins was grim.
+"It's a mighty dangerous thing calling up Charliet on number one Wolf,
+with the whole of La Chance crawling with Macartney and his gang,
+hunting for Miss Paulette. But we can go up to the back door and try
+it!"
+
+"Oh, no," Paulette burst out wildly, "I'm afraid! I mean I know we must
+find out first if Charliet's all right, but you mayn't get him--and
+you'll give yourselves away!"
+
+It was almost the first time she had spoken, and it was more to Collins
+than to me, but I answered. "We'll get Charliet all right," I began--and
+Collins gripped me.
+
+"I dunno," he drawled. "Strikes me some one's going to get us--first!"
+
+He snapped out our candle, which was senseless, since Dunn's red-hot
+fire showed us up as plain as day, and all four of us stood paralyzed.
+Somebody--running, slipping, with a hideous clatter of stones--was
+coming down the long passage Collins called his back door.
+
+"Macartney," said I, "and Charliet's given us away!" And with the words
+in my mouth I had Paulette around the waist and shoved out of sight
+behind the boulder that separated Collins's cave from his tunnel and the
+pierced wall of Thompson's stope. Macartney might be a devil, but there
+was no doubt the man was brave to come like that for a girl, through the
+dark bowels of the earth where Charliet must have warned him Dunn and
+Collins would be lurking. Only he had not got Paulette yet, and he would
+find three men to face before he even saw her. I stooped over her in the
+dark of Collins's tunnel, where just a knife-edge of the cave firelight
+cut over the boulder's top. "Keep still, Paulette--and for any sake
+don't move and kick Collins's devilish explosive he's got stuck in here
+somewhere," I said, exactly as if I were steady. Which I was not,
+because it was my unlooked for, heaven-sent chance to get square with
+Macartney. I sprang around the boulder to do it and saw Collins strike
+up the barrel of Marcia's rifle in Dunn's stretched left arm.
+
+"Don't shoot," he yelled. "You fool, it's Charliet!"
+
+I stood dead still. It was Charliet, but a Charliet I had never seen.
+His French-Canadian face was tallow white, as he tore into the cave,
+grinning like a dog with rage and excitement. He brushed Dunn and
+Collins aside like flies and grabbed my arm. "Come out," he panted.
+"Sacré damn, bring Mademoiselle Paulette and _come out_! It is that
+Marcia! She sees you in the shack last night; sees you--alive and out of
+Thompson's stope where they buried you--carrying Mademoiselle away! She
+tells Macartney so this morning, when he and I get in after hunting for
+Mademoiselle all night--praying, me, that I might not make a mistake and
+find her, and that you might. Oh, I tell you I was crazy--dog crazy! I
+cannot get away from Macartney, I think she may be dead in the snow,
+looking for me who was not there, till first thing this morning we come
+in--and that she-devil tells Macartney Stretton takes Mademoiselle away!
+Not till now, till all are out of the house, do I have the chance to
+come and warn you what is coming! They--that Marcia, Macartney, all of
+the men--start now to dig you out of Thompson's stope they put you in.
+They think they left some hole you crawl out of in the snow and dark,
+that you come for Mademoiselle and take her back into. I could not get
+you even one small cartridge to hold this place, and--Macartney is
+clever! He will be in here, with all his guns, all his men. And then,
+_quoi faire_? Come now, all of you, while there is the one chance to
+come unseen, and get on horses and go away. Ah," the man's fierce voice
+broke, ran up imploringly, "I beg you, Mademoiselle, like I would beg
+the Blessed Virgin, to make them come! Before Macartney, or that Marcia,
+finds--you!"
+
+I jumped around and saw Paulette, in the cave. I had left her safe in
+Collins's tunnel; and there she stood, come out into plain view at the
+sound of Charliet's voice. But she was not looking at him, or me, or any
+of us. Her eyes stared, sword-blue, at the hole where Charliet had
+rushed in from Collins's secret passage: I think all I realized of her
+face was her eyes. I turned, galvanized, to what she stared at,--and
+saw. Marcia Wilbraham was standing in the entrance from the long
+passage, behind us all, except Paulette; meeting Paulette's eyes with
+her small, bright brown ones, her lips wide in her ugly, gum-showing
+smile. I knew, of course, that she had picked up Charliet's track in the
+snow from his kitchen door to Collins's juniper-covered back door, had
+followed fair on his heels down the dark passage, instead of going with
+Macartney to dig me out of Thompson's stope; that in one second she
+would turn and run back again, to show Macartney Collins's back door.
+
+My jump was late. It was Dunn who saved us. He sprang matter-of-factly,
+like a blood-hound, and pulled Marcia down. She was as strong as a man,
+pretty nearly; she fought fiercely, till she heard the boy laugh. That
+cowed her, in some queer way. I heard Dunn say: "You'd better stay here
+a while, Miss Wilbraham. It's safer--than with Macartney;" saw Charliet
+run to help him, and the two of them placidly tie and gag Marcia
+Wilbraham with anything they could take off themselves. It was with a
+vivid impression of Charliet's none too clean neck-handkerchief playing
+a large part in Marcia's toilette that Collins and I jumped, with one
+accord, to Paulette. I don't know what he said to her. I saw her nod.
+
+I said, "We're done for if Macartney gets in on us through Thompson's
+stope and finds this place. He'll just send half his men to scout for
+the other entrance; they'll find it from Charliet's and Marcia's tracks
+and get at us both ways. You stay here with Charliet, while Collins and
+I meet Macartney in Thompson's stope. When--if--you hear we can't best
+him, run--with Charliet! Dunn'll look after Marcia."
+
+She gave me a stunned sort of look, as if I were deserting her, as if I
+didn't--care! I would have snatched her in my arms and kissed her,
+Dudley or no Dudley lying dead in the bush, but I had no time. Collins
+had me by the elbow, his fierce drawl close to my half-comprehending
+ear. We'd no guns but Marcia's popgun and her rifle; two of us, even on
+the shelf in Thompson's stope, would do little good with those against
+all Macartney's men crowding into the stope and giving us a volley the
+second our fire from the shelf drew theirs. We might pick off half a
+dozen of them before our cartridges gave out. But there was no sense in
+that business. We would have to try----But here I came alive to what
+Collins was really talking about.
+
+"That high explosive," he was saying. "It's a filthy trick, but God
+knows they deserve it! If we blow them back far enough at the very
+entrance of the tunnel, they may never come on again to get in."
+
+I daresay I'd have recoiled in cold blood. But my blood ran hot that
+morning. I did think, though; hard. I said, "Can't do it! No fuse."
+
+"Heaps. Dunn's and mine!" I heard Collins grabbling for it, somewhere in
+the dark of the tunnel.
+
+Behind me somebody lit a candle; who, I never looked to see. In the
+light of it I saw Collins pick up his bundle of blasting powder and
+warned him sharply.
+
+"Look out with that stuff! We don't know it; it may work anyway. If it
+bursts up in the air the stope roof'll be down on us. It may fire back,
+too--and we'd be hit behind the point of burst!"
+
+"We won't be," said Collins, between his teeth. "I'll burst it _out_ the
+tunnel, and blow Macartney's gang to rags!"
+
+But that lighted candle at my back had shown me other than explosives:
+the silly, pointless snowshoes I had lugged from my own room in the
+shack. My conscious mind knew now what my subconscious mind had wanted
+them for, like a mill where some one had turned on the current. I swore
+out loud. "By gad, Collins, listen! If we don't smash Macartney, and he
+gets in on us, he'll get Paulette! I've got to stop that, somehow.
+Macartney doesn't _know_ she's here yet; Marcia only guessed it.
+Supposing he were to see only me, alone in Thompson's stope, he might
+never know she was here too!"
+
+"Dunno what you mean," Collins snapped. And I snapped back:
+
+"I mean that if we blow a clean hole at the tunnel entrance, and I burst
+out of it and run, I can get the whole gang after me--and make time for
+you and Charliet to get Paulette away somewhere, by the back door."
+
+"But"--Collins halted where he swarmed up into Thompson's
+stope--"where'll you go? You can't, Stretton. It's death!"
+
+"It's sense," said I. "As for where I'll go, Lac Tremblant'll do for
+me; and I bet it will finish any man of Macartney's who tries to come
+after me! Get through into that stope with your fuse, man; I'll hand you
+the blasting stuff. Got it? All right. Here you, gimme that candle!" I
+turned and took it--out of Paulette's hand!
+
+I gasped, taken aback all standing, before I lied, "It's all right,
+Paulette. I'll be back in a minute." And though I knew she must have
+heard what I was going to do, I had no better sense than to stoop before
+the girl's blank eyes and snatch up my two pairs of snowshoes, that had
+been lying beside the explosive I had just passed up to Collins, before
+I clambered up through the hole into Thompson's stope, on to the shelf
+from whence I had first dropped into Collins's cave.
+
+Collins was down in Thompson's tunnel already, laying his fuse with
+deadly skill. Already, too, we could hear Macartney's men outside,
+leveraging away the boulders that had plugged up the tunnel entrance
+where I was to starve and die. Collins placed the stuff I carried down
+to him. I said, "My God, you can't use all that; the whole stope'll be
+down on us!" And he answered, "No; I've done it right." That was every
+word we uttered till we were back on our high shelf, with a lit fuse
+left behind us in the stope. The fuse burned smooth as a dream, and
+Collins nudged me with fierce satisfaction. But I was suddenly sick with
+horror. Not at the thing we were doing--if it were devil's work we had
+been driven to be devils--but at the knowledge that Paulette was
+standing within reach of my feet, that were through the stope wall and
+were hanging down into Collins's tunnel,--that tunnel every bone in me
+knew was amateur, unsafe, a death trap. The shock of a big explosion in
+Thompson's stope might well bring its roof down on Paulette, standing
+alone in it, waiting,--trusting to me for safety. I turned my head and
+yelled at her as a man yells at a dog--or his dearest--when he is sick
+with fear for her: "Get back out of that into the cave! _Run!_"
+
+I heard her jump. Heard her----But thought stopped in me, with one
+unwritable, life-checking shock. The whole earth, the very globe, seemed
+to have blown to pieces around me. The flash and roar were like a
+thousand howitzers in my very face; the solid rock shelf I was on leapt
+under me; and behind me the whole of Collins's tunnel collapsed, with a
+grinding roar. I heard Collins gasp, "Good glory"; heard the rocks and
+gravel in the stope before me settling, with an indescribable,
+threatening noise, between thunder and breaking china--and all I thought
+of was that I'd warned my dream girl in time, that she'd answered me,
+that she was back in Collins's cave, and safe. Till, suddenly to eyes
+that had been too dazzled and seared to see it clearing, the smoke
+before me cleared, the choking fumes lessened, and I saw. Saw, straight
+in front of me, where a tunnel had been and was no longer, a clean hole
+like a barn door where Thompson's tunnel entrance had been but two-men
+wide; saw out, into furious, crimson color that turned slowly, as my
+sight grew normal, into the golden, dazzling glory of winter sun on
+snow.
+
+There was silence outside in the sun, all but some yells and moaning.
+How much damage we'd done I couldn't see; or where Macartney's men were,
+dead or alive. But now, while they were paralyzed with shock and
+surprise, now was my time to get through them. I lowered myself gingerly
+to the rubbish heap that had been the smooth floor of Thompson's stope;
+edged to the tunnel entrance; slipped my feet into the toe and heel
+straps of the snowshoes I had held tightly against me through all the
+unspeakable, hellish uproar of rending rock, and sprang,--sprang out
+into the sunlight, out on the clear snow, past wounded men, reeling men,
+dying men, and raced as I never put foot to ground before or since, for
+Lac Tremblant, glittering clear and free in front of me,--that Lac
+Tremblant I had thought of subconsciously when I carried snowshoes into
+Collins's cave.
+
+In the beginning of this story I said what Lac Tremblant was like. It
+was a lake that was no lake; that should have been our water-way out of
+the bush instead of miles of expensive road; and was no more practicable
+than a rope ladder to the stars. For the depth of Lac Tremblant, or its
+fairway, were two things no man might count on. It would fall in a night
+to shallows a child might wade through, among bristling rocks no one had
+ever guessed at; and rise in a morning to the tops of the spruce scrub
+on its banks,--a sweet spread of water, with never a rock to be seen.
+What hidden spring fed it was a mystery. But in the bitterest winter it
+was never frozen further than to form surging masses of frazil ice that
+would neither let a canoe push through them, nor yet support the weight
+of a man. It was on that frazil ice, that some people called lolly, that
+I meant to run for my life now, trusting to the resistance of the two
+feet of snow that lay on the lake in the mysterious way snow does lie on
+lolly, and to the snowshoes on my feet. And as I slithered on to the
+soft snow of the lake, from the crackling, breaking shell ice on the La
+Chance shore, I knew I had done well. Some--a good many--of Macartney's
+men were killed or half-killed by our deadly blast, but not all. He had
+been more cautious than I guessed. I saw the rest of his men bunched
+some hundred feet from the smashed-out tunnel; saw Macartney, too,
+standing with them. But all I cared for was that he should see me and
+come out after me on the crust of snow and lolly over Lac
+Tremblant,--that would never carry him without the snowshoes he did not
+have--and give Paulette her chance to get away. I yelled at him and
+skimmed out over the trembling ice like a bird.
+
+Neither Macartney nor his men had stirred in that one flying glance I
+had dared take at them. But sheer tumult came out of them now. Then
+shots--shots that missed me, and a sudden howled order from Macartney I
+dared not turn my head or break my stride to understand. The giving
+surface under me was bearing, but a quarter-second's pause would have
+let me through. There was no sense in zigzagging. Once I was clear, I
+ran as straight as I dared for the other shore, five miles away;
+but--suddenly I realized I was not clear! I was followed.
+
+Somebody else on snowshoes had shot out of Thompson's tunnel, over the
+crackling shore ice on to the snow and frazil; was up to me, close
+behind me.
+
+"Run, Nicky," shrieked Paulette's voice. "_Run!_"
+
+I slewed my head around and saw her, running behind me!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+LAC TREMBLANT
+
+    "Across the ice that never froze
+      The snow that never bore,
+    My love ran out to follow me--
+      To follow to the shore."
+
+    _The Day the World Went Mad._
+
+
+It may be true that I swore aloud; but what I meant by it was more like
+praying. Over me was the blue winter sky and the gold sun; under me the
+treacherous spread of the lake that was no lake, that one misstep might
+send me through, to God knew what hideous depth of unfrozen water, or
+bare, bone-shattering stone; behind me were Macartney and Macartney's
+men; and close up to me, nearer every second, my Paulette, my dream girl
+who had never been mine. There was nothing to do for both of us but to
+keep on crossing Lac Tremblant. Missteps might be death, but turning
+back was worse--for her, anyway.
+
+I yelled, "Keep wide! Get abreast of me--don't take any direction you
+don't see me take. But _keep wide_!" Because what held one of us would
+never hold two, and behind me, running in my tracks----Well, even a
+light girl would not run long!
+
+Paulette only screamed, "Yes. Keep on! They're coming!" She may have
+needed her breath, I don't know; but she didn't run like it. She ran
+like a deer, with my own flat, heel-dragging stride on the snowshoes I
+had not thought she knew how to use. One more shot came after us. I
+yelled again to her to keep wide and heard her sheer off a little to
+obey me; but she still ran behind me. God knows I didn't realize, till
+afterwards, that it was to keep Macartney from shooting me. I didn't
+even wonder why Collins and Dunn weren't firing into the brown of
+Macartney's men with Marcia's rifle and popgun. I was too busy watching
+the snow surfaces before me.
+
+There was a difference in them. I can't explain what, but a difference
+between where there was water to buoy the snow, and where it lay on
+shell ice. The open black holes where there was nothing at all any one
+could see, and I didn't worry over them. I only knew we must run over
+water, or the light stuff under us would let us through. I kept moving
+my hand in infinitesimal signals to Paulette, and God knows she was
+quick at understanding. My heart was in my mouth for her, but she never
+made a mistake, or a stumble where a stumble would have meant the end.
+She called to me suddenly; something that sounded like, "They're
+coming!"
+
+I turned my head and saw out of the tail of my eye, as a man sees when
+he's riding a race. They _were_ coming! Macartney's men, and--I
+thought--Macartney; but I knew better than to look long enough to make
+sure. His men, anyhow, had raced out on the lake as we had raced, and
+there was no need to watch what became of them. Their dying screams came
+to us, as they floundered and sank in their heavy boots through snow and
+frazil ice, to depths they would never get out of. I might have been
+sick anywhere else. I was fierce with joy out there in Lac Tremblant,
+running with a girl over the thin crust under which death lurked to
+snatch at us, as it had snatched at Macartney's men. Neither of us
+spoke. I was thinking too hard. I could have run indefinitely as we were
+running, but Paulette was just a girl. What of Paulette if she slackened
+with weariness, if I led her wrong by six inches, or missed a single
+threatening sign on the stuff we fled over?
+
+If I had been sure Macartney was drowned with his men, I might have
+taken her back to La Chance; but I was not sure. And, Macartney or no
+Macartney, the track I had led her out on the lake by was the only one I
+would have dared trust to return on,--and it was all lumps of snowy
+lolly and blue water, where Macartney's men had broken through. I looked
+ahead of me with my mind running like a mill. We had done about half the
+five-mile crossing; we might do the rest if we could stop and breathe
+for ten minutes, for five, even for two. Only, in all the width of the
+lake that lay like cake icing in front of us, there was not one place
+where we could dare to stand. The water under us was higher than I had
+ever known it. Not one single dagger-toothed rock showed as they had
+showed when I crossed it in a canoe the night before it froze to the
+thick slush that was all it ever froze to. There was not one single
+place to----But violently, out of the back of my memory, something came
+to me. There was one place in Lac Tremblant where, high water or low, a
+man might always stand--if I could hit it in the smothering, featureless
+snow.
+
+"The island!" I gasped out loud. Because there was one--a high, narrow
+island without even a bush on it--rising gradually, not precipitately
+like the rest of the rocks in Lac Tremblant, out of the uncertain water.
+But for half an hour I thought it might as well be non-existent. Stare
+as I might I could see no sign of it--and suddenly I all but fell with
+blessed shock. I was on it; on the highest end of it, with solid ground
+under my feet; solid ground and safety, breath and rest. I yelled to
+Paulette, "Jump to me!" and she jumped. That was all there was to it,
+except a man and a girl, panting, staggering, clinging together, till
+sense came to them, and they dropped flat in the snow.
+
+I said sense, but I don't know that I had any. I lay there staring at
+Paulette and her long bronze hair that had come down as she ran, till it
+was like a mantle over her and the snow round her. I had never thought
+women had hair like that. I cried out, "My God, Paulette, why did you
+come?"
+
+I may have sounded angry. I was, as a man always is angry when he has
+dragged a woman into his danger. Paulette panted without looking at me.
+"I--had to! The tunnel--caved in!"
+
+"I told you to get out of it!" I sat up where I had flung myself down
+and stared at her. She sat up, too, both of us crimson-faced and
+dishevelled. But neither of us thought of that. I stormed like a fool.
+"What possessed you to stay in the tunnel--or to follow me? I told you
+to jump for the cave!"
+
+"Well, I didn't!" Paulette stiffened as if she froze. "I hadn't time. I
+would have had to cross the tunnel. And I hadn't _time_ to do anything
+but jump to you and Collins before your stuff blew up. I'd just got on
+your shelf when it went off, and it stunned me till I had just sense
+enough left to lie still and hold on. But afterwards, when I saw what
+you were going to do, I put on the snowshoes you'd left by the tunnel
+entrance and came after you. I'm sorry I did, now!"
+
+"But Collins----" I looked blankly across the two miles of quivering
+death trap we still had to cross before we gained what safety there
+might be in the Halfway shore and the neighborhood of Macartney's
+picket, and my thoughts were not of Collins--"Why, in heaven's name,
+didn't Collins have sense enough to lug you back into his cave with him
+and Charliet, instead of letting you take a chance like this?"
+
+"Collins couldn't get back himself," Paulette retorted, as if I were
+unbearably stupid. "Nobody could get back! I told you the tunnel _caved
+in_, till it was solid between us and the others. Collins saw I had to
+follow you. In two more minutes Dick would have come to hunt Thompson's
+stope for me, and we had no guns to stave him off. You and Collins left
+them in the tunnel!" It was just what we had done, and I wasted good
+time in remembering it, guiltily. Paulette stood up and twisted back her
+streaming cloud of hair. "So, as I had to come with you," she resumed
+without looking at me, "don't you think we'd better get on? If you're
+waiting for me to rest, you needn't."
+
+I wasn't, altogether. I stared back over the perilous way we had come.
+There was no black speck of any one following us on its treacherous
+face; no sound of shots; no anything from the shore we had left. Yet,
+"Where do you suppose Macartney is?" I asked involuntarily.
+
+"Dead." Her voice was almost indifferent, but she shivered. "Or he'd
+have gone on shooting at us."
+
+I nodded, but I would have felt easier if I had thought so. Somehow I
+didn't, I don't know why. I know nothing would have induced me to take
+Paulette back to La Chance, even if the trodden lolly would have borne
+us again. I had a pang about Collins, left alone there; but Collins
+could take care of himself, and Paulette's shiver had reminded me we
+should freeze to death if we loitered where we were. I pointed to the
+snowy lake between us and the Halfway shore. "Can you do two more miles
+of running, over that?"
+
+"Yes," she glanced down at her slim, trained body, rather superbly.
+"Only--there's no one following us! Have we got to be quite so quick?"
+
+"Quicker! We don't know about Macartney. If he's alive he has a stable
+full of horses, and he knows where we're running to. He may try to cut
+us off." I half lied; he could not cut us off, since horses would be of
+no use to him in the heavy snow, and on foot it would take him two days
+to go round Lac Tremblant to the Halfway, where crossing the lolly could
+bring us in two hours. But I had no mind to air my real reason for
+haste.
+
+I should have known Paulette was too shrewd for me. "I'm a fool--Lac
+Tremblant never bears, of course," she said quite quietly. "Go on, Mr.
+Stretton. Only--don't stop, if anything goes wrong with me!"
+
+"Nothing will go wrong," said I, just as if I believed it. If she had
+called me Nicky, as she had done by mistake the night before, when she
+slept with her hand clasping mine, if she'd even looked at me, I must
+have burst out that I loved her, past life and death, and out to the
+world to come. But it was no time to force love-making on a girl who had
+seen the man she meant to marry lie dead before her eyes. If she turned
+shaky, or cried, I could never save her. For the bit of lake in front of
+us was ten times worse than what we'd crossed. I knew that when I
+tightened up the snowshoes silently and led my dream girl out on it. I
+would have given half my life for a rope, such as people have on
+glaciers. But I had no rope, and each of us would have to run, or sink,
+alone.
+
+I meant, of course----But that's no matter. I got Paulette off the
+island and, inch by inch, feeling my way, back to the channel where
+buoyant water, at least, lay under us. I twisted and turned like a
+corkscrew, but I dared not leave it. Once I cautioned Paulette never to
+try a short cut, just to keep abreast of me; and twice my heart was in
+my mouth at a hollow, instant-long clatter under our shoes. But we got
+on over the stuff somehow, leaving holes of blue water in our tracks,
+with great gobbets of snow floating in them. The shore lay close in
+front of us, with a hard distinct edge of shell ice showing where the
+water stopped. I was just going to call out that in ten feet more we'd
+be safe over the lolly, when--smash--both of us went through! I thought
+I fell a mile before I hit the water that was going to drown us; hit it
+knees first, just as I'd gone through, and--I sprawled in icy slush that
+rose no higher than my waist. I was in a sort of pocket between two
+rocks that were holding up the lolly. There was an avalanche of caving
+snow and ice all round me, but I was not drowned or likely to be,--only
+I barely thought of it. For I could not see Paulette. Suddenly, past
+belief, I heard her scream: "Nicky!"
+
+I fought blindly to the sound of her voice, wormed between my screening
+rocks, and shouted as I stood up. She was not even in slush! She had
+gone through shell ice to bare ground, a long strip of bare ground that
+led straight to the Halfway shore; roofed, high above my head, with
+shell ice and lolly that filtered a silver-green light. My dream girl
+lay there in her little blue sweater with the wind knocked out of
+her--and that was all. I kicked off my snowshoes that were not even
+broken and carried her under the ice roof to the Halfway shore. I may
+have thanked God aloud; I don't know. Only I carried her, with my face
+close to hers, and the slush and snow from her falling over me as I
+stumbled under the ice roof to the blessed shore. I had just sense
+enough to drop her in the blinding daylight, and drop myself beside her.
+I couldn't speak, from dead cold fear, now that I had saved her, of what
+it would have been if I had not. For two gasping minutes we just lay
+there.
+
+Then Paulette said pantingly, "I'm so dreadfully sorry--I've been such a
+trouble! But I couldn't do anything but come, and--I forgot you couldn't
+want me!"
+
+I sat up and saw her, sitting on a cold, bare, wind-swept rock that was
+all the refuge I had to offer her. Half a mile farther on were food and
+shelter in the Halfway shack--and it might as well have been in Heaven,
+for with Macartney's men cached in it I naturally could not take her
+there. Behind that, twenty-seven miles off, was Caraquet; but even a
+girl with a trained body like Paulette's could never make twenty-seven
+miles on top of all we'd done.
+
+"It's no question of wanting you," I exclaimed angrily. "It is that I
+don't know what to do. But want you--when do you suppose I haven't
+wanted you, ever since the night I first saw you by Dudley's fire? What
+do you suppose I'd ever have been in this game _for_, if I hadn't wanted
+just you in all this world? My heart of hearts, don't you know I love
+you?" I lost my head, or I never would have said it, for I saw her
+flinch. That brought me back to myself in the snow and desolation round
+us that stood for God's world as nothing else would have done. I burst
+out in shame, "Oh, forgive me! I never meant to let that out. I know you
+never cared a hang for me; that you were going to marry Dudley, if he
+hadn't been killed!"
+
+For one solid minute Paulette never opened her mouth. She sat like a
+colored statue, with rose-crimson cheeks and gold-bronze hair, under the
+white January sun. Her eyes were so dark in her face that they looked
+like blue-black ink. "I--I never was engaged to Dudley," she gasped at
+last, more as if it were jerked out of her than voluntarily. "I didn't
+think it was any business of yours, but I never was. We--Dudley and
+I--only said so, because it seemed the simplest way to manage Marcia,
+when Dudley brought me here to get me out of that emerald business. He
+was good to me, if ever a man was good to a girl he was only sorry for;
+I can't forget that brought him to his death. I'm sick with sorrow for
+him,--but I never was going to marry Dudley! He didn't even want me to.
+He----Oh, _Nicky_!"
+
+Because I couldn't stand it; I'd seen her eyes. I had both her hands in
+mine, I think I was telling her over and over how I had always loved
+her, how I had stood out of Dudley's way, that I didn't expect, of
+course, that she could care about an Indian-faced fool like me,
+when--suddenly--I knew! Like roses and silver trumpets and shelter out
+there in the homeless snow, _I knew_! All Paulette said was, "Oh,
+Nicky," again. But the two of us were in each other's arms.
+
+I don't know how long we clung or what we said. But at last I lifted my
+Indian-dark head from her gold one and spoke abruptly out of Paradise.
+"By gad, I have it!"
+
+"Have what?" Paulette gasped. "Oh, you certainly have most of my hair;
+it's all wound up in your coat buttons--if you mean that!"
+
+I didn't. "I meant I knew where we could go, and that's to Skunk's
+Misery," I harked back soberly, remembering the boy I had left there
+with a fire and shelter anyhow, if not food.
+
+"But you said it was a horrible place!"
+
+"So it is, when you have anywhere else to go. But we can't try the
+Halfway with Macartney's men in it, and neither of us could make
+Caraquet to-night. We've got to have shelter, darling."
+
+Paulette stopped plaiting her hair in a thick rope. "Say that again,"
+she ordered curiously.
+
+"What--Skunk's Misery?" But suddenly I understood, and used that word I
+had never said aloud before:
+
+"_Darling_ darling, Skunk's Misery is our only chance. Get up and come
+on!"
+
+But she answered without moving.
+
+"Want to tell you something first. The tunnel falling in wasn't all the
+reason I ran after you. I thought--thought Dick might not dare to shoot
+at you if I were between you and him, so----Oh, Nicky, _don't_ kiss my
+horrid, chapped hands!"
+
+But I was glad to hide my humbled face on them, remembering how I had
+stormed at her. I muttered, "Why didn't you tell me--out there on the
+lake?"
+
+"Well, you were pretty unpleasant, and"--as I kissed her, my dear love I
+had never thought to touch--"oh, Nicky, how could I tell you? I said
+everything to you last night but '_Nicholas Dane Stretton, I love
+you!_'--and all the notice you took was to kneel perfectly silent, with
+a face as long as your arm. You never even answered me, when I called
+you Nicky by mistake!"
+
+I hadn't dared. But it was no time to be talking of those things. Let
+alone that my wet breeches had frozen till I felt as if my legs didn't
+belong to me, we had landed exactly where old Thompson had been drowned.
+I wanted to get away from there, quickly; leaving no more trail than was
+necessary. I looked round me and saw how to do it.
+
+In front of us was the hole in the shore ice and all the smash and
+flurry where we had gone through. Where we had crawled on shore, from
+under the intact ice roof, was bare rock, wind-swept clean. It struck me
+that with a little management, and to a cursory inspector, it could look
+as though Paulette and I were drowned like Thompson. The snow had not
+piled on this side the lake as it had on ours. Detached rocks, few but
+practicable stepping-stones, lifted their bare bulk out of it, between
+us and the spruce bush we had to strike through to avoid the Halfway and
+Macartney's picket. Some kind of a trail we must leave to Skunk's
+Misery, but it need not begin here, in the first place Macartney would
+look, if he were alive to look anywhere. Paulette's eyes followed mine
+as I thought it, and she nodded. It was without a track of any sort,
+after the lake trail ended, that she and I stopped in the thick spruces
+and put on our snowshoes for the last lap of the way to Skunk's Misery.
+
+My dream girl's trained young body served her well. As she stepped out
+after me, I would never have guessed she had run a yard. It was easy
+enough to avoid the Halfway, and unlikely that Macartney's men would
+ever discover our devious track in the thick bush. Crossing the Caraquet
+road was the only place where we had to leave a track in the open. I did
+the best I could with it by picking up Paulette, and carrying her and
+her shoes into thick bush again; but I could not honestly feel much
+pleasure in the result. Any one with any sense would know my sunken shoe
+marks had carried double, but it was the best I could do. It was no
+pleasure to me either to hear Paulette exclaim sharply, as I set her
+down:
+
+"Nicky, I _forgot_! Dick can snowshoe after us, if he's alive. Charliet
+made a lot of snowshoes at odd times, to sell in Quebec if he ever went
+back there. They were piled up in the shed behind the kinty, and I
+believe Dick knew--though he didn't remember it in time to save his men.
+If he follows us I"--her lip curled in fear and hatred--"Oh, I hope he's
+dead!"
+
+So did I. Yet somehow I had never felt it. "Well, if he isn't," I said
+roughly, "he'll have to do twenty-two miles to catch up to our five, and
+then some to Skunk's Misery. He couldn't make good enough time round the
+lake to catch us to-night, supposing he knew where we were going; even
+on the chance of him, we've got to have one night's rest. And our only
+place to find it is Skunk's Misery!"
+
+Paulette nodded and stepped out after me once more. It was dead toil in
+the soft snow, and it was slow; for Macartney or no Macartney, there was
+no making time in the untrodden bush. I cut our way as short as I dared,
+but do the best I could it was dark when we came to that forlorn, evil
+hollow in the gap of desolate hills that Caraquet folk called Skunk's
+Misery. That had its points though, considering we needed to reach
+Macartney's old lean-to unseen, for the Skunk's Misery population was in
+bed, and as I said before, they had no dogs to bark at us. In dead
+silence, with Paulette holding to my coat and our snowshoes under our
+arms, we went Indian file through the maze of winding tracks Skunk's
+Misery used for roads, under rocks and around them; and on the
+hard-trodden paths our feet left no trace. At least, I thought so: and
+it was just where I slipped up! If I had looked behind me, when Paulette
+would not let me carry her snowshoes, I would have seen the tails of
+them dragging a telltale cut in the snow behind her, as they sagged from
+her tired arm. But my eyes were straight before me, on the door of
+Macartney's lean-to. It hung open, as it had always hung, but I only
+glanced in to make sure it was empty. It was elsewhere I was going,
+around the huge boulder that backed the place, and down a gully that
+apparently brought up against blind rock--only I knew better. I found
+the opening of the rocky passage I had wormed down once before with my
+back scraping the living rock between me and the sky, and on my hands
+and knees, with Paulette after me, I went down it again. It ended
+without warning, just as I had known it would end, in an open cave. A
+glow of fire was ahead of me; and, stooping over it--what I had never
+imagined I should see with joy and gratitude--the boy I had left there,
+toasting a raw rabbit on a stick. That was all I saw. And what possessed
+me I don't know, but as I stood up I turned on Paulette with a sudden
+wave of stale jealousy overwhelming me, and a question I had kept back
+all the afternoon:
+
+"Paulette, you're sure--_sure_--it's me, and not Dudley? That you didn't
+love the poor chap best?"
+
+Paulette scrambled to her feet beside me. "It's you," she said clearly.
+"I told you Dudley never loved me, or I him. I'll mourn for him always,
+for he met his death through me. But he never wanted to marry me, and if
+he were alive, he'd be the first person to tell you so!"
+
+There was a pause, definite, distinct, while you could count five. The
+boy at the fire started to frozen attention at sight of us, as sharply
+as his distorted body could start. But before he could speak, or I did,
+another voice answered Paulette's from the dark of the cave behind the
+fire,--an unexpected, mind-shattering voice, that took me toward it with
+one bound. "By gad," it said, "he would, would he? Two things have to go
+to that!"
+
+I stood paralyzed where I had jumped. Paulette's snowshoes dropped
+clattering on the cave floor. Dudley Wilbraham, whom the wolves had
+eaten--little, fat, with a face more like an egg than ever, but whole
+and _alive_--stood in the dimness of the cave behind the fire and my
+Skunk's Misery boy!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+SKUNK'S MISERY
+
+
+Paulette said, "Oh my heavens, Dudley!" and went straight to pieces.
+
+I don't know that I made much of a job of being calm myself. All I could
+get out was, "The wolves! We thought they'd eaten you--Paulette found
+your cap out by the Caraquet road."
+
+Dudley, for whom the whole of La Chance had beaten the bush all one
+livelong night, whom his own sister had sworn was killed and eaten,
+Dudley made the best show of the three. He had a flask, of course,--when
+had he not? He dosed Paulette and me with what was left in it, but even
+with the whisky limbering my parched throat I hadn't sense to ask a
+coherent question. Dudley looked from Paulette to me and spoke pretty
+collectedly to both of us.
+
+"I wasn't eaten, if that's what brought you two here--though judging
+from your conversation I imagine it wasn't. Thank the Lord you are here
+though, anyway. I've been pretty wild, tied up here with this snow.
+But"--sharply--"where the devil's Marcia?"
+
+"Hidden away from Macartney, with Charliet to look after her." It was
+all I could bring myself to say, except that she thought Dudley was
+dead.
+
+"Does Macartney think so too?" the corpse demanded.
+
+"He worked hard enough to feel safe in thinking it," I returned
+bitterly, and came out with the whole story. How Macartney said the
+wolves had howled around the shack till their noise drove Dudley
+distracted, and he had slipped out after them unnoticed, with a gun;
+that Macartney, the two girls and half the men had gone to look for him,
+when he never returned, till Paulette found his wolf-doped cap torn up
+by the Caraquet road, and Marcia found him, in the bush--unrecognizable
+but for what rags of his sable-lined coat were left on his body. And
+Dudley's hard-boiled egg face never changed with one word of it.
+
+"So that was how it was worked," he reflected quite composedly. "And
+Macartney thinks it was I Marcia found! Well, it wasn't--though I
+daresay it was my coat, all right, just as it was my cap Paulette picked
+up by the road. But it damn well would have been me, if it hadn't been
+for"--he paused casually, and pointed behind him--"Baker."
+
+"Baker! That good-for-nothing devil who was always trailing after you?
+Why, Macartney said----" but I remembered Macartney had only said Baker
+was missing, too. I wheeled on the dimness of the inside cave and saw
+what I had missed in my flurry over Dudley. A second man--white-faced,
+black-eyebrowed, slim looking--was standing just where the fire glow did
+not reach him, staring at Paulette and me. I said, "Land of love,
+_Baker_!" And I may be forgiven if I swore.
+
+Baker nodded as undramatically as Dudley. "Yes, it was me. I had sense
+enough all along to guess Macartney was going to finish Mr. Wilbraham
+with the wolf dope he'd tried out on you, if the rest of the gang
+hadn't. And I wouldn't stand for sculduddery like that, for one thing;
+and for another I thought I'd come out better in the end by sticking to
+the boss, like you seen me doing often enough! So I just told him he was
+being lain for and brought him out here. I knew this cave was safe, for
+I lived here two months before me and the rest of us dribbled into La
+Chance. And I knew the Halfway wasn't--for the two men who turned Billy
+Jones out of it, with a sham letter from the boss, were the two who
+drowned old Thompson! I've played honest in my way, Mr. Stretton, if
+you never thought so."
+
+"Shut up," Dudley interrupted him indignantly. "I'd be where Marcia
+thought she found me, if it hadn't been for you. Listen, Stretton! I got
+fussy after you left for Billy Jones's that afternoon; I'd been hitting
+it up the day before, and you know how that leaves me! I didn't see why
+in blazes I hadn't gone with you to Billy's instead of sitting around
+the house, and a couple of hours after you left I started out to get a
+horse and follow you. But it's a lie that I heard wolves, or thought of
+them: there wasn't one around the place. Macartney wasn't around,
+either. I guess he was out in the bush fixing up the wolf-baited ground
+that was to get me, for he'd fixed up my coat and cap with it before he
+started. I thought something smelt like the devil when I put them on,
+but I never guessed it was my own things. I went out to the stable just
+as I might on any other day, only nobody happened to see me go, and
+right there I ran on Baker. I told him to come for a ride with me, but
+he didn't seem to think much of the horse racket; said he knew a short
+cut to Billy's, and it would be better for my head if we just walked. It
+was Baker told me the devilish reek I smelled was coming from my own
+coat, and I chucked it down by the stable door. God knows which of
+Macartney's men picked it up and wore it after I left it, for Marcia to
+find," even Dudley looked sick, "but it wasn't me! I smelt my cap, too,
+after I'd walked some of the muzziness out of me, and I threw that
+away--where Paulette found it. We didn't leave a sign of a track, of
+course; it was long before there was any snow. If I'd known why Baker
+had me out there, walking away from La Chance, I'd have turned back and
+defied Macartney, or I'd never have started. But it wasn't till it was
+black dark, and I'd walked enough sense into myself to ask why we were
+not getting to Billy Jones's, that Baker took his life in his hands--for
+you may bet I was fighting mad at having seemed to run away--and told me
+that you and I and all of us were in a trap that was going to spring and
+get us, and give Macartney our mine. He let out about Thompson's murder,
+and you and the wolf dope; and that Macartney'd kicked Billy Jones out
+of the Halfway with a forged dismissal from me, and had his own men
+waiting there to get you while he limed the bush and my cap and coat,
+for the wolves to get _me_. And you know I'd have been dead sure to go
+out after them with a gun, just as he said I did, if I'd heard them come
+yowling around the shack while I was in it! I'd have gone back to face
+Macartney, even then, only----Well, you've had experience of
+Macartney's wolves, and you'd know I couldn't! We could hear the row
+they were making even where we stood, miles away. We set off on the dead
+run for Caraquet and help, but we had to break the journey somewhere. We
+couldn't face Macartney's men at Billy's, for neither of us had a
+gun--and that's another lie to Macartney--and it was no good leaving the
+devil to run into hell. So Baker brought me here."
+
+"But," I gasped, "I don't see how you missed me! I was here, too, that
+night!"
+
+"Well, we weren't--till the morning," Dudley snapped in his old way. "It
+was just beginning to snow when we crawled down the burrow you'd crawled
+out of and found this place--and your boy."
+
+"But I told him----D'ye mean he just _let_ you find him?"
+
+"He did not," grimly. "He was hidden away somewhere, and I don't suppose
+he'd ever have come out, if I hadn't happened to use what seems to have
+been your password! I said out loud that I'd give twenty dollars to any
+one who'd get me some food; and out comes your friend, and says you told
+him to trust any one who said that, and where was the twenty? So, after
+that, we settled down!"
+
+"But----" Dudley's selfishness had always been colossal, yet this time
+it beat even me. "What did you suppose was going to become of your
+sister and Paulette--left with Macartney when you'd disappeared, and the
+Halfway picket had got _me_?" I burst out.
+
+"My acquaintance with you made me hopeful they wouldn't get you," Dudley
+began drily, "and as for the girls----" but his sham indifference broke
+down. "Don't talk of it, will you?" he bellowed. "I did think you'd be
+all right, but I was in hell for those girls till I could get to
+Caraquet and take back help for them! Only this cursed snow stopped me.
+We had to wait till it was packed enough for Baker to sneak down to the
+Halfway and steal a couple of my own horses, for us to ride to Caraquet.
+But that's how I'm here--and how Marcia found a half-eaten man in my
+top-coat, that she thought was me!"
+
+I was speechless. It was all so simple, even to Dudley's twenty dollars
+and my boy. But before I could say so, Dudley turned on me with his old
+vicious pounce. "Why in blazes don't you tell me what you left Marcia
+for, after bullying me because I did? And why are you and Paulette here,
+if you thought I was killed?"
+
+"We left her because we had to, with a thousand tons of earth between us
+and the only way we could have got back to her alive," said I
+wrathfully. "And as for why we're here,"--I poured out the whole story
+of my return to La Chance, from Dudley's own funeral procession that met
+me and my bootless fight with Macartney, to the resurrection of Collins
+and Dunn, and Paulette's and my race across Lac Tremblant. I left out
+Marcia's share in my defeat, but Dudley gave a comprehending sniff.
+
+"Marcia always was a fool about Macartney! But it's no matter, since she
+isn't with him--whether he's alive or dead. Only you were a worse fool,
+Stretton, to cross that lake with a girl in tow. I don't know why you
+weren't both drowned, like Thompson----" but his voice broke. He was a
+good little man, under his bad habits, or he never would have done what
+he had for Paulette. He muttered something about all the decent men
+who'd met their death because he wouldn't listen to Paulette when she
+tried to tell him the truth about Macartney, damned him up and down, and
+turned to Paulette with a sweet sort of roughness:
+
+"You look done up, my girl! Here, get down by the fire and eat what our
+chef's got ready!" For the crippled boy had gone on with his cooking,
+regardless of the talk round him, and his rabbit was done.
+
+But Paulette never looked at the food Dudley held out to her. "You're
+not angry, Dudley?" she asked very low. "I mean--for what I said to
+Nicky as we came in?"
+
+"I was," but Dudley grinned in the half dark. "It was true enough, only
+nobody likes to hear their own obituary. But I knew about Stretton long
+ago, if you hadn't the sense to! You take him, my child, and my
+blessing. God knows I never asked you to marry an old soak like me!"
+
+He shoved Paulette's hand into mine and stared at the two of us for a
+second. Then--"By gad," he added, in a different voice, "I hope
+Macartney's got drowned, or he may walk in on the lot of us!"
+
+"How?" I demanded scornfully. "He couldn't do thirty-two miles in the
+time Paulette and I did fifteen, even if he knew where to do it to!"
+
+"He doesn't have to, my young son," Dudley stood musing on it. "Baker
+and I didn't do any twenty, coming here; and it was Macartney's own path
+we came by. That doesn't go round by any Halfway! If he takes a fancy to
+come here by it, and strikes your tracks as you two came into Skunk's
+Misery, the rest wouldn't take him long! I believe--hang on a minute,
+while I speak to Baker!" He wheeled suddenly and disappeared into the
+dark of the cave where Baker stood aloof.
+
+"You needn't worry about Macartney," I said to Paulette. "We didn't
+leave any tracks, once we got into broken snow!"
+
+I turned at a rustle behind me and looked straight into the muzzle of
+Macartney's revolver and into Macartney's eyes!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+THE END
+
+
+The boy at the fire let out a yelp and dropped flat. Dudley and Baker,
+invisible somewhere, neither spoke nor stirred. And I stood like a fool,
+as near the death of Nicholas Dane Stretton as ever I wish to get.
+
+But Macartney only stood there, looking so much as usual that I guessed
+he must have rested outside the mouth of our burrow before he wormed
+down to tackle me.
+
+"You wouldn't have left any tracks," he said, picking up what I'd just
+said in his everyday manner, if it had not been for the dog's grin he
+always wore when he was angry, "if I hadn't run on single snowshoe
+tracks carrying double, where you crossed the Caraquet road. And if one
+of you hadn't trailed your shoe tails through Skunk's Misery--that
+doesn't wear them!"
+
+"How did you get here?" said I slowly, because I was calculating my
+spring to Macartney's gun hand.
+
+"I walked," and I thought he had not noticed I was half a step nearer
+him. "If you meant me to drown myself following you over your lake, I
+didn't--thanks to the kind warning you made of my men. But I didn't
+imagine you'd drowned yourselves either--after I looked through a field
+glass! Charliet had plenty of snowshoes cached away; I was always
+quick on my feet; and after I struck your track the rest was
+simple--especially as you were fool enough to bring a girl here. I----"
+but his level voice was suddenly thick with passion. "_Get back!_ If you
+try to grab my gun I'll shoot you, and your boy too, like dogs! You'll
+stay still and listen--to what I've to say. I've an account to settle
+with you, Stretton; now that I've cleaned up Dudley's, and he's dead!"
+
+You could have heard a pin drop on the dead silence of that underground
+hole. Neither Dudley nor Baker stirred, and it hit me like a hammer that
+Macartney didn't know they were alive; _he didn't know!_
+
+I stood as though I had been struck dumb; so did Paulette. Neither of us
+even flickered an eyelash toward the shadows behind us, where Dudley
+must be crouching, anything but dead, with Baker beside him. Perhaps it
+struck both of us, simultaneously, that Dudley had heard Macartney
+coming before we did and disappeared on purpose, thinking Macartney
+might speak naked truth to Paulette and myself, where he would have
+varnished it up to a mysteriously resurrected employer whom he might yet
+bamboozle as he always had bamboozled him. Anyhow, neither of us saw fit
+to give Dudley away. Macartney sneered into our silent faces.
+
+"There's not much fight in you," he commented contemptuously. "Though it
+was never any good to try to fight me! If you like to have it in
+black and white, _I've_ been all the brains of the business
+here--single-handed! It was I got the secret of the wolf bait from the
+mother of your lame friend here," he pointed with his unoccupied hand to
+my grovelling boy, "when first I followed Paulette out from New York and
+laid up in Skunk's Misery to wait till I had a clear way to get to La
+Chance. That old ass Thompson gave me that, when I scooped him up on the
+road. After I'd used him, two of my men drowned him in Lac
+Tremblant--and you'd never have guessed a word about it, if it hadn't
+been for his cursed card they overlooked in the shack here, where you
+found it. It was I put that bottle in your wagon the day it broke there.
+I did it before I knew Paulette was going to drive with you; that was
+the only thing in the whole business that ever gave me a scare! It was I
+got rid of Collins and Dunn"--I saw that he believed it, just as he
+believed he was rid of Dudley--"and the most of your men who might have
+stuck by you if it came to a fight for the mine. I had to shoot the last
+four of them, as you _didn't_ find out that night in the assay office! I
+baited the bush that rid me of Dudley Wilbraham, with his yells about
+emeralds and hunting down Thompson's murderer; and I've got your and his
+mine, in spite of your blowing up and drowning all the men I meant to
+hold it with. But you found out most of that, even if it was a little
+late. What you didn't find out, or Dudley either, was that he was right
+about Van Ruyne's emeralds!"
+
+Paulette leapt up like a wildcat. "You mean you took them?"
+
+"I took them," he nodded sneeringly, and I saw her eyes blaze. "I took
+them--to get you into a hole you'd have to come to me to get out of!"
+
+"But I didn't have to come to you! I----" but she spoke with sudden
+cutting deliberation. "I don't believe you. You were never in the
+Houstons' house that night. I should have seen you."
+
+"Oh, seen me!" Macartney grinned. I think the two of them forgot me,
+forgot everything but that they were facing each other at last with the
+masks off. I know neither of them heard a slow, creeping, nearing sound
+in the long burrow behind Macartney, a sound that swung my blood up
+with the wild, furious hope that Collins and Dunn--anyhow Collins--was
+hot on Macartney's trail, as Macartney had been on Paulette's and mine,
+and was creeping down the burrow behind him now, ready to take him in
+the rear when I jumped at him from the front. I waited till whoever it
+was came close up; waited for the moment to grab Macartney, watching his
+triumphant, passionate eyes as he stared victoriously at Paulette.
+
+"Seen me?" he repeated, and I hoped the sound of his own voice would
+deafen him to that other sound, that was so loud to me. "You saw the
+Houstons' guests, and their servants! You never thought of seeing the
+expert who was down from New York about the heating of Mrs. Houston's
+new orchid houses! I left the real man dead drunk in New York, in a
+place he wouldn't leave in a hurry; and the week-end you spent at the
+Houstons' I, and my plans, had the run of Mrs. Houston's library, that
+neither she nor any one else ever goes into. And," he laughed outright,
+"it was next _your_ sitting room, opening on the same upstairs balcony!
+I had only to put my hand through an open window to scoop Van Ruyne's
+emeralds out of their case while you had your back turned, writing the
+note you sent _outside_ the case, instead of inside! Remember?" But this
+time he did not laugh. "I missed fire about getting you that night,
+thanks to that fool Wilbraham happening round with his car. But now I'll
+take all I did this whole business for--and that's you,--Paulette
+Valenka!"
+
+Paulette never took her eyes from him. "That's a lie," she said quite
+evenly. "Oh, not that you took the emeralds; I believe that. But it was
+not only to get me into trouble. It was for themselves! You had to steal
+something. You hadn't one penny."
+
+"Not then!" Even in the gloom I saw two scarlet spots flare out like
+sealing-wax on the always dead blondeness of Macartney's cheeks. I
+thought I could hear his heart beat where I stood. "But I have now! With
+the emeralds, your late friend Dudley's mine, and _you_,"--his voice was
+unspeakably, insultingly significant, but that unheard rustle behind
+him, growing nearer, more unmistakable, kept me motionless. "By heaven,
+a man might call himself rich! Did you suppose Stretton here could fight
+me? Why, I've been the secret wolf he never had the _nous_ to guess at!
+I----" he swung around on me like light, his revolver six inches from my
+ear. "Stand there," he shouted at me, "and die like Wilbraham, you----"
+
+His hand dropped, his jaw fell with the half-spoken words in it; his
+eyes, all pupils, stared over my shoulder. I turned and saw
+Dudley,--Dudley, silent, watching us both; saw him even before I grabbed
+the gun out of Macartney's hanging, lax hand. But Macartney never so
+much as felt me do it. He stared paralyzed at Dudley--little, fat, with
+a face like a hard-boiled egg--standing silent against the dark of the
+inner cave.
+
+Dudley had a nerve when you came through to it. "I've not died, yet," he
+snarled out suddenly.
+
+I had the only gun in the place and the drop on Macartney; but I never
+stirred. That long-heard rustle in the burrow was close on me: was--
+
+"My God, Marcia!" said I. I never even wondered about Collins and Dunn
+letting her get away. Marcia stood up in the entrance from the burrow,
+panting, purple-faced, exhausted. Marcia sprang to Macartney--not
+Dudley, I doubt if she even saw Dudley--with a cry out of her very soul.
+
+"Mack, you're not Hutton--you never took those emeralds--and for that
+girl! Say it's a lie, and it's _I_ you love! Mack, say you love me
+still!"
+
+Macartney flung back a mechanical hand and swept her away from him like
+a fly. She fell and lay there. None of us had said a word since Dudley
+came out and faced Macartney. None of us said a word now. I saw, almost
+indifferently, Collins burst out of the burrow behind Macartney, as
+Marcia had burst out, and grab me. "Stretton," he gasped, "thank
+God--found your tracks. But that she-devil Marcia got away from me,
+and----" But in his turn he jerked taut where he stood, at sight of
+Dudley, and stood speechless.
+
+But I never looked at him. I looked at nothing but Macartney's face.
+
+It was rigid, as if it were a mask that had frozen on him. The
+sealing-wax scarlet on his cheeks had gone out like a turned-out lamp.
+His eyes went from Dudley to Collins and back again, as if they were the
+only living part of his deathly face.
+
+"Ah," said Macartney, "A-ah!" He dropped on the floor all in one piece,
+like a cut-down tree.
+
+Collins made a plunge for him. I sent Collins reeling.
+
+"Let him alone, you young fool," I swore. "We've got him, and he's
+fainted. I've seen him like this before--the night he shot our own men
+in the assay office. It's only his old fainting fits."
+
+"It's his new death," said Dudley, quite quietly. He came forward and
+bent over Macartney, laid a hand on his breast. "Can't you see the man's
+gone, Stretton? It killed him: the run here--the shock of seeing me. He
+must have had a heart like rotten quartz!"
+
+Paulette, Collins, Baker, all of us, stood there blankly. We had not
+struck a blow, or raised a voice among the whole lot of us; Macartney's
+gun was still warm from his grasp whence I had snatched it; and
+Macartney--the secret wolf at La Chance, masquerader, thief,
+murderer--lay dead at our feet. I heard myself say out loud: "His heart
+was rotten: that was why he fainted in the assay office. But----Oh, the
+man was mad besides! He must have been." And over my words came another
+voice. It was Marcia's, and it made me sick.
+
+"Macartney," she was screaming, "Macartney!" She ran round and round
+like a hen in a road, before me, Dudley, all of us; then flung herself
+on her brother as if she had only just realized him. "You're
+alive--you're not dead! Can't you see he never stole any emeralds nor
+loved that girl, any more than he killed you? You made up lies about
+him, all of you! And you stand here doing nothing for him. He----Oh,
+Mack, speak to me! _Mack!_"
+
+She sprang to Macartney; dropped on her knees by the dead, handsome
+length of him; tore open his coat and shirt. But she knelt there, rigid,
+with her hand on his quiet heart.
+
+Macartney had never stolen Van Ruyne's emeralds: she had just said it.
+There, around Macartney's bared throat, lying on the white skin of his
+chest, green lights in the dull fire-glow of the cave, were Van Ruyne's
+emeralds, that Paulette Brown--whose real name was Tatiana Paulina
+Valenka--had never seen or touched since she put them back into Van
+Ruyne's velvet case!
+
+I will say Marcia Wilbraham knew when she was beaten. She cowered back
+to Dudley and began to cry; but it was with her arms round his neck. And
+the fat little man held her to his queer, kind heart. I turned my back
+sharply on the pair of them, and----My eyes met Paulette's!
+
+There would be all sorts of fuss and unpleasantness to go through with
+the sheriff from Caraquet, over what was left of Macartney; there was
+old Thompson's death to be accounted for; Van Ruyne's emeralds to be
+returned to him, so that Tatiana Paulina Valenka, and not Paulette
+Brown, could marry that lucky, Indian-dark fool who was Nicky Stretton.
+There was Dudley's mine, too, all safe again, and such an incredible
+mine that even I would be passably rich out of it,--but I barely, just
+barely, thought of all those things. My dream girl's blue eyes were like
+stars in mine, under the burnt gold of her silk-soft hair. The clear
+carnation rose in her cheeks as I looked at her, where she stood close
+to me, all mine, as I had always dreamed she would be,--till I met her
+and was sick with doubt of it. She was mine! As far as I was concerned,
+this story had ended at Skunk's Misery,--where it had begun, if I had
+only guessed it. I gave an honest start as Collins jogged my elbow.
+
+"We can't stay here, with _that_," he whispered, nodding at Macartney.
+"What do you think about getting out of this? We could leave--him--here,
+with Baker and the boy for a guard, till we can get the Caraquet people
+to come and see him. We've our snowshoes, and mine and the girls',
+besides Macartney's, that I guess he's done with. I think we could
+manage along as far as the Halfway in the morning, if we made a travois
+of boughs for Wilbraham!"
+
+"But," I stared at him, "Macartney's picket's there!"
+
+"Oh, Charliet and Dunn were going to clear them out with Miss
+Wilbraham's rifle, while I got after her, when she broke away on to
+Macartney's track here," Collins returned calmly. "I expect that's all
+right, and they've run. Anyhow, you've got Macartney's gun! You can go
+ahead and see."
+
+But I had no need to. An abandoned picket has a way of knowing when the
+game is up, and Macartney's men had cleared out on the double, even
+before Charliet's first rifle bullet missed them. We caught them
+afterwards, half dead in the bush,--but that doesn't come in here. I
+walked into the Halfway with my dream girl beside me, and both of us
+jumped as Dudley suddenly poked his pig-eyed face between us.
+
+"You needn't hop, you two," he commented irritably; "you can have your
+Old Nick, Paulette, for all me! What I'm thinking of's that boy--and
+Baker! I guess they saved my life all right between them, and I'm going
+to set them up for what's left of theirs. Got anything to say against
+that, hey?" with his old snarl.
+
+"Not much," I returned soberly. But Paulette clasped both Dudley's podgy
+hands in hers.
+
+"Oh, _dear_ Dudley," she said softly. But there were tears in her eyes.
+
+I know; for I kissed them away afterwards, when we were alone.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The La Chance Mine Mystery, by Susan Carleton Jones
+
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+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of The La Chance Mine Mystery, by S. Carleton.
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css">
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+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's The La Chance Mine Mystery, by Susan Carleton Jones
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The La Chance Mine Mystery
+
+Author: Susan Carleton Jones
+
+Illustrator: George W. Gage
+
+Release Date: November 9, 2008 [EBook #27209]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LA CHANCE MINE MYSTERY ***
+
+
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+
+Produced by D Alexander, Josephine Paolucci and the Online
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+</pre>
+
+
+
+<h1>THE LA CHANCE MINE MYSTERY</h1>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>S. CARLETON</h2>
+
+<h4>WITH FRONTISPIECE BY</h4>
+
+<h3>GEORGE W. GAGE</h3>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 150px;">
+<img src="images/i001.jpg" width="150" height="209" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>BOSTON</h4>
+
+<h4>LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY</h4>
+
+<h4>1920</h4>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>Copyright, 1920</i>,<br />
+<span class="smcap">By Little, Brown, and Company</span>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>All rights reserved</i><br />
+<br />
+Published March, 1920<br />
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 395px;">
+<img src="images/i003.jpg" width="395" height="600" alt="Frontispiece. See page 76." title="" />
+<span class="caption">&quot;I STOOD UP AND DROVE FOR ALL I WAS WORTH, AND THE GIRL
+BESIDE ME SHOT,&mdash;AND HIT!&quot; Frontispiece. <i>See page 76</i>.</span>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>THE LA CHANCE MINE MYSTERY</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+
+<p>CHAPTER <span class="tocnum">PAGE</span></p>
+
+<p>
+I. <span class="smcap">I Come Home: And the Wolves Howl</span>                      <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_1'>1</a></span><br />
+<br />
+II. <span class="smcap">My Dream: and Dudley's Girl</span>                         <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_16'>16</a></span><br />
+<br />
+III. <span class="smcap">Dudley's Mine: and Dudley's Gold</span>                   <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_30'>30</a></span><br />
+<br />
+IV. <span class="smcap">The Man in the Dark</span>                                 <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_46'>46</a></span><br />
+<br />
+V. <span class="smcap">The Caraquet Road: and the Wolves Howl Once More</span>     <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_56'>56</a></span><br />
+<br />
+VI. <span class="smcap">Mostly Wolves: and a Girl</span>                           <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_71'>71</a></span><br />
+<br />
+VII. <span class="smcap">I Find Little Enough on the Corduroy Road, and Less at Skunk's Misery</span>     <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_86'>86</a></span><br />
+<br />
+VIII. <span class="smcap">Thompson</span>!                                        <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_100'>100</a></span><br />
+<br />
+IX. <span class="smcap">Tatiana Paulina Valenka</span>!                           <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_116'>116</a></span><br />
+<br />
+X. <span class="smcap">I Interfere for the Last Time</span>                       <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_134'>134</a></span><br />
+<br />
+XI. <span class="smcap">Macartney Hears a Noise: and I Find Four Dead Men</span>  <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_148'>148</a></span><br />
+<br />
+XII. <span class="smcap">Thompson's Cards: and Skunk's Misery</span>              <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_164'>164</a></span><br />
+<br />
+XIII. <span class="smcap">A Dead Man's Messenger</span>                           <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_182'>182</a></span><br />
+<br />
+XIV. <span class="smcap">Wolves&mdash;and Dudley</span>                                <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_199'>199</a></span><br />
+<br />
+XV. <span class="smcap">The Place of Departed Spirits</span>                      <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_218'>218</a></span><br />
+<br />
+XVI. <span class="smcap">In Collins's Care</span>                                 <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_231'>231</a></span><br />
+<br />
+XVII. <span class="smcap">High Explosive</span>                                   <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_247'>247</a></span><br />
+<br />
+XVIII. <span class="smcap">Lac Tremblant</span>                                   <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_265'>265</a></span><br />
+<br />
+XIX. <span class="smcap">Skunk's Misery</span>                                    <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_283'>283</a></span><br />
+<br />
+XX. <span class="smcap">The End</span>                                            <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_293'>293</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THE LA CHANCE MINE MYSTERY</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<h3>I COME HOME: AND THE WOLVES HOWL</h3>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I am sick of the bitter wood-smoke,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And sick of the wind and rain:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I will leave the bush behind me,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And look for my love again.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<p>Little as I guessed it, this story really began at Skunk's Misery. But
+Skunk's Misery was the last thing in my head, though I had just come
+from the place.</p>
+
+<p>Hungry, dog-tired, cross with the crossness of a man in authority whose
+orders have been forgotten or disregarded, I drove Billy Jones's old
+canoe across Lac Tremblant on my way home to Dudley Wilbraham's gold
+mine at La Chance, after an absence of months. It was halfway to dark,
+and the bitter November wind blew dead in my teeth. Slaps of spray from
+flying wave-crests blinded me with gouts of lake water, that was oddly
+warm till the cutting wind froze it to a coating of solid ice on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span> my
+bare hands and stinging face, that I had to keep dabbing on my paddling
+shoulder to get my eyes clear in order that I might stare in front of my
+leaky, borrowed canoe.</p>
+
+<p>To a stranger there might have seemed to be nothing particular to stare
+at, out on a lake where the world was all wind and lumpy seas and
+growing November twilight; but any one who had lived at La Chance knew
+better. By the map Lac Tremblant should have been our nearest gold route
+to civilization, but it was a lake that was no lake, as far as transport
+was concerned, and we never used it. The five-mile crossing I was making
+was just a fair sample of the forty miles of length Lac Tremblant
+stretched mockingly past the La Chance mine toward the main road from
+Caraquet&mdash;our nearest settlement&mdash;to railhead: and that was forty miles
+of queer water, sown with rocks that were sometimes visible as
+tombstones in a cemetery and sometimes hidden like rattlesnakes in a
+blanket. For the depth of Lac Tremblant, or its fairway, were two things
+no man might ever count on. It would fall in a night to shallows a child
+could wade through, among bristling needles of rocks no one had ever
+guessed at; and rise in a morning to the tops of the spruce scrub on its
+banks,&mdash;a sweet spread of water with not a rock to be seen. What hidden
+spring fed it was a mystery.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span> But in the bitterest winter it was never
+cold enough to freeze, further than to form surging masses of frazil ice
+that would neither let a canoe push through them, nor yet support the
+weight of a man. Winter or summer, it was no thoroughfare&mdash;and neither
+was the ungodly jumble of swamp and mountains that stopped me from
+tapping the lower end of it&mdash;or I should not have spent the last three
+months in making fifty miles of road through untrodden bush to Caraquet,
+over which to transport the La Chance gold to a post-road and a railway:
+and it was no chosen return route of mine to La Chance now, either.</p>
+
+<p>If I could draw you a map I should not have to explain the country. But
+failing that I will be as clear as I can.</p>
+
+<p>The line of Lac Tremblant, and that of the road I had just made from
+Caraquet to La Chance, ran away from each other in two sides of a
+triangle,&mdash;except that the La Chance mine was five miles down the far
+side of the lake from Caraquet, and my road had to half-moon round the
+head of Lac Tremblant to get home&mdash;a lavish curve, too, by reason of
+swamps.</p>
+
+<p>But it was on that half-moon road that I should have been now, if my
+order to have a horse meet me at the Halfway stables I had built at the
+beginning of it had not been forgotten<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> or disregarded by some one at La
+Chance.</p>
+
+<p>Getting drenched to the skin with lake water was no rattling good
+exchange for riding home on a fresh horse that felt like a warm stove
+under me, but a five-mile short cut across the apex of the road and lake
+triangle was better than walking twenty-two miles along the side of it
+on my own legs&mdash;which was the only choice I had had in the matter.</p>
+
+<p>I was obliged to get home, for reasons of my own; but when I walked in
+on Billy Jones, the foreman at the Halfway stables, that afternoon,
+after months of absence and road-making, there was not even a team horse
+in his stables, let alone my own saddle mare. There was not a soul about
+the place, either, but Billy himself, blandly idle and sprawling over a
+grubby old newspaper in front of the stove in his shack.</p>
+
+<p>His welcome was heartening, but his intelligence was not. No one had
+told him a word about me or my mare, he informed me profanely; also that
+it was quite impossible for me to ride over to La Chance that night.
+There were not any work horses at the Halfway, because he had doubled up
+the teams for some heavy hauling from Caraquet, according to my orders
+sent over from Caraquet the week before, and no horses had been sent
+back<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span> from La Chance since. He guessed affably that some one might be
+driving over from the mine in the morning, and that after tramping from
+Caraquet I had better stay where I was for the night.</p>
+
+<p>I hesitated. I was dog-tired for once in my life, but I had not done any
+tramp from Caraquet that day, if I had told the bald truth. Only I had
+no idea of telling it, nor any wish to explain to Billy Jones that I had
+been making a fool of myself elsewhere, doing a solid week of hospital
+nursing over a filthy boy I had found on my just-finished road the
+morning I had really left Caraquet. From the look of him I guessed he
+had got hurt cutting down a tree and not getting out of the way in time,
+though he was past telling me that or anything else. But I had also
+guessed where he lived, by the dirt on him, and was ass enough to carry
+him home to the squalid, half-French, half-Indian village the Caraquet
+people called Skunk's Misery.</p>
+
+<p>It lay in the bush, in a slanting line between Caraquet and Lac
+Tremblant: a nest of thriftless evil stuck in a hollow you might pass
+within twenty yards of, and never guess held a house. Once there I had
+no choice but to stay and nurse the boy's sickening pain, till his
+mother came home from some place where she was fishing eels for the
+winter; for none of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span> the rest of the population of fat-faced,
+indifferent women&mdash;I never saw a man, whether they were away in the
+lumber woods or not&mdash;would lay a hand on him. I will say plainly that I
+was more than thankful to hand him over to his mother. I had spilt over
+myself a bottle of some nameless and abominable brew that I'd mistaken
+for liniment, and my clothes smelt like carrion; also the lean-to I had
+lived in was so dirty that I scratched from suspicion all day long,
+except when I was yawning from a week of hardly closing my eyes.
+Altogether, as I said, I was dog-tired, if it were not from walking, and
+I might have stayed at Billy Jones's if I had not been crazy to get rid
+of my dirt-infected clothes. The worst reek had gone from them, but even
+out in the open air they smelt. I saw Billy Jones wrinkle up his nose to
+sniff innocently while he talked to me, and that settled me.</p>
+
+<p>"I have to get home," I observed hastily. "Wilbraham expected me a week
+ago. But I don't walk any twenty-two miles! I'll take your old canoe and
+a short cut across the lake."</p>
+
+<p>I was the only man who ever used Lac Tremblant, and the foreman of the
+Halfway stables cast a glance on me. "If it was me, I'd walk," he
+remarked drily. "But take your choice. The lake's a short cut right
+enough, only I wouldn't say where <i>to</i>&mdash;in my<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span> crazy old birchbark this
+kind of a blowing-up evening!"</p>
+
+<p>That, and a few more things he said as he squinted a weather-wise eye on
+the lake, came back to me as I fought his old canoe through the water.
+And fighting it was, mind you, for the spray hid the rocks I knew, and
+the wind shoved me back on the ones I didn't know. Also the canoe was
+leaking till she was dead logy, and the gusts were so fierce I could not
+stop paddling to bail her. The short, vicious seas that snapped at me
+five ways at once were the color of lead and felt as heavy as cold
+molasses. But, for all that, crossing Lac Tremblant was saving me
+twenty-two miles on my feet, and I was not wasting any dissatisfaction
+on the traverse. Only, as I shoved the canoe forward, I was nearer to
+being played out, from one thing on top of another, than ever I was in
+my life. I pretended the paddle that began to hang in spite of me was
+only heavy with freezing spray and that the dead ache in my back was a
+kink. But I had to put every ounce there was in my six feet of weary
+bones into lightning-change wrenches to hold the old canoe head on to
+the splattering seas and keep her from swamping. I was very near to
+thinking I had been a fool not to have stayed with Billy Jones,&mdash;when I
+was suddenly aware of absolute, utter calm in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span> air that felt as warm
+on my face as if I'd gone into a house; of tranquil water under the
+forefoot of the canoe that had jumped forward under me as the resistance
+of the wind ceased; and of the lake shore&mdash;dark, featureless,
+silent&mdash;within twenty feet of me. I was across Lac Tremblant and in the
+shelter of the La Chance shore!</p>
+
+<p>There is no good in denying that for five minutes all I did was to sit
+back and breathe. Then I lit my pipe, that was dry because it was inside
+my shirt; bailed the unnecessary water out of the canoe and the
+immediate neighborhood of my legs; and, without meaning to, turned a
+casual eye on the shore at my right hand.</p>
+
+<p>It might have been because I was tired, but that shore struck me as if I
+had never seen it before; and on a November evening it was not an
+inviting prospect. Bush and bush, and more bush, grew down to the very
+verge of the water in a mass that spoke of heavy swamp and no landing.
+Behind that, I knew, was rising land, country rock, and again swamp and
+more swamp,&mdash;and all of it harsh, ugly, and inhospitable. But the queer
+thought that came over me was that it was more than inhospitable: it was
+forbidding. High over my head poured the bitter wind in a river of sound
+through the bare tree tops; close at hand it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span> rustled with a flurry of
+dead leaves that was uncannily like the bustle of inimical businesses
+pursued insolently in the dark, at my very elbow; and suddenly, through
+and over all other sounds, there rose in the harsh gloom the long,
+ravening cry of a wolf.</p>
+
+<p>Heaven knows I was used to the bush, and no howling was much to me; but
+you know how things come over you sometimes. It came over me then that I
+was sick of my life at La Chance; sick of working with Wilbraham and
+sicker still of washing myself in brooks and sleeping on the
+ground,&mdash;for I had not been in a house since August. Before I knew it I
+was speaking out loud as men do in books, only it was something I had
+thought before, which in books it generally isn't: "Scott, I'm a fool to
+stay here. I'd sooner go and work on day's wages somewhere and have a
+place <i>to go home to!</i>" And then I felt my face get red in the dark, for
+I knew what I meant, if you do not.</p>
+
+<p>There was nothing to go home to at Wilbraham's, except a roof over my
+head, till circumstances sent me out into the bush again. In the daytime
+there were the mine and the mill. At night there was the bare living
+room of Wilbraham's shack, without a book, or a paper, or a decent
+chair; Wilbraham himself, fat, pig-headed, truculent, stumping the
+devil's sentry-go up and down the bare floor,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> talking eternally about
+himself and the mine, till a saint must have loathed the two of them;
+Thompson, the mine superintendent, silent, slow and stupid, playing
+ghastly solitaire games in a corner with a pack of dirty cards; and me,
+Nick Stretton, hunching myself irritably on a hard chair till I could
+decently go to bed. Even the bush was better than night after night of
+that,&mdash;and suddenly I felt my thoughts bursting out, even if I had sense
+enough to keep my mouth shut.</p>
+
+<p>I was as sick of the bush as I was of the shack. I wanted a place of my
+own and a life of my own: and I was going to have it. There was nothing
+but old friendship to tie me to Wilbraham's; I could do as well anywhere
+else, and I was going there&mdash;to-morrow; going somewhere, anyhow, so that
+when my day's work was over I could go home to a blazing fire on a wide
+hearth, instead of Wilbraham's smelly stove where no one ever cleaned
+the creosote out of the pipe,&mdash;and where the girl I had had in my head
+for ten years would be waiting for me.</p>
+
+<p>Don't imagine it was any girl I knew that I was thinking of; it was just
+a dream girl I meant to marry, when I found her. I'd never met such a
+girl anywhere, and it sounds like a fool to say I knew I was going to
+meet her: that she was waiting somewhere in the world<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> for me, just as I
+was looking for her. I knew exactly what she must be like. She would
+have that waving bronze-gold hair that stands out in little separate,
+shining tendrils; eyes that startled you with their clear blue under
+dark, level eyebrows&mdash;I never look twice at a girl with arched
+brows&mdash;the rose-white, satin-smooth skin that goes with all of them, and
+she would move like&mdash;&mdash;Well, you've seen Pavlova move! Her
+voice&mdash;somehow one of the most important things I knew about her seemed
+to be her voice&mdash;would be the clear, carrying kind that always sounds
+gay. I was certain I should know my dream girl&mdash;first&mdash;by that. And that
+was the girl&mdash;I forgot it was all made-up child's play&mdash;who somewhere in
+the world was waiting for me, Nick Stretton; a fool with nothing on
+earth but six feet of a passably good body, and a dark, high-nosed face
+like an Indian's, who was working in the bush for Wilbraham instead of
+sieving creation for her. Well, I would start to-morrow; and, where the
+clean heavens meant me to, I should find her!</p>
+
+<p>And with the words I came alive to the dark lake, and the leaky canoe I
+sat in, and the knowledge that all I had been thinking about a
+bronze-haired girl was just the cracked dream of a lonely man. Even if
+it had not been, and I could have started to look for a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> real girl
+to-morrow, I had to get back to Wilbraham's to-night. My drenched
+clothes were freezing on me, and I was hungrier than the wolf who had
+just howled again, as I picked up my slippery paddle and started for the
+La Chance landing.</p>
+
+<p>There was no light there, naturally, since no one ever used the lake
+except myself, and I had been away for months; but as I rounded the
+point between the canoe and the landing, and slipped into the dark of
+its shadow, the lamplight from Wilbraham's living room shone out on me
+in a narrow beam, like a moon path on the water. As I crossed it and
+beached the canoe I must have been in plain sight to any one on the
+shore, though all I saw was the dark shingle I stepped upon. I stooped
+to lift the canoe out of water,&mdash;and I did what you mean when you say
+you nearly jumped out of your skin.</p>
+
+<p>Touching my shoulder, her hand fiercely imperative in the dark, was a
+girl&mdash;at La Chance, where no girl had ever set foot!&mdash;and she was
+speaking to me with just that golden, carrying voice I knew would belong
+to my own dream girl, if she were keeping it down to a whisper.</p>
+
+<p>"So you're here," was what she said; and it would have fitted in with
+the fool's thoughts I had just come out of, if it had not been for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span> her
+tone. That startled me, till all I could do was to nod in the dark I
+could just see her in. I could not discern what she looked like, for her
+head was muffled in a shawl; and I never realized that all she could see
+of me was my height and general make-up, since my face must have been
+invisible where I stood in the shadow.</p>
+
+<p>"You!" her golden voice stabbed like a dagger. "I won't have you staying
+here&mdash;where I am! I told you I'd speak to you when I could, and I'm
+speaking. You kept your word and disgraced me once, if I don't know how
+you did it; but I won't run the chance of <i>that</i> again! I'm safe here,
+except for you; and you've got to let me alone. If you don't, I&mdash;I&mdash;&mdash;"
+she stammered till I knew she was shaking, but she got hold of herself
+in the second. "You won't find it safe to play any tricks with the gold
+here&mdash;or me&mdash;if that's what you came for," she said superbly, "and
+you've given me a way to stop it. <i>That's</i> why I've sneaked out to meet
+you: not because I care for you. You must go away, or&mdash;I'll tell that
+you're here! Do you hear? I don't care what promises you make me&mdash;they
+always came easily to you. If you want me to hold my tongue about you,
+you've got to go. Go and betray me, if you like&mdash;but <i>go</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>There was dead, cold hatred in it, the kind<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> a woman has for a man she
+once cared for, and it staggered what wits I had left. I nodded like a
+fool, just as if I had known what she was talking about, and went on
+lifting the canoe ashore. Whether I really heard her give a terrified
+gasp I don't know; perhaps I only thought so. But as I put the canoe on
+the bank I heard a rustle, and when I looked up she was gone. There was
+nothing to tell me she had really even been there. It was just as
+probable that I was crazy, or walking in my sleep, as that a girl who
+talked like that&mdash;or even any kind of a girl&mdash;should be at La Chance.
+The cold, collected hatred in her voice still jarred me, since it was no
+way for even a dream girl to speak. But what jarred me worse was that
+the whole thing had been so quick I could not have sworn she had been
+there at all. I was honestly dazed as I walked up the rough path to
+Wilbraham's and my shack. I must have stood in front of it a good five
+minutes, with my wet clothes freezing as hard as a board, and the noise
+of the men in the bunk house down by the mine coming up to me on the
+night wind.</p>
+
+<p>"'If I be I, as I should be, I've a little dog at home, and he'll know
+me,'" I said to myself at last like the old woman in the storybook, only
+with a grin. For when I went into the house there would be the neglected
+living room<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> with the smelly stove, and Wilbraham walking up and down
+there as usual; and Dudley Wilbraham's conversation would bring any man
+back to his senses, even if he needed it worse than I did. I opened the
+shack door and went in,&mdash;and in the bare passage I jerked up taut.</p>
+
+<p>The living room faced me,&mdash;and there was no stove in it. And no
+Wilbraham, walking up and down and talking to himself. There was a
+glowing, blazing log fire in a stone fireplace that must have been built
+while I was away; and, sitting alone before it, exactly as I had always
+thought of her, was my dream girl,&mdash;that I had meant to hunt the world
+for to welcome me home!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<h3>MY DREAM: AND DUDLEY'S GIRL</h3>
+
+
+<p>All I could do was to stand in the living room doorway and stare at her.</p>
+
+<p>There she sat by the fire, in a short blue skirt that showed her little
+feet in blue stockings and buckled shoes, and a blue sweater whose
+rolling collar fell away from the column of her soft throat. And she was
+just exactly what I had known she would be! There was a gold crest to
+every exquisite, warm wave of her bronze hair; her level eyebrows were
+about five shades darker, and her curled-up eye-lashes darker still,
+where she sat with her head bent over some sort of sewing. And even
+before she looked up and I saw her eyes, the beauty of her caught me at
+my heart. I had never thought even my dream girl could be as lovely as
+she was. But there was more to her face than beauty. It was so young and
+sweet and gay, and&mdash;when you looked hard at her&mdash;so sad, that I forgot I
+ought either to speak up or go away. Of who she was or how she came<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> to
+be at La Chance, I had no earthly clue. I knew, of course, that it was
+she who had met me at the landing, and common sense told me she had
+taken me for some one else: but I had no desire to say so, or to go away
+either. And suddenly she looked up and saw me.</p>
+
+<p>Whoever she was she had good nerves, for she never even stared as women
+do at a strange man. I could have been no reassuring vision either,
+standing there in moccasined feet that had come in on her as silently as
+a wolf or an Indian; with dirty, frozen clothes; and a face that the
+Lord knows is dark and hard at its best, and must have been forbidding
+enough that night between dirt and fatigue. But that girl only glanced
+at me as quietly as if she had known I was there.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you&mdash;&mdash;Were you looking for any one?" she asked. And the second I
+heard her voice I knew she guessed she had spoken to me a quarter of an
+hour ago in words she would probably have given all she possessed to
+prevent a stranger from knowing she had need to speak to any one.</p>
+
+<p>Only that was not the reason I half stammered, "Not exactly." It was
+because I could see her eyes,&mdash;and they were like sapphires, and the
+sea, and the night sky with the first stars in it. I snatched off my cap
+that I had forgotten, and bits of melting ice fell off it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> and tinkled
+on the floor. The sharp little sound brought my wits back to me. Perhaps
+I had never really thought my dream girl would come true, but once I had
+found her I never meant to lose her. And I knew, if I cared a straw for
+my life and the love that was to be in it, that I must meet her now <i>for
+the first time</i>; that nothing, not even if she told me so herself, must
+make me admit she had come to me at the lake by mistake, or that I had
+ever heard her voice before.</p>
+
+<p>I said, easily enough, "I'm afraid I startled you. I'm Stretton,
+Wilbraham's partner"&mdash;which I was to the extent of a thousand
+dollars&mdash;"I've just come home."</p>
+
+<p>And crazy as it sounds, I felt as if I had come home, for the first time
+in my life. For the girl of my dreams came to her feet with just that
+lovely, controlled ease you see in Pavlova, and with the prettiest
+little gesture of welcome.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you're frozen stiff," she said with a kind of dismayed sympathy.
+"And I heard Mr. Wilbraham say some one had forgotten to send out your
+horse for you, and that you'd probably walk&mdash;the whole way from
+Caraquet! You must be tired to death. Please come to the fire and get
+warm&mdash;now you've come home!"</p>
+
+<p>I thought of the queer smell that clung to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> my stained old coat and the
+company I had kept at Skunk's Misery&mdash;though if I had guessed what that
+wretched boy was going to mean to me I might have grudged my contact
+with him less&mdash;and I would not have gone near my dream girl for a
+fortune. "I think I'll get clean first," I began, and found myself
+laughing for the first time in a week. But as I turned away I glanced
+back from the dark passage where Charliet, the French-Canadian cook, was
+supposed to keep a lamp and never did, and saw the girl in the living
+room look after me,&mdash;with a look I had never seen in any girl's eyes, if
+I'd seen a hunted man have it.</p>
+
+<p>"Gad, she knows I know she met me&mdash;and she doesn't mean to say so," I
+thought vividly. What the reason was I couldn't see, or whom there could
+be at La Chance that such a girl should find it necessary to tell that
+she would not have him disgrace her, and that he must go away. It made
+me wrathy to think there could be any one she needed to hit out at like
+that. But we had a queer lot at the mine, including Dunn and Collins, a
+couple of educated boys who had not been educated enough to pass as
+mining engineers, and had been kicked out into the world by their
+families. It might have been either of those two star failures in the
+bunk house. The only person it could not have been was Dudley
+Wilbraham;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> since aside from the fact that she could easily speak to him
+in the shack she could not have told him he must go away from his own
+mine. Which reminded me I'd never even asked where Dudley was or one
+thing about the mine I'd been away from so long.</p>
+
+<p>But my dream girl, where no girl had ever been, was the only thing I
+could think of. I had meant to get some food and go to bed, but instead
+I threw my Skunk's Misery clothes out of the window, and got ready to go
+out to supper and see that girl again. Who under heaven she could be was
+past me, as well as how she came to be at La Chance. I would have been
+scared green lest she was the wife of some man at the mine, only she had
+no wedding ring on the slim left hand that had beckoned me to the fire.
+Yet, "She can't just be here alone, either, and I'm blessed if I see who
+she can have come with," I thought blankly. And I opened my room door
+straight on Marcia Wilbraham,&mdash;Wilbraham's sister!</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Well</i>," I said. It was the only thing that came to me. I knew
+immediately, of course, that the girl in the living room must have come
+out with Marcia; but it knocked me silly to see Marcia herself at La
+Chance. I had known Marcia Wilbraham, as I had known Dudley, ever since
+I wore blue serge knickerbockers trimmed with white braid. She never
+went<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> anywhere with Dudley. She had money of her own, and she spent it
+on Horse Show horses, and traveling around to show them. But here she
+stood in front of me, in a forsaken backwoods mine that I should not
+have expected even Dudley himself to stay at if I had not known his
+reasons.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't wonder you say 'well,'" Marcia returned crisply. She was
+good-looking in a big way, if you did not mind brown eyes that were too
+small for her face and a smile that showed her gums. I had never liked
+or disliked her especially, any more than you do any girl about your own
+age whom you've always known. "I've been here for three months! I was
+very near going home a month ago&mdash;but I don't think I'll go now. I
+believe I'll try a winter here."</p>
+
+<p>"A winter!" I thought of Marcia "trying a winter," and I laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you needn't throw back your handsome Indian head to grin at me,
+Nicky Stretton," said she crossly. "I'm tired of always doing the same
+thing. And anyhow, the stable lost money, and I had to sell out!"</p>
+
+<p>"But why stay here&mdash;with Dudley?" I let out. The two of them had always
+fought like cats.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm going to do some shooting&mdash;and wolf hunting," Marcia smiled the
+ugly smile I never<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> could stand. "I'm going to stay, anyhow; so you'll
+have to bear it, Nicky!"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm&mdash;charmed!" I thought like lightning that my dream girl would do
+whatever Marcia did, and I blessed my stars she was staying; though I
+knew she would be all kinds of a nuisance if she insisted on turning out
+to hunt wolves. She was all but dressed for it even then, in a horrid
+green divided skirt that made her look like a fat old gentleman. But it
+was not Marcia I meant to talk about.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you brought the&mdash;other girl&mdash;to hunt wolves, too?" I inquired, as
+we moved on down the passage; there was no upstairs to the shack.</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Marcia quite carelessly, if I had not caught the snap in her
+eyes. "She's come to hunt Dudley! She's going to marry him."</p>
+
+<p>"She's <i>what</i>?" I was suddenly thankful we had left the light from my
+open door and that Charliet despised keeping a lamp in the passage. The
+bland idea that I had found my dream girl split to bits as if a half-ton
+rock had landed on it. For her to be going to marry any one was bad
+enough; but <i>Dudley</i>, with his temper, and his drink, and the drugs I
+was pretty sure he took! The thing was so unspeakable that I stopped
+short in the passage.</p>
+
+<p>Marcia Wilbraham stopped short too. "I don't wonder you're knocked
+silly," she said.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> "Here, come out of this; I want to speak to you, and
+I may as well do it now!" She pushed me into the office where Dudley did
+his accounts&mdash;which was his name for sitting drinking all day, and never
+speaking to any one&mdash;and shut the door. "Look here, Nicky, if you're
+thinking that girl is a friend of mine, she isn't! I don't know one
+thing about her. Except that this summer I had reason to oblige Dudley,
+and one day he came to me&mdash;you know he was in New York for nearly two
+months&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>I nodded. I had not cared where he was, so that he was away from La
+Chance, where he and old Thompson would drive a tunnel just where I knew
+it was useless.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, he came to me in the first of August, and said he was going to
+marry a girl called Paulette Brown,&mdash;and he wanted me to bring her out
+here! Why he didn't marry her straight off and bring her out here
+himself, I don't know; he only hummed and hawed when I asked him. But
+anyhow, I met Paulette Brown, <i>for the first time</i>, at the station, when
+we started up here&mdash;she and I and Dudley. And she puzzled me from the
+second we got into the Pullman, and I saw her pull off the two veils
+she'd worn around her head in the station! And she puzzles me worse
+now."</p>
+
+<p>"Why?" I might have been puzzled myself,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> remembering Paulette Brown's
+speech to me in the dark, but it was none of Marcia's business.</p>
+
+<p>"Because I know I've seen her before," Marcia returned calmly, "only
+with no 'Paulette Brown' tacked on to her. I've seen her dance
+somewhere, but I can't think <i>where</i>&mdash;and that's the first thing that
+puzzles me."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see why," I said disagreeably, "considering that every one
+dances somewhere all day long just now."</p>
+
+<p>"It wasn't that kind of dancing. It was rather&mdash;wonderful! And there was
+some story tacked on to it," Marcia frowned, "only I can't think what!
+And the second thing that puzzles me about Paulette Brown&mdash;I tell you,
+Nicky, I believe she can't <i>bear</i> Dudley, and that she doesn't want to
+marry him!"</p>
+
+<p>It was the first decent thing I had heard from her, and I could have
+opened my mouth and cheered. But I said, "Then why's she here?"</p>
+
+<p>"Just because it suits her for some reason of her own," Marcia was
+earnest as I had never seen her. "Nicky, I don't think she's anything in
+the world but some sort of an adventuress&mdash;only what I can't understand
+about her is what she wants of Dudley! It isn't money, for I know he's
+tried to make her take it, and she wouldn't. Yet I know, too, that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> she
+hadn't a cent coming up here, and she hasn't now&mdash;or even any clothes
+but summer things, and a blue sweater she wears all the time. She never
+speaks about herself, or where she comes from&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see why there should be any mystery about that!" It was a lie,
+but I might not have seen, if she had not spoken to me incomprehensibly
+in the dark. "Dudley probably knows all about her people."</p>
+
+<p>"A girl called Paulette Brown doesn't have any people," scornfully.
+"Besides, her name isn't Brown, or Paulette&mdash;she used to forget to
+answer to either of them at first; and if Dudley knows what it really
+is, I'm going to know too&mdash;before I'm a month older! I tell you I've
+seen her before, and I know there was some kind of an ugly story tacked
+on to her and her dancing. That, and her real name, are up in the attic
+of my brain somewhere, and some day they'll come down!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, they won't concern me," I cut in stolidly. Whoever Paulette Brown
+was, if she were going to marry Dudley Wilbraham ten times over, she was
+the one girl in the world who belonged to me,&mdash;and I was not going to
+have her discussed by Marcia behind a shut door.</p>
+
+<p>But Marcia's retort was too quick for me. "They may interest you, all
+the same, if that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> girl's what I think she is! Don't make any mistake,
+Nicky; she's no chorus girl out of work. She's a lady. Only&mdash;she's been
+something else, too! You watch how she uses a perfectly trained body."</p>
+
+<p>I all but started. I had seen it already, when I thought she moved like
+Pavlova. "Anything else?" I inquired disagreeably.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Marcia quietly. "She's afraid for her life, or Dudley's&mdash;I
+can't make out which. Wait, and you'll see. Come on; we'll be late for
+supper. It would have been over hours ago if Dudley and I hadn't been
+out shooting this afternoon. We've only just come in."</p>
+
+<p>But I was not thinking about supper. The Wilbrahams had been out, and
+Paulette Brown, left alone, had taken her chance to speak to some one.
+That she had happened to mistake her man and spoken to me made no
+difference in the fact, and it came too aptly on Marcia's suspicions
+about her. But "My good heavens, I won't care what she did," I thought
+fiercely. My dream girl's eyes were honest, if they were deep blue lakes
+a man might drown his soul in, too. If she were Dudley's twice over I
+was going to stand by her, because by all my dreams of her she was more
+mine. "I haven't time, or chances, to be watching pretty ladies," I said
+drily, "and I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> wouldn't bother over it myself if I were you. I'd let it
+go at plain Paulette Brown!"</p>
+
+<p>"If you could," said Marcia, just as drily. And over her words, close
+outside the window, a wolf howled.</p>
+
+<p>It startled me, as it had startled me once before that evening, only
+this time I knew the reason. "Scott, I never knew the wolves to be
+coming out so early in the season!" I was thankful to be back to things
+I could exclaim about. "And down here, beside the house, I never saw
+any!"</p>
+
+<p>"No; so Dudley said," Marcia returned almost absently. She opened the
+door for herself, because I had forgotten it, and stood looking at the
+lighted living room at the end of the passage by the front door. "But
+the wolves have been round for a week&mdash;that was what I meant when I said
+I was going to have some wolf hunts! The mine superintendent's going to
+take me."</p>
+
+<p>"Thompson!" I let out. Then I chuckled. Marcia was likely to have a
+great wolf hunt with Thompson, who knew no difference between a shotgun
+and a rifle, and would have legged it from a fox if he had met it alone.
+"Marcia Wilbraham, I'll pay you five dollars if you ever get out wolf
+hunting with Thompson. Why, the only thing he <i>can</i> do for diversion is
+to play solitaire!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Oh, him&mdash;yes," said Marcia carelessly and without grammar. "But I
+didn't mean old Thompson. He's been gone for a month, and we've a new
+man. His name's Macartney, and he's been here two weeks."</p>
+
+<p>It was news to me, if it was also an example of the way Dudley Wilbraham
+ran his mine. But before I could speak Marcia nodded significantly down
+the passage to the living room door. I had been looking into the room
+myself, as you do at the lighted stage in a theatre, and I had seen only
+one thing in it: my dream girl&mdash;whose name might or might not be
+Paulette Brown, whom Dudley Wilbraham had more right to than I
+had&mdash;sitting by the fire as I had left her, that fire I had dreamed I
+should come home to, just myself alone, and talking to Dudley. But
+Marcia had been looking at something else, and now my gaze followed
+hers.</p>
+
+<p>A tall, lean, hard, capable-looking man stood on the other side of the
+fire. He was taking no share in the conversation between Dudley and the
+girl who had only lived in my dreams till to-night. He was watching the
+living room door, quite palpably, and it struck me abruptly that I had
+not far to seek for Marcia Wilbraham's reason for staying the winter at
+La Chance. But I might have taken more interest in that and in
+Macartney, the new<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> mine superintendent, too, if the girl sitting by the
+fire had not seen Marcia in the doorway and risen to her feet.</p>
+
+<p>For she floated up, effortlessly, unconsciously, to the very tips of her
+toes, and stood so&mdash;like Pavlova!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<h3>DUDLEY'S MINE: AND DUDLEY'S GOLD</h3>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I have stared my eyes blind for her,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Bridled my body alive for her,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Starved my soul to the rind for her&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Do I lose all?<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4"><i>The Lost Lover.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<p>I could feel Marcia's satisfied, significant smile through the back of
+my neck as I shook hands with Dudley, and was introduced in turn to Miss
+Brown&mdash;the last name for her, even without the affected Paulette, though
+I might not have thought of it but for Marcia&mdash;and to Macartney, the new
+incumbent of Thompson's shoes. Dudley, little and fat, in the dirty
+boots he had worn all day, and just a little loaded, told me to wait
+till the morning or go to the devil, when I asked about the mine.
+Charliet banged the food on the table for supper&mdash;Marcia despised
+housekeeping, and if the living room had been reformed nothing else
+had&mdash;and I sat down in silence and ate. At least I shovelled food into
+my famished stomach. My attention was elsewhere.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Paulette Brown sat beside Dudley. She was just twice as pretty as I had
+realized, even when the first sight of her struck me dumb. Her eyes were
+as dark as indigo, in the lamplight, and a marvellous rose color flitted
+in her cheeks as she spoke or was silent. She had wonderful hands, too,
+slim and white, without a sign of a bone at the wrists; but I had a
+curious feeling that they were the very strongest hands I had ever seen
+on a girl. Remembering Dudley, it hurt me to look at her; and suddenly
+something else hurt me worse, that I had been a fool not to have thought
+of before. Macartney, the mine superintendent, was new there; I knew no
+more of him than I did of Paulette Brown&mdash;not so much, perhaps, thanks
+to Marcia&mdash;and it came over me that he might have been the man for whom
+she had taken me to-night, and that it was he she had crept out into the
+dark to speak to in secret. I looked at him over my coffee cup, and
+there was something about him I did not like.</p>
+
+<p>He was a tall man, very capable-looking, as I said; extremely fair and
+rather handsome, with hard, grayish eyes that looked straight at you
+when he spoke. He had a charming laugh&mdash;yet when he laughed I saw
+suddenly what it was that I did not like about him; and it was nothing
+more nor less than a certain set look about his eye muscles. Some
+gamblers<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> have it, and it did not strike my fancy in the new mine
+superintendent at La Chance. But watch as I might, I saw no sign of an
+understanding between him and my dream girl. It was impossible to be
+sure, of course, but I was nearly sure. She spoke to him as she spoke to
+Marcia and Dudley&mdash;she never addressed one word to me&mdash;just easily and
+simply, as people do who live in the same house. Macartney himself
+talked mostly to Marcia, which was no business of mine. Only I was
+somehow curiously thankful that it had not been Macartney whom Paulette
+had meant to meet in the dark. There was something about his eyes that
+said he was no safe customer for any girl to speak to with
+hatred,&mdash;especially a girl whom another girl was watching, as Marcia was
+watching Paulette Brown. I decided it must have been either Dunn or
+Collins&mdash;our two worthless Yale boys at the mine&mdash;whom she had wanted to
+get rid of, and I felt better; for it would be easy enough to save her
+trouble by doing that myself. They might just have come back to La
+Chance like me, for all I knew, because Dudley had a trick of sending
+the men heaven knew where to prospect.</p>
+
+<p>It was rot, anyhow, to be taking a girl's affairs so seriously. I looked
+at my dream girl's clear eyes, and thought that if she knew what Marcia
+and I were thinking about her she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> might have good reason to be angry.
+Also that Dudley probably knew all about her evening stroll and what she
+was doing at La Chance, if Marcia did not. And Dudley's self-important
+voice cut through my thoughts like a knife:</p>
+
+<p>"Where on earth were you this evening, Paulette?" he was demanding
+irritably. "I couldn't see a sign of you when Marcia and I went out, and
+you weren't anywhere when we came in!"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know"&mdash;the girl began&mdash;and I saw the color go out of her face,
+and it made me angry.</p>
+
+<p>"I can tell you where Miss Brown was," I said deliberately, "if she's
+ashamed to own it. She was good and settled by this fire."</p>
+
+<p>Why I lied for her I could not say. But the glance she turned on me gave
+me a flat sort of feeling, as if Marcia might be right and she was there
+for reasons of her own that I had all but stumbled on by accident. I was
+a fool to care; but then I had been a fool all day with my silly
+thoughts of leaving La Chance to chase the world for an imaginary girl,
+and more fool still to think I had found her there waiting for me. I
+said something about being tired and went off to bed. I was tired, right
+enough, but I was something else too. All that business about the girl I
+meant to find and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> marry may sound like a child's silly game to you, but
+it had been more than a game to me. It had been a solid prop to hold to
+in ugly places where a man might slip if he had not clean love and a
+girl in his head. And now, at seven-and-twenty, I wanted my child's game
+to come true: just my own fire, and my own girl, and a life that held
+more than mere slaving for money. And it had come true, as far as the
+fire and the welcome home; only the girl was another man's.</p>
+
+<p>I knew what I ought to do was to get out of La Chance, but I could not
+screw myself up to the acceptance of the obvious fact that there were
+other girls in the world than Paulette Brown. I told myself I was too
+dead tired to care. I stumbled to my window to open it&mdash;Charliet's lamp
+had burned out while I was at supper and the room was stifling&mdash;and a
+sudden queer sense that some one or something was under my window made
+me stand there without raising it. And there was some <i>thing</i>, anyway.
+The windows in the shack were about a yard above the ground. There was a
+glimpse of the moon through the wind-tortured clouds, now on the rough
+clearing, now on the thick spruces round the edge of it,&mdash;for my window
+looked on the bush, not toward the bunk house and the mine. And as the
+moonlight flickered back on the clearing I saw my<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> clothes I had worn at
+Skunk's Misery and tossed out for Charliet to burn because they
+smelled,&mdash;and something else that made me stare in pure surprise.</p>
+
+<p>There was a wolf&mdash;gaunt, gray, fantastic in the moonlight&mdash;rolling on my
+clothes; regardless of the human eyes on him and within ten feet of the
+house. It was so crazy that I almost forgot the girl Marcia had said was
+only "called" Paulette Brown. I jerked up the window and stood waiting
+for the wolf to run. And it did not take the least notice of me. I could
+have shot it ten times over, but the thing was so incredible that I only
+stood staring; and suddenly my chance was gone. The beast picked up my
+coat, as a dog does a bone, and disappeared with it like a streak into
+the black bush.</p>
+
+<p>"Scott, I never saw a wolf behave like that!" I thought. But one more
+impossibility in an impossible day did not matter. I left the window
+open and tumbled into bed.</p>
+
+<p>I would have forgotten the thing in the morning, only that when I got up
+<i>all</i> my Skunk's Misery clothes had disappeared, and Charliet had not
+taken them, because I asked him. I did not mention last night's wolf to
+him, because I was in a hurry to catch Dudley and tell him I meant to
+leave La Chance. But I did not tell him, for when I thought of leaving<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>
+my dream girl to him it would not come to my tongue. An obstinate,
+matter-of-fact devil got up in my heart instead and prompted me to stay
+just where I was. I looked at Dudley&mdash;little, fat, pompous, and so
+self-opinionated that it fairly stuck out of him&mdash;and thought that if I
+had a fair chance I could take my dream girl from him. I might be dark
+as an Indian and without a cent to my name except the few dollars I had
+sunk in the mine, but I did not drink or eat drugs; and I knew Dudley
+did one and guessed he did the other. Interfering with him was out of
+the question, of course; it was not a thing any man could do to his
+friend, deliberately. I supposed he would be good to the girl, according
+to his lights. But, all the same, I decided to stay at La Chance. I saw
+Dudley was brimming over with something secret, and I hoped to heaven it
+was not his engagement, and that I should not have to stand my own
+thoughts of a girl translated into Dudley's. But he did not mention her.
+He hooked his fat wrist into my elbow and trotted me down to the mine.</p>
+
+<p>It was an amateur sort of mine, as you may have gathered. Dudley had no
+use for expert assistance or for advice. And it was a simple looking
+place. The shore of Lac Tremblant there ran back flat to a hill, a
+quarter of a mile<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> from the water, with a solid rock face like a cliff.
+Along that cliff face came first Dudley's shack, then Thompson's tunnel,
+then&mdash;a good way farther down&mdash;the bunk house, the mill, and a shanty
+Dudley called the assay office. But I stared at a new hole in the cliff,
+farther down even than the assay office.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, you've driven a new tunnel," I exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, my young son," said Dudley; and then he burst out with things.
+Macartney had run that new tunnel as soon as he came and struck quartz
+that was solid for heaven knew how far, and carrying thick, free gold
+that assayed incredibly to the ton. The La Chance mine, whose name had
+been more truth than poetry&mdash;for when I made fifty miles of road that
+cost like the devil, to haul in machinery and a mill it was pitch and
+toss if we should ever need it&mdash;had turned out a certainty while I was
+away.</p>
+
+<p>I stood silent. It meant plenty to me, who had only a trifle in the
+thing, but I was the only soul in the world who knew what it meant to
+Dudley. Stocks, carelessness, but chiefly bull-headed extravagance, had
+run through every cent he had, and La Chance had saved him from having
+to live on Marcia's charity,&mdash;if she had any. There was no fear, either,
+of his being interfered with in the bonanza he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> had struck; for leaving
+out my infinitesimal share, Dudley was sole owner,&mdash;and he had bought a
+thousand acres mining concession from the Government for ten dollars an
+acre, which is the law when a potential mining district in unsurveyed
+territory is more than twenty miles by a wagon road from a railway. All
+he had to do with would-be prospectors was to chuck them out. He had got
+in ten stamps for his mill over the road I had built from Caraquet,
+and&mdash;since Macartney arrived&mdash;was milling stuff whose net result made me
+stare, after the miserable, two-dollar ore old Thompson had broken my
+heart with.</p>
+
+<p>"So you see, we're made," Dudley finished simply. "Macartney struck his
+vein first go off, and we'll be able to work it all winter. You'd better
+start in to-day and get some snowsheds built along the face of the
+workings&mdash;they ought to have been started a week ago. Why in the
+devil"&mdash;drink and drugs do not make a man easy to work with, and you
+never knew when Dudley might turn on you with a face like a
+fiend&mdash;"didn't you get back from Caraquet before? You'd nothing to keep
+you away this last week!"</p>
+
+<p>"I'd plenty," I returned drily. "And I may remind you that I didn't
+propose to have to walk back!" It was the first time I had mentioned my
+missing horse. I did not mention<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> my stay in Skunk's Misery: it was a
+side show of my own, to my mind, and unconnected with Dudley,&mdash;though I
+ought to have known that nothing in life is ever a side show, even if
+you can't see the door from the big tent.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, your horse," said Dudley more civilly. "I didn't think I'd
+forgotten about it, but I suppose I must have. I was a good deal put out
+getting Thompson off."</p>
+
+<p>"What happened about him?" I had had no chance to ask before.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I never could stand him," and I knew it was true. "Sitting all the
+evening playing cards like a performing dog! And he wasn't fit for his
+work, either. I told him so, and he said he'd go. He went out to
+Caraquet nearly a month ago&mdash;I thought you knew. D'ye mean you didn't
+see him going through?"</p>
+
+<p>I shook my head. It was a wonder I had not, for I had spent most of last
+month fussing over some bad places on the road, by the turn where I had
+found my boy from Skunk's Misery, and I ought to have seen Thompson go
+by. But the solution was simple. There was one Monday and Tuesday I had
+my road gang off in the bush, on the opposite side from the Skunk's
+Misery valley, getting stuff to finish a bit of corduroy. In those two
+days I could have missed seeing Thompson, and I said so.</p>
+
+<p>"You didn't miss much," Dudley returned<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> carelessly. "This Macartney's a
+long sight better man."</p>
+
+<p>"Where'd you get him?" I was pretty sure it was not Macartney for whom
+my dream girl had mistaken me in the dark, but there was no harm in
+knowing all I could about him.</p>
+
+<p>Dudley knocked the wind straight out of my half suspicion.</p>
+
+<p>"Thompson sent him," he returned with a grin. "I told him to get
+somebody. Oh, we parted friends all right, old Thompson and I! He saw,
+just as I did, that he wasn't the man for the place. Macartney struck
+that vein first go off, and that was recommendation enough for me. But
+here's Thompson's, if you want to see it!" He extracted a folded letter
+from a case.</p>
+
+<p>It was written in Thompson's careful, back-number copperplate, perhaps
+not so careful as usual, but his unmistakably. And once and for all I
+dismissed all idea that it could have been Macartney who was tangled up
+with Paulette Brown. Old Thompson's friends were not that sort, and he
+vouched for knowing Macartney all his life. He was a well-known man,
+according to Thompson, with a long string of letters after his name.
+Thompson had come on him by accident, and sent him up at once, before he
+was snapped up elsewhere.</p>
+
+<p>"Thompson seems to have got a move on in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> sending up his successor,"
+said I idly. "When did he write this?" For there was no envelope, and
+only Montreal, with no date, on the letter.</p>
+
+<p>"Dunno&mdash;first day he got to Montreal, it says," carelessly. "Come along
+and have a look at the workings. I want you to get log shelters built as
+quick as you can build them&mdash;we don't want to have to dig out the new
+tunnel mouth every time it snows. After that you can go to Caraquet with
+what gold we've got out and be gone as long as you please. Now, we may
+have snow any day."</p>
+
+<p>I nodded. The winter arrives for good at La Chance in November, and
+besides the exposed tunnel mouth, there was no shelter over the ore
+platform at the mill. This year the snow was late, but there was no
+counting on that. And I blinked as I went out of the white November
+sunshine into Macartney's new tunnel, and the candlelight of his humming
+stope. One glance around told me Dudley was right, and the man knew his
+business; and it was the same over at the mill. It seemed to me
+superintendent was a mild name for Macartney, and general manager would
+have fitted better. But I said nothing, for Dudley considered he was
+general manager himself. Another thing that pleased me about the new man
+was that he seemed to be doing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> nothing, till you saw how his men jumped
+for him, while Thompson had never been able to keep his hands off the
+men's work. There was none of that in Macartney; and if he had struck me
+as capable the night before he looked ten times more so now, as he
+placidly ran four jobs at once.</p>
+
+<p>He was a good-looking figure of a man, too, in his brown duck working
+clothes, and I did not wonder Marcia Wilbraham had taken a fancy to him.
+Dudley would probably be blazing if he caught her philandering with his
+superintendent, but it was no business of mine. And anyhow, Macartney
+had my blessing since it could not be he to whom Paulette Brown had
+meant to speak the night before. That ought to have been none of my
+business either, and to get it out of my head I turned to Dudley,
+fussing round and talking about tailings. And one omission in all he and
+Macartney had shown me hopped up in my head. "Where's your gold?" I
+demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"That's one thing we don't keep loose on the doorsteps," Macartney
+returned drily, and I rather liked him for it, since he knew nothing of
+my share in the mine.</p>
+
+<p>But Dudley snapped at him: "Why can't you say it's in the house&mdash;in my
+office? Stretton's going to take it into Caraquet; there's no sense in
+making a mystery to him. Come on,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> Stretton, and have a look at it now!"
+He stuck his fat little arm through mine, and we went back to the house
+by the back door and Charliet's untidy kitchen. It was the shortest way,
+and it was not till afterwards that I remembered it was not commanded by
+the window in his office, like the front way. I was not keen on going;
+later I had a sickly feeling that it was because I had a presentiment of
+seeing something I did not want to see. Then all I thought was that I
+had a hundred other things to do, and though I went unwillingly, I went.</p>
+
+<p>"The gold's in my safe, in boxes," Dudley said on the way, "and that I'm
+not going to undo. But I've a lump or two in my desk I can show you."</p>
+
+<p>"Lying round loose?" I shrugged my shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>"No, it's locked up. But no one ever comes in here but me, and"&mdash;he gave
+a shove at the office door that seemed to have stuck,&mdash;"and Miss Brown!"</p>
+
+<p>But I was speechless where I stood behind him. There was the bare
+office; Dudley's locked desk; Dudley's safe against the wall. And
+turning away from the safe, in her blue sweater and blue skirt and
+stockings and little buckled shoes, was my dream girl!</p>
+
+<p>Something in my heart turned over as I looked at her. It was not that
+she had started,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> for she had not. She just stood in front of us, poised
+and serene, and some sort of a letter she had been writing lay half
+finished on Dudley's desk. But something totally outside me told me she
+had been writing no letter while we were out; that she knew the
+combination of the safe; had opened it; had but just shut it; and&mdash;<i>that
+she had been doing something to the boxes of gold inside it</i>.</p>
+
+<p>There was nothing in her face to say so, though, and my thought never
+struck Dudley. He gave her a nod and a patronizing: "Well, nice girl,"
+without the least surprise at seeing her there. But I had seen a pin dot
+of blue sealing wax on the glimpse of white blouse that showed through
+the open front of her sweater, and something else. I stooped, while
+Dudley was fussing with the lock of his desk, and picked up a curious
+little gold seal that lay on the floor by the safe.</p>
+
+<p>Whether I meant to speak of it or not I don't know; for quick as light,
+the girl held out her hand for it. I said nothing as I gave it to her.
+Dudley did not see me do it; and, of course, it might have been a seal
+of his own. But, if it were, why did not Paulette Brown say so,&mdash;or say
+something&mdash;instead of standing dead white and silent till I turned away?</p>
+
+<p>I knew&mdash;as I said "Oh" over Dudley's gold, and my dream girl slipped out
+of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> room&mdash;that I had helped her to keep some kind of a secret for
+the second time. And that if she had any mysterious business at La
+Chance it was something fishy about Dudley's gold!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+<h3>THE MAN IN THE DARK</h3>
+
+
+<p>It sounded crazy, for what could a girl like that do to gold that was
+securely packed? But women had been mixed up in ugly work about gold
+before, and somehow the vision of my dream girl standing by the safe
+stuck to me all that day. Suppose I had helped her to cover up a theft
+from Dudley! It was funny; but the ludicrous side of it did not strike
+me. What did was that I must see her alone and get rid of the poisonous
+distrust of her that she, or Marcia, had put into my head. But that day
+went by, and two more on top of it, and I had no chance to speak to
+Paulette Brown.</p>
+
+<p>Part of the reason was that I had not a second to call my own. La Chance
+had been an amateur mine when we began it, and it was one still. There
+was only Dudley&mdash;who did nothing, and was celebrating himself stupid
+with drugs, or I was much mistaken&mdash;Macartney, and myself to run it;
+with not enough men<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> even to get out the ore, without working the mill
+and the amalgam plates. It had been no particular matter while the whole
+mine was only a tentative business, and I had been having half a fit at
+Dudley's mad extravagance in putting up a ten-stamp mill when we had
+nothing particular to crush in it. But now, with ore that ran over a
+hundred to the ton being fed into the mill, and Macartney and I doing
+the work of six men instead of two, I agreed with Dudley when he
+announced in a sober interval that we required a double shift of men and
+the mill to crush day and night, instead of stopping at dark,&mdash;besides a
+cyanide plant and a man to run it.</p>
+
+<p>But Macartney unexpectedly jibbed at the idea. He returned bluntly that
+he could attend to the cyanide business himself, when it was really
+needed; while as to extra men he could not watch a night shift at the
+plates as well as a day one, and he would have to be pretty sure of the
+honesty of his new amalgam man before he started in to get one.
+Also&mdash;and it struck me as a sentiment I had never heard from a mine
+superintendent before&mdash;that if we sent out for men half of those we got
+might be riffraff and make trouble for us, without so much as a sheriff
+within a hundred miles. "I'd sooner pick up new men one at a time," he
+concluded, "even if it takes a month.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> We've ladies here, and if we got
+in a gang of tramps&mdash;&mdash;" he gave a shrug and a significant glance at
+Dudley.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, we've some devils out of purgatory now," I began scornfully, and
+stopped,&mdash;because Dudley suddenly agreed with Macartney. But the waste
+of time in making the mine pay for itself and the stopping of the mill
+at night galled me; and so did the work I had to do from dawn to dark,
+because any two-dollar-a-day man could have done it instead.</p>
+
+<p>Macartney seemed to be made of iron, for he took longer hours than I
+did. But he could talk to Marcia Wilbraham in the evenings, while Dudley
+stood between me and the dream girl I thought had come true for me when
+first I came to La Chance.</p>
+
+<p>I watched her, though; I couldn't help it. There were times when I could
+have sworn her soul matched her body and she was honest all through; and
+times when a devil rose up in me and bade me doubt her; till between
+work and worry I was no nearer finding out the kind she really was than
+to discovering the man she had meant to speak to in the dark the night
+she blundered on me. Yet I had some sort of a clue there, if it were not
+much of one. Dunn and Collins, our two slackers who had been kicked out
+of Yale to land in our bunk house, evidently had some game on. Dunn I
+was not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> much bothered about: he was just a plain good-for-nothing, with
+a perennial chuckle. But Collins was a different story. Tall, pale,
+long-eyelashed, his <i>blas&eacute;</i> young face barely veiled a mind that was an
+encyclop&aelig;dia of sin,&mdash;or I was much mistaken. And he and Dunn had
+suddenly ceased to raise Hades in the bunk house every night and
+developed a taste for going to bed with the hens. At least, the snoring
+bunk house thought so. If they went abroad instead on whatever they were
+up to, I never caught them at it; but I did catch them watching <i>me</i>,
+like lynxes, whenever they were off shift. I never saw either of them
+speak to Miss Brown, but I got a good growing idea it was just Collins
+she had meant to interview the night she spoke to me: and it fitted in
+well enough with my doubts about her and Dudley's gold, for I would have
+put no gold stealing past Collins. As for Paulette Brown herself, I
+could see no earthly sense in Marcia's silly statement that "she was
+afraid for her life&mdash;or Dudley's." She was afraid <i>of</i> Dudley, I could
+see that; for she shrank from him quite often. But on the other hand, I
+saw her follow him into his office one night, when he was fit for no
+girl to tackle, and try to get him to listen to something. From outside
+I heard her beg him to "please listen and try to understand"&mdash;and I made
+her a sign from the doorway<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> to come away before he flew at her. I asked
+her if there were anything I could do, and she said no; it was only
+something she wanted to tell Dudley. But suddenly she looked at me with
+those clear eyes of hers. "You're very&mdash;good to me," she said rather
+piteously.</p>
+
+<p>I shook my head, and that minute I believed in her utterly. But the next
+night I had a jar. I was starting for Caraquet the morning after, with
+the gold Dudley had in his office, so I was late in the stable, putting
+washers on my light wagon, and came home by a short cut through the
+bush, long after dark. If I moved Indian-silent in my moccasins it was
+because I always did. But&mdash;halfway to the shack clearing&mdash;I stopped
+short, wolf-silent; which is different. Close by, invisible in the dark
+spruces, I heard Paulette Brown speaking; and knew that once more she
+was meeting a man in the dark, and, this time, the right one! I could
+not see him any more than I could hear him, for he did not speak; but I
+knew he was there. I crouched to make a blind jump for him&mdash;and my dream
+girl's voice held me still.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't care how you threaten me: you've got to <i>go</i>," she said
+doggedly. "I know I've my own safety to look after, but I'll chance
+that. I'll give you one week more. Then, if you dare to stay on here,
+and interfere with me<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span> or the gold or anything else, I'll confess
+everything to Dudley Wilbraham. I nearly did it last night. I <i>won't</i>
+trust you&mdash;even if it means your giving away my hiding place to the
+police!"</p>
+
+<p>Whoever she spoke to moved infinitesimally in the dark. He must have
+muttered something I could not hear, for the girl answered sharply: "As
+for that, I'm done with you! Whether you go or don't go, this is the
+last time I'll ever sneak out to meet you. When you dare to say you love
+me"&mdash;and once more the collected hatred in her voice staggered me, only
+this time I was thankful for it&mdash;"I could die! I won't hear of what you
+say, remember, but I'll give you one week's chance. Then&mdash;or if you try
+anything on with me and the gold&mdash;I'll tell!"</p>
+
+<p>There was no answer. But my blood jumped in me with sheer fury, for
+answer or no answer, I knew who the man beside her was. Close by me I
+heard Dunn's unmistakable chuckle: and where Dunn was Collins was too. I
+behaved like a fool. I should have bounced through the bush and grabbed
+Dunn at least, which might have stopped some of the awful work that was
+to come. But I stood still, till a sixth sense told me Collins was gone,
+just as I could have gone myself, without sound or warning. Yet even
+then I paused<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> instead of going after him. First, because I had no
+desire to give my reason for dismissing him next morning; second,
+because I had a startling, ghastly thought that I'd heard Macartney's
+quiet, characteristic footstep moving away,&mdash;and if a hard, set-eyed man
+like our capable superintendent had been out listening to what a girl
+said to Collins, as I had, I didn't know how in the devil I was to make
+him hold his tongue about it. And in the middle of that pleasant thought
+my dream girl spoke again, to herself this time: "Oh, I can't trust him!
+I'll have to get hold of the gold myself&mdash;at least all I've marked."</p>
+
+<p>On the top of her words a wolf howled startlingly, close by. It was
+evidently the last touch on what must have been a cheerful evening, for
+Paulette Brown gave one appalled spring and was gone, fleeing for the
+kitchen door. I am not slow on my feet. I was in the front way before
+she struck the back one. From the front door I observed the living room,
+and what I saw inside it before I strolled in there made me catch my
+breath with relief and comforting security for the first time that
+night. Macartney could not have been out listening in the dark, if I
+had. He sat lazily in the living room, talking to Marcia, with his feet
+in old patent leather shoes he could never have run in, even if it had
+not been plain he had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> not been out-of-doors at all. Marcia had
+evidently not been spying either, which was a comfort; and Dudley was
+out of the question, for he dozed by the fire, palpably half asleep. But
+suddenly I had a fright. The girl who entered the living room five
+minutes behind me had very plainly been out; and I was terrified that
+Marcia would notice her wind-blown hair. I spoke to her as she passed
+me. "You're losing a hairpin on the left side of your head," was all I
+said. And much I got for it. My dream girl tucked in her wildly flying
+curl with that sleight of hand women use and never even looked at me.
+But the thing was done, and I had covered up her tracks for the third
+time.</p>
+
+<p>I decided to fire Collins before breakfast the next morning and get off
+to Caraquet straight after. But I didn't; and I did not fire Collins,
+either. When I went to the bunk house and then to the mine, where he was
+a rock man, he had apparently fired himself, as Paulette had told him
+to. He was nowhere to be found, anyhow, or Dunn either. I wasted an hour
+hunting for him, and after that Macartney wanted me, so that it was late
+afternoon before I could load up my gold and get off. And as I opened
+the safe in Dudley's office I swore.</p>
+
+<p>There were four boxes of the stuff; small, for easy handling; and if I
+had had time I would have opened every hanged one of them.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> Even as it
+was, I determined to do no forwarding from Caraquet till I knew what
+something on them meant. For on each box, just as I had expected even
+before I heard Paulette Brown say she had marked them, was a tiny seal
+in blue wax!</p>
+
+<p>The reason for any seal knocked me utterly, but I couldn't wait to worry
+over it. No one else saw it, for I loaded the boxes into my wagon
+myself, and there was nobody about to see me off. Dudley was dead to the
+world, as I'd known he was getting ready to be for a week past; Marcia,
+to her fury, had had to retire to bed with a swelled face; and Macartney
+was the only other person who knew my light wagon and pair of horses was
+taking our clean-up into Caraquet,&mdash;except Paulette Brown!</p>
+
+<p>And there was no sign of her anywhere. I had not expected there would
+be, but I was sore all the same. I had helped her out of difficulties
+three times, and all I'd got for it was&mdash;nothing! I saw Macartney coming
+up from the mill, and yelled to him to come and hold my horses, while I
+went back to my room for a revolver. This was from sheer habit. The snow
+still held off, and before me was nothing more exciting than a cold
+drive over a bad road that was frozen hard as a board, a halt at the
+Halfway stables to change horses, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> perhaps the society of Billy
+Jones as far as Caraquet,&mdash;if he wanted to go there. The only other
+human being I could possibly meet might be some one from Skunk's Misery,
+though that was unlikely; the denizens of Skunk's Misery had few errands
+that took them out on roads. So I pocketed my gun mechanically. But as I
+went out again I stopped short in the shack door.</p>
+
+<p>My dream girl, whom I'd never been alone with for ten minutes, sat in my
+wagon, with my reins in her hands. "My soul," I thought, galvanized,
+"she can't be&mdash;she must be&mdash;coming with me to Caraquet!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+<h3>THE CARAQUET ROAD: AND THE WOLVES HOWL ONCE MORE</h3>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Why comest thou to ride with me?<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">"The road, this night, is dark."<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dost thou and thine then side with me?<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">"Ride on, ride on and hark!"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4"><i>The Night Ride.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<p>There she sat, anyhow, alone except for Macartney, who stood at the
+horses' heads. Wherever she was going, I had an idea he was as surprised
+about it as I was, and that he had been expostulating with her about her
+expedition. But, if he had, he shut up as I appeared. I could only
+stammer as I stared at Paulette, "You&mdash;you're not coming!"</p>
+
+<p>"I seem to be," she returned placidly. And Macartney gave me the
+despairing glance of a sensible man who had tried his best to head off a
+girl's silly whim, and failed.</p>
+
+<p>"It's as you like," he said&mdash;to her, not to me. "But you understand you
+can't get back to-night, if you go to Caraquet. And&mdash;Good heavens&mdash;you
+ought <i>not</i> to go, if you want the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> truth of it! There's nothing to
+see&mdash;and you'll get half frozen&mdash;and you mayn't get back for days, if it
+snows!"</p>
+
+<p>Paulette Brown looked at him as if he were not there. Then she laughed.
+"I didn't say I was going to Caraquet! If you want to know all about my
+taking a chance for a drive behind a pair of good horses, Miss Wilbraham
+wants Billy Jones's wife to come over for a week and work for her. I'm
+going to stay all night with Mrs. Jones and bring her back in the
+morning. She'll never leave Billy unless she's fetched. So I really
+think you needn't worry, Mr. Macartney," she paused, and I thought I saw
+him wince. "I'm not going to be a nuisance either to you or Mr.
+Stretton," and before he had a chance to answer she started up the
+horses. I had just time to take a flying jump and land in the wagon
+beside her as she drove off.</p>
+
+<p>Macartney exclaimed sharply, and I didn't wonder. If he had not jumped
+clear the near wheels must have struck him. I lost the angry, startled
+sentence he snapped out. But it could have been nothing in particular,
+for my dream girl only turned in her seat and smiled at him.</p>
+
+<p>I had no smile as I took the reins from her. I had wanted a chance to be
+alone with her, and I had it: but I knew better than to think<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> she was
+going to Billy Jones's for the sake of a drive with me. The only real
+thought I had was that behind me, in the back of the wagon, were the
+boxes of gold she had marked inexplicably with her blue seal, and that I
+had heard her say the night before that she "would have to get that
+gold!"</p>
+
+<p>How she meant to do it was beyond me; and it was folly to think she ever
+<i>could</i> do it, with six feet of a man's strength beside her. But
+nevertheless, when you loved a girl for no other earthly reason than
+that she was your dream of a girl come true, and even though she
+belonged to another man, it was no thought with which to start on a
+lonely drive with her. I set my teeth on it and never opened them for a
+solid mile over the hummocky road through the endless spruce bush,
+behind which the sun had already sunk. I could feel my dream girl's
+shoulder where she sat beside me, muffled in a sable-lined coat of
+Dudley's: and the sweet warmth of her, the faint scent of her
+gold-bronze hair, made me afraid to speak, even if I had known what I
+wanted to say.</p>
+
+<p>But suddenly she spoke to me. "Mr. Stretton, you're not angry with me
+for coming with you?"</p>
+
+<p>"You know I'm not." But I did not know what I was. Any one who has read
+as far as this will know that if ever a plain, stupid fool<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> walked this
+world, it was I,&mdash;Nicholas Dane Stretton. Put me in the bush, or with
+horses, and I'm useful enough,&mdash;but with men and women I seem to go
+blind and dumb. I know I never could read a detective story; the clues
+and complications always made me feel dizzy. I was pretty well dazed
+where I sat beside that girl I knew I ought to find out about, and her
+nearness did not help me to ask her ugly questions. If she had not been
+Dudley's,&mdash;but I broke the thought short off. I said to myself
+impersonally that it was impossible for a girl to do any monkey tricks
+about the La Chance gold with a man like me. Yet I wondered if she meant
+to try!</p>
+
+<p>But she showed no sign of it. "I had to come," she said gently. "Marcia
+really wants Billy Jones's wife: she won't let me wait on her, and of
+course Charliet can't do it. You believe me, don't you? I didn't come
+just for a drive with you!"</p>
+
+<p>I believed that well enough, and I nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"Then," said my dream girl quietly, "will you please stop the horses?"</p>
+
+<p>I looked round. We were miles from the mine, around a turn where the
+spruce bush ceased for a long stretch of swamp,&mdash;bare, featureless, and
+frozen. Then, for the first time, I looked at Dudley's girl that I was
+fool enough to love.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"What for?" I demanded. "I mean, of course, if you like," for I saw she
+was white to the lips, though her eyes met mine steadily, like a man's.
+"Do you mean you want to go back?"</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head almost absently. "No: I think there's something
+bumping around in the back of the wagon. I"&mdash;there was a sharp, nervous
+catch in her voice&mdash;"want to find out what it is."</p>
+
+<p>I had packed the wagon, and I knew there was nothing in it to bump. But
+I stopped the horses. I wondered if the girl beside me had some sort of
+baby revolver and thought she could hold me up with it, if I let her get
+out; and I knew just what I would do if she tried it. I smiled as I
+waited. But she did not get out. She turned in her seat and reached
+backwards into the back of the wagon, as if she had neither bones nor
+joints in her lovely body. Marcia was right when she said it was
+perfectly educated and trained. For a moment I could think of nothing
+but the marvellous grace of her movement as she slid her hand under the
+tarpaulin that covered the gold; then I thought I heard her catch her
+breath with surprise. But she turned back with an exquisite lithe grace
+that made me catch mine, and slid down in her seat as if she had never
+slid out of it.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a bottle," she said lightly. But it was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> with a kind of startled
+puzzle too, as if she had sooner expected dynamite. "I can't think why;
+I mean, I wonder what's in it!"</p>
+
+<p>"A bottle!" I jerked around to stare at a whisky bottle in her hands. It
+was tightly sealed and full of something colorless that looked like gin.
+I was just going to say I could not see where it had come from, seeing I
+had packed the wagon myself, and I would have gone bail there was no
+bottle in it. But it came over me that she might be pretending
+astonishment and have put the thing there herself while I was in my room
+getting my revolver; since there had been no one else near my wagon but
+Macartney, and he could not have left the horses' heads. It flashed on
+me that the baby beside me, being used to Dudley, might have drugged a
+little gin, thinking I would take various drinks on the way; and I
+nearly laughed out. But I said: "Back there was no place for a bottle.
+It's a wonder it didn't smash on the first bump!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Paulette slowly. "Only I wonder&mdash;I mean I can't see&mdash;&mdash;" and
+she paused, staring at the bottle with a thoughtful sort of frown. "I
+believe I'll hold it on my lap."</p>
+
+<p>I was looking at the bottle too, where she held it with both fur-gloved
+hands; and I forgot to wonder if she were lying about it or not.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> For
+the gloves she wore were Dudley Wilbraham's, as well as the coat,&mdash;and
+that any of Dudley's things should be on my dream girl put me in a
+black, senseless fury. I wanted to take them straight off her and wrap
+her up in my own belongings. I grabbed at anything to say that would
+keep my tongue from telling her to change coats with me that instant,
+and the bottle in her hand was the only thing that occurred to me. It
+brought a sudden recollection back to me anyhow, and I opened my lips
+quite easily.</p>
+
+<p>"Scott, that looks like some of the brew I spilled over my clothes at
+Skunk's Misery!"</p>
+
+<p>"Skunk's Misery!" Paulette exclaimed sharply. "What on earth is Skunk's
+Misery?"</p>
+
+<p>"A village&mdash;at least, a den&mdash;of dirt, chiefly; off this road, between
+Caraquet and Lac Tremblant." I was thankful to have something to think
+about that was neither her, or me, or Dudley. I made as long a story as
+I could of my stay in Skunk's Misery when I took home the half-killed
+boy; of the filthy stuff I had spilled on my clothes, and how I had seen
+a wolf carry them off. "By George, I believe he <i>liked</i> the
+smell&mdash;though I never thought of that till now!"</p>
+
+<p>"What?" Paulette gave a curious start that might have been wonder, or
+enlightenment.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> "And you got the stuff at Skunk's Misery, out of a
+bottle like this? Oh, I ought to have guessed"&mdash;but she either checked
+herself, or her pause was absolutely natural&mdash;"I should have guessed
+you'd had some sort of a horrible time that night you came home. You
+looked so tired. But what I meant to say was I don't see how such poor
+people would have a bottle of <i>anything</i>. Didn't they say what it was?"</p>
+
+<p>"Didn't ask! It looked like gin, and it smelt like a sulphide factory
+when it got on my clothes. They certainly had that bottle."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Skunk's Misery hasn't got <i>this</i> bottle, anyhow!" I could see no
+reason for the look on her face. It was not gay any more; it was stern,
+if a girl's face can be stern, and it was white with angry suspicion.
+Suddenly she laughed, rather fiercely. "I'm glad I thought of it before
+the jolting broke it in the wagon! I want to get it safely to Billy
+Jones's."</p>
+
+<p>The reason why beat me, since she had pretended to know nothing of it,
+so I said nothing. After a long silence Paulette sighed.</p>
+
+<p>"You've been very kind to me, Mr. Stretton," she said, as if she had
+been thinking. "I wish you could see your way to&mdash;trusting me!"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know how I've been kind," I left<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> out the trusting part. "I
+have hardly seen you to speak to till to-night, except," and I said it
+deliberately, "the first time I ever saw you, sitting by the fire at La
+Chance. You did speak to me then."</p>
+
+<p>"Was that&mdash;the first time you saw me?" It might have been forgetfulness,
+or a challenge to repeat what she had said to me by the lake in the
+dark. But I was not going to repeat that. Something told me, as it had
+told me when I came on her by Dudley's fire&mdash;though it was for a
+different reason, now that I knew she was his and not mine&mdash;that I would
+be a fool to fight my own thoughts of her with explanations, even if she
+chose to make any. I looked directly into her face instead. All I could
+see was her eyes, that were just dark pools in the dusk, and her mouth,
+oddly grave and unsmiling. But then and there&mdash;and any one who thinks me
+a fool is welcome to&mdash;my ugly suspicions of her died. And I could have
+died of shame myself to think I had ever harbored them. If she had done
+things I could not understand&mdash;and she had&mdash;I knew there must be a good
+reason for them. For the rest, in spite of Marcia and her silly
+mysteries, and even though she belonged to Dudley, she was my dream
+girl, and I meant to stand by her.</p>
+
+<p>"That was the first time I spoke to you," I said, as if there had been
+no pause. "After<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> that, I picked up a seal for you, and I told you your
+hair was untidy before Marcia could. I think those are all the
+enormously kind things I've ever done for you. But, if you want
+kindness, you know where to come!"</p>
+
+<p>"Without telling you things&mdash;and when you don't trust me!"</p>
+
+<p>"Telling things never made a man trust any one," said I. "And besides,"
+it was so dark now, as we crawled along the side of the long rocky hill
+that followed the swamp, that I had to look hard to see her face, "I
+never said I didn't trust you. And there isn't anything you could tell
+me that I want to know!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," Paulette cried as sharply as if I had struck her, "do you mean
+you're taking me on trust&mdash;in spite of everything?"</p>
+
+<p>"In spite of nothing." I laughed. I was not going to have her think I
+knew about Collins, much more all the stuff Marcia had said. But she
+turned her head and looked at me with a curious intentness.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll try," she began in a smothered sort of voice, "I mean I'm not all
+you've been thinking I was, Mr. Stretton! Only," passionately, and it
+was the last thing I had expected her to say, "I wish we were at Billy
+Jones's with all this gold!"</p>
+
+<p>I did not, whether she had astonished me or not. I could have driven all
+night with her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> beside me, and her arm touching mine when the wagon
+bumped over the rocks.</p>
+
+<p>"We're halfway," I returned rather cheerlessly. "Why? You're not afraid
+we'll be held up, are you? No human being ever uses this road."</p>
+
+<p>"I wasn't thinking of human beings," she returned simply. "I was
+thinking of wolves."</p>
+
+<p>"Wolves?" I honestly gasped it. Then I laughed straight out. "I can't
+feel particularly agitated about wolves. I know we had some at La
+Chance, but we probably left them there, nosing round the bunk-house
+rubbish heap. And anyhow, a wolf or two wouldn't trouble us. They're
+cowardly things, unless they're in packs." I felt exactly as if I were
+comforting Red Riding Hood or some one in a fairy tale, for the Lord
+knows it had never occurred to me to be afraid of wolves. "What on earth
+put wolves in your head?"</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;don't know! They seemed to be about, lately."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I never saw any on this road! I've a revolver, anyhow."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm g-glad," said Paulette; and the word jerked out of her, and my arms
+jerked nearly out of me. In the dark the wagon had hit something that
+felt like nothing but a boulder in the middle of my decent road. The
+wagon stopped dead, with an up-ending lurch, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> nothing holding it to
+the horses but the reins. Why on earth they held I don't know. For with
+one almighty bound my two young horses tried to get away from me,&mdash;and
+they would have, if the reins had not been new ones. As it was I had a
+minute's hard fighting before I got them under. When they stood still
+the girl beside me peered over the front of the wagon into the dark.
+"It's the whiffletree, I think," she said, as if she were used to
+wagons.</p>
+
+<p>I peered over myself and hoped so. "Mercy if it is," said I. "If it's a
+wheel we're stuck here. Scott, I wonder if I've a bit of rope!"</p>
+
+<p>Paulette Brown pulled out ten feet of spun yarn from under her coat; and
+if you come to think of it, it was a funny thing for a girl to have. It
+struck me, rather oddly, that she must have come prepared for accidents.
+"There," she said, "I expect you can patch us up if I hold the horses.
+Here's a knife, too, and"&mdash;I turned hot all over, for she was putting
+something else into my hand, just as if she knew I had been wondering
+about it since first we started; but she went on without a
+break&mdash;"here's my revolver. Put it in your pocket. I'd sooner you kept
+it."</p>
+
+<p>I was thankful I had had the decency to trust her before she gave the
+weapon to me. But I was blazingly angry with myself when I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> got out of
+the wagon and saw just what had happened. Fair in the middle of my new
+road was a boulder that the frost must have loosened from the steep
+hillside that towered over us; and the front of the wagon had hit it
+square,&mdash;which it would not have done if I had been looking at the road
+instead of talking to a girl who was no business of mine, now or ever. I
+got the horses out of the traces and the pole straps, and let Paulette
+hold them while I levered the boulder out of the way, down the hillside.
+I was scared to do it, too, for fear they would get away from her, but
+she was evidently as used to horses as to wagons: Bob and Danny stood
+for her like lambs, while I set to work to repair damages. The pole was
+snapped, and the whiffletree smashed, so that the traces were useless. I
+did some fair jury work with a lucky bit of spruce wood, the
+whiffletree, and the axle, and got the pole spliced. It struck me that
+even so we should have to do the rest of the way to Billy Jones's at a
+walk, but I saw no sense in saying so. I got the horses back on the
+pole, and Paulette in the wagon holding the reins, still talking to the
+horses quietly and by name. But as I jumped up beside her the quiet flew
+out of her voice.</p>
+
+<p>"The <i>bottle</i>," she all but shrieked at me. "<i>Mind the bottle!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>But I had not noticed she had put it on my<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> seat when she got out to
+hold the horses. I knocked it flying across her, and it smashed to
+flinders on the near fore wheel, drenching it and splashing over Danny's
+hind legs. I grabbed the reins from Paulette, and I thought of skunks,
+and a sulphide factory,&mdash;and dead skunks and rotten sulphide at that.
+Even in the freezing evening air the smell that came from that smashed
+bottle was beyond anything on earth or purgatory, excepting the stuff I
+had spilt over myself at Skunk's Misery. "What on earth," I began
+stupidly. "Why, that's that Skunk's Misery filth again!"</p>
+
+<p>Paulette's hand came down on my arm with a grip that could not have been
+wilder if she had thought the awful smell meant our deaths. "Drive on,
+will you?" she said in a voice that matched it. "Let the horses <i>go</i>, I
+tell you! If there's anything left in that bottle it may save us for
+a&mdash;I mean," she caught herself up furiously, "it may save me from being
+sick. I don't know how you feel. But for heaven's sake get me out of
+that smell! Oh, why didn't I throw the thing away into the woods, long
+ago?"</p>
+
+<p>I wished she had. The stuff was on Danny as well as on the wheel, and we
+smelt like a procession of dead whales. For after the first choking
+explosion of the thing it reeked of nothing but corruption. It was the
+Skunk's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> Misery brew all right, only a thousand times stronger.</p>
+
+<p>"How on earth did Skunk's Misery filth get in my wagon?" I gasped. And
+if I had been alone I would have spat.</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;can't tell you," said Paulette shortly. "Mr. Stretton, can't you
+hurry the horses? I&mdash;&mdash;Oh, hurry them, please!"</p>
+
+<p>I saw no particular reason why; we could not get away from the smell of
+the wheel, or of Danny. But I did wind them up as much as I dared with
+our kind of a pole,&mdash;and suddenly both of them wound themselves up, with
+a jerk to try any pole. I had all I could do to keep them from a dead
+run, and if I knew the reason I trusted the girl beside me did not. It
+had hardly been a sound, more the ghost of a sound. But as I thought it
+she flung up her head.</p>
+
+<p>"What's that?" she said sharply. "Mr. Stretton, what's that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing," I began; and changed it. "Just a wolf or two somewhere."</p>
+
+<p>For behind us, in two, three, four quarters at once rose a long wailing
+howl.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+
+<h3>MOSTLY WOLVES: AND A GIRL</h3>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Oh, what was that drew screaming breath?<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">"A wolf that slashed at me!"<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Oh, who was that cried out in death?<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">"A man who struck at thee!"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4"><i>The Night Ride.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<p>The sound might have come from a country hound or two baying for sheer
+melancholy, or after a cat: only there were neither hounds nor cats on
+the Caraquet road. I felt Paulette stiffen through all her supple body.
+She whispered to herself sharply, as if she were swearing&mdash;only
+afterwards I knew better, and put the word she used where it belonged:
+"The devil! Oh, the devil!"</p>
+
+<p>I made no answer. I had enough business holding in the horses,
+remembering that spliced pole. Paulette remembered it too, for she spoke
+abruptly. "How fast do you dare go?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, not too fast," my thoughts were still on the pole. "They're not
+after us, if you're worrying about those wolves."</p>
+
+<p>But she took no notice. "How far are we from Billy Jones's?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We were a good way. But I said, "Oh, a few miles!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, we've got to make it!" I could still feel her queerly rigid
+against my arm; perhaps it was only because she was listening.
+But&mdash;quick, like life, or death, or anything else sudden as
+lightning&mdash;she had no need to listen; nor had I. A burst of ravening
+yells, gathering up from all sides of us except in front, came from the
+dark bush. And I yelled myself, at Bob and Danny, to keep them off the
+dead run.</p>
+
+<p>It was rot, of course, but I had a queer feeling that wolves <i>were</i>
+after us, and that it was just that Skunk's Misery stuff that had
+started them, as it had drawn the wolf that had taken my clothes. I
+could hear the yelping of one after another grow into the full-throated
+chorus of a pack. The woods were full of them.</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't think he'd dare," Paulette exclaimed, as if she came out of
+her secret thoughts.</p>
+
+<p>But it did not bring me out of mine, even to remember that young devil
+Collins. I had pulled out my gun to scare the wolves with a shot or
+two,&mdash;and there were no cartridges in it! I could not honestly visualize
+myself filling it up the night before, but I was sure I had filled it,
+just as I was sure I had never troubled<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> to look at it since. But of
+course I could not have, or it would not have been empty now. I inquired
+absently, because I was rummaging my pockets for cartridges, "Who'd
+dare? <i>Whoa</i>, Bob! What he?"</p>
+
+<p>"They," Paulette corrected sharply. "I meant the wolves. I thought they
+were cowards, but&mdash;they don't sound cowardly! I&mdash;Mr. Stretton, I believe
+I'm worried!"</p>
+
+<p>So was I, with a girl to take care of, a tied-on pole and whiffletree,
+and practically no gun; for there was not a single loose cartridge in my
+pockets. I had been so mighty secure about the Caraquet road I had never
+thought of them. I cursed inside while I said disjointedly, "Quiet, Bob,
+will you?&mdash;There's nothing to be afraid of; you'll laugh over this
+to-night!" Because I suddenly hoped so&mdash;if the pole held to the
+Halfway&mdash;for the infernal clamor behind us had dropped abruptly to what
+might have been a distant dog fight. But at a sudden note in it the
+sweat jumped to my upper lip.</p>
+
+<p>"Dunn and Collins!" I thought. They had been missing when we left.
+Paulette had said she did not trust Collins, and since he had had the
+<i>nous</i> to get hold of the Skunk's Misery wolf dope, he or Dunn could
+easily have stowed it in my wagon in the night, and been caught by it
+themselves where they had started<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span> out to waylay us by the boulder they
+put in my road. But all I said was, "The wolves have stopped!"</p>
+
+<p>"Not they," Paulette retorted, and suddenly knocked me silly with
+surprise. "Oh, I haven't done you a bit of good by coming, Mr. Stretton!
+I thought if I were with you I might be some use, and I'm not."</p>
+
+<p>I stared stupidly. "D'ye mean you came to fight wolves?"</p>
+
+<p>"No! I came&mdash;&mdash;" but she stopped. "I was afraid&mdash;I mean I hated your
+going alone with all that gold, and Marcia really wanted Mrs. Jones."</p>
+
+<p>Any other time I would have rounded on her and found out what she was
+keeping back, but I was too busy thinking. The horses had calmed to a
+flying trot up the long hill along whose side we had been crawling when
+the pole went. Once over the crest of it we should have done two miles
+since we heard the first wolf howl; which meant we were nearer to Billy
+Jones's than I had remembered. If the pole held to get us down the other
+side of the long hill there was nothing before us but a mile of corduroy
+road through a jungle-thick swamp of hemlock, and then the one bit of
+really excellent going my road could boast,&mdash;three clear miles, level as
+a die, straight to the Halfway stables.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"We haven't far now," said I shortly. "And it doesn't matter why you
+came; you've been useful enough! I couldn't have held the horses and
+patched the wagon too." I omitted to say I could have tied them to a
+wheel. "But if you're nervous now, there's one thing we could do. Can
+you ride?"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Ride?</i>" I thought she laughed. "Yes! Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"We could cut the horses loose and ride them in to the Halfway."</p>
+
+<p>"What? And leave the gold out here, as we were m&mdash;&mdash;" I knew she cut off
+"meant to." "I won't do it!"</p>
+
+<p>"Wolves wouldn't eat it&mdash;and there's no one to steal it," I returned
+matter-of-factly&mdash;because if Collins had meant to, the sinister flurry
+behind us had decided me his career was closed. "However, it would be
+wasting trouble to leave the stuff; there's no sign of any pack after us
+now." And a ravening yell cut the words off my tongue.</p>
+
+<p>The brutes must have scoured after us in silence, hunting us in the dark
+for the last mile. For as we stood out, a black blot on the hilltop
+against the night sky, they broke out in chorus just behind us, for all
+the world like a pack of hounds who had treed a wildcat; and too close
+for any fool lying to occur to me.</p>
+
+<p>"Paulette," I blurted, "there's not a cartridge<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> in my gun! Yours is so
+little I'm afraid of it. But it may scare them. Take these reins!"</p>
+
+<p>But she turned in her seat and knelt there, looking behind us. If I
+could have got her on Danny's back and let her run clear five minutes
+ago it was impossible now. No human being could have pulled up Bob or
+him.</p>
+
+<p>"See them?" I snapped. "By heaven, I wish the brutes would stop that
+yelling; they're driving the horses crazy! See them?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. But&mdash;yes, yes," her voice flashed out sharp as a knife. "They're on
+us! Give me the revolver, quick! I can shoot; and I've cartridges. You
+couldn't do any good with it: it throws low&mdash;and it's too small for your
+hand. And I wouldn't dare drive. I might get off the road, and we'd be
+done."</p>
+
+<p>It was so true that I did not even turn my head as I shoved over her
+little gun. I had no particular faith in her shooting; my trust was in
+the horses' speed. We were getting down the hill like a Niagara of
+galloping hoofs and wheels over a road I had all I could do to see; with
+that crazy pole I dared not check the horses to put an ounce on. I stood
+up and drove for all I was worth, and the girl beside me shot,&mdash;and hit!
+For a yell and a screaming flurry rose with every report of her
+revolver. It was a beastly noise, but it rejoiced<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> me; till suddenly I
+heard her pant out a sickened sentence that made me gasp, because it was
+such a funny thing to say.</p>
+
+<p>"My heavens, I never thought I could be cruel to animals&mdash;like this. But
+I've got to do it. I"&mdash;her voice rose in sudden disjointed triumph&mdash;"Mr.
+Stretton, I believe I've stopped them!"</p>
+
+<p>"I believe you have," I swore blankly,&mdash;and one leapt out of the dark by
+the fore wheel as I spoke, and she shot it.</p>
+
+<p>But it was the last; she <i>had</i> stopped them. And if I had not known that
+to have turned even one eye from my horses as we tore down that hill
+would have meant we were smashed up on one side of it, I would have been
+more ashamed than I was of being fought for by a girl. "You're a
+wonder&mdash;just a marvellous wonder," I got out thickly. "We're clear&mdash;and
+it's thanks to you!" And ahead of us, in the jungle-thick hemlock that
+crowded the sides of the narrow road I had corduroyed through the swamp
+for a ricketty mile, a single wolf howled.</p>
+
+<p>It had a different, curious note, a dying note, if I had known it; but I
+did not realize it then. I thought, "We're done! They've headed us!" I
+said, "Look out ahead for all you're worth. If we can keep going, we'll
+be through this thicket in a minute."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But Paulette cut out my thought. "We <i>are</i> done, if they throw the
+horses!" And instantly, amazingly, she stood up in the bumping, swaying
+wagon as if she were on a dancing floor and shed Dudley Wilbraham's
+coat. She leaned toward me, and I felt rather than saw that she was in
+shirt and knickerbockers like a boy. "Keep the horses going as steady as
+you can, and whatever you do, don't try to stop them. I'm going to do
+something. Mind, keep them <i>galloping</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>I would have grabbed her; only before I knew what she was going to do
+she was past me, out over the dashboard, and running along the smashed
+pole between Bob and Danny in the dark.</p>
+
+<p>It was nothing to do in daylight. I've done it myself before now, and so
+have most men. But for a girl, in the dark and on a broken pole, with
+wolves heading the horses,&mdash;I was so furiously afraid for her that the
+blood stopped running in my legs, and it was a minute before I saw what
+she was after. She had not slipped; she was astride Danny&mdash;ducking under
+his rein neatly, for I had not felt the sign of a jerk&mdash;but only God
+knew what might happen to her if he fell. And suddenly I knew what she
+had run out there to do. She was shooting ahead of the horses, down the
+road; then to one side and the other of it impartially,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> covering them.
+Only what knocked me was that there was no sign of a wolf either before
+or beside us on the narrow, black-dark highway,&mdash;and that she was
+shooting into the jungle-thick swamp hemlocks on each side of it at the
+breast height of a man!</p>
+
+<p>And at a single ghastly, smothered cry I burst out, "By gad, it <i>is</i>
+men!" For I knew she had shot one. I listened, over the rattling roll of
+the wheels on the corduroy, but there was no second cry. There was only
+what seemed dead silence after the thunder of the wheels on the uneven
+logs, as we swept out on the level road that led straight to the Halfway
+stable. It was light, too, after the dead blackness of the narrow swamp
+road. I saw the girl turn on Danny carelessly, as if she were in a
+saddle, and wave her hand forward for me to keep going. But the only
+thought I had was to get her back into the wagon. Not because I was
+afraid of a smash, for if the mended pole had held in that crazy,
+tearing gallop from the top of the hill it would hold till the Halfway.
+I just wanted her safe beside me. I had had enough of seeing a girl do
+stunts that stopped my blood. "Come back out of that," I shouted at her;
+"I'm going to stop the horses&mdash;and you come <i>here</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>She motioned forward, crying out something<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> unintelligible. But before I
+could pull up the horses, before I even guessed what she meant to do, I
+saw her stand up on Danny's back, spring from his rump, and,&mdash;land
+lightly in the wagon!</p>
+
+<p>It may be true that I damned her up in heaps from sheer fright; I know I
+asked fiercely if she wanted to kill herself. She said no, quite coolly.
+Only that that pole would not bear any more running on it, or the jerk
+of a sudden stop either: it was that she had called out to me.</p>
+
+<p>"Neither can I bear any more&mdash;of tricks that might lose your life to
+save me and my miserable gold," I said angrily. "Sit down this minute
+and wrap that coat round you." I had ceased to care that it was
+Dudley's. "It's bitter cold. And there's the light at the Halfway!"</p>
+
+<p>"What I did wasn't anything&mdash;for me," my dream girl retorted oddly. "And
+I don't know that it was altogether to save you, Mr. Stretton, or your
+gold either, that you thought I meant to steal. I was pretty afraid for
+myself, with those wolves!"</p>
+
+<p>I was too raging with myself to answer. Of course it had not been she
+who had meant to steal my gold; and no matter how she had known some one
+meant to get at me, with wolves or anything else. It had been just
+Collins&mdash;and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> the sheer gall of it jammed my teeth&mdash;Collins and Dunn,
+two ne'er-do-well brats in our own mine. I had realized already that
+they had been missing from La Chance quite early enough for me to thank
+them for the boulder on my good road, and Collins&mdash;&mdash;But I hastily
+revised my conviction that it was Collins I had heard the wolves chop in
+the bush as hounds chop a fox: Collins had too much sense. It had more
+likely been Dunn; he was the kind to get eaten! Collins must have legged
+it early for my corduroy road, where Paulette had expected him enough to
+shoot at him; while Dunn stayed round La Chance to put the wolf bait in
+my wagon and got caught by it himself on his way to join Collins.</p>
+
+<p>As for the genesis of the wolf dope, its history came to me coherently
+as letters spelling a word, beginning with the bottle of mixed filth I
+had spilt on myself at Skunk's Misery. The second I and my smelly
+clothes reached shore the night I returned to La Chance, a wolf had
+scented me and howled; had followed me to the shack and howled again
+while I was talking to Marcia about Paulette Brown; and another had
+carried off those very clothes under my own eyes where I stood by my
+window, as if the smell on them had been some kind of bait it could not
+resist. Wherever Dunn and Collins had got it, the smell from the broken
+bottle had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> been exactly the same, only twenty times stronger: and it
+had been meant to smash at the boulder on my road and turn me into a
+living bait for wolves!</p>
+
+<p>The theory may sound crazy, but it happens to be sane. There is a wolf
+dope, made of heaven knows what, except that it contains certain
+ingredients that have to be put in bottles and ripened in the sun for a
+month. Two Frenchmen were jailed this last June in Quebec province for
+using it around a fish and game club, and endangering people's lives.
+That same wolf bait had been put in my wagon by somebody,&mdash;and the human
+cry out of the swamp at Paulette's shot suddenly repeated itself in my
+ears. I was biting my lip, or I would have grinned. Paulette had hit the
+man who was to have put me out of business, if the wolves failed when
+that bottle smashed and the boulder crippled my wagon. Collins, who,
+laid up in the swamp, was to have reaped my gold and me if I got
+through! The cheek of him made me blaze again, and I turned on Paulette
+abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>"Look here, do you know you shot a man in the swamp?"</p>
+
+<p>"I hope I killed him," returned that same girl who had disliked being
+cruel to wolves,&mdash;and instantly saw what I was after. "That's nonsense,
+though! There couldn't have been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> any man there, Mr. Stretton. The
+wolves would have eaten him!"</p>
+
+<p>"Only one wolf got by you," I suggested drily.</p>
+
+<p>She shrugged her shoulders. "They'd have shot at us&mdash;men, I mean!"</p>
+
+<p>I made no answer. It struck me forcibly that Collins certainly would
+have; unless he was not out for shooting, but merely waiting to remove
+the gold from my wagon as soon as the wolves had disposed of my horses
+and me. Even then I did not see why he had held his fire, unless he had
+no gun. But the whole thing was a snarl it was no good thinking about
+till the girl beside me owned how much she knew about it. I wondered
+sharply if it had been just that knowledge she was trying to give Dudley
+the night I stopped her. The lights at the Halfway were very close as I
+turned to her.</p>
+
+<p>"If I've helped you at all, why can't you tell me all the trouble,
+instead of Dudley?" I asked, very low.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know anything," but I thought she checked a sob, "that I&mdash;can
+tell. I just thought there might be trouble to-night, but I imagined it
+would happen before you started. That was why I marked that gold. Don't
+take any, <i>ever</i>, out of the safe, if it hasn't my seal on it."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"You can't prevent Collins from changing the boxes&mdash;forever," I said
+deliberately; because, unless he were dead, as I hoped, she couldn't.
+But Paulette stared at me, open-lipped, as we drove into the Halfway
+yard, and Billy Jones ran out with a lantern.</p>
+
+<p>"Collins?" she repeated, as if she had never heard his name, much less
+met him secretly in the dark. "I don't know anything about any Collins,
+nor any one I could&mdash;put a name to! I tell you I don't know who was in
+the swamp!"</p>
+
+<p>She had not said she did not know who was responsible for the bottle in
+my wagon. But if I am Indian-dark I can be Indian-silent too. I said
+nothing about that. "Well, it doesn't matter who did anything," I
+exclaimed suddenly, "so long as there's trust between you and me!"
+Because I forgot Dudley and everything but my dream girl who had fought
+for me, and I suddenly wondered if she had not forgotten Dudley, too.
+For Bob and Danny stood still, played out and sweating, and Paulette
+Brown sat staring at me with great eyes, instead of moving.</p>
+
+<p>But she had forgotten nothing. "You're very kind&mdash;to me, and Dudley,"
+she said quietly, and slipped out of the wagon before I could lift her
+down. A sudden voice kept me from jumping after her.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"By golly," said Billy Jones, sniffing at my fore wheel. "Have you run
+over a hundred skunks?"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+<h3>I FIND LITTLE ENOUGH ON THE CORDUROY ROAD, AND LESS AT SKUNK'S MISERY</h3>
+
+
+<p>I told Billy Jones as much as I thought fit of the evening's
+work,&mdash;which included no mention of wolf dope, or shooting on the
+corduroy road.</p>
+
+<p>If he listened incredulously to my tale of a wolf pack one look at Bob
+and Danny told him it was true. They had had all they wanted, and we
+spent an hour working over them. The wagon was a wreck; why the spliced
+pole had hung together to the Halfway I don't know, but it had; and I
+let the smell on it go as a skunk. I lifted the gold into the locked
+cupboard where Billy kept his stores. It had to be put in another wagon
+for Caraquet, anyhow; and besides, I was not going on to Caraquet in the
+morning. The gold was safe with Billy, and there were other places that
+needed visiting first. There was no hope of getting at the ugly business
+that had brewed up at La Chance through Paulette Brown, or Collins
+either; since one would never tell how much or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> how little she knew, and
+the other would lie, if he ever reappeared. But the wolf bait end I
+could get at, and I meant to. Which was the reason I sat on one of the
+horses I had sent over to the Halfway&mdash;after my one experience when it
+held none&mdash;when my dream girl and Mrs. Jones came out of Billy's shack
+in the cold of a November dawn.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm riding some of the way back with you," I observed casually.</p>
+
+<p>Paulette stopped short. She was lovelier than I had ever seen her, with
+her gold-bronze hair shining over the sable collar of Dudley's coat. I
+fancied her eyes shone, too, for one second, at seeing me. But there I
+was wrong.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought you'd started for Caraquet," she exclaimed hastily. "You
+needn't come with us. There won't be any wolves in the daytime, and&mdash;you
+know there's no need for you to come!"</p>
+
+<p>There was not. Even if her voice had not so significantly conveyed the
+fact that there was no bottle in her wagon this time, Mrs. Billy
+Jones&mdash;to put a hard fact politely&mdash;was about the most capable lady I
+had ever met. She was big-boned, hard-faced and profane; and usually
+left Billy to look after the house while she attended to a line of
+traps, or hunted bears for their skins. No wolves would worry the
+intrepid and thoroughly armed Mrs. Jones.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> But all the same I was riding
+some of the way back to La Chance.</p>
+
+<p>There was not a thing to be seen on the corduroy road through the swamp,
+or on the hill we had come down at the dead run; and I had not expected
+there would be. But on the top of the hill I bade good-by to my dream
+girl,&mdash;who was not mine, and was going back to Dudley. It was all I
+could manage to do it, too. I did not know I was biting my lip until it
+hurt; then I stopped watching her out of sight and turned back on the
+business that had brought me.</p>
+
+<p>You could ride a horse down the hill into the swamp if you knew how; and
+I did. I tied him to a tree and went over each side of the corduroy road
+on my feet. It was silent as death there in the cold gray morning, with
+the frost-fog clinging in the somber hemlocks, and the swamp frozen so
+solid that my moccasins never left a mark. No one else's feet had left a
+mark there, either, and I would have given up the idea that a man had
+been cached by the road the night before, if it had not been for two
+things.</p>
+
+<p>One was a dead wolf, with a gash in his throat in which the knife had
+been left till he was cold; you could tell by the blood clots round the
+wound: the other I did not find at once. But wolves do not stab
+themselves, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> I remembered that the lone wolf cry ahead of us on that
+road had been a dying cry, not a hunting one. If Collins had killed the
+beast he had waited there long enough to let an hour pass before he took
+his knife out of its throat: so he had been there when we raced
+by,&mdash;which was all I wanted to know, except where he had gone since. As
+for the other thing I found, it was behind the hemlocks when I quartered
+the sides of the road in the silence and the frost-fog: and it was
+nothing but a patch of shell ice. But the flimsy, crackling stuff was
+crushed into two cup-like marks, as plainly telltale as if I had seen a
+man fall on his knees in them. And by them, frozen there, were a dozen
+drops of blood.</p>
+
+<p>I knew angrily that if it were Collins's blood he had not missed it
+particularly, for he had moved away without leaving a sign of a trail.
+Where to I had no means of knowing, till five minutes later I found
+another spatter of blood on my corduroy road,&mdash;and as I looked at it my
+own blood boiled. There was not only no one but that young devil Collins
+who could have lain in wait for me; but he had had the nerve to walk
+away on my own road! Where to, beat me; but considering what I knew of
+his easy deviltry it was probably back to La Chance and a girl who was
+daring to fight him.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>If I were worried for that girl I could not go back to her. I had to get
+my gold to Caraquet. Besides, I had a feeling it might be useful to do a
+little still hunting round Skunk's Misery. If Collins had had that
+bottle of devil's brew at La Chance he had got it from Skunk's Misery:
+probably out of the very hut where I had once nursed a filthy boy. And I
+had a feeling that the first thing I needed to do was to prove it.</p>
+
+<p>As I rode back to Billy Jones's I would have given a deal for any kind
+of a motor car that would have reduced the twenty-seven miles to
+Caraquet into nothing, instead of an all-day job,&mdash;which it proved to
+be.</p>
+
+<p>Not that I met a soul on the road. I didn't. But it took my wagon four
+hours to reach Caraquet over the frozen ruts of that same road; and
+another hour to hand over Dudley's gold to Randall, a man of my own who
+was to carry it on the mail coach to the distant railway.</p>
+
+<p>I had no worry about the gold, once Randall had charge of it: no one was
+likely to trouble him or the coach on the open post road, even if they
+had guessed what he convoyed. I was turning away, whistling at being rid
+of the stuff, when he called me back to hand over a bundle of letters
+for La Chance. There were three for Marcia, and one&mdash;in old Thompson's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span>
+back-number copperplate&mdash;for Dudley. There were no letters for Paulette
+Brown or myself, but perhaps neither of us had expected any. I know I
+hadn't. I gave the Wilbraham family's correspondence the careless glance
+you always bestow on other people's letters and shoved it into my inside
+pocket. After which I left my horses and wagon safe in Randall's stable
+and started to walk back to Skunk's Misery and the Halfway stables.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed a fool thing to do, and I had no particular use for walking
+all that way; but there was no other means of accomplishing the twenty
+miles through the bush from Caraquet to Skunk's Misery. Aside from the
+fact that I had no desire to advertise my arrival, there was no wagon
+road to Skunk's Misery. Its inhabitants did not possess wagons,&mdash;or
+horses to put in them.</p>
+
+<p>It was black dark when I reached the place, and for a moment I stood and
+considered it. I had never really visualized it before, any more than
+you do any place that you take for granted as outside your scheme of
+existence. I was not so sure that it was, now. Anyhow, I stood in the
+gap of a desolate hill and looked into the hollow before me that&mdash;added
+to the dirt no skunk could stand&mdash;had earned the place its name. It was
+all stones: gravel stones, little stones, stones as big as cabs and as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span>
+big as houses; and, hunched up among them like lean-tos, hidden away
+among the rocks and the pine trees growing up from among the rocks
+wherever they could find root-hold, were the houses of the Skunk's
+Misery people. There was no pretense of a street or a village: there
+were just houses,&mdash;if they deserved even that name. How many there were
+I could not tell. I had never had the curiosity to explore the place.
+But if it sounds as though a narrow, stone-choked valley were no citadel
+for a man or men to have hidden themselves, or for any one to conduct an
+industry like making a secret scent to attract wolves, the person who
+said so would be mistaken. There was never in the world a better place
+for secret dwelling and villainy and all the rest than Skunk's Misery.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, you could not see the houses among the rocks. The
+valley was just like a porcupine warren. No rock stood out alone: they
+were all jumbled up together, big and little, with pine trees growing on
+the tops of them and in between them, up from the earth that was twelve,
+twenty, or sometimes forty feet below. The whole hollow was a maze of
+narrow, winding tracks, between rocks and under them, sometimes a foot
+wide and sometimes six, that Skunk's Misery used for roads. What its
+citizens lived on, I had never<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> been able to guess. Caraquet said it was
+on wolf bounties,&mdash;which was another thing that had set me thinking
+about the bottle I had spilt on my clothes. If Collins or Dunn had got a
+similar bottle there I meant to find out about it: and I had the more
+heart for doing it since Paulette Brown knew nothing of Skunk's Misery.
+You can tell when a girl has never heard of a place, and I knew she had
+never heard of that one. I settled down the revolver I had filled up at
+Billy Jones's, and trod softly down the nearest of the winding alleys,
+over the worn pine needles, in the dark.</p>
+
+<p>There were just twenty houses, when I had counted all I could find.
+There might have been twenty more, under rocks and behind rocks I could
+not make my way around; but I was no porcupine, and in the dark I could
+not stumble on them. There was not a sign of a stranger in the place, or
+a soul about. And judging from the darkness and the quiet, all the
+fat-faced, indifferent women were in bed and asleep, and the shiftless
+rats of men were still away. There were no dogs to bark at me: I had
+learned that in my previous sojourn there. Dogs required food, and
+Skunk's Misery had none to spare. I went back through the one winding
+alley that was familiar to me, found the hut where I had nursed the boy,
+and walked in.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>There was not any Collins there, anyhow. The boy and his mother were in
+bed, or what went for being in bed. But at the sound of my voice the
+woman fairly flung herself at me, saying that her son was recovered
+again, and it was I who had saved him for her. She piled wood on the
+fire that was built up against the face of the rock that formed two
+sides of her house, and jabbered gratitude as I had never thought any
+Skunk's Misery woman could jabber. And she did not look like one,
+either; she was handsome, in a haggard, vicious way, and she was not
+old. I did not think myself that her son looked particularly recovered.
+He lay like a log on his spruce-bough bed, awake and conscious but
+wholly speechless, though his mother seemed satisfied. But I had not
+come to talk about any sick boys. I asked casually where I could find
+the stranger who had been in Skunk's Misery lately. But the woman only
+stared at me, as if the idea would not filter into her head. Presently
+she said dully that there had been no stranger there; I was the only one
+she had ever seen.</p>
+
+<p>It was likely enough; a Skunk's Misery messenger had more probably taken
+the wolf dope to Collins. I asked casually if she had any more of the
+stuff I had spilt on my clothes, and where she had got it,&mdash;and once
+more I ran bang up against a stone wall. The woman explained<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span>
+matter-of-factly that she had not got it from any one. She had found it
+standing in the sun beside one of the rocks, and stolen it, supposing it
+was gin. When she found it was not she took it for some sort of
+liniment; and put it where I had knocked it over on myself. She had
+never seen nor heard of any more of it. But of course it might have
+belonged to any one in the place, only I could understand she could not
+ask about it: which I did, knowing how precious a whole bottle of
+anything was in those surroundings. As to where she had found it, she
+could not be sure. She thought it was by the new house the Frenchwoman's
+son had built that autumn and never lived in!</p>
+
+<p>I pricked up my ears. The Frenchwoman's son was one of the men arrested
+in Quebec province for using wolf dope: a handsome, elusive devil who
+sometimes haunted the lumber woods at the lower end of Lac Tremblant,
+trapping or robbing traps as seemed good to him, and paying back
+interruptions with such interest that no one was keen to interfere with
+him. If the Frenchwoman's son were in with Collins in trying to hold up
+the La Chance gold, and was at Skunk's Misery now, I saw
+daylight,&mdash;anyhow about the wolf dope.</p>
+
+<p>But the woman by the fire knocked that idea out of me, half-made. The
+Frenchwoman's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> son had not been there for two months past and had only
+come there at all to build a house. It was empty now, but no one had
+dared to go into it. She could show it to me, but she was sure he had
+had nothing to do with that liniment, if I wanted any more. After which
+she relapsed into indifference, or I thought so, till I showed her what
+little money I had in my pocket. She rose then, abruptly, and led the
+way out of her hut to the deserted house the Frenchwoman's son had built
+for caprice and never lived in.</p>
+
+<p>It was deserted enough, in all conscience. The door was open, and the
+November wind free to play through the place as it liked. I stood on the
+threshold, thinking. I had found out nothing about any wolf-bait,
+excepting the one bottle the Frenchwoman's son might or might not have
+left there; certainly nothing about Collins ever having got hold of any;
+and if I had meant to spend the rest of the night in Skunk's Misery I
+saw no particular sense in doing it. I had a solid conviction that the
+boy's mother would not mention I had ever been there, for fear she might
+have to share what little I had given her&mdash;which, as it fell out, was
+true&mdash;and turned to go.</p>
+
+<p>But when the woman had left me to creep home in the dark, while I made
+my own way out of the village, I altered my mind about<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> going. I cut
+down enough pine boughs to make a bed under me, shut the door of the
+deserted house&mdash;that I knew enough of the Frenchwoman's son to know
+would have no visitors&mdash;had a drink from my flask, and slept the sleep
+of the hunting dog till it should be daylight.</p>
+
+<p>And, like the hunting dog, I went on with my business in my dreams; till
+my legs jerked and woke me, to see a waning moon peering in from the
+west, through the hole that served the hut for a chimney, and I rose to
+go back to Billy Jones. For I dreamed there was a gang of men in a
+cellar under the very hut I slept in, with a business-like row of
+wolf-bait bottles at their feet, where they sat squabbling over a poker
+game. But as I said, it was the waning morning moon that woke me, and
+the hut was silent as the grave. I picked up the pine-bough bed I had
+slept on and carried it into the bush with me far enough to throw it
+down where it would tell no tales&mdash;I did not know why I did it, but I
+was to be glad&mdash;tightened up my belt, and took a short cut through the
+thick bush to Billy Jones's stables, with nothing to show for my day's
+and night's work but a dead wolf, a stained bit of shell ice, and a few
+drops of blood on the logs of my corduroy road. I was starving, and it
+was noonday, when I came out of the bush and tramped into<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> the Halfway,
+much as I had done that first time I came from Skunk's Misery and went
+home to La Chance. Only to-day Billy Jones was not sitting by his stove
+reading his ancient newspaper. He was standing in the kitchen with two
+teamsters from La Chance, looking down at a dead man.</p>
+
+<p>As I opened the door and stood staring, the teamsters jumped as if they
+had been shot. But Billy only turned a stolid white face on me.</p>
+
+<p>"My God, Mr. Stretton," he said, stolidly too, "what do you make of
+this?"</p>
+
+<p>All I could see from where I stood was a rigid hand, that had said death
+to me the second I opened the door. I gave a sort of spring forward.
+What I thought was that here was the man who had left the blood in the
+swamp when Paulette's bullet hit him, and that I had got Collins. I had
+nearly burst out that he had what he deserved. But instead I stopped,
+paralyzed, where my spring had left me.</p>
+
+<p>"My God," I said in my turn, "I don't know!"</p>
+
+<p>For the man who lay in front of me, stone dead in water-soaked clothes
+that were frozen to his stark body, was Thompson, our old
+superintendent, who only six weeks ago had left the La Chance mine;
+whose letter to Dudley,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> with its careful, back-number copperplate
+address, lay in my pocket now.</p>
+
+<p>"It's Thompson!" was the only thing I could say.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+
+<h3>THOMPSON!</h3>
+
+
+<p>Thompson it was, if it seemed incredible. And Billy Jones exclaimed, as
+he pointed to him, "He can't have been dead longer than since last
+night! And I can't understand this thing, Mr. Stretton! It's but six
+weeks since Thompson <i>left</i> here; and from what he said he didn't mean
+to come back. He told me he was in a hurry to get away, because he was
+taking a position in a copper mine in the West. I remember I warned him
+you hadn't got all your swamps corduroyed, and likely he couldn't drive
+clear into Caraquet; so he left his wagon here and borrowed a saddle
+from me to ride over. And a boy brought his horse back next day, or day
+after,&mdash;I forget which. I remember Thompson forgot to send me a tin of
+tobacco he promised to get me off Randall, at Caraquet!"</p>
+
+<p>"D'ye mean you think he never went to Caraquet?" It was a stupid
+question, for, of course, I knew he had gone there, and farther, or he
+could not have sent Macartney to La<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> Chance, or a letter to Dudley now.
+But what I was really thinking of was that I had been right about the
+date old Thompson left the mine, and that he had gone over my road on
+one of the two days I was away with all my road men, getting logs out of
+the bush.</p>
+
+<p>Billy Jones scattered my thoughts impatiently: "Oh, he went there all
+right. It's his&mdash;coming back&mdash;that beats me!"</p>
+
+<p>It beat me too, for reasons Billy knew nothing about. Why Thompson had
+come back was his own business; but it was plain he had been dead a
+scant twenty-four hours, and the only place I could think of where he
+was likely to have been killed was on my corduroy road the night before.
+Only I did not see how Thompson's clothes could have got water-soaked in
+a frozen swamp; and I did not see, either, what a decent man like
+Thompson could have been doing out there like a wolf, with wolves. I had
+more sense than to think he could have had any truck with Collins about
+our gold. I nodded back at the teamsters: "Where did they find him?"</p>
+
+<p>"They didn't find him," returned Billy simply, "it was my hound dog. He
+was yelling down at the lake shore this morning, like he'd treed a
+wildcat, and when I went down it was Thompson he'd found,&mdash;lying right
+on shore in the daylight! You know how that fool Lac<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span> Tremblant behaves;
+the water in it had gone down to nothing this morning, and on the bare
+stones it had left was Thompson. Only I don't see how he ever <i>got</i>
+there unless he was coming back, from wherever he'd been outside, by Lac
+Tremblant instead of your road!"</p>
+
+<p>"Where was his canoe?"</p>
+
+<p>"He didn't have any! But you know that lake&mdash;it might have smashed his
+canoe on him like an egg, and then&mdash;just by chance&mdash;put him ashore!" I
+did know: I had had all I wanted to keep from being smashed myself the
+night I crossed to La Chance. I nodded, and Billy choked. "It&mdash;it kind
+of sickened me this morning; I <i>liked</i> Thompson, Mr. Stretton!"</p>
+
+<p>So had I, if I had laughed at his eternal solitaire. Billy and I laid
+him on the bed, decently, after we had done what we could for him. And I
+was ashamed to have even wondered if he had been the man Paulette had
+shot at on the La Chance road; for there was not a mark on him, and a
+fool could have told he had just been drowned in Lac Tremblant. There
+was nothing in his pockets to tell how he had got there: only a single
+two-dollar bill and a damp pack of cards in a wet leather case.
+Thompson's solitaire cards! Somehow the things gave me a lump in my
+throat; I wished I had talked more to Thompson in the long<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> evenings.
+The letter in my pocket from him was Dudley's, and I did not mention it
+to Billy. I said I would try to find out where the dead man had come
+from, and anything else I could, before he buried him. And with that I
+left old Thompson lying on Billy's bed with his face covered, and rode
+home to La Chance.</p>
+
+<p>When I got in, Dudley and Macartney were in the living room, talking.
+Any other time I might have wondered why Dudley looked so jumpy and
+bad-tempered, but all I was thinking of then was my ugly news. But
+before I could tell it, Dudley flew at me. "Where the devil have you
+been all day? And what's happened to my gold?"</p>
+
+<p>I don't know why, but I had a furious, cold qualm that either Dudley or
+Macartney had <i>found out</i>,&mdash;I don't mean about Collins so much as about
+Paulette having been mixed up with him. Till I knew I was damned if I'd
+mention him.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't understand," I said shortly. "The gold's in Caraquet. But the
+reason I didn't get home this morning is that Thompson's back!"</p>
+
+<p>"What?" Macartney never spoke loud, yet it cracked out.</p>
+
+<p>I nodded. "I mean he's dead, poor chap! They found his body in Lac
+Tremblant this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> morning." And suddenly I knew I was staring at
+Macartney. His capable face was always pale, but in one second it had
+gone ghastly. It came over me that he had known old Thompson all his
+life, and I blurted involuntarily, "I'm sorry, Macartney!"</p>
+
+<p>But he took no notice.</p>
+
+<p>"They found Thompson's body," he said heavily, as a man does when he is
+sick with shock. "Who found it? Why,&mdash;he wasn't <i>here</i>! What in hell do
+you mean?"</p>
+
+<p>I told him. Dudley sat and goggled at the two of us, but Macartney
+stared at the floor, his face still ghastly. "I beg your pardon,
+Stretton," he muttered as if he were dizzy. "Only Thompson was about the
+oldest friend I had. I thought&mdash;&mdash;" But he checked himself and exclaimed
+with a sudden sharp doubt, "It can't be old Thompson, Stretton; you must
+be mistaken! He couldn't be here&mdash;he was going out West. I was expecting
+a letter from him any day, to say he'd started."</p>
+
+<p>"It's here. At least, I mean there's <i>a</i> letter from him, that I got in
+Caraquet, only it's for Mr. Wilbraham. And I wasn't mistaken, Macartney.
+I wish I were!"</p>
+
+<p>Macartney could not speak. I was surprised; I had not suspected him of
+much of a heart. I pulled out the letter, and Dudley opened it.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Down and out&mdash;the poor old devil," said he slowly, staring at it, "and
+came back. Well, poor Thompson!" He read the thing again and handed it
+to Macartney. But Macartney only gave one silent, comprehensive stare at
+it, in the set-eyed way that was the only thing I had never liked about
+him, and pushed the letter across the table to me.</p>
+
+<p>It was dated and postmarked Montreal. There was no street address, which
+was not like Thompson. But its precise phrases, which <i>were</i> like him,
+sounded down and out all right.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"<span class="smcap">Dear Mr. Wilbraham</span>: I write to inquire if you will take me
+back at La Chance. There is no work here, or anywhere, and
+the British Columbia copper mine, where I intended to go,
+has shut down. I have nothing else in view, and I am
+stranded. If by to-morrow I cannot obtain work here I see
+nothing between me and starvation but to return to La
+Chance. I trust you can see your way to taking me back, in
+no matter how subordinate a position, at least till I can
+hear of something else. If I am obliged to chance coming to
+you I will take the shortest route, avoiding Caraquet, and
+coming by Lac Tremblant.</p></div>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Yours truly,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">"<span class="smcap">William D. Thompson.</span>"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>"That's funny," I let out involuntarily.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> And Dudley snapped at me that
+it wasn't; it was ghastly.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't mean the letter," I said absently. "It's that about Lac
+Tremblant. Thompson was scared blue of that lake; he used to beg me not
+to go out on it. And by gad, Dudley, I don't see how he could have come
+that way! He couldn't paddle a canoe!"</p>
+
+<p>"What?" Macartney started, staring at me. "You're right: he couldn't,"
+he said slowly. "That does make it queer&mdash;except that we don't know he
+meant to paddle up the lake. He might have intended to walk here along
+its shore, and strayed or slipped in or something, in the dark. But what
+troubles me is&mdash;can't you see he'd gone crazy? This letter"&mdash;he put a
+finger on it, eloquently&mdash;"isn't sane, from a self-contained man like
+Thompson! He must have been off his head with worry before he wrote it,
+or started back to a place he'd left for&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Incompetency, if you want the brutal truth," Dudley broke in not
+unkindly. "He was too old-fashioned to make good elsewhere, I expect;
+and if he found it out, I don't wonder if he did go off his head."</p>
+
+<p>I glanced over Dudley's shoulder at the letter he and Macartney were
+studying. It did not look crazy, with its Gaskell's Compendium
+copperplate and its careful signature. I don't<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> know why I picked up the
+envelope from where it lay unnoticed on the table by Dudley and fiddled
+with it scrutinizingly, but I did. The outside of it looked all right,
+with its address in Thompson's neat copperplate. But it wasn't well
+glued or something, for as I shoved my fingers inside, the whole thing
+opened out flat, like a lily. I looked down mechanically as I felt it
+go, and&mdash;by gad, the inside of it <i>didn't</i> look right! There was nothing
+on the glued-down top flap, but the inside back of the envelope wasn't
+blank, as it should have been. It wasn't written on in Thompson's neat
+copperplate or in his neat phrases, either. A pencil scrawl stared at
+me, upside down, as I gripped the lower flap of the envelope
+unconsciously, under the ball of my big thumb. "Why, here's some more,"
+I exclaimed like an ass, glaring at the envelope's inside back. "'Take
+care&mdash;something&mdash;&mdash;' What's this? What on earth did the old man mean?"</p>
+
+<p>Macartney caught the splayed-out envelope from my hand, so sharply that
+the flap I didn't know I held tore away, and stayed in my fist as he
+gazed on the rest of the reversed envelope with his set-eyed stare.
+"'Take care, Macartney! Gold, life, everything&mdash;in danger!'" he read out
+blankly. "Why, it's some kind of a crazy warning to <i>me</i>! Only&mdash;nobody
+wants<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> my life, and I've no gold&mdash;if that's what he means! I&mdash;&mdash;" but he
+broke down completely. "Old Thompson must have gone stark mad," he
+muttered. "I&mdash;it makes me heartsick!"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know," Dudley snapped unexpectedly. "It fits about the gold,
+perhaps. Thompson might have suspected something before he left here!"</p>
+
+<p>He looked at Macartney significantly, and I remembered the question he
+had rapped at me when I came in. Something inside me told me to hold my
+tongue concerning my adventures on the Caraquet road till I knew what
+Paulette had said about them,&mdash;which I was pretty certain was mighty
+little. But once again I had that cold fear that Macartney might have
+found out something about the seal she had put on all our gold, or her
+talking to Collins in the dark, for the question Dudley flung at me was
+just what I had been expecting:</p>
+
+<p>"You didn't see anything of Dunn or Collins between here and
+Caraquet&mdash;or hear from Billy Jones that they'd gone by the Halfway?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," I fenced with a bland, lying truth. "I saw two of our teamsters at
+the Halfway!"</p>
+
+<p>Dudley shook his head. "Not them&mdash;I knew about them! But Dunn and
+Collins cleared out the day you left, and I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span> thought&mdash;&mdash;" he broke off
+irrelevantly. "What the dickens possessed you to take Paulette with you
+that night? She might have been killed&mdash;I heard you'd the dog's own
+trouble on the road!"</p>
+
+<p>That something inside me stiffened up. Whatever he'd heard, I was pretty
+certain was not all; and I was hanged if I were coming out with the full
+story of that crazy drive till I knew whether Paulette came into it. I
+had no desire to talk before Macartney either, in spite of what he might
+have found out, or guessed; no matter what Paulette might have been
+mixed up in I was not going to have a stern-faced, set-eyed Macartney
+put her through a catechism about it. Or Dudley either, for that matter.
+I had no real voucher for the terms he and Paulette were on, except
+Marcia's word; and Dudley was no man to trust not to turn on a girl.</p>
+
+<p>"We shot a few wolves, if that's what you mean," I said roughly. "I
+don't see why that should have worried you about Miss Paulette&mdash;or what
+it has to do with Dunn and Collins!"&mdash;which was a plain lie.</p>
+
+<p>"Few wolves! I know all about them!" Dudley retorted viciously. "Billy
+Jones's wife came out with the plain truth&mdash;that you'd been chased by a
+pack! And as for what Dunn and Collins had to do with my worrying about<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span>
+the gold you carried, it's simple enough. They&mdash;&mdash;" but he stopped,
+chewing two fingers with a disgusting trick he had. "By gad," he looked
+up suddenly, "I believe it was them the wolves were after to begin with,
+Stretton&mdash;before they got started on you! And it wasn't what they left
+La Chance for!"</p>
+
+<p>"What d'ye mean?"</p>
+
+<p>Dudley was chewing his fingers again, but Macartney answered with his
+usual set-eyed openness. "The gold," he supplied. "I got an idea those
+two deserters might have laid up beside the Caraquet road somewhere, to
+wait for you and get it. I had trouble with them over some drilling the
+morning you left; and when I went back to the stope after seeing you and
+Miss Paulette off, they'd cleared out. They must have gone a couple of
+hours before you did. They let out something about hold-ups while I was
+having the trouble with them, and Wilbraham and I got worried they might
+have managed to get over the road before you, and be lying up for you
+somewhere."</p>
+
+<p>"They only left&mdash;two hours before I did," said I, with flat irrelevance.
+I must have stared at Macartney like a fool, but he had knocked the wind
+clean out of me as to Collins having been the man in the swamp. With
+only two hours' start neither he nor Dunn, nor any man, for matter of
+that, could have legged<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> it over my road in time to lie up in the only
+place I knew some one had laid up,&mdash;on the corduroy road.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, they didn't get me, and I never saw them," I began,&mdash;and suddenly
+remembered that ghastly noise, like the last flurry of a dog fight, that
+had halted the wolves on my track. My first thought of it, and of Dunn
+and Collins, had been right. "By gad, I believe I heard them though," I
+exclaimed, "and if they were on that road they're killed and eaten! But
+I didn't have any trouble about the gold."</p>
+
+<p>It was true to the letter, for my side had attended to all the trouble,
+if my side was only a girl who would not have shot without need. But
+when I explained the noise that might have accounted for Dunn and
+Collins, Dudley shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"They didn't get eaten; not they! And your having no trouble with the
+gold isn't saying you won't have any. If no one saw Dunn and Collins
+going out to Caraquet I bet they're laid up somewhere on your road yet,
+waiting for your next trip! And as if that wasn't worry enough, poor old
+Thompson has to go out of his mind and come back here to be found
+dead&mdash;and I mean to find out how!" He was working himself up into one of
+his senseless rages, and he turned on Macartney furiously.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span> "You knew
+him before I did! Write to his people and find out how he got here,
+anyhow. I'm not going to have any man come back, and just be found dead
+like a dog, if it is only old Thompson! I'm going to have him traced
+from the time he left Montreal."</p>
+
+<p>"He had no people," said Macartney blankly. "As far as I know, he was
+just a bit of driftwood. And as for finding out anything about his
+journey here, I don't suppose we ever can! All we'll get at was that he
+came back&mdash;and was found dead." And something made me look past him and
+Dudley, sitting with their backs to the living-room door, and the blood
+jumped into my face.</p>
+
+<p>Paulette Brown stood in the doorway, motionless, as if she had been
+there some time. I didn't know if she were merely knocked flat about the
+wolves and Collins, or scared Macartney might have found out something
+about her. But she was staring at Macartney's unconscious back as you
+look at a chair or anything, without seeing it, and if he were pale she
+was dead white,&mdash;except her mouth that was arched to a piteous crimson
+bow, and her eyes that looked dark as pools of blue ink. But she did not
+speak of Dunn or Collins.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you mean Thompson's been found dead?&mdash;the quiet man who was here
+when I came?" she stammered, as if it choked her.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> And I had an ungodly
+fright she was going to say she must have shot him on the corduroy road!</p>
+
+<p>"Billy Jones found him drowned in Lac Tremblant; it was an accident," I
+exclaimed sharply, before she could come out with more about shooting
+and wolf bait, and perhaps herself, than I chose any one to know,&mdash;till
+I knew it first. And I saw the blood flash into her face as it had
+flashed into mine at the sight of her.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I thought Mr. Macartney meant he'd been&mdash;murdered," she returned
+faintly. "I'm glad&mdash;he wasn't. But if he had been, I suppose it would be
+sure to come out!"</p>
+
+<p>"Crime doesn't always come out, Miss Paulette," said Macartney.</p>
+
+<p>But Paulette only answered listlessly that she was not sure, one never
+could tell; and moved to her usual seat by the fire.</p>
+
+<p>I was knocked endways about Collins; for who could have been on the
+corduroy road if he had not. I would have given most of the world for
+ten minutes alone with my dream girl and explanations. But Dudley began
+the whole story of Thompson over again, and Macartney stood there, and
+Marcia&mdash;whom I had not seen since she went to bed with a swollen
+face&mdash;came in, dressed in her hideous green tweed, and stood on tiptoe
+to chuck me<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> under the chin, with a "Hullo, Nicky, you're back again!"</p>
+
+<p>There was no earthly hope of speaking to my dream girl alone. I shoved
+the mystery of Collins into the back of my head and went off to my room
+before I remembered I was still unconsciously holding that torn-off flap
+of poor old Thompson's envelope in my shut fist. I dropped it on my
+floor,&mdash;and grabbed it up again, to stare at it for a full minute.
+Because there was writing on <i>it</i>, too.</p>
+
+<p>"For God's sake, search my cards&mdash;my cards&mdash;my cards," Thompson had
+scrawled across the three-cornered envelope flap Macartney's grab had
+left in my hand: and, knowing Thompson, it was pitiful. He was the sort
+who must have been crazy indeed before he spoke of the Almighty and
+cards in the same breath.</p>
+
+<p>I remembered taking his measly solitaire pack out of his pocket at the
+Halfway, and wished I had brought them along with me. But it was simple
+enough to go and get them from Billy Jones. Meantime I had no desire to
+speak to Macartney of them or the scrawled, torn-off flap from
+Thompson's envelope: he was sick enough already about old Thompson's
+aberration, without any more proofs of it. It hurt even me to remember I
+had always laughed at the poor devil and his forlorn cards.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> I had no
+heart to burn the scrap of his envelope either, while old Thompson lay
+unburied. I put it away in my letter case, and locked it up.</p>
+
+<p>Which seemed a tame ending; I had not sense enough to know it was not
+tame at all!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+
+<h3>TATIANA PAULINA VALENKA!</h3>
+
+
+<p>Poor old Thompson seemed a closed incident. There was nothing to be
+found out about him, even regarding his departure from La Chance. Nobody
+remembered his going through Caraquet, or even the last time he had been
+there. He was not a man any one would remember, anyhow, or one who had
+made friends. We put a notice of his death and the circumstances in a
+Montreal paper, and I thought that was the end of it all, till Dudley,
+to my surprise, stuck obstinately to his idea of tracing Thompson from
+Montreal. He told Macartney and me that he had written to a detective
+about it, and I think we both thought it was silly. I know I did; and I
+saw Macartney close his lips as though he kept back the same thought.
+But we gave old Thompson the best funeral we could, over at the Halfway,
+with a good grave and a wooden cross. All of us went except Marcia. She
+said she had never cared about the poor old thing, and she wasn't going
+to pretend it.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It was a bitter day, with no snow come yet. Macartney looked sick and
+drawn about the mouth as he stood by the grave, while Dudley read the
+prayers out of Paulette's prayer book. I saw her notice Macartney when I
+did, and I think neither of us had guessed he had so much feeling. I
+stayed a minute or two behind the others, because I'd ridden over,
+instead of driving with them; and just before I started for La Chance I
+remembered that torn scrap of paper in my room there. I turned hastily
+to Billy Jones.</p>
+
+<p>"Those solitaire cards of Thompson's," said I, from no reason on earth
+but that to find them had been the last request of the dead man, even if
+it did sound crazy. "I'd like them!"</p>
+
+<p>Billy nodded and went into his shack. Presently he came out and said the
+cards were gone. He thought he'd put them away somewhere, but they
+weren't to be found. It was queer, too, because he remembered replacing
+them in their prayer-book sort of case after he'd spread them by the
+stove to dry with Thompson's clothes. But his wife said she would find
+them and send them over. Which she never did, and I forgot them.
+Goodness knows I had reason to.</p>
+
+<p>I did an errand instead of going straight home from Thompson's funeral
+that took me into the bush not far from where the boulder<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> had been
+placed on my road. It was there or near by I had heard wolves pull down
+a man or men; and after I'd tied my horse and done a little looking
+around, I found the spot. It was not the scattered bones of two men that
+sickened me, or even that the long thighs and shanks of one of them were
+the measure of Collins. It was the top of a skull, with the hair still
+on it. I did not need the face that was missing. Dunn, with his eternal
+chuckle, had had stubbly fair hair without a part in it, clipped close
+till it stood on end,&mdash;and the same fair hair was on the top of the
+skull that lay like a round stone in the frozen bush. Whether the two
+had set out to rob me I didn't know. I did know they had not done it,
+and that the man Paulette had shot at in the swamp was more of a mystery
+than ever.</p>
+
+<p>The ground was too hard to do any burying. I made the bones into a
+decent heap and piled rocks into a cairn over them. If I said a kind of
+a prayer, too, it was no one's business but that of the God who heard
+me; the boys had been young, and they were dead while I lived, which was
+enough to make a man pray. I felt better when I had done it.</p>
+
+<p>But when I got home to La Chance the bald story I told Dudley was
+wasted. He swore I was a fool, first, for burying two skulls with no
+faces and imagining they belonged to Dunn<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> and Collins; and next that
+they were still alive and meaning to run a hold-up on us. From where, or
+how, he couldn't say. But he kept on at the thing; and the minute he had
+half a drink in him&mdash;which was usually the first thing in the
+morning&mdash;he began to worry me to go out and find where they were cached
+and hike them out of it; and he kept at it all day. That would not have
+worried me much since it was only Dudley, and Macartney and the others
+believed my story; but everything else at La Chance began to go crooked,
+and every one's nerves got edgy. Marcia was unpleasantly silent, except
+when Macartney was there, when she sat in his pocket and they talked low
+like lovers,&mdash;only that I was always idiotically nervous they might be
+talking about Paulette Brown. That was seldom enough though, for half
+the time Macartney never showed up, even for meals. He was working like
+ten men over the mine, and good, solid, capable work at that. Whatever
+had made poor Thompson send him to us he was worth his weight in the
+gold he was getting out of La Chance in&mdash;&mdash;Well, in chunks! Which was
+one of the reasons he had to work so hard, and brings me to the naked
+trouble at La Chance.</p>
+
+<p>We were deadly short of men. Not only were Dunn and Collins dead, but
+their grisly end seemed to have scared the others. Not a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> day went by
+that three or four of them did not come for their time, chiefly rockmen
+and teamsters,&mdash;for we had no ore chute at La Chance. Macartney thought
+it was Dudley's fault, for nagging around all the time, and was sore
+over it. Dudley said it was Macartney's, though when I pressed him he
+said, too, that he did not know why. The men I spoke to before they left
+just said they'd had enough of La Chance, but I could feel a sulky
+underhand rebellion in the bunk house. I ran the ore hauling as best I
+could, and Macartney doubled up the work in the mill. The ore-feeder
+acted as crusher-man, too, the engineer was his own fireman, which, with
+the battery man and the amalgamator, brought the mill staff down to
+four,&mdash;but they were the best of our men. The others Macartney turned to
+with the rockmen, and in the course of a fortnight he got a few more men
+from somewhere he wrote to outside. They were a rough lot; not
+troublesome, but the kind of rough that saves itself backache and elbow
+grease. Personally, I think they would not have worked at all, if
+Macartney had not put the fear of death in them. I caught him at it, and
+though I did not hear what he said in that competent low voice of his,
+there was no more lounging around and grinning from our new men. But the
+trouble among the old men kept on till we had none of them left<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> except
+the four in the mill. It did not concern me particularly, except that I
+had to work on odd jobs that should not have concerned me either, and I
+did not think much about it. What I really did think about&mdash;and it put
+me out of gear more than anything else at La Chance&mdash;was Paulette Brown!</p>
+
+<p>It had been all very well to call her my dream girl and to think I'd got
+to heaven because she'd taken the trouble to drive to the Halfway with
+me and fight wolves. But she had hardly spoken to me since. And&mdash;well,
+not only the bones and skull I'd buried had smashed up my theory that it
+was only Collins who'd meant to hold up my gold, but I'd smashed it up,
+for myself, for a reason that made me wild: Paulette Brown, whose real
+name Marcia swore was something else, was still meeting a man in the
+dark! Where, I couldn't tell, but I knew she did meet him; and naturally
+I knew the man was not Collins, or ever had been. I did my best to get a
+talk with her, but she ran from me like a rabbit. I was worried good and
+hard. For from what I'd picked up, I knew the man she met could be
+nobody at La Chance,&mdash;and any outsider who followed a girl there likely
+had a gang with him and meant business, not child's play like Collins.</p>
+
+<p>The thing was serious, and I had no right<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> to be trusting my dream girl
+and keeping silence to Dudley, but I went on doing it. There is no sense
+in keeping things back. I was mad with love for her, and if she had
+given me a chance I would have brushed Dudley out of my way like a
+straw. I had to grip all the decency I had not to do it, anyway. But if
+you think I just made an easy resignation of her and sat back meekly,
+you're wrong. I sat back because I was helpless and too stupid to
+formulate any way to deal with the situation. I don't know that I was
+any more silent than I always am, though Marcia said so. I did get into
+the way of pretending to write letters in the evenings, while Marcia and
+Macartney talked low, and Dudley went up and down the room in his
+eternal trudge of nervousness, throwing a word now and then to Paulette
+seated sewing by the fire,&mdash;that I kept my back to so that the others
+could not see my face.</p>
+
+<p>But one night, nearly a month after Thompson was buried, I came in after
+supper, and Paulette was in my usual place. She was writing a letter or
+something, and Dudley was preaching to Macartney about the shortage of
+men in the bunk house. Marcia, cross as two sticks because she was only
+there to talk to Macartney herself, had Paulette's seat by the fire. I
+sat down by the table where Paulette<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> was writing, more sideways than
+behind her.</p>
+
+<p>If I had chosen to look I could have read every word she was writing.
+But naturally I was not choosing to, for one thing, and for another my
+eyes were glued to her face. Something in the look of her gave me a sick
+shock. She was deadly pale, and under the light of Charliet's
+half-trimmed lamp I saw the blue marks under her eyes, and the tight
+look round the nostrils that only come to a woman's face when she is
+fighting something that is pretty nearly past her, and is next door to
+despair. She looked hunted; that was the only word there was for it. It
+struck me that look must stop. If I had to march her out into the bush
+with me by force next morning, I meant to get a solitary talk with her;
+find out what her mysterious business was at La Chance with a man who
+had laid up for our gold; and, with any luck, transfer the hunted look
+to the face of the man who was hounding her,&mdash;for I felt certain he was
+still hanging around La Chance.</p>
+
+<p>After that&mdash;but there could be no after that to matter to me, with a
+dream girl who scooted to Dudley every time I tried to speak to her! I
+took a half-glance at him, and it was plain enough he would be no good
+to her in the kind of trouble that was on now. If I couldn't have
+her&mdash;since she didn't want me&mdash;I was the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> only person who could help
+her. She was angel-sweet to Dudley, heaven knows, and he was charming to
+her when he was himself. When he was not, he had a patronizing,
+half-threatening way of speaking to her, as if he knew something ugly
+about her, as Marcia had insinuated, that made me boil. She never
+resented it either, and that made me boil too. If I had ever seen her
+even shrink from him, I don't know that the curb bit I had on myself
+would have held. I wished to heaven she <i>would</i> shrink and give me a
+chance to step in between her and a man who might love her, as Marcia
+said, but who loved drink and drugs better, or he would not have been
+talking between silliness and sobriety, as he was that night. And I was
+so busy wishing it that Marcia spoke to me three times before I heard
+her.</p>
+
+<p>"Nicky, do make Dudley shut up," she repeated, "he won't let any one
+else speak! He's been preaching the whole evening that Collins and Dunn
+aren't dead, only laid up somewhere round and making the other men
+desert, and you ought to go and find them&mdash;and now he's worrying us
+about that old idiot Thompson, who got himself drowned! For heaven's
+sake tell him no one would have bothered to murder the old wretch!"</p>
+
+<p>"Nobody ever thought he was murdered,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> and I buried Dunn and Collins
+right enough," said I absently, with my thoughts still on Paulette. But
+Dudley whisked around on me.</p>
+
+<p>"Marcia's talking rot," he exclaimed, his little pig's eyes soberer than
+I expected. "I don't mean about those two boys, for I bet they're no
+more dead than I am, and it would be just like them to lie low and set
+up a smothered strike among the men as soon as you were ass enough to be
+taken in by some stray bones! But I do mean it about Thompson. There's
+no sense in saying there was nothing queer about the way he came back
+and was found dead&mdash;because there was! It was natural enough that the
+police couldn't trace him in Montreal, for I hadn't a sign of data to
+give them: but it's darned unnatural that <i>I</i> can't trace him in
+Caraquet. I've sieved the whole place upside down, and nobody ever saw
+Thompson after he left Billy Jones's that morning on his way to
+Caraquet!"</p>
+
+<p>Macartney stared at him for a minute; then he put down the pipe he was
+smoking. "If I thought that, I'd sieve the whole place upside down,
+too," he said so quietly that I remembered Thompson had been his best
+friend, and that he had looked deadly sick beside his grave. "But I
+don't. What it comes to with me is that no one remembers seeing Thompson
+in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> Caraquet that particular time, but no one says he wasn't there!"</p>
+
+<p>"Then where's the&mdash;&mdash;" But Dudley checked himself quick as light. If I
+had been quite sure he was himself I should have been curious about what
+he had meant to say. But all he substituted was: "Well, nobody remembers
+seeing him that day, anyway, except Billy Jones!"</p>
+
+<p>"Seems to me that narrows poor Thompson's potential murderers down to
+Billy Jones," said Macartney ironically, since Billy Jones would not
+have murdered the meanest yellow pup that ever walked, and Macartney
+knew it as well as I did. But Dudley made the two of us sit up.</p>
+
+<p>"Who's to say he didn't?" he demanded. "What darned thing do we know
+about him to say that he mightn't have waylaid poor old Thompson for
+what money he had on him, and kept him shut up till he had a chance to
+say he found him drowned?"</p>
+
+<p>Macartney and I stared at each other. The very thought was so monstrous
+that it must have struck him, as it did me, that it was born of Dudley's
+drugs and not his intelligence. But it had to be stopped, or heaven knew
+whom Dudley would be accusing next.</p>
+
+<p>"For God's sake, Wilbraham, shut up," said Macartney curtly. "You make
+me sick.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> Isn't it enough to have the old man dead, without saying
+innocent people killed him!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, if they are innocent," Dudley returned so quietly that it
+surprised both of us. "But I tell you this, Macartney, and Stretton
+too&mdash;if any one within a hundred miles of this mine did murder Thompson,
+Billy Jones or any one else, it'll come out!" and he jerked his head
+around. "Don't you think so, Paulette?"</p>
+
+<p>"I? I never thought of poor old Thompson having been murdered!" She
+answered as if she were startled, but she did not turn. "If he was
+murdered I pray God it will be found out," she added unexpectedly. She
+had made two false starts at her letter and torn them up, but she had
+evidently finished it to her liking now, for she sat with the pen poised
+over the blank end of the sheet to sign her name. Yet she did not sign
+it. She only sat there abstractedly, with her hand lifted from the
+wrist.</p>
+
+<p>"There, you see," Dudley crowed triumphantly. "Paulette's no fool: it's
+facts she and I are after, Macartney. Why, you take the history of
+crimes generally&mdash;murders&mdash;jewel robberies&mdash;kidnapping for money&mdash;half
+of them with not nearly so much to them as this thing about
+Thompson&mdash;they're always found out!"</p>
+
+<p>"If you're going to talk this rubbish, I'm<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span> going to bed," Marcia burst
+out wrathfully. I saw her pause to catch Macartney's eye, but for once
+his set gaze was on the floor. She got up, which I don't think she had
+meant to do, and flounced out of the room. I had no idea I was going to
+be deadly thankful.</p>
+
+<p>Macartney answered Dudley as the door shut behind her. "I don't know
+that crimes are always found out, in spite of your faith&mdash;and Miss
+Paulette's," he argued half crossly. "I could remind you of one or two
+that weren't. What about the Mappin murder, way back in nineteen-five?
+And that emerald business at the Houstons' country house this spring,
+with that dancing and circus-riding girl who used to be at the
+Hippodrome&mdash;the Russian, who did Russian dancing on her horse's back?
+What was her name? I ought to remember. I knew a poor devil of a cousin
+of hers out in British Columbia who was engaged to her when it happened,
+and he talked about her enough. Oh, yes, Valenka! She had a funny
+Christian name too, sort of half Russian, only I forget it. But when
+that Valenka girl got away with an emerald necklace from the Houstons'
+house no one ever found out how it was done! You must have heard about
+her, Stretton?"</p>
+
+<p>I had. Every one had: Macartney need not have troubled to hunt his
+memory for her Christian name, though it had only reached me<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span> in the
+wilderness through a stray New York paper. But before I could say so
+Dudley burst out with the same truculence he had used about Billy Jones:</p>
+
+<p>"What d'ye mean Stretton must have heard?"</p>
+
+<p>"Only that Mrs. Houston took a fancy to Valenka and had her down to ride
+and dance at a week-end party at her house in Long Island; that on
+Sunday morning, Jimmy Van Ruyne, one of the guests, was found in
+Valenka's room, soaked with morphine and robbed&mdash;not only of the cash in
+his pocket in the good old way, but of an emerald necklace he had just
+bought at Tiffany's; and that, to this day, no one has ever laid eyes on
+that necklace nor on Valenka. She's free and red-handed somewhere, if no
+one ever found out who railroaded her and Van Ruyne's emeralds out of
+the United States!"</p>
+
+<p>What sent Dudley into a blazing rage was beyond me. But he fairly yelled
+at Macartney.</p>
+
+<p>"Free she may be, but when you say 'red-handed' you say a lie! If Jimmy
+Van Ruyne was fool enough to think so, it was because no Van Ruyne ever
+could see a. b. spelled ab. D'ye know him? Well," as Macartney shook his
+head, "he's a rotter, if ever there was one! Got more money than he
+knows what to do<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> with and always chasing after women. As for Valenka,
+if you think she came out of a circus and was fair game, that's a lie,
+too! She was a lady, born and bred. Her mother was American, a Miss
+Bocqueraz; and her father was one of the best known men in Petrograd,
+and <i>persona grata</i> with one of the Grand Dukes till he got into some
+sort of political disgrace and died of it. His daughter came to America
+and danced and rode for her living. First because she was beggared; and
+second because she'd been taught dancing in the Imperial School at
+Petrograd and riding in the Grand Duchess Tatiana's private ring for
+<i>haute man&eacute;ge</i>; and was a corker at both. She called herself plain
+Valenka, and Jimmy Van Ruyne went crazy about her&mdash;though Mrs. Houston
+didn't know it, or she never would have asked the nasty little cad to a
+spring week-end party."</p>
+
+<p>"To lose an emerald necklace and be stabbed and drugged," commented
+Macartney drily. "Oh, I'm not saying the Valenka girl wasn't a
+marvellous sight on a horse! But what Van Ruyne told the police was that
+he gave his string of emeralds to her on the Saturday afternoon, and got
+a note from her just after dinner saying that she returned them; only
+the case&mdash;in the time-honored method this time&mdash;was empty when he opened
+it! He was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> blazing. He went straight up to Valenka's room when he found
+it out, which was at two in the morning, and said he wanted his
+emeralds; and she flew at him with a dagger. After which he knew nothing
+at all till a servant came in at eight and found him lying unconscious
+in her empty room that she'd just walked out of with his emeralds in her
+pocket. And no one's ever laid eyes on her, or on Van Ruyne's emeralds
+ever since."</p>
+
+<p>"That's what Van Ruyne says," Dudley began hotly&mdash;and went on in a
+different voice. "The Valenka girl never stole his emeralds! She may
+have cut him across the wrist with one of those knife-things women will
+use for paper cutters; I don't say she didn't. Any girl would have been
+justified when a man forced his way into her bedroom&mdash;for I bet Van
+Ruyne didn't let out the whole story of that, if he did let out that he
+bullied her when he found her alone! And he didn't lay any stress,
+either, on the fact that he was found with the cut artery in his
+wrist&mdash;that was all the stabbing that ailed him&mdash;bound up as a surgeon
+would have done it; or that he'd been given just enough morphine to keep
+him from wriggling off his bandage and bleeding to death before anybody
+came: not Van Ruyne!"</p>
+
+<p>"All that doesn't explain how Valenka got away&mdash;or what became of her,"
+said Macartney<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> obstinately. "That's the mystery I began on."</p>
+
+<p>I was bored stiff with the whole thing. And whether she had Van Ruyne's
+emeralds or not I saw no particular mystery in the Valenka girl's
+disappearance: she had probably had some one outside who had taken her
+clear away in a motor car. I said so, more because Dudley was glaring at
+Macartney like a maniac than anything else. And Dudley caught me up
+short. "I won't have either of you say one more word about Valenka in my
+house. She was as good as she was pretty; and if some one helped her
+away she&mdash;deserved it!"</p>
+
+<p>There was something so like honest passion in the break in his voice
+that involuntarily I glanced at Paulette, to see if by any chance she
+was startled at Dudley's evidently intimate knowledge of a girl none of
+us had even heard him speak of&mdash;and it took every bit of Indian quiet I
+owned not to stare at her so hard that Dudley and Macartney must have
+noticed. She was listening, as motionless as if she were a statue. Her
+lifted hand still held her pen poised over her unfinished letter; but it
+was rigid, as the rest of her was rigid. Whether it was from anger,
+surprise, or jealousy of Dudley, I had no idea, but she sat as if she
+had been struck dumb. And suddenly I was not sure if she were perfectly
+collected,&mdash;or absolutely<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> abstracted. For&mdash;without even a glance to
+show she felt my eyes on her&mdash;the carved lines of her poised hand fell
+to the level of her wrist that lay flat on the table, and she began to
+write the signature to her unfinished letter. I could see every separate
+character as she shaped it; and with the blazing enlightenment of what
+she set down on paper only a merciful heaven kept my wits in my skull
+and my tongue quiet in my head.</p>
+
+<p>For the signature she wrote as plainly as I write it now was not
+Paulette Brown. It was Tatiana Paulina&mdash;that "queer Christian name, half
+Russian too," of the dancing circus-rider, that no one had ever
+mentioned,&mdash;<i>Tatiana Paulina Valenka</i>!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER X</h2>
+
+<h3>I INTERFERE FOR THE LAST TIME</h3>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Must I go now&mdash;in the moonlight clear?<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Would God that it were dark,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That I might pass like a homeless hound<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Men neither miss nor mark."<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4"><i>The Ransom.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Tatiana Paulina Valenka</span>!</p>
+
+<p>I sat as still as if I had been stabbed. It was no wonder she had
+laughed when I asked her if she could ride, no wonder I had thought she
+moved like Pavlova. Paulette Brown, whom Dudley had brought to La
+Chance, was Tatiana Paulina Valenka, who had or had not stolen Van
+Ruyne's emeralds! But the blood sprang into my face at the knowledge,
+for&mdash;by all the holy souls and my dead mother's name&mdash;she was my dream
+girl too! And I believed in her.</p>
+
+<p>All the same, I was thankful Marcia had flounced out of the room before
+Dudley let loose. It was no wonder she had thought she had seen Paulette
+Brown before. The wonder was that she had ever forgotten how she had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span>
+seen her&mdash;dancing at the Hippodrome on her four horses as no girl ever
+had danced&mdash;or forgotten the story about her that she had said was
+"queer"! If Marcia's eyes had fallen on the signature mine were on now,
+I knew her first act would have been to write to Jimmy Van Ruyne; that
+even if she had only heard Dudley defending an ostensibly absent Valenka
+she would have written&mdash;for Marcia was no fool. Then and there I made up
+my mind that Marcia should never guess the whole of what she already
+half-guessed about Paulette Brown; there were ways I could stop <i>that</i>.</p>
+
+<p>As for Dudley&mdash;&mdash;But a sudden tide of respect for Dudley, in spite of
+his drink and all his queerness, rose flood-high in me. It had been
+Dudley, of course, who had got Paulette away,&mdash;for I could not think of
+her as Tatiana Paulina. How, I did not know; I knew he had not been one
+of the Houstons' week-end party; but he had done it somehow, and
+spirited Paulette out to La Chance. As for the rest, a fool could have
+told that he respected and believed in her. If it had been risky
+bringing Marcia out into the wilderness with her, it had been clever
+too, because it was so bold that Marcia had never suspected it. Even I
+never would have, if Macartney had not brought up Miss Valenka's name. I
+knew he had done it merely to get Dudley off his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> cracked idea that
+Billy Jones might have murdered Thompson, but I was suddenly nervous
+that Dudley's fool vehemence over a missing girl might have set
+Macartney on the track of things,&mdash;and heaven knows that, except he was
+a competent mine superintendent, I knew little enough how far it would
+be safe to trust Macartney. But suddenly one thing I did know flashed
+over me. Macartney and Marcia were a firm, or going to be; and I was
+instantly scared blue that he might turn around and see that name
+Paulette Brown had signed to her letter, lying plain under the
+living-room lamp! I knew I had to wake Paulette up to what she had done
+and shut up Dudley before he let out any more intimate details the
+public had never known, like Van Ruyne's bandaged wrist. I yawned and
+got up, with one hand on the table, and my forefinger pointing straight
+to that black signature of Tatiana Paulina Valenka that ought to have
+been Paulette Brown.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm like Marcia, Miss Paulette; I'm going to bed unless you can turn
+off Dudley's eloquence. Oh, I'm so sorry&mdash;I'm afraid I've blotted your
+letter," I said. I tapped my finger on it soundlessly&mdash;and she looked
+down,&mdash;and saw!</p>
+
+<p>I said once before that my dream girl had good nerves; she had iron
+ones. I need not have been afraid she would exclaim. She said<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> quite
+naturally: "No, it's all right. And it wasn't a letter, anyhow. It was
+only something I wanted to make clear." She picked it up, folded it
+small, gathered up the bits of paper she had written on and torn up, and
+turned round to Dudley. "What are you talking about all this time?"</p>
+
+<p>But if her glance warned him to hold his tongue, as heaven knows her
+mere presence would have warned me, Dudley was too roused to care. "I
+was talking about that liar, Van Ruyne," he said, glaring at Macartney.</p>
+
+<p>"He may be a liar, all right," said Macartney rather unpleasantly.
+"Only, if that Valenka girl didn't steal his emeralds, Mr. Wilbraham,
+who did?"</p>
+
+<p>"That cousin of hers you said you knew; Hutton, or whatever you said his
+name was," Dudley retorted, like a fool, for Macartney had never
+mentioned the man's name. "How, I don't know, but I'm certain of it. He
+was more in love with her than Van Ruyne, and more dangerous, for all
+you say he was a good sort. Why, he was the kind to stick at nothing.
+Miss Valenka had had the sense to turn him down hard; and I believe he
+stole that necklace of Van Ruyne's from her during the short time she
+had it&mdash;either just to get her into trouble and be revenged on her, or
+to get her into his power. Whichever it was&mdash;to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> blackmail her&mdash;for he'd
+cadged on her for money before her father died&mdash;or to scare her into
+going to him for help&mdash;I'd like to hunt the worthless hound down for it.
+And I'd never stop till I got him!"</p>
+
+<p>"Like poor old Thompson's murderer," Macartney commented rather drily,
+"and with no more foundation." But the thought of Thompson seemed to
+have brought his self-command back to him; he tried to smooth Dudley
+down. "I don't honestly believe old Thompson could have been murdered,"
+he said gently, "or that Miss Valenka's cousin could have stolen those
+jewels, for any reason. He seemed a pretty good sort when I knew him in
+British Columbia. He was a clever mining engineer, too."</p>
+
+<p>"He might have been the devil for all I care! Only if ever I come across
+him I'll get those emeralds out of his skin," Dudley exploded. Paulette
+gave one glance at him. It would have killed me; but even Dudley saw how
+he was giving himself away to a stranger.</p>
+
+<p>"Why under heaven do you work me up about abstract justice, Macartney?"
+he growled. "You know how I lose my temper. Talk about something else,
+for goodness sake!"</p>
+
+<p>"Not I&mdash;I'm going to bed," Macartney returned casually. Dudley always
+did work himself up over things that were none of his business,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span> and the
+Valenka argument evidently had not struck his superintendent as anything
+out of the ordinary. He nodded and went out. Paulette strayed to the
+fireplace, and I saw her handful of papers blaze up before she moved
+away. I was thankful when that signature of Tatiana Paulina Valenka was
+off the earth, even if Macartney had gone out of the room. Paulette said
+good night, and went out on his heels.</p>
+
+<p>I heard Macartney ask her something as she passed him where he stood in
+the passage, getting on his coat to go over to the assay office, where
+he slept. I thought it was about Marcia, from the tone of his voice, and
+from Paulette's answer, cursory and indistinct through the closed door:
+"I know. I'm going to." She added something I could not hear at all, but
+I heard Macartney say sharply that to-morrow would be too late.</p>
+
+<p>Paulette said "yes," and then "yes" again, as though he gave her a
+message. Then she spoke out clearly: "There's nothing else to say. I'll
+do it now." I heard her move away, I thought to Marcia's door. Macartney
+went out the front door, banging it.</p>
+
+<p>I had no desire to go to bed. I felt as if I had walked from Dan to
+Beersheba and been knocked down and robbed on the way. I knew my dream
+girl was not mine, now or ever, because<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> she was Dudley's, but I had
+never thought of her being anything like Tatiana Paulina Valenka. It was
+not the jewel story that hit me: I knew she had not stolen Van Ruyne's
+old necklace, no matter how things looked. It was that she must care for
+Dudley, or she would never have let him bring her out here. And another
+thing hit me harder still, and that was Hutton,&mdash;the cousin Macartney
+said was engaged to her, and Dudley said cadged on her, till he ended by
+branding her as a thief and getting away with the spoils. And the crazy
+thought that jumped into my head, without any earthly reason, was that
+it was just Hutton who had been hounding her at La Chance; that, while I
+had been addling my brains with suspecting Collins, it was Hutton that
+Paulette Brown&mdash;whose real name was Valenka&mdash;had stolen out to meet in
+the dark!</p>
+
+<p>Once I thought of it, I was dead sure Hutton had followed her to La
+Chance. I knew from my own ears that she hated and distrusted the man
+for whom she had once mistaken me, that it was he from whom she had
+tried to protect my gold; and I wondered with a horror that made me too
+sick to swear, if it were Hutton himself, and not Dunn nor Collins, who
+had cached that wolf dope in my wagon! If it were, he had not cared
+about wolves killing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> the girl who drove with me, so long as he got my
+gold. But there I saw I was making a fool of myself, for he could not
+have known she was going. I steadied my mind on the thing, like you
+steady a machine.</p>
+
+<p>If Hutton had been hanging around La Chance, either from so-called love,
+or to get Paulette into a mess with our gold, as Dudley swore he had
+with Van Ruyne's emeralds, he could not have been seen about the
+mine,&mdash;for Macartney would have recognized him and given him away. He
+must be cached in the bush somewhere, waiting his chance to grab our
+gold and incriminate Paulette, as common sense told me she expected. I
+was sure as death he had a gang somewhere, for no outsider would try to
+run that business alone; Collins and Dunn might have been on their way
+to join it the night they got scuppered, very likely: they were just
+devils enough. But if they had started out to meet Hutton at my corduroy
+road they had never got there, and I was pretty sure the rest of the
+gang hadn't either, and Hutton&mdash;alone&mdash;had been scared to shoot at us
+and give himself away.</p>
+
+<p>That thought assured me of two things. It was Dunn and Collins who had
+hidden the wolf bait in my wagon, for Hutton could never have done it
+and reached the corduroy road before us; and Paulette must really hate
+Hutton<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> savagely, for she must have known whom she was shooting at on my
+swamp road! That made me feel better&mdash;a little&mdash;but there was something
+I wanted to know. I turned on Dudley for it.</p>
+
+<p>"Look here, I never heard anything about Valenka but newspapers'
+stories, till to-night. But, if you know the inside of the business, how
+did that cousin Macartney was talking of ever get hold of that emerald
+necklace? Didn't Macartney imply he was in British Columbia?"</p>
+
+<p>"He was more likely anywhere than where he'd have to work&mdash;if he could
+get money out of a girl," Dudley snapped. "What I think is that he was
+masquerading as a servant in the Houstons' house&mdash;a chauffeur,
+perhaps&mdash;anything, that would let him hang round and drive a girl half
+wild. He was a plain skunk. I don't know how he managed the thing, but I
+know he was there in the Houstons' house, somehow, if Paulette doesn't
+think so"&mdash;he forgot all about the Valenka&mdash;"and that he took those
+emeralds; left the girl powerless even to think so; and disappeared. I
+never saw him; don't even know what he looks like. But if ever I get a
+chance I'll hand him over to the law as I'd hand a man I caught throwing
+a bomb at a child!"</p>
+
+<p>I said involuntarily: "Shut up!" I knew<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> it was silly, but I felt as if
+walls might have ears in a house that sheltered Paulette Brown,&mdash;though
+I knew Marcia was in bed and asleep, and there was no one else who could
+hear. "You're never likely to see him here, anyhow," I added, since I
+meant to see him myself first, somehow; after which I trusted he was not
+likely to matter. And I thought of something to change the subject.
+"What were you going to say to-night about no one having seen poor old
+Thompson&mdash;when you cut yourself off?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, that," Dudley replied almost carelessly. "It mayn't amount to
+anything, and I only shut up because I didn't want Macartney to take the
+wind out of my sails by saying so. It was just that if Thompson ever
+went to Caraquet it ought to be simple enough to find the boy who took
+his horse back to Billy Jones, and&mdash;there's apparently no such boy in
+Caraquet! What set me on Billy Jones first was that he stammered and
+stuttered about not knowing him, till I don't believe there ever was any
+such boy. He's never been heard of since, any more than if he'd gone
+into the ground. And what I want to know is <i>why</i>?&mdash;if it's all straight
+about Thompson and Billy Jones!"</p>
+
+<p>I was silent, remembering&mdash;I don't know why&mdash;the half-dead boy I had
+carried home to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> Skunk's Misery. There was no cause to connect him with
+the return of Thompson's horse to the Halfway, yet somehow my mind did
+connect him with it, obstinately. I had never really discovered how he
+had been hurt by a falling tree, and without reason some animal instinct
+told me the two things belonged together and that they were queer. But
+before I could say so, Dudley burst into unexpected speech, his little
+pig's eyes as fierce as a tiger's: "Look here, Stretton! I'm going to
+find out who drowned Thompson, and who took Van Ruyne's emeralds&mdash;and
+hand them both over to the law, if I die for it. And when I say that you
+know I mean it!"</p>
+
+<p>I did. But once more I made no answer, for I thought I heard Marcia in
+the passage. I am quick on my feet, and I was outside the door before I
+finished thinking it. But it was not Marcia outside; it was only
+Macartney. Yet I stopped short and stared at him, for it was a Macartney
+I had never seen. He was close to the living-room door, just as if he
+had been listening to Dudley, and his face was the face of a devil. I
+never want to see set eyes like his again. But all the effect they had
+on me was to make me furiously angry, and I swore at him.</p>
+
+<p>"What the devil's the matter with you, Macartney? What do you want?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"My keys," roughly. "I left them somewhere around this passage and I had
+to come back for them; I couldn't get into my office. As for what's the
+matter"&mdash;he lowered his voice and motioned me some feet away, out of the
+light from the living-room door&mdash;"I heard all Wilbraham said just now,
+and by gad, the man's crazy! We've got to get him off all that rot about
+Billy Jones, or any one else, murdering Thompson; it's stark madness.
+Both of us know Billy wouldn't murder a cat! And there's another thing,
+too! I heard all Wilbraham said about that Valenka girl's cousin, and I
+wish you'd tell him to go slow on it. I was in too much of a rage, or
+I'd have gone in and told him myself. Dick Hutton was a friend of mine;
+no matter how much he was in love with a girl who'd got sick of him for
+Van Ruyne, he wasn't the kind to sneak round the Houstons' house as a
+servant. I won't let any one say that with impunity. It's no use my
+telling Wilbraham so in the state he's in to-night, but you might gently
+hint it when you've a chance. I wish to heaven he'd give up drink and
+drugs and being an amateur detective!" He shrugged his shoulders with a
+complete return to his ordinary manner. "I'm sorry I startled you just
+now, but I was too cursed angry to say I was here. Oh, there are my
+keys!" He stooped, picked them<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> up off the floor, and went out with a
+careless good night.</p>
+
+<p>"Was that Macartney?" Dudley inquired as I went back to him. "I thought
+he'd gone!"</p>
+
+<p>"Forgot the office key and came back for it." I felt no call to enter on
+Macartney's embassy regarding Hutton. "Going to bed?"</p>
+
+<p>Dudley gulped down a horn of whisky that would have settled any two men
+in the bunk house, nodded, and shut the door behind him. I put out the
+light and sat on in the living room alone, how long I don't know. I had
+nothing pleasant to think of, either. It was no use my trying to imagine
+that Tatiana Paulina Valenka was not going to marry Dudley, whatever I
+had hoped about Paulette Brown. As far as any chance of her loving me
+was concerned, I had lost my dream girl forever. She was none of my
+business any more, except that&mdash;"By gad, she <i>is</i> my business," I
+thought in a sudden bitter fury, "as far as Hutton and our gold! If I'm
+right, and he's hiding round here, I'll put a stopper on any more
+hold-ups. And I'll make good and sure she never goes out to meet him
+again, too!"</p>
+
+<p>As I swore it I turned away from the dead fire and the dark room, that
+looked as if we'd all deserted it hours ago, and went Indian-silent<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span>
+into the hallway. And my heart contracted in a hard, tight lump.</p>
+
+<p>The passage was light as day, with the moon full on the window at the
+end of it. And wrapped in a shawl, with her back to me, stood my dream
+girl, undoing the front door as noiselessly as I had come into the
+passage.</p>
+
+<p>I let her do it. The hallway on which Marcia's bedroom door opened, let
+alone Dudley's, was no place for Paulette Brown and myself to talk. But
+I was just three feet behind her as she slid around the corner of the
+shack, toward the bush that lay dark against the cold winter moon. And I
+rustled with my feet on purpose, so that she turned and saw me, with the
+moon full on my face.</p>
+
+<p>"You sha'n't do it," I said. I did not know I had made a stride to her
+till I felt her arm under my hand. "You sha'n't go!"</p>
+
+<p>My dream girl, who had two names and belonged to Dudley anyhow, said
+nothing at all. She and I, who had really nothing to do with one
+another, if I would have laid my soul under her little feet, stood still
+in the cold moonlight, looking inimically into one another's eyes.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+
+<h3>MACARTNEY HEARS A NOISE: AND I FIND FOUR DEAD MEN</h3>
+
+
+<p>We must have stood silent for a good three minutes. I think I was
+furious because Paulette did not speak to me. I said, "You're not to
+go&mdash;you're <i>never</i> to go and meet Hutton again, as long as you live!"
+And for the first time I saw my dream girl flinch from me.</p>
+
+<p>"What?" she gasped so low I could hardly hear. "You know that? What am I
+going to do? My God, what am I going to do?"</p>
+
+<p>"You're coming back into the shack with me!" We were on the blind side
+of the house for Marcia and Dudley, but we were in plain view from
+Charliet's window, and I was not going to have even a cook look out and
+see Paulette talking to a man in the middle of the night. Her despair
+cut me; I had never seen her anything but valiant before, and I had a
+lump in my throat. But I spoke roughly enough. "I didn't know the whole
+of things till to-night, but now I do, you'll have to trust me. Can't
+you see I mean to do all I can to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span> help you&mdash;and Dudley?" If it were
+tough to have to add Dudley I did it. But I felt her start furiously.</p>
+
+<p>"Dudley?" she repeated almost scornfully. "Nobody can help Dudley but
+me&mdash;and there's only one way! Mr. Stretton, I promise you I'll never ask
+again, but&mdash;for God's sake let me go to meet Dick Hutton to-night!"</p>
+
+<p>"Not blindly," said I brutally. "If you tell me why, perhaps&mdash;but we
+can't talk here. If you'll come into the house and trust me about what
+you want to do, I may let you go&mdash;just this once&mdash;if I think it's the
+right way!"</p>
+
+<p>"I've only half an hour before it's too late&mdash;for any way!" But she
+turned under the hand I had never lifted from her arm.</p>
+
+<p>I led her noiselessly into the office. I was afraid of the living room.
+Marcia might come back to it for a book or something. No one but Dudley
+ever went near the office, and he was safely dead to the world, judging
+from the horn of whisky he had gone to bed on. The place was freezing,
+for the inside sash was up, leaving only the double window between us
+and the night; and it was black-dark too, with the moon on the other
+side of the house. But there were more things than love to talk about in
+the dark,&mdash;to a dream girl you would give your soul to call your own,
+and know you never will. And I began bluntly, "You've never<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> had any
+reason to distrust me. I've helped you&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Three times," sharply. "I know. I've been&mdash;grateful."</p>
+
+<p>It was four, counting to-night when I had warned her to hide her
+signature from Macartney; but I was not picking at trifles. I said:
+"Well, I've trusted you, too! I knew the first night I came back here
+that you were meeting some man secretly, in the dark. But it was none of
+my business and I held my tongue about it; then, and when you met him
+again&mdash;when it was my business."</p>
+
+<p>"Again?" I heard the little start she gave, if I could not see it.</p>
+
+<p>"The night before you and I took the gold out," I answered practically,
+"when I told you your hair was untidy. I suppose you only thought I knew
+you had been out of doors, but I heard the man you met leave you and
+heard you say to yourself that you'd have to get hold of the gold. I
+didn't know whether you were honest or not then, or when I gave you back
+your little seal; and not even when you started for Billy Jones's with
+me. I knew by the time I got there, if I was fool enough to believe it
+was Collins you were fighting instead of helping. But any fool must see
+now that Hutton was the only man likely to have followed you out here! I
+suppose he told you some lie<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> about giving you up for Van Ruyne's
+necklace, unless you made silence worth while with Dudley's gold?" and
+her assent made me angry clear through.</p>
+
+<p>"My soul, girl," I burst out, "you balked him about that, even when you
+knew he'd put that wolf dope in my wagon, and you were risking your
+life&mdash;you put a bullet in him in the swamp&mdash;I can't see why you should
+be worrying to conciliate him by meeting him to-night!"</p>
+
+<p>But she caught me up almost stupidly. "Put a bullet in him? I
+didn't&mdash;you must know I didn't!"</p>
+
+<p>"There was blood in the swamp and on the road!"</p>
+
+<p>I felt her staring at me in the dark. "It wasn't Dick's," she said
+almost inaudibly. "It must have been some one else's. And&mdash;he doesn't
+know it was he I shot at that night!"</p>
+
+<p>"It might do him good if he did!" I felt like shaking her, if I had not
+wanted to take her in my arms more. "Can't you see you've no reason to
+worry about Hutton? If Dudley told the truth to-night, and he stole
+those emeralds and shifted the crime on to you, it's you who have the
+whip hand of him!"</p>
+
+<p>"But he didn't," Paulette exclaimed wildly. "He wasn't near the
+Houstons' house! It's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> mad of Dudley to think so. I know he believes it,
+but&mdash;oh, it's mad all the same! And even if Dick did take those
+emeralds&mdash;though I can't see how it was possible&mdash;it wouldn't clear me!
+It would only mean he was able to drag me into it, somehow."</p>
+
+<p>"But you never touched the necklace!" For I knew that.</p>
+
+<p>"No," simply, "but I'm afraid of Dick all the more. If he did take it,
+to get me into his power"&mdash;she caught my arm in her slim hands I had
+always known were so strong&mdash;"can't you see he's <i>got</i> me?" she said
+between her teeth, "and that, next thing, he'll get the La Chance gold?
+If you don't let me meet him to-night I'll be helpless. I&mdash;&mdash;Oh, can't
+you see I'll be like a rat in a trap?&mdash;not able to do anything? I can
+make him go away, if I meet him! Otherwise"&mdash;the passion in her voice
+kept it down to a whisper&mdash;"it's not only that I'm afraid he can make
+things look as if I stole from Dudley as well as from Van Ruyne: I'm
+afraid&mdash;<i>for Dudley</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>The two last words gave me a jar. I would have given most of the world
+to ask if she loved Dudley, but I didn't dare: I suppose a girl could
+love a man with a face like an egg, if she owed him enough. But whether
+she cared for him or not, "By gad, you've got to tell Dudley that
+Hutton's here," I said roughly, because I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> was sick with the knowledge
+that anyhow she did not love me.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell him?" Paulette gasped through the dark that was like a curtain
+between us. "I've told him twenty times&mdash;all I dared. And he wouldn't
+listen to a word I said. Ask him: he'll tell you that's true!"</p>
+
+<p>I had no doubt it was. Even on business Dudley's brain ran on lines of
+its own; you might tell him a thing till you were black in the face, and
+he would never believe it. Lately, between drugs and drink, he was past
+assimilating any impersonal ideas at all. Macartney was so worried about
+him that he'd told off Baker, one of his new men, to go wherever Dudley
+went. I had no use for the man: he was a black and white looking devil
+and slim as they make them, in my opinion, though Dudley took to him as
+though he were a long-lost brother luckily,&mdash;how luckily I couldn't
+know. But I wasn't thinking about Baker that night.</p>
+
+<p>"We can't worry over Dudley," I said shortly, "he'll have to take care
+of himself. But you won't be helpless with Hutton, if I meet him
+to-night&mdash;in your place!"</p>
+
+<p>"You? I couldn't bear you to be in it!" so sharply that I winced.</p>
+
+<p>"It won't hurt you to take that much from me!" It wasn't till long
+afterwards that I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> knew I'd been a fool not to have said it with my arms
+round her, while I told her why&mdash;but since I didn't do it there's no
+sense in talking about it. I went on baldly: "I've got to be in it! I'm
+not concerned with post-mortems and your past. All I know, personally,
+is that Hutton's hiding somewhere round this mine to hold up our gold
+shipments and get even with Dudley; and if you'll tell me where to meet
+him to-night I can stop both&mdash;and be saved the trouble of looking for
+him from here to Caraquet, let alone getting you some peace of mind
+instead of the hell you're living in."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, my God," said Paulette, exactly as if she were in church. "I can't
+take peace of mind like blood-money&mdash;I can't tell you where to find
+Dick, if you don't know now," and I should have known why if I had had
+any sense, but I had none. "It's no use, Mr. Stretton, I must go to
+Dick, alone. I&mdash;&mdash;" But suddenly she blazed out at me: "I won't let you
+see him! And I'm going to him&mdash;now. Take your hand off me!"</p>
+
+<p>I tightened it. "You'll stay here! <i>Please!</i> And you can't go on
+preventing me from meeting Hutton, either. What about the first time I
+take any gold out over the Caraquet road&mdash;and he and his gang try a
+hold-up on me?"</p>
+
+<p>I said gang without thinking, for I was naturally<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span> dead sure he had one.
+But I was not prepared to have the cork come straight out of the bottle.
+Paulette clutched me till I bit my lip to keep steady.</p>
+
+<p>"His gang's what I'm afraid of&mdash;for Dudley," she gasped, which certainly
+steadied me&mdash;like a bucket of ice. "Look here, when first I met Dick, he
+told me things, to frighten me&mdash;that he'd eighteen or twenty men laid up
+between here and Caraquet&mdash;enough to raid us here, even, if he chose. It
+was because I knew they were waiting somewhere on the road that night
+that I drove to Billy Jones's with you. It was one of them I shot when
+we tore through the swamp. But something went wrong with them; either
+they'd no guns, or they didn't want to give themselves away by shooting
+when they saw we were ready&mdash;I don't know. But anyhow, something went
+wrong. And Dick was black angry. He&mdash;the last time I spoke to him&mdash;he
+wouldn't even tell me what he'd done with his gang; just said he had
+them somewhere safe, in the last place you or Dudley would ever look for
+them. Oh, you needn't hold me any more; I've given in; I'm not going to
+meet Dick to-night. But I had to tell you about his gang, if I can't
+about him. And listen, Mr. Stretton. I've tried every possible way to
+get it out of him, but Dick won't even answer when I taunt him for a
+coward who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> has to be backed up. I know he has men somewhere, but he
+won't tell me where they are, or who they are&mdash;now. I believe&mdash;&mdash;" but
+her voice changed sharply. "Those two boys, Dunn and Collins! You don't
+think Dudley can be right and they <i>are</i> still alive&mdash;and have joined
+Dick's gang?"</p>
+
+<p>"They're dead!" I was about sick of Dunn and Collins, and anyhow I was
+wondering where the devil Hutton's gang could have gone after their
+fiasco in the swamp. "They may have meant to join Hutton. But I found
+what the wolves left&mdash;and that was dead, right enough!"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't believe they're dead," said Paulette quietly.</p>
+
+<p>I shrugged my shoulders. But I never even asked her why. For
+suddenly&mdash;with that flat knowledge you get when you realize you should
+have put two and two together long ago&mdash;I knew where Hutton's gang was
+now and always had been. "Skunk's Misery," I thought dumbfounded. "By
+gad, Skunk's Misery!" For the thing I should have added to the Skunk's
+Misery wolf dope was my dream of men talking and playing cards under the
+very floor where I slept in the new hut the Frenchwoman's son had built
+and gone away from,&mdash;because it had been no dream at all. I had actually
+heard real men under the bare lean-to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> where I lay; and knowing the
+burrows and runways under the Skunk's Misery houses, I knew where&mdash;and
+that was just in some hidden den under the rocks the new house had been
+built on&mdash;that house left with the door open, ostentatiously, for all
+the world to see!</p>
+
+<p>I was blazing, as you always are blazing when you have been a fool. But
+I could start for Skunk's Misery the first thing in the morning and
+start alone, with my mouth shut. None of our four old men could be
+spared from the mill, and I had no use for any of Macartney's new ones;
+or for Macartney either, for he was no good in the bush. As for Dudley,
+nerves and a loose tongue would do him less harm at home. Besides, any
+ticklish job is a one-man job and I was best alone: once I got hold of
+Hutton there would be no trouble with his followers. But I had no
+intention of mentioning Skunk's Misery to the girl beside me; she was as
+capable of following me there as of fighting wolves for me, and with no
+more reason.</p>
+
+<p>"It's late, and neither you nor I are going to meet Hutton to-night," I
+said rather cheerlessly. "You'd better go to bed."</p>
+
+<p>"I want to say something first," slowly, as if she had been thinking.
+"What Macartney said to-night&mdash;that I was engaged to Dick Hutton when
+Mr. Van Ruyne said I took those<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> emeralds&mdash;wasn't true! I never was
+engaged to Dick. I was sorry for him once, because I knew he did&mdash;care
+for me. But I always hated him&mdash;I can't tell you how I hated him! I
+didn't think I could ever love any man till&mdash;just lately."</p>
+
+<p>It made me sick to know she meant Dudley. I would have blurted out that
+shrinking from the mere touch of his hand was a queer way to show it;
+only I was afraid to speak at all, for fear I begged her for God's sake
+not to speak of love and Dudley to me! And suddenly something banged
+even that out of my head. "Listen," I heard my own whisper. "Somebody's
+awake&mdash;walking round!"</p>
+
+<p>It was only the faintest noise, more like a rustle than a footstep, but
+it sounded like Gabriel's trumpet to a man alone in the middle of the
+night with a girl he had no shadow of right to. If it were Marcia,&mdash;but
+I knew that second it was not Marcia, or even Dudley; though I would
+rather have had his just fury than Marcia's evil thoughts and tongue.</p>
+
+<p>"By gad, it's outside," I breathed. "Look out!" But suddenly I changed
+my mind on it. There was only one person who could be outside, and that
+was Hutton, sick of waiting for Paulette and come to look for her. I had
+no desire for her to see how I met him instead, and my hands found her
+shoulders in the dark.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> "Get back, in the corner&mdash;and don't stir!" As
+she moved under my hands the faint sweet scent of her hair made me catch
+my breath with a sort of fierce elation. The gold and silk of it were
+not for me, I knew well enough, but at least I could keep Hutton's hands
+off it. I slipped to the side of the window and stared out into the dark
+shadow of the house, that lay black and square in the white moonlight.
+On the edge of it was a man&mdash;and the silly elation left my heart as the
+gas leaves a toy balloon when you stick a pin in it. It was not Hutton
+outside. It was&mdash;for the second time that night&mdash;only Macartney!</p>
+
+<p>I stood and stared at him like a fool. It was a good half minute before
+I even wondered what had brought Macartney out of his bed in the assay
+office. I watched him stupidly, and he moved; hesitated; and then turned
+to the house door. My heart gave a jump Hutton never could have brought
+there. Macartney in the house with a light, coming into the office for
+something, for all I knew, and finding Paulette and me, would be merely
+a living telephone to Marcia! I tapped at the office window.</p>
+
+<p>Macartney had good ears, I praised the Lord. He turned, not startled,
+but looking round him searchingly, and I stuck my head out of the hinged
+pane of the double window,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> thanking the Lord again that I had not to
+shove up a squeaking inside sash. "What's brought you back again?" I
+kept my voice down, remembering Marcia. "Anything gone wrong?"</p>
+
+<p>"What?" said Macartney rather sharply. He came close and stared at me.
+"Oh, it's you, Stretton? I thought it was Wilbraham, and he wouldn't be
+any good. It was you I wanted. I've got a feeling there's some one
+hanging round outside here."</p>
+
+<p>I hoped to heaven he had not seen Hutton, waiting for an appointment a
+girl was not going to keep, and I half lied: "I haven't seen any one.
+D'ye mean you thought you did?"</p>
+
+<p>Macartney nodded. "Couldn't swear to it, but I thought so. And I'd too
+much gold in my safe to go to bed; I cleaned up this afternoon. I was
+certain I glimpsed a strange man slipping behind the bunk house when I
+went down an hour ago, and I've been hunting him ever since. I half
+thought I saw him again just now. But, if I did, he's gone!"</p>
+
+<p>"I'll come out!"</p>
+
+<p>But Macartney shook his head sententiously. "I'm enough. I've guns for
+the four mill men who sleep in the shack off the assay office, and
+you've a whack of gold in that room you're standing in; you'd better not
+leave it. Though<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span> I don't believe there's any real need for either of us
+to worry: if there was any one around I've scared him. I only thought
+I'd better come up and warn you I'd seen some one. 'Night," and he was
+gone.</p>
+
+<p>I had a sudden idea that he might be a better man in the woods than I
+had thought he was, for he slid out of the house shadow into the bush
+without ever showing up in the moonlight. And as I thought it I felt
+Paulette clutch me, shivering from head to foot. It shocked me, somehow.
+I put my arm straight around her, like you do around a child, and spoke
+deliberately, "Steady, sweet, steady! It's all right. Hutton's gone by
+now. Anyhow, Macartney and I'll take care of you!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, my heavens," said Paulette: it sounded half as if she were sick
+with despair, and half as if I were hopelessly stupid. "Take care of
+me&mdash;you can't take care of me! You should have let me go. It's too late
+now." She pushed my arm from her as if she hated me and was gone down
+the passage to her room before I could speak.</p>
+
+<p>I shut the office window, with the inside sash down this time, and took
+a scout around outside. But Macartney was right; if any one had been
+waiting about he was gone. I could not find hide or hoof of him
+anywhere, and the moon went down, and I went in and went to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> bed. In two
+minutes I must have been asleep like a log,&mdash;and the first way I knew it
+was that I found myself out of bed, dragging on my clothes and grabbing
+up my gun.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever the row was about it was in the assay office. I heard Macartney
+yell my name through a volley of shots and knew we had both been made
+fools of. I had stopped Paulette meeting Hutton, and Hutton had dropped
+on Macartney and the assay office gold! I shook Dudley till he sat up,
+sober as I never could have been in his shoes, saw him light out in his
+pyjamas to keep guard in his own office that Paulette and I had only
+just left, and legged it for the assay office and Macartney.</p>
+
+<p>I didn't see a soul on the way, except the men who were piling out of
+the bunk house at the sound of a row, as I had piled out of bed; and I
+thought Macartney had raised a false alarm. But inside his office door I
+knew better. The four mill men who slept in the shack just off it were
+all on the office floor, dead, or next door to it. Their guns were on
+the floor too, and Macartney stood towering over the mess.</p>
+
+<p>"Get those staring bunk-house fools out of here," he howled, as the men
+crowded in after me. "I haven't lost any gold, only somebody tried to
+raid me. Why didn't you come<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> and cut them off when I yelled for you?
+They&mdash;they got away!"</p>
+
+<p>And suddenly, before I even saw he was swaying, he keeled over on the
+floor.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+
+<h3>THOMPSON'S CARDS: AND SKUNK'S MISERY</h3>
+
+
+<p>For that second I thought Macartney was dead. But as I jumped to him I
+saw he had only fainted, and that nothing ailed him but a bullet that
+had glanced off his upper arm and left more of a gouge than a wound. Why
+it made him faint I couldn't see, but it had. I left him where he had
+dropped and turned to the four men he had been standing over. But they
+were past helping. They were decent men too, for they were the last of
+our own lot,&mdash;and it smote me like a hammer that they might have been
+alive still if I had not interfered with Paulette that night and kept
+her from meeting Hutton.</p>
+
+<p>I knew as I knew there was a roof over my head that it was he who had
+fallen on Macartney, and I would have chased straight after him if
+common sense had not told me he would be lying up in the bush for just
+that, and all I should get for my pains would be a bullet out of the
+dark that would end all chance of me<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> personally ever catching Hutton. I
+took stock of things where I stood, instead. Whether he had a gang or
+not, I knew he had been alone in the thing to-night, and he had done a
+capable job. Our four men had been surprised, for they were all shot in
+the back, as if they had been caught coming in the office door.</p>
+
+<p>Whether Macartney had been surprised or not I could not tell. The
+revolver he had dropped as he fainted lay beside him empty, and there
+were slivers out of the doorpost behind the dead men. None of them
+seemed to have been much help to him. Three had not fired a shot; the
+fourth had just one cartridge missing from his revolver, where he lay
+with his face to the door&mdash;and I saw it accounted for by a tearing slash
+in a blue print stuck on the wall to the left of the doorway. I turned
+to the inside wall to see where the bullet that had glanced off
+Macartney had landed, and as I swung round he sat up.</p>
+
+<p>"You may well look&mdash;it was one of our own men got me," he said thickly,
+and his curse turned my stomach; I never knew any good come of cursing
+the dead. I told him to shut up and tell how the thing had happened. And
+he grinned with sheer rage.</p>
+
+<p>"It was plain damn foolery! I told you I believed I'd seen some one
+spying around the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> mine, and after I'd left you I didn't feel so sure
+that I'd cleared him out. I woke those fools up," his glance at the dead
+matched his curse at them, "and said if they heard any one prowling
+round my door they were to lie low in their own shack, let him get in at
+me here, and then bundle out and cut him off from behind. And what they
+did was to lose their heads. They heard some one or they didn't&mdash;I don't
+know. But the crazy fools piled out of their shack and ran in to me; and
+a man behind them&mdash;<i>behind</i> them, mind you&mdash;came on their heels and
+plugged every son of them before they were more than inside my door! It
+was then I yelled for you."</p>
+
+<p>"D'ye mean you saw him&mdash;when he shot them?"</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't see what he <i>looked</i> like," scornfully, "with four yelling,
+tumbling men between him and me. But I guess he was the man I'd been
+looking for. I fired and missed him, and when I lit for him over the men
+he'd killed he was gone. I emptied my gun into the dark on chance and
+yelled some more for you, and it was then I got it myself. As I turned
+around in the doorway, Sullivan," he pointed to the only man whose gun
+had been fired, "that I thought was <i>dead</i>, sat up and let me have it in
+the arm." He pointed to the ripped blue print. "You see what I'd have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span>
+got if it had caught me straight! And that's all there was to it."</p>
+
+<p>"D'ye mean"&mdash;I bit back Hutton's name. I had no time to hatch up a lie
+about him, and I was not going to drag in Paulette&mdash;"that&mdash;whoever was
+there, never even fired at you?"</p>
+
+<p>"How do I know who he fired at?&mdash;I couldn't see inside of his head! I
+know he <i>hit</i> those chumps who could have got him if they had obeyed
+orders&mdash;let alone that if they'd stayed out I'd have got him clean
+myself when he came in. As it was, he cleared out before I could do it,"
+said Macartney blackly, but the excitement had gone from his voice.
+"Call a couple of the bunk-house men to carry these four back to their
+shack and clean up this mess, will you? And come into my room while I
+tie up this cut. It's no good going after whoever was here now."</p>
+
+<p>I knew that: also that I could get after him better single-handed at
+Skunk's Misery, where he would not expect me; or I would have been gone
+already. But I didn't air that to Macartney as I followed him into the
+partitioned-off corner he called his room. He had the last two clean-ups
+in his safe there, and he nodded to it as he hauled off his shirt for me
+to bind up his arm.</p>
+
+<p>"With what's there, and what you and Wilbraham have in his office, we've
+too much<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> around to be healthy," he observed succinctly, "and I guess
+some one's got wind of it. I don't know that it'll be any healthier for
+you to try running it out to Caraquet and get held up on the road! But I
+suppose it's got to go."</p>
+
+<p>I nodded. I knew it was hand to mouth with Dudley: he had no cash to
+call on but the mine output, and immediate payments had to be made on
+the machinery we were using. But I was not excited about being held up
+on the Caraquet road,&mdash;after I'd once been to Skunk's Misery. I was not
+red-hot about hurrying there, either; I wanted to give Hutton time to
+get back to his lair and feel easy about pursuit after his abortive
+raid. "I expect we'll worry along," I said idly. "Gimme that clean rag
+for your arm!"</p>
+
+<p>But Macartney cast down the handkerchief in his hand. "This fool thing's
+too short! Open that box, will you? There's a roll of bandage just
+inside."</p>
+
+<p>There was. But there was something else just inside, too. I stared at a
+worn leather case, that pretended to be a prayer-book with a brass clasp
+and tarnished gilt edges, a case I had seen too often to make any
+mistake about. "By gad," I cried blankly. "Why, you've got old
+Thompson's cards!"</p>
+
+<p>Macartney was poking at his wounded arm, and he winced. "Hurry up, will
+you? I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span> can't stop this silly blood. Of course I have Thompson's cards;
+I can't help it if you think I'm an ass. I liked the old man, and I
+didn't fancy the Billy Joneses playing cribbage with the only thing in
+the world he cared for. I took the cards the day we buried him&mdash;saw them
+lying in the kitchen."</p>
+
+<p>"I expect you needn't have worried about Billy," I commented absently.
+"He was going to give those cards to me, only he and I couldn't find
+them."</p>
+
+<p>"Do come on," snapped Macartney. He was set-eyed as usual, but I guessed
+he was ashamed to have had me find him out in a sentimental weakness.
+"I'd have told you I had them if I'd known you cared. You can take the
+things now, if you want them."</p>
+
+<p>It was not till that minute that I remembered Macartney could not know
+why I wanted them, nor anything about the sort of codicil I'd torn off
+the envelope of Thompson's letter to Dudley: for there had been nothing
+about cards in what he'd read in it, or in the letter itself. But as the
+remembrance of both things shot up in me, I didn't confide them to
+Macartney, any more than I had to Dudley himself. I had a queer sort of
+idea that if Thompson's pencilled scrawl had meant anything more than
+the wanderings of a distressed mind, I'd better get hold of it myself
+first. I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> said: "All right," and pocketed Thompson's cards. Then I did
+up Macartney's arm, and the two of us went up the road to Dudley. He and
+his dry nurse, Baker, who'd promptly arrived from the bunk house,
+stumped straight back to the assay office with Macartney to fuss over
+the men who'd been killed. I was making for my own room, to see if
+Thompson's resurrected cards would shed any light on his crazy scrawls,
+when I heard a poker drop in the living room. Somebody was in there,
+raking up the fire.</p>
+
+<p>Charliet had gone after Macartney, with Dudley and Baker. I guessed
+Paulette had got up and was trying to start the fire,&mdash;for she was
+always working to keep things comfortable&mdash;if I haven't mentioned
+it&mdash;even for me. I once caught her darning my rags of socks and crying
+over them&mdash;the Lord knew why! I went in to stop her now&mdash;and it was I
+who stopped dead in the doorway. It was not Paulette inside: it was
+Marcia! Marcia in a velvet dressing gown, poking the ashes all over the
+hearth. I could have sworn I had seen Paulette burn the letter she had
+signed with Tatiana Paulina Valenka's name, but all the same the look of
+Marcia's back turned me sick. And her face turned me sicker as she flung
+around on me, with her fingers all ashes,&mdash;and Paulette's letter in her
+hand!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I kept back a curse at the raw fool that was me. I might have seen it
+was not a tightly folded wad of stiff paper I had watched burn up, but
+just the light torn scraps Paulette had thrown in with it. What was
+more, I had been alone with the thing under my very nose in the light
+ashes into which it must have sunk and never had the sense to burrow for
+it. It was too late even to snatch for it: Marcia had read it! She held
+it up to me now,&mdash;and Tatiana Paulina Valenka, black on the yellow of
+the scorched paper, hit me on the eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Who was right, Nicky Stretton?" she demanded triumphantly. "I told you
+I'd seen <i>Paulette Brown</i> before! Only I never thought of the Houston
+business. I could kill Dudley; how dare he bring me out here with a
+thief! I won't have her here another day."</p>
+
+<p>"What thief?" I snapped. "I don't know what you mean! Why on earth are
+you poking in the ashes? What are you up for?"</p>
+
+<p>"Only a Paulette Brown could stay asleep, with Dudley yelling at you and
+Macartney," scornfully. "But if you want to know what I was poking in
+the ashes for, I had no matches, and my fire was out, so I came in here
+for a log to light it up. And I found this!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, burn it," said I furiously. But she had begun to read it out, and
+I would have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> been a fool to stop her, for what Marcia knew I had to
+know. But it knocked me silly. The something Paulette had "wanted to
+make clear" was just a letter to Hutton! And the Lord knows it made me
+more set than ever on getting to Skunk's Misery before Hutton could know
+that Tatiana Paulina Valenka had given in! Because she had. She was not
+only going to meet him; she was going away with him, Marcia's hard voice
+read out baldly, if only he would give up the plan in his head. But it
+was the last sentence that bit into me:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Dick, have some mercy! I know you hate me now, but have some
+mercy; don't do what I'm afraid of. I'll give you all you
+want&mdash;myself&mdash;everything&mdash;if only you'll let that be. Go away, as I
+begged you, and I'll leave Dudley for you, and go too." And it was
+signed, as I knew Paulette Brown had not meant to sign anything,
+"Tatiana Paulina Valenka."</p>
+
+<p>I never even wondered how she had meant to get it to Hutton, if she had
+not supposed she burned it. Every drop of my blood boiled in me with the
+determination that she should never pay Hutton's price with her lips
+against his that she hated, and his cheek on her soft hair I had never
+touched; all the gold Dudley Wilbraham could ever mine was not worth
+that. But I kept a cold eye on Marcia. "A<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> half-burnt letter&mdash;that
+wasn't going to be sent&mdash;isn't anything but girl's nonsense," I swore
+contemptuously.</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't it? We'll see&mdash;when Dudley reads it!" Marcia looked like a devil
+hunched up in her dressing gown, with her gums showing as she grinned.
+"I told you she never meant to marry him. Now we'll see if he marries
+her&mdash;when she writes letters like this!"</p>
+
+<p>"I won't let you show it to Dudley!"</p>
+
+<p>"You are like&mdash;everybody: cracked about a Paulette Brown!" Marcia
+retorted; and if I had only known what the "everybody" was going to mean
+I think I could have managed her, even then, by coming out with it. But
+I didn't know, and I did the best I could.</p>
+
+<p>"Marcia Wilbraham, if you dare to show that thing to Dudley, or so much
+as speak of it, I'll pay you out,&mdash;so help me," I said; and if it was in
+a voice no decent woman knows a man can use, I meant it to be. It scared
+Marcia, anyhow, though heaven knew I didn't see how I could ever pay her
+out, no matter what she did. She let go of the letter, which she had to,
+for I had her by the wrist. I would have burnt it up, only I had no
+match. Marcia leaned forward suddenly, electrically, and tapped the "Oh,
+Dick" in the last sentence, that was the only name in the letter.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I'm damned," said she coolly.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> "Why, the thing's to you! Do you
+mean you're going to run away with that&mdash;that girl?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," I said furiously and then saw I was an ass, "I mean, not now!"</p>
+
+<p>"Since I know about you," Marcia cut me off sweetly. But she stared at
+me calculatingly. "H&mdash;m," said she, "I beg your pardon for mistaking
+your N for a big, big D, Nicky darling, but you see I never heard any
+one call you plain, short Nick! I don't exactly see why she had to write
+with you in the house, either, but you needn't be nervous. I'm not going
+to use my cinch on you&mdash;not now, anyway! I've changed my mind about
+telling Dudley. It won't do me any harm to keep something up my sleeve
+against you, if ever I want to do anything you don't admire. It wasn't
+the least bit of use for you to snatch that letter; I learned it off by
+heart before you came in on me. And I can always threaten Dudley now
+that I'll tell who Paulette Brown really is, if he tries to bully me
+about any one I have a fancy for!"</p>
+
+<p>Of course I knew she was thinking of Macartney. I didn't believe Dudley
+would have cared if she had married him ten times over. But he might
+have been making some unreasonable objection to Macartney, at that, for
+all I knew.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I don't care one straw about your knowing I was going to take Paulette
+Brown out of this. But if you don't hold your tongue on it, I'll know
+it, so you mind that," I observed with some heat. Yet I was easier. She
+could not talk that night, anyhow, and she was welcome to come out with
+her crazy lie about Paulette and myself, once Hutton was dead,&mdash;because
+he and a snake would be all one to me, once I got my hands on him. After
+that I had no qualms about being able to make Dudley see the truth
+concerning that letter, and that it had been written to save his
+gold,&mdash;and his life, likely enough! I let Marcia believe the name in the
+letter was mine, and that Paulette had been going off with me. All I
+wished was that she had been. I went off to my room and left Marcia
+sitting over the dead fire,&mdash;not so triumphant as she'd meant to be, for
+all the good face she put on it.</p>
+
+<p>Paulette's letter had pretty well knocked out all the interest I had in
+old Thompson's cards, but I got out the torn scrap of paper I'd put
+away. There was nothing on it but what I'd read before: "For God's sake
+search my cards&mdash;<i>my cards!</i>"&mdash;and it looked crazier than ever with the
+things in my hand. The cards had been water-soaked and were bumpy and
+blistery where Billy Jones had dried them, even though they were
+flattened out again by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> the pressure of their tight case; but there was
+nothing <i>to</i> them, except that they were old Thompson's beyond a doubt.
+If I had thought there might be writing on them there was not so much as
+the scratch of a pencil. There seemed to be a card missing. I thought it
+was the deuce of hearts; but I was too sick over Marcia's discovery
+about Paulette to really examine the things and make sure. I shoved them
+into my coat pocket beside what was there already, just as Dudley came
+into my room.</p>
+
+<p>He had enough to worry him without hearing that Marcia had found out
+about Paulette. He sat on my bed, biting his nails; and said&mdash;what
+Macartney had said&mdash;that we had too much gold at La Chance to run the
+risk of losing it by a better organized raid on it: and&mdash;what I had
+known for myself&mdash;that the mine output represented his only ready money
+for notes that were past renewing, and that it had to go out to
+Caraquet. When I said why not, he bit his nails some more, and said he
+was afraid of a hold-up: what he wanted me to do was to ride over to the
+Halfway and scout around from there to clear the Caraquet road, before I
+started out from La Chance with an ounce of gold.</p>
+
+<p>The idea suited me well enough. It would cover my expedition to Skunk's
+Misery. But<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> I did not mention that, or Hutton, to Dudley; and never
+guessed I was a criminal fool! I did not mean to waste any time in
+scouting around the road, either, when I knew just where my man would be
+sitting, with the half dozen wastrels he had probably scraped up. But
+first I wanted five minutes, even two minutes, with Paulette, to warn
+her of what Marcia knew. So I said the afternoon would be time enough to
+start.</p>
+
+<p>But Dudley would not hear of it and blazed out till I had to give up all
+idea of warning Paulette, and get out. And as I rode away from La Chance
+the last person I saw was Macartney, though I might not have remembered
+it, if I had not turned my head after I passed and caught the same grin
+on his face he had worn there the night his own man shot him. I rode
+back and asked him what the mischief he was grinning at.</p>
+
+<p>"Grinning&mdash;because I'm angry," Macartney returned with his usual set
+stare. "I'd sooner go with you than stay here, burying men and talking
+to Wilbraham. I'm sick of La Chance, if you'd like to know. I came here
+to mine, not to play in moving pictures. But I guess I've got to stick,
+unless I can hurry up my job here. So long&mdash;but I don't expect you'll
+see anything of last night's man on the Caraquet road!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Neither did I, nor of any one else. But I was not prepared to find the
+Halfway stable empty, when I rode in there just at dark. The house was
+as deserted as the stable, though the fire was alive in the stove, and
+taking both things together, I decided Billy and his wife had taken a
+four-horse team into Caraquet for a load. I had meant to borrow one of
+his horses to go on to Skunk's Misery,&mdash;for this time I intended to ride
+there. But with no horse to borrow, there was nothing to do but to ride
+my own, and it was toward ten that night when I left him to wait for me
+in a spruce thicket, within half a mile of the porcupine burrows that
+Skunk's Misery called houses.</p>
+
+<p>As I turned away, the cold bit a hundred times worse for the lack of
+snow in the woods, and the bare ground made the pat of my moccasins
+sound louder than I liked; but on the other hand I should leave no track
+back to my waiting horse, if I had to clear out without getting Hutton.
+The thought made me grin, for I had no fear of it.</p>
+
+<p>Hutton would be asleep, judging from the look of things; for as I got
+fairly into Skunk's Misery, it lay still as the dead. The winding tracks
+through it were deserted; silent between and under the great rocks and
+boulders; slippery in the open with droppings from the pine trees that
+grew in and on the masses of huddled<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> rocks. The wind rose a little,
+too, and soughed in the pine branches, to die wailing among the stones.
+It did not strike me as a cheerful wind for a man in Hutton's shoes, for
+it covered the light sound of my feet as I went past the hut of the boy
+I had nursed and through the maze of tracks his mother had shown me, to
+the new log lean-to the Frenchwoman's son had built and never used. But,
+as I reached it, I was suddenly not so sure Hutton was there!</p>
+
+<p>The lean-to looked all right. The door was open, just as I had left it.
+But, as I crossed the threshold, I knew I was too late, and there was
+nobody inside, or in the cave underneath it where men had been when I
+slept there. The place had that empty feeling of desertion, or late
+occupancy and a cold lair, that even a worse fool than I could not
+mistake now. I shut the door on myself without sound, all the same;
+snapped my pocket lantern; and stared,&mdash;at just what I had known I was
+going to find.</p>
+
+<p>There was nothing in the place now but the bare lean-to walls and the
+rock they backed on; but twenty men had been living there since I left
+it. The black mark of their fire was plain against the rock face; the
+log floor was splintered by heavy boots with nails in them&mdash;which did
+not speak of the moccasined return of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span> Frenchwoman's son&mdash;and in the
+place where I had once made a bed of pine boughs and carried it away
+with me there lay a flurry of litter that spoke volumes: for among it
+was a corned-beef can that was no product of Skunk's Misery, where meat
+meant squirrels and rabbits, and&mdash;a corked bottle of wolf dope! That I
+laid gingerly aside till I had poked around in the rest of the mess, but
+there was not much else there besides kindling. I got up to leg it for
+the underground cave, blazing that I had missed Hutton and half hoping
+he might be there,&mdash;but I dropped flump on my knees again, dumbfounded.</p>
+
+<p>Underneath the displaced litter, stuck sideways in a crack of the log
+floor, was a shiny, dirty white playing card. I pulled it out. And in
+the narrow white beam of my electric lantern I saw the missing two of
+hearts out of Thompson's pack!</p>
+
+<p>I saw more, too, before I even wondered how one of Thompson's cards had
+ever got to Skunk's Misery. The deuce of hearts was written on&mdash;closely,
+finely and legibly&mdash;with indelible pencil. And as I read the short
+sentences, word by word, I knew Thompson had never got to Caraquet,
+never got anywhere but to the cave under the very lean-to I knelt
+in&mdash;till he had been brought up from it, here&mdash;to be taken away and
+drowned in Lac Tremblant,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span> as a decent man would not drown a dog! And I
+knew&mdash;at last&mdash;where Hutton and his gang were, and who Hutton was!</p>
+
+<p>But I made no move to go underground to the cave to look for them. And
+the only word that came to my tongue was: "<i>Macartney!</i>"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XIII</h2>
+
+<h3>A DEAD MAN'S MESSENGER</h3>
+
+
+<p>For the written message on Thompson's lost card was plain. Macartney
+was&mdash;Hutton! And Hutton's gang were just the new, rough men Macartney
+had dribbled in to the La Chance mine!</p>
+
+<p>It was Macartney&mdash;our capable, hard-working superintendent&mdash;for whom
+Paulette had mistaken me in the dark, that first night I came home to La
+Chance and the dream girl, who was no nearer me now than she was then;
+Macartney from whom she had sealed the boxes of gold, to prevent him
+substituting others and sending me off to Caraquet with worthless
+dummies; Macartney I had heard her tell herself she could not trust;
+Macartney who had put that wolf dope&mdash;that there was no longer any doubt
+he had brought from Skunk's Misery&mdash;in my wagon; Macartney who had had
+that boulder stuck in the road to smash my pole, by the same men who
+were posted by the corduroy road through the swamp to cut me off there
+if the wolves and the broken wagon failed; and Macartney who had been
+balked by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> a girl I had left at La Chance to fight him alone now!</p>
+
+<p>The thing seemed to jump at me from six places at once, now that I knew
+enough to see it was there at all. But what sickened me at my own utter
+blindness was not the nerve of the man, but just the risk he had let
+Paulette run on the Caraquet road, and&mdash;old Thompson! For Thompson had
+never sent Macartney to La Chance, and Macartney had had him murdered in
+cold blood!</p>
+
+<p>If my eyes fogged as I stared at the dead man's two of hearts, it was
+only half with fury. Old Thompson had been decent, harmless, happy with
+his unintelligent work and his sad solitaire,&mdash;and he had been through
+seven hells before he wrote what I read now:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Wilbraham&mdash;Stretton&mdash;pray God one of you saw all I could
+put inside envelope of last letter Macartney forced me to
+write. I never sent him to La Chance. I never saw the man
+till he waylaid me between Halfway and Caraquet, and brought
+me here. Do not know where it is, am prisoner underground.
+Wrote you two letters to save my miserable life; know now I
+have not saved it. Your lives&mdash;gold&mdash;everything&mdash;in danger
+too. For any sake get Macartney before he gets you. No use
+to look for me. Tried to warn you inside envelope, but
+suppose was no use. Good-by. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span><i>Take care, take care!</i> There
+was a boy Macartney sent off with my horse; was kind; said
+he would come back. When he does, takes this to you&mdash;&mdash;He
+has not come. Been brought up into lean-to, am gagged, feel
+death near. Forgive treachery&mdash;life was dear&mdash;get Macar&mdash;&mdash;"</p></div>
+
+<p>But the scrawl broke off in a long pencil line, where death had jerked
+Thompson's elbow, and his card had fallen from his hand.</p>
+
+<p>I sat on the floor and saw the thing. Macartney, hidden in Skunk's
+Misery, making plans to get openly and with decent excuse to La Chance,
+had fallen on Thompson and used him. And for Thompson, writing lying
+letters in Skunk's Misery in fear of the death that had come to him in
+the end, there had been no rescue. His scribbled envelope, even if
+Dudley or I had understood it, had come too late. The boy who took his
+horse to Billy&mdash;whoever he was&mdash;had never come back. Thompson had not
+even had time, in the end, to slip his written-over card into the cased
+pack I had found in his almost empty pockets, before Macartney's
+men&mdash;for of course Macartney himself had never been near the place since
+he got his wolf dope there and left it for good&mdash;had taken him off and
+made away with him. Once his last letter was written and posted under<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span>
+cover from Caraquet to be reposted to Dudley from Montreal by some
+unknown hand, Macartney had no more use for Thompson, and a screen
+against betrayal on two sides: either by his own men, or that chance
+finding of Thompson's body that had actually happened; for Thompson's
+own letter would clear his murderer.</p>
+
+<p>As for Thompson's envelope! It's an easy enough thing to do if you just
+slip your pencil inside an envelope and write blindly, but it made me
+sick to think of poor old Thompson scrawling in the inside of his
+envelope, furiously, furtively, while the ink of his neat copperplate
+dried on the outside, and Macartney likely stood by poring over the
+actual letter, wondering if there was any flaw in it that could show out
+and damn him. And the desperate scrawl in the envelope had been <i>no
+good</i>, thanks to the fool brain and tongue of myself, Nicky Stretton! It
+had done more to warn Macartney than either Dudley or me, since if
+Thompson had written in the reverse of the envelope he was also likely
+to have written on anything that would take a pencil.</p>
+
+<p>It was no wonder Macartney had stood stunned over that envelope, till
+Dudley and I believed him heartsick for his friend, for it must have
+been then that he remembered Thompson's cards,&mdash;that I guessed the old<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span>
+man had just sat and played with, day in and day out, while he was a
+prisoner and about to die. Thompson could have written on them; and
+Macartney must have feared it, or he never would have stolen them from
+Billy Jones. I hoped grimly that he had been good and worried before he
+got his chance to do it and set his mind at ease. And at ease it must
+have been, for he had actually known nothing about the cards; he could
+only have taken them on chance, from sheer terror, and found them
+harmless. He had probably never even noticed one was missing&mdash;and
+whatever Thompson had not been wise about he had been wise when he took
+out a deuce, and not one of the four aces the most casual eye must
+miss&mdash;or he would never have let me have them, contemptuously, as one
+lets a child play with a knife without a blade.</p>
+
+<p>Only I was not so sure this particular knife had no blade,&mdash;for
+Macartney!</p>
+
+<p>He knew nothing of the desperate scrawl on the bottom flap of that
+envelope that his own hasty grab had jerked off and left in my fist;
+nothing of the deuce of hearts that made its crazy inscription pitifully
+sane to me now; and nothing in particular about me, Nicky Stretton. But
+when I came to think of all I knew about Macartney, that was no
+remarkable consolation; for&mdash;except his never noticing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> that the bottom
+flap of Thompson's envelope was missing, and taking it for granted it
+had been blank like the top one&mdash;he had made a fool of me all along the
+line!</p>
+
+<p>I had stopped Paulette from going away with him the night before, after
+she thought she had burned the note she had meant to slip into his hand;
+but he must have told her, outside in the passage, when I thought he was
+sending a message to Marcia, that if she did not go with him then&mdash;in
+the next hour&mdash;he would begin trouble that very night for Dudley and La
+Chance.</p>
+
+<p>And he had! It was Paulette he was waiting for, when he lied to me about
+a strange man. And he had gone straight down to the assay office, done
+his own alarm of a robber, and killed four men to give it artistic
+truth. It was no wonder he had said he was sick of playing in moving
+pictures and grinned at me when I left La Chance to search the Caraquet
+road for nobody else but himself.</p>
+
+<p>As for his gang, the very bunk-house men he had told me to order out of
+the assay office, were just Macartney's own gang from Skunk's Misery,
+come over when they had silenced Thompson forever; at Macartney's elbow
+whenever he chose to murder the lot of us and commandeer the La Chance
+mine. I wished, irrelevantly, that Dunn and Collins <i>had</i> got to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span>
+Macartney, instead of being killed on the way; they might have been
+chancy young devils about stealing gold, but they would never have stood
+for murdering old Thompson! It was no good thinking of that, though.</p>
+
+<p>I stowed away Thompson's deuce of hearts, that no boy had ever come for,
+in the case with those other pitiful cards he had told me to search, and
+got on my feet with only one thought in my head,&mdash;to get back to La
+Chance and my dream girl that Macartney was alone with, except for
+Dudley,&mdash;Dudley whom he hated, who had threatened him for Paulette
+Valenka, for Thompson, till it was no wonder I had found him with the
+face of a devil where he lurked eavesdropping in the shack hall. And
+there something else hit me whack. Baker, Dudley's jackal, was one of
+Macartney's gang: told off, for all I knew, to put him out of the way! I
+wheeled to get out of that damn lean-to quicker than I had got in; and
+instead I stood rooted to the floor. <i>Below me, somewhere underground,
+somebody was moving!</i></p>
+
+<p>Naturally, I knew it could not be Macartney, because he could not have
+got there, even if he had not had other fish to fry at home. But one of
+his gang might have been left at Skunk's Misery and could have the life
+choked out of him. There was no way leading underground<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> directly from
+the lean-to, or I would have been caught the night I slept there and
+believed real voices were a dream. I slid out of the door, around the
+boulder that backed the place, and was afraid of my lantern. I went down
+on my hands and knees to feel for a track and found one, down a gully
+that ran in under a blind rock. I crawled down it, all but flat, as I
+burrowed like a rabbit, with my back scraping against the living rock
+between me and the sky, and my head turned to the place where I knew the
+lean-to stood. I was under it with no warning whatever; in a natural,
+man-high cellar I could stand up in, with half a dozen bolt holes
+running off it: and I had no need to flash up my lantern to see them.
+There was a light in the place already from a candle-end Macartney's men
+must have left behind; and beside it, not looking at me, not even
+hearing my step, because he was sobbing his heart out, lay the boy I had
+carried home from the Caraquet road!</p>
+
+<p>"Thompson's boy, who took his horse to Billy&mdash;who never came back!" I
+said to myself. God knows I touched him gently, but he screamed like a
+shot rabbit till he saw my face.</p>
+
+<p>"You?" said I. "What's the matter with you? Brace up; it's only me!"</p>
+
+<p>Brace up was just what he did not do. He sank back with every muscle of
+him relaxed.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> "Bon Dieu, I thought you was him come back," he gasped in
+his bastard French Indian, "that man that half killed me on the Caraquet
+road! But it wasn't him I was crying about. It was the other man&mdash;that
+promised me two dollars for something."</p>
+
+<p>"To come back and take a letter&mdash;where you had taken his horse?"</p>
+
+<p>The boy&mdash;I did not even know his name&mdash;nodded, with a torrent of sullen
+patois. He had never come for his two dollars, and now the man was gone
+and he would never get it. But it was not his fault. The first man&mdash;the
+one who had sent him to the Halfway with the horse&mdash;had caught him
+crawling back for the letter, had told him the man who was going to pay
+him had gone away long ago, and had taken him out to chop firewood and
+let a tree fall on him. How the lad had ever crawled out to the Caraquet
+road I did not ask. I think the thing that stabbed me was that I had
+been within five hundred yards of Thompson all the time I was nursing
+this very boy, that the knowledge of it had lain behind unconscious lips
+within a hand's breadth of me, that I had gone away ignorant, leaving
+Thompson robbed of the only help he could ever have had.</p>
+
+<p>"Why didn't you tell me all that&mdash;the night I came over to your
+mother's?" I groaned.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The boy said shortly that his mother would have gone straight off and
+told I'd been there, if he had come out with the truth. It was all lies
+she had told me about the Frenchwoman's son; he had never been near the
+place. It was the man who had half killed him who had built the lean-to,
+and his mother had said she would finish the business if ever he opened
+his mouth about it, or let out the truth about the same man sending him
+to the Halfway with a horse, or the smelling stuff she had helped him
+make.</p>
+
+<p>"You're sure she didn't go and tell that man about me, anyway?" I
+remembered Macartney's grin.</p>
+
+<p>But the boy shook his head. "She didn't worry; she said you were too big
+a fool to matter!" After which wholesome truth he announced listlessly
+that he was done with his mother. She had turned him out of her house
+now, anyway. She said he was no good to her, now that he could only
+crawl, and could not even trap enough rabbits to live on, and she had
+another man living in her house who would do it for her. So he had come
+here to find the man who had promised him two dollars&mdash;that solitary
+bill that had been all the money in Thompson's pockets&mdash;and when he
+found him gone and the place empty he had stayed there to hide, and
+because he had nowhere else to go.</p>
+
+<p>I thought of his mother's haggard, handsome<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> face and hard mouth.
+Macartney had certainly found a good ally while he was laid up in
+Skunk's Misery waiting for his chance to fall on Paulette. But all that
+did not matter now. What did matter was that I had found the missing
+link between Thompson's cards and Macartney in the boy who had taken
+Thompson's horse back to the Halfway. I had no mind to produce him now
+though; for there were other things to be looked to than showing up old
+Thompson's murder. And the boy was safe where he was, for one glance at
+him had told me he could not walk half a mile.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you safe from your mother here&mdash;and can you get food for yourself?"
+I demanded abruptly, and the boy nodded the head I knew would never be
+other than a cripple's. "Well, you stay here," I told him, because if
+ever I needed the poor little devil for a witness against Macartney he
+would be no good lying dead somewhere in the bush, "and I'll come back
+and pay you ten times two dollars for just waiting here till I come. But
+you'll have to hide if that man comes back who sent you out with the
+horse!" I knew Macartney would kill him in good earnest, if he came back
+and found him with a living tongue in his head. "Don't you trust any one
+but me&mdash;or some one who comes and gives you twenty dollars,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span> I added
+emphatically, just because that was the only absolutely unlikely event I
+could think of. "And even then, you stay here till you see me!
+Understand?"</p>
+
+<p>He said he did; it was easy enough to creep out after dark and rob
+rabbit traps; he was doing it now. And from the greed a fortune of
+twenty dollars had lit in his wretched eyes, I knew he would go on doing
+it till I came back. Of what wildly unexpected use he was to be to me in
+his waiting, heaven knows I had no thought. I crept out of his burrow as
+I had crept in, got back to my half-frozen horse, and rode hell for
+leather back to the Halfway. And just there was where I slumped.</p>
+
+<p>My horse had to be fed and rested; he was dead beat when I led him into
+the unlocked stable, and when I had seen to him I meant to rouse up
+Billy Jones and tell him all the ugly stuff I had unearthed&mdash;and seen
+too&mdash;for the killing of four innocent men was hot in my mind. But I did
+not, for the excellent reason that Billy was not back. His house was
+dark, and his four horses still away from their vacant stalls. I sat
+down on a heap of clean straw to wait for him, and I said I slumped. I
+went sound, dead asleep. If I was hunting for excuses I might say it was
+two in the morning, and I had been up most of the night before. But
+anyhow, I did it. And I sat up, dazed,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> to see a lantern held in front
+of my eyes and one of Macartney's men from La Chance staring at me.</p>
+
+<p>It struck me even then that it was not he who was surprised; and the
+sleep jerked out of me like wine out of a glass. "What are you doing
+here? And where the devil's Billy?" I snapped, without thinking.</p>
+
+<p>I saw the man grin. "Billy's fired," he returned coolly. "Him and his
+wife got it in a note from Wilbraham, day before yesterday, when your
+teamsters stopped here on their way to Caraquet. They doubled up their
+teams with Billy's and took him and his wife along, and all their stuff.
+And I guess they'd been fired too, for they ain't come back. Mr.
+Macartney sent me over to see. Anything I can do for you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Take that lantern out of my eyes, and hustle me up some breakfast.
+I&mdash;I'm sorry about Billy!" I was not; I was startled,&mdash;and worse. It had
+not been Dudley who had dismissed him, asinine as he had been about
+Billy and old Thompson, or he would have told me. It had been Macartney,
+getting rid of him and my teamsters under my very nose; and&mdash;as
+Macartney's parting grin recurred to me&mdash;if his man had any one with him
+in Billy's vacant shack they had been put there to get rid of <i>me</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"Get me a bucket of water and make coffee,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> if you haven't done it," I
+said, yawning. "I'll come in&mdash;as soon as I've fed my horse."</p>
+
+<p>But I did neither. I stopped yawning, too. Through the frosty window, as
+the man disappeared for the shack, I saw a light in its doorway and two
+more of Macartney's men standing in it, black between the lamp and the
+gray morning glimmer. I stirred some meal into the water Macartney's man
+had brought, drank a mouthful before I let my horse have just enough to
+rinse his throat with, and threw on his saddle. It was flat on his neck
+that I came out the stable door, and what Macartney's men meant to have
+done I don't know, for I was down the road toward La Chance like a
+rocket. And before I had made a mile I knew I had got off none too soon,
+for we were going to have snow at last, and have it hard.</p>
+
+<p>Before I cleared the corduroy road it cut my face in fine stinging
+flakes, and by the time I was halfway to La Chance it was blinding me.
+It came on a wind, too, and I cursed it as I faced it, with my horse
+toiling through the heavy, sandy stuff that was too cold and dry to
+pack. The twenty-two miles home took me most of the day. It was close on
+dusk when I fumbled through drifting, hissing snow and choking wind, to
+the door of the La Chance stable. And the second I got inside I knew
+Macartney's man had told the truth, and Macartney<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> had fired my
+teamsters with Billy Jones. There was not a soul about the place, and
+ten hungry horses yelled at me at once as I stamped my half-frozen feet
+on the floor. I would have shouted for Charliet if it had not seemed
+quicker to feed them myself. I yanked down a forkful of hay for each of
+them, after I saw to my own horse. And if you think I was a fool to
+worry over dumb beasts, just that small delay made a difference in my
+immediate future that likely saved my life. If I had raced off for the
+house at once I might have met with&mdash;&mdash;Well, an accident! But that comes
+in later.</p>
+
+<p>As it was I was a good twenty minutes in that stable. When I waded out
+into the swirling white dusk of snow and wind between me and the shack I
+was just cautious enough, after the Halfway business, to stare hard
+through the blinding storm at the house I was making for, though I did
+not think Macartney was ripe to dare anything open against me at La
+Chance. But with that stare I knew abruptly that he was! Massed just
+inside the open door of Dudley's shack, that was black dark but for one
+light in the living-room window, were a crowd of men that looked like
+nothing in the world but our own miners, that I knew now for
+Hutton's&mdash;or Macartney's&mdash;gang! How he dared have them there, instead of
+in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span> the bunk house, beat me,&mdash;but it was them, all right. The wind was
+clear of snow for one second, and I saw them plainly. And they saw me.
+Without one sound the whole gang jumped for me. I had my gun out, and I
+could have stopped the leaders before I had to get back against the
+stable door; but there was no need.</p>
+
+<p>There was a shout behind me. The men checked, sprawling over each other
+in the snow&mdash;ludicrously, if I had been seeing much humor in things&mdash;and
+it was then it struck me that I should have had an accident if I had
+bolted straight into a dark house, instead of delaying in the stable
+till Macartney's gang got tired of waiting for me and bundled out
+themselves to see where I was. But I only wheeled, with my gun in my
+fist, to Macartney's voice.</p>
+
+<p>What I had expected to see I don't know. What I did see, stumbling
+through the drifts to me, was an indistinguishable figure that turned
+out to be two. For it was Macartney, carrying Marcia Wilbraham. And
+behind him, short-skirted to her knees, and with no coat but her
+miserable little blue sweater, came my dream girl.</p>
+
+<p>I forgot Macartney could not know I knew he was Hutton, or all the rest
+that I did know. I said, "What hell's trick are you up to now?"</p>
+
+<p>But Macartney only turned a played-out<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span> face to me. "Take her from me,
+will you?" he snapped. "I'm done." He let Marcia slip down into the
+snow. "Wilbraham's killed!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+
+<h3>WOLVES&mdash;AND DUDLEY</h3>
+
+
+<p>It was cleverly done. So was the desperate gesture of Macartney's hand
+across his blood-shot, congested eyes. If I had not had Thompson's deuce
+of hearts in my pocket I might have doubted if Macartney really were
+Hutton, or had had any hand in the long tale of tragedy at La Chance.
+But as it was I knew, in my inside soul, bleakly, that if Dudley were
+dead Macartney had killed him,&mdash;as only luck had kept him from killing
+me.</p>
+
+<p>I saw him give a quick, flicking sign to his men with the fingers of the
+hand that still covered his eyes, and I knew I was right in the last
+thing, anyhow, for the men straggled back from us, as to an order. They
+were to do nothing now, before Paulette and Marcia, if their first
+instructions had been to ambush inside the shack to dispose of me when I
+got back from the Halfway,&mdash;which I had not been meant to do. I did not
+drop my gun hand, or fling the truth at Macartney. But I made no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> move
+to pick up Marcia. I said, "How d'ye mean Dudley's killed? Who killed
+him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Wolves!" If Macartney meant me to think he was too sick to answer
+properly he was not, for he spoke suddenly to the bunk-house men. "There
+is no good in your waiting round, or looking any more. They've got Mr.
+Wilbraham, and"&mdash;he turned his head to me again&mdash;"they damn nearly got
+me!"</p>
+
+<p>Later, I wished sincerely that they had, for it would have saved me some
+trouble. At that minute all I wanted was to get even with Macartney
+myself. I said, "Pick up Marcia and get into the house. You can talk
+there!"</p>
+
+<p>Macartney glanced at me. Secretly, perhaps, neither of us wanted to give
+the other a chance by stooping for a heavy girl; I knew I was not going
+to do it. But Paulette must have feared I was. She sprang past me and
+lifted Marcia with smooth, effortless strength, as if she were nothing.</p>
+
+<p>Macartney started, as though he realized he had been a fool not to have
+done it himself, and wheeled to walk into the house before us, where he
+could have slipped cartridges into his gun; I knew afterwards that it
+was empty. But Paulette had moved off with Marcia and a peremptory
+gesture of her back-flung head that kept Macartney behind her. I came
+behind him. And because he had no idea of all I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span> knew about him, he took
+things as they looked on the surface. With Paulette leading, and me on
+Macartney's heels, we filed into the living room. There was a light
+there, but the fire was out. I guessed Charliet was hiding under his
+bed,&mdash;in which I wronged him. But I was not worrying about Charliet or
+cold rooms then. Paulette laid Marcia down on the floor, and I stood in
+the doorway. I did not believe the bunk-house men would come back till
+an open row suited Macartney's book, but there was no harm in commanding
+the outside doors of the shack, all the same. And the sudden thought
+that we were all in the living room but Dudley, and that he would never
+come back to it, gripped my soul between fury and anguish. "Get it
+out&mdash;about Dudley," I said; and I did not care if my voice were thick.</p>
+
+<p>Macartney looked over at me just as an honest, capable superintendent
+ought to have looked. "I can't; because I don't know it. All I do know's
+this. After you went off yesterday Wilbraham got to drinking; the wolves
+began to howl round the place after dark, and he said they drove him
+mad. He got a gun and went out after them&mdash;and he never came back. I
+didn't even know he was gone till midnight. I thought he'd shut himself
+in his office as he often does, till I heard shots outside,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> and found
+he wasn't in the house. I turned out the bunk-house men to look for him
+that instant, and when the lot you saw waiting in the shack for me came
+home toward morning, and said they couldn't find a sign of Wilbraham,
+and the bush was so full of wolves they were scared to go on looking, I
+went myself&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"And took <i>girls</i>"&mdash;I remembered the reek of my wolf-doped clothes till
+I fancied I could smell the stuff there in the room, thought of a half
+drunk man walking out on a like baited track, and two girls taken over
+it to look for him&mdash;"into bush like that!"</p>
+
+<p>"They followed me," curtly. "I didn't know it till it was too late to
+turn them back! I couldn't have sent Miss Wilbraham back, anyhow; she
+was nearly crazy. And if you're thinking of wolves, it was getting
+daylight, and&mdash;&mdash;" he hesitated, and I could have filled in the pause
+for myself, remembering how that wolf dope acted: two lambs could have
+moved in the bush with safety, so long as they kept away from where it
+was smeared on the ground. But Macartney filled it in differently. "And,
+anyhow, it was well they did come. It was Marcia&mdash;found Wilbraham!"</p>
+
+<p>I don't think I had really believed Dudley was dead till then. I stared
+at Marcia, lying on the floor as purple in the face from over-exertion<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span>
+and fright as if she had had an apoplectic fit, and at Paulette stooping
+over her, silent, and white around the mouth. She looked up at me, and
+her eyes gave me fierce warning, if I had needed it.</p>
+
+<p>"Marcia got afraid and bolted for home&mdash;the wrong way," she spoke up
+sharply. "When I ran after her she was standing in some spruces,
+screaming and pointing in front of her. I saw the blood on the ground,
+and&mdash;&mdash;Here's Dudley's cap! I found it, all chewed, close by." She
+pulled out a rag of fur from under her snow-caked sweater; and as the
+stale reek of the Skunk's Misery wolf dope rose from the thing, I knew
+the smell in the room had been no fancy, and how Dudley Wilbraham had
+died. I wheeled and saw Macartney's face,&mdash;the face of a man who took me
+for a fool whose nose would tell him nothing.</p>
+
+<p>"D'ye mean <i>that</i> was all you found?" I got out.</p>
+
+<p>"No! The rest was there. But it was&mdash;unrecognizable! Even I couldn't
+look at it. It was&mdash;pretty tough, for girls. I shot one wolf we scared
+off it, but I couldn't do anything more. I couldn't lift&mdash;it;
+but&mdash;Dudley's coat was on it." He had turned so white that I remembered
+his faint in the assay office, like you do remember things that don't
+matter. I would have thought him chicken-hearted for a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> wholesale
+murderer, if it had not been for the cold hate in his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"D'ye mean you left Dudley&mdash;out there in the bush? Where the devil was
+Baker, that black and white weasel you set to look after him? I'll bet
+he saved <i>his</i> skin! Where is he?"</p>
+
+<p>"Baker's missing, too," simply; and I did not believe it. "And I don't
+see what else I could have done but leave Dudley. None of the men were
+with me to carry him in; it had begun to snow; and in another hour I
+couldn't have kept the track back to La Chance. As it was, Miss Marcia
+played out; I had to carry her most of the way. And that's all there is
+to it," with sudden impatience, "except that Wilbraham's dead and
+Baker's missing. If he wasn't, he would have brought Dudley in."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," I said. I saw Charliet's head poke around the corner of the
+kitchen door and called to him to carry Marcia to her room, and to get
+fires going and something to eat; for the queer part of it was that
+there seemed to be two of me, and one of them was thinking it was
+starving. It saw Charliet and my dream girl take Marcia out, and the
+other me turned on Macartney.</p>
+
+<p>"By gad, there's one thing more," I said slowly. "You don't have to go
+on playing moving pictures, Dick Hutton, or using an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span> alias either!
+You've killed Dudley and Thompson, and for a good guess Dunn and
+Collins, if I can't be sure&mdash;and you'd have had me first of all, if your
+boulder and your wolf dope hadn't failed you on the Caraquet road!"</p>
+
+<p>Macartney's furious, surprised oath was real. "I don't know what you
+mean! Who on earth"&mdash;but he stammered on it&mdash;"Who d'ye mean by Hutton?"</p>
+
+<p>"You," said I. "And if you're not he, I don't know why! There's no one
+else who would have followed Paulette Valenka out here. I don't believe
+what you've done's been all revenge on the girl you tried to get into
+trouble about Van Ruyne's emeralds, or scare that Dudley would worm out
+the truth about that, either: but if it was to jump the La Chance mine
+too, you're busted! Your accident serial story won't go down. I knew
+about your wolf dope business long ago, and do you suppose <i>this</i>," I
+shoved Dudley's cap under his nose, "doesn't tell me how you limed the
+trap you set for Dudley last night, or what you smeared on his clothes
+when he was too drunk to smell it? I know what brought the wolves to
+howl around this house, if I don't know how you shoved Dudley out to
+them. I know it was a home-made raid you had down at the assay office,
+and&mdash;I've been to Skunk's Misery!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well?" said Macartney thickly.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Well enough! I have Thompson's deuce of hearts you didn't see was
+missing, when you gave me back his pack! With any luck I'll pay you out
+for that, and our four mill men, <i>and</i> Dudley; not here, where you can
+fight and die quick, but outside&mdash;where they've things like gallows! Oh,
+you would, would you?"</p>
+
+<p>For his empty gun just missed me as he made a lightning jump to bring it
+down on my head, and my left hand stopped him up just under the ear. I
+ought to have shot him. I don't know why I held back. I was so mad with
+rage when he dropped that I could have jumped on him like a lumberman
+and tramped the heart out of him. But I only lit for the kitchen, and
+Charliet's clothesline. As I got back and knelt down by the man who had
+called himself Macartney, Thompson rose up before me, as he had sat in
+that very room, playing his lonely solitaire; and the four dead men in
+the assay office; and Dudley&mdash;only I had no grief for Dudley, because it
+was drowned in rage. I bound Macartney round and round with the
+clothesline, whether he was really Hutton or not,&mdash;and I meant to have
+the truth out of him about that and everything else before I was done.
+But when I had him gagged with kitchen towels while he was still knocked
+out, I sat back on my heels to think;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span> and I damned myself up and down
+because I had not shot Macartney out of hand.</p>
+
+<p>I had Macartney all right; but I had next door to nothing else, unless I
+could find a safe place to jail him while I disposed of his men. Now, if
+they chose to rush me, I could not hold the eight shack windows against
+them, if Paulette and I might each hold a door. If I took to the bush
+with Paulette and Marcia, <i>and</i> Macartney, I had nowhere on earth to go.
+There could be no piling that ill-assorted company on horses and putting
+out for Caraquet, with the road choked with snow, even if I could have
+got by Macartney's garrison at the Halfway. Crossing Lac Tremblant, that
+by to-morrow would be lying sweetly level under a treacherous scum of
+lolly and drifted snow, ready to drown us all like Thompson,&mdash;I cursed
+and put that out of the question. That lake that was no lake offered
+about as good a thoroughfare as rats get in a rain-barrel. Whereas, to
+hold Macartney at La Chance till I downed his gang&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"By gad," I flashed out, "I can do it&mdash;in Thompson's abandoned stope!"
+It was not so crazy as it sounds. Thompson's measly entrance tunnel
+would only admit one man at a time, and I could hold it alone till
+doomsday. Macartney could be safely jailed inside the stope till I had
+wiped out his men; Paulette<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span> would be safe; and there remained no
+doubtful quantities but Marcia and Charliet the cook. I guessed I could
+scare Marcia and that Charliet would probably be on my side, anyway. If
+he were and sneaked down now to provision the stope, the thing would be
+dead easy, even to firewood, for Thompson had yanked in a couple of
+loads of mine props and left them there. I lit out into the passage to
+hunt Charliet and find out where the bunk-house men had gone to. But
+there was no sign of either in the wind and snow outside the shack. I
+bolted the door on the storm, turned for the kitchen, and saw my dream
+girl standing outside Marcia's room.</p>
+
+<p>She was dead white in the dim candlelight that shone through Marcia's
+half-open door. I thought of that as I jumped to her, and I would have
+done better to have thought of Marcia. I could see her from the passage,
+lying on her bed, purple-faced still, and with her eyes shut. But one
+glance was all I gave to Marcia. I said:</p>
+
+<p>"For heaven's sake, Paulette, don't look like that! I'm top-sides with
+Macartney now. Got him tied up. Come into the kitchen till I speak to
+you. I want Charliet&mdash;&mdash;" But as I pushed Paulette before me, into the
+kitchen just across the passage from Marcia's room, I stopped speaking.
+She was holding out<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span> Thompson's case of cards,&mdash;open, with that scrawled
+two of hearts on the top!</p>
+
+<p>"Charliet's gone&mdash;run away somewhere." Her chest labored as if she were
+making herself go on breathing, "and you dropped&mdash;this! I ran out from
+Marcia to see what you were doing with Macartney," she hesitated on the
+name, "and you'd dropped this. I&mdash;&mdash;You know Macartney killed Dudley,
+really. Does this mean he killed <i>Thompson</i>, too?"</p>
+
+<p>"You can say Macartney's real name," I snapped bitterly. "I've known he
+was Dick Hutton ever since last night."</p>
+
+<p>But Paulette only gasped, as if she did not care whether I knew it or
+not, "Where&mdash;how&mdash;did you get these cards?"</p>
+
+<p>I told her, and she gave a queer low moan. "Dudley's dead, and I'm past
+crying." Her voice never rose when she was moved; it went down, to D
+below the line on a violin. "I'm past everything, but wishing I was
+dead, too, for I'm the reason that brought Dick Hutton here as
+Macartney. Oh, you should have let me meet him that night! I wasn't only
+going to meet him; I meant to go away with him before morning. It would
+have been too late for poor, innocent old Thompson, but it would have
+saved the four mill men&mdash;and Dudley!" She had said she was past crying,
+but her voice thrilled through me worse than tears; and it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> might have
+thrilled Marcia in her room across the passage, if I'd remembered
+Marcia. "God knows Dudley was good to me&mdash;but it's no use talking of
+that now. What have you done with Macart&mdash;with Dick Hutton&mdash;that you
+said you had him safe for now?"</p>
+
+<p>"Knocked him out; and tied him up with the clothesline, in the living
+room&mdash;till I can take him out to Caraquet to be hanged!"</p>
+
+<p>"You ought to have killed him," Paulette answered very slowly. "I would
+have, when we found Dudley, only he'd taken my gun. At least, I believe
+he had: he said I'd lost it. And I'm afraid, without it&mdash;while Dick
+Hutton's alive!"</p>
+
+<p>I looked at her ghastly face and behaved like a fool for the hundredth
+time in this history; for I shoved my own gun into her hand and told her
+to keep it, that I'd get another. I would have caught her in my arms if
+it had not been for remembering Dudley, who was dead because the two of
+us had held our tongues to him. "Look here," I said irrelevantly. "D'ye
+know Marcia thinks Macartney wants to marry her?"</p>
+
+<p>"He doesn't want to marry any one&mdash;except me," Paulette retorted
+scornfully; and once more I should have remembered Marcia across the
+passage, only I didn't. "He's made love to Marcia, of course, for a
+blind, like he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> did everything else. If we could make her realize that
+and that he killed Dudley as surely as if he'd lifted his own hand to
+him&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>But I cut her off. "By gad, Paulette, what sticks me is what Macartney
+did all this <i>for</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>"Me," said Paulette very bitterly. "At least, at first; I'm not so sure
+about it now. When I first met Dick we were in Russia. He'd got into
+trouble over a copper mine&mdash;you've heard Macartney talk of the
+Urals?"&mdash;if we both spoke of him as though he were two different men
+neither of us noticed. "He came to me in Petrograd, penniless, and I
+helped him. But when I came to America, alone, I turned him out of my
+flat. He may have loved me, I don't know; but when I wouldn't marry him,
+he said he'd make me; that he'd hound me wherever I went and disgrace
+me, till I had to give in and come to him. And he <i>must</i> have done it at
+the Houstons', if I don't know how; for the police would take me now for
+those emeralds I never stole, if they knew where I was. I can't see
+where Dick could have been or how he managed the thing, but all the rest
+Dudley told you and him about that night at the Houstons' was true. I
+did give Van Ruyne sleeping stuff to keep him quiet while I got away,
+but it was because it came over me&mdash;the second I knew those emeralds
+were gone&mdash;that Dick must be in that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> house!&mdash;that if I didn't run away,
+he'd come in and threaten me till I had to go with him. And I'd have
+died first. I slipped out of the house unseen; and it was just the
+Blessed Virgin," simply, "who made me find Dudley's car stalled outside
+the Houstons' gate!"</p>
+
+<p>"D'ye mean you'd known Dudley before?"</p>
+
+<p>She nodded. "I'd met him: and I liked him, because he never made love to
+me. He hadn't been at the Houstons' that night; he was only coming back
+from Southampton alone, without any chauffeur. I knew no one would ever
+think he'd helped me, so I just got into his car. But I never should
+have let him bring me here," bitterly; "I should have known Dick would
+find me, and play gold robberies here to pay Dudley out. He told me he
+would, unless I'd go away with him&mdash;that first night you heard me
+talking to him&mdash;but I didn't see how he could work it. I thought I could
+tire him out by always balking him&mdash;till that night I didn't meet him,
+and he killed those four men. Then I knew I couldn't fight him; and the
+reason was that Dick's a finished mining engineer who never ran straight
+in his life!"</p>
+
+<p>"What?" I knew both things, only I saw no connection with Paulette.</p>
+
+<p>But she nodded. "He could get good work anywhere, but he won't work
+honestly. All he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> cares for is the excitement of big things he can get
+at crookedly. That was why he tried a <i>coup</i> with that copper mine in
+the Urals and had to clear out of Russia. And the La Chance mine that he
+came to contemptuously, and just to get hold of me, is a big thing too.
+No&mdash;listen! You don't know how big, for you've been kept in the dark.
+But Dick knows; and that's how I first knew I couldn't manage him any
+more, and why I don't think it is I he has done all he has for, nor that
+it was even to pay out Dudley. I believe it was to <i>get the mine</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>"Then why, in heaven's name, didn't you tell Dudley who he was?"</p>
+
+<p>"I couldn't make Dudley listen, at first. Then," very low, "I didn't
+dare; I knew it would mean that Dudley would get killed. I never thought
+that&mdash;would happen, anyway."</p>
+
+<p>"There was me." I was stung unbearably. "You must have known ever since
+the night I first came here that there was always me!"</p>
+
+<p>"Y-you," she stumbled oddly on it. "I couldn't tell <i>you</i>! Can't you see
+I was afraid, Nicky, that you might&mdash;get killed for me, too?"</p>
+
+<p>For the first time that night she looked at me as if she saw me&mdash;me,
+Nicky Stretton, dark, fierce and dirty&mdash;and not Dudley Wilbraham and the
+dead. My name in that voice<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> of hers would have caught me at my heart,
+if I had dared to be thinking of her. But I was not. It had flashed
+through me that Marcia's door had been half open when we went into the
+kitchen,&mdash;and that now it was shut!</p>
+
+<p>It was a trifling thing to make my heart turn over; but it did. I
+covered the passage in two jumps to the living-room door. But as I flung
+it open, all I had time to see was that the window was open too; with
+Marcia standing by it in her horrible green shooting clothes, just as
+she had lain on her bed, and a crowd of bunk-house men swarming through
+the open sash behind her and Macartney,&mdash;Macartney, standing on his feet
+without any clothesline, with his gun in his hand!</p>
+
+<p>I saw, like you do see things, how it had all happened. I had misjudged
+Macartney's intellect about the bunk-house men; he had had them within
+call. But it was no one but Marcia who had let them in, and she had
+freed Macartney. She had overheard Paulette and me in the kitchen, had
+shut her door, slipped out of her own window and into the living room,
+and cut Macartney's rope. She had no earthly reason to connect him with
+Dudley's death, except the scraps of conversation she had overheard from
+Paulette and me; she knew nothing of the bottle of wolf dope that had
+been meant to smash in my wagon, or that Dudley&mdash;so<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span> full up with drink
+and drugs that he could not have smelled even that mixture of skunks and
+sulphide&mdash;could easily have been sent out reeking with it, into bush
+that reeked of it too. And that second she screamed at me: "You lie,
+Nicky Stretton; you, and that girl! He's not Hutton&mdash;he's Macartney!"</p>
+
+<p>But Macartney fired full in my face.</p>
+
+<p>It was Marcia's flying jump that made him miss me. Even though his very
+cartridge was one of hers that she always carried in her pockets, and
+must have been given to him the first thing, I don't think she had been
+prepared to see me killed. I didn't wait to see. I was down the passage
+to Paulette before Macartney could get in a second shot. As he, and some
+of the bunk-house men tore out of the living room after me, I fired into
+the brown mass of them with my own gun, that I snatched from Paulette. I
+thought it checked them, and lit out of the kitchen door, into the wind
+and the dark and the raving, swirling snow, with my dream girl's hand
+gripped in mine. We plunged knee-deep, waist-deep through the drifts,
+for our lives,&mdash;for mine, anyhow.</p>
+
+<p>"Thompson's stope," I gasped; and she said yes. I couldn't see an inch
+before me, but I think we would have made it, since Macartney could not
+see, either. I knew we were far<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> ahead of him, but that was all I did
+know, till I heard myself shout to Paulette, "<i>Run!</i>"&mdash;and felt my legs
+double under me. If something hit me on the head like a ton of brick I
+had no sense of what had happened, as people have in books. I only
+realized I had been knocked out when I felt myself coming to. Somehow it
+felt quite natural to be deadly faint and sick, and lying flat, like a
+log,&mdash;till I put out my hand and touched hard rock.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see how it's rock," I thought dully; "it ought to be snow!
+Something hit me&mdash;out in the snow with Paulette!" And with that sense
+came back to me, like a red-hot iron in my brain. I <i>had</i> been out in
+the snow with Paulette; one of Macartney's men must have hit me a swipe
+on the head and got her from me. But&mdash;where in heaven's name was
+Paulette now? The awful, sickening thought made me so wild that I
+scrambled to my knees to find out in what ungodly hole I had been put
+myself. I had been carried somewhere, and the rock under me felt like
+the mine. But somehow the darkness round me did not smell like a mine,
+where men worked every day. It smelt cold, desolate, abandoned, like&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>And suddenly I knew where Macartney's men had carried me when I was
+knocked out! It was no comfort to me that it was to the very place where
+I had meant to jail Macartney<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> and hide Paulette, where Charliet and I
+were to have stood off Macartney's men.</p>
+
+<p>"Thompson's stope," I gasped. "It's there Macartney's put me!" I
+crawled, sick and dizzy, to what ought to have been the tunnel and the
+tunnel entrance, opening on the storm out of doors. The tunnel was
+there, all right. But as I fumbled to what ought to have been the open
+entrance, stillness met me, instead of a rush of wind; piled rock met my
+groping hands, instead of piled snow. I was in Thompson's abandoned
+stope all right,&mdash;only Macartney had sealed up the only way I could ever
+get out! I shoved, and dug, and battered, as uselessly as a rat in a
+trap, and suddenly knew that was just what I was! Macartney had not even
+taken the trouble to kill me,&mdash;not to avoid visible murder at this stage
+of the game, when only the enemy was left, if you did not count a duped
+woman and a captured one; but for the sheer pleasure of realizing the
+long, slow death that must get me in the end.</p>
+
+<p>"Die here&mdash;I've got to die here," I heard my own voice in my ears.
+"While&mdash;&mdash;My God, Paulette! Macartney's got Paulette!"</p>
+
+<p>And in the darkness behind me somebody slipped on a stone.</p>
+
+<p>I had not thought I could ever feel light and fierce again. I was both,
+as I swung round.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XV</h2>
+
+<h3>THE PLACE OF DEPARTED SPIRITS</h3>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Every man carries his skull under his face, but<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">God alone knows the marks on it.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4"><i>Indian Proverb.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<p>For a man moved, silent and furtive, in the tunnel between me and the
+stope!</p>
+
+<p>At the knowledge something flared up in me that had been pretty well
+burnt out: and that was Hope. That any one was in the place showed
+Macartney had either put a guard on me&mdash;which meant Thompson's abandoned
+stope was not sealed so mighty securely as I thought&mdash;or else it was he
+himself facing me in the dark, and I might get even with him yet. I let
+out a string of curses at him on the chance. There was not one single
+thing he had done&mdash;to me, Paulette, or any one else&mdash;that I did not put
+a name to. And I trusted Macartney, or any man he had left in the
+ink-dark stope, would be fool enough to jump at me for what I said.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But no one jumped. And out of the graveyard blackness in front of me
+came a muffled chuckle!</p>
+
+<p>It rooted me stone still, and I dare swear it would have you. For the
+chuckle was Dunn's: Dunn's,&mdash;who was dead and buried, and Collins with
+him! But suddenly I was blazing angry, for the chuckle came again,
+and&mdash;dead man's or not&mdash;it was mocking! I jumped to it and caught a live
+throat, hard. But before I could choke the breath out of it a voice that
+was not Dunn's shouted at me: "Hold your horses, for any sake, Stretton!
+It's us."</p>
+
+<p>A match rasped, flared in my eyes, and I saw Dunn and Collins! Saw
+Dunn's stubbly fair hair, clipped close till it stood on end, as it had
+on the skull I'd said a prayer over and buried; saw Collins standing on
+the long shank bones I knew I had buried in the bush!</p>
+
+<p>I stared, dazed, facing the two boys I could have sworn were dead and
+buried. And instead Dunn gasped wheezingly from the rock where I had let
+him drop, and Collins drawled as if we had met yesterday:</p>
+
+<p>"We heard we were dead! But it wasn't us you buried, or any of Hutton's
+men either, for he'd have missed 'em. I expect you'd better put your
+funeral down to two stray prospectors, and let it go at that!" He looked
+curiously into my face. "You don't seem to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> have got much yourself by
+playing the giddy goat with Hutton!"</p>
+
+<p>In the dying flicker of his match I saw his young, sneering eyes, as he
+called Macartney "Hutton," and realized furiously that Paulette had been
+right, not only that Dunn and Collins were alive, but that they were on
+Macartney's side. I blazed out at the two of them:</p>
+
+<p>"So you've been in with Hutton all along, you young swine! I've been a
+blank fool; I ought to have guessed Hutton had bought you!"</p>
+
+<p>Dunn let out a sharp oath, but Collins only threw down the glowing end
+of his match. "I wouldn't say we were on Hutton's pay roll exactly,
+since you seem to have found out Macartney's real name at last," he
+retorted scornfully. "We've been on our own, ever since we saw fit to
+disappear and bunk in here. Though by luck Hutton hasn't guessed it, or
+we wouldn't be here now!"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know that it's any too clear why you are here," I flung out
+hotly. "D'ye mean to say you've been living here, <i>hiding</i>, ever since
+you cleared out, and I thought the wolves ate you? That you knew all
+along who Macartney was&mdash;and never told me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not exactly here, if you mean Thompson's old stope you're corked up in;
+but of course<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span> we knew Macartney was Hutton," Collins returned
+categorically. "As for telling you about him&mdash;well, we weren't any too
+sure you weren't Hutton's man yourself&mdash;till to-night!"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>What?</i>" said I.</p>
+
+<p>But Collins apologized calmly. "We were asses, of course; but we
+couldn't tell we'd made a mistake. We didn't have as much fun as a bag
+of monkeys while we were making it, either, especially when there was
+that&mdash;trouble&mdash;in the assay office. We came in on the tail-end of that,
+only we'd no guns, and it was too late to help our poor chaps, anyway.
+Besides, we thought you&mdash;&mdash;" but he checked abruptly. "It's too long to
+explain in this freezing hole. Let's get out! You're not corked up here
+so dead tight as Hutton-Macartney thinks," and in the dark I knew he
+grinned. "Only I imagine we'd better decide what we're going to do
+before he discovers that!"</p>
+
+<p>"Do? I've got to get Paulette!" But I lurched as I turned back to the
+blocked tunnel entrance, and Collins caught me by the shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"You can't get her," said he succinctly, "unless we help you! Going to
+trust us?"</p>
+
+<p>It didn't seem to me that I had any choice; so I said yes. Then I gaped
+like a fool. Dunn<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span> and Collins had me by the arms and were marching me
+through the dark, not toward the tunnel where I'd been slung in, but
+back through Thompson's black, abandoned stope, as if it had been
+Broadway, till the side wall of it brought us up. "Over you go," said
+Collins gruffly. He gave me a boost against the smooth wall of the
+stope, and my clawing fingers caught on the edge of a sharp shelf of
+stone. I swung myself up on it, mechanically, and felt my feet go
+through the solid stope wall, into space. There was an opening in the
+living rock, and as Collins lit another match where he stood below me, I
+saw it: a practicable manhole, slanting down behind my shelf so sharply
+that it must have been invisible from Thompson's stope, even in
+candlelight. Collins and Dunn swarmed up beside me, and the next second
+we all three slid through the black slit behind our ledge, and
+out&mdash;somewhere else. Collins lit a candle-end, and I saw we were in a
+second tunnel, a remarkably amateur, unsafe tunnel, too, if I'd been
+worrying about trifles, but not Thompson's!</p>
+
+<p>The thing made me start, and Collins grinned. "More convenient exit than
+old Thompson's, only we don't live here! If you'll come on you'll see."
+He and his candle disappeared round a loose looking boulder into a dark
+hole in the tunnel side, and his voice continued<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span> blandly as I stumbled
+after. "Natural cave, this tunnel was, when we found it; this second
+cave leading out of it; and a passage from here to&mdash;outside!" He waved
+his hand around as I stood dumb. "Our little country home!"</p>
+
+<p>What I saw was a small round cave, the glow of a fire under a shaft that
+led all betraying smoke heaven knew where into the side of the hill, and
+two spruce beds with blankets. The permanent look of the place was the
+last straw on my own blind idiocy of never suspecting Macartney, and I
+burst out, "Why the deuce, with all you knew, couldn't you have brought
+Paulette here and hidden her?"</p>
+
+<p>"Charliet said we should have." Collins nodded when I stared. "Oh, yes,
+there's more to that French Canadian than just cook! He's been in the
+know about us here all this time, or we'd have been in a nice hole for
+grub. Mind, I don't say he's brave&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"He was under his bed when I wanted him to-night," I agreed with some
+bitterness.</p>
+
+<p>"Was he?" Collins exclaimed electrically. "He was here, giving us the
+office about you! He tore down and told us you'd got Hutton, and we'd
+better light out and help you: but when we turned out it looked more as
+if Hutton had got <i>you</i>! When you and Miss Paulette rushed out of the
+kitchen door you must<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> have run straight into an ambush of his men, and
+I guess one of them landed you a swipe on the head. Anyhow, Dunn and I
+met a procession with you frog-marched in the middle of it, that was
+more than we could manage without guns. So we kind of retired and let
+the men cork you into Thompson's stope to die. And you bet they did it.
+Not six of us could have got you out, ever, if we hadn't known a private
+way."</p>
+
+<p>I cursed him. "My God, stop <i>talking</i>! It's not me I want to hear about.
+Where was Paulette? D'ye mean you followed me and left her&mdash;left a
+girl&mdash;to Macartney? I&mdash;I've got to go for her!"</p>
+
+<p>But Collins caught me as I turned. "Macartney hadn't got her&mdash;she wasn't
+there! We hoofed Charliet off to find her, first thing; he'll bring her
+here, as soon as it's safe to make a get-away. We'd have brought her
+ourselves, only the show would have been spoiled if Hutton had spotted
+us. And we had to hustle, too, to get back here and waltz you out of
+Thompson's mausoleum. It'll be time enough for you to go for Miss
+Paulette when she doesn't turn up. You're not fit now, anyway." I felt
+him staring into my face. "Had anything to eat all day, except a hard
+ride and a fight?" he demanded irrelevantly, in a voice that sounded
+oddly far off.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I shook my head; and the smell of coffee smote my famished nostrils as
+he took a tin pot off the fire. I knew how nearly I had been done when
+the scalding stuff picked me up like brandy. But&mdash;"You're sure about
+Paulette?" I gasped. "Remember, Macartney was bound to get her!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, he didn't," Collins returned composedly. "I bet he's looking for
+her right now, and I'm dead sure he won't find her. Charliet wasn't born
+yesterday: he'll bring her here all right."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll wait ten minutes," I gave in abruptly, and because I knew I
+couldn't do anything else till I had filled my empty stomach. But there
+was something I wanted to know. "What did you mean, just now, about not
+being sure of me&mdash;with Hutton?"</p>
+
+<p>Dunn spoke up for the first time. "It was Miss Paulette; we thought it
+was you we heard her talking to, two nights in the dark. So when she
+drove off to Caraquet with you and the gold, after we'd heard her say
+she couldn't trust you&mdash;at least, the man we thought was you&mdash;we didn't
+know whether you were in with Hutton or not, or what kind of a game you
+were playing."</p>
+
+<p>"Me?" I swore blankly. "I suppose it never struck you that <i>I</i> believed
+the man playing the game was Collins&mdash;till you both disappeared,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> and I
+decided it must be some one who never was employed around this mine!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I'm hanged," said Collins, and suddenly knocked the wits out of
+me by muttering that at least we'd both had sense enough to know that
+Miss Valenka was square.</p>
+
+<p>"Valenka? D'ye mean you knew who she was, too?" I stuttered.</p>
+
+<p>"Dunn did," Collins nodded. "I only knew Hutton. But I knew more than my
+prayers about him, and Dunn told me about the girl. So we sort of kept
+guard for her and watched you and Hutton&mdash;till the day we had the row
+with him."</p>
+
+<p>"In the mine! He told me." Only half of me heard him. The rest was
+listening for the sound of footsteps. But the place was still.</p>
+
+<p>"In Thompson's stope," Collins corrected drily. "You see, we thought you
+and Macartney-Hutton were working together, and we didn't see our way to
+tackling the two of you at once. So when you went off to Caraquet with
+Miss Paulette, we thought we'd get Hutton cleared out of this before you
+got back again. We kind of let him see us leave work in the mine and
+sneak into the old stope. When he came after us, we dropped on him with
+what we knew about him; and between us we knew a deal. We gave him his
+choice about leaving the neighborhood that minute, or our going<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span>
+straight to Wilbraham and telling who he was and what he was there
+for&mdash;which was where we slipped up! He'd the gall to tell us to our
+faces that we'd no pull over him, because we were doing private work in
+Thompson's stope and stealing Wilbraham's gold out of it. And&mdash;that
+rather gave us the check."</p>
+
+<p>"But&mdash;why? There wasn't six cents' worth of gold there to steal!"</p>
+
+<p>Collins smiled with shameless simplicity. "I know. But stealing gold was
+exactly what we were doing, only it wasn't in Thompson's old stope. We'd
+have been caught with the goods on us though, if any one had fussed
+round there to investigate. We found our way in here," he jerked his
+head toward his amateur tunnel, "by accident, in Thompson's time, one
+day when the stope happened to be empty; and we burrowed on to what
+looked like the anticlinal, before we heard the stope shift coming and
+had to slide out. But we'd seen enough to keep us burrowing. We couldn't
+do much, even after Hutton ran the other tunnel half a mile down the
+cliff and caught gold there; but we kind of slipped in, evenings, when
+you missed us out of the bunk house"&mdash;he grinned again&mdash;"and got the
+bearings of that vein. And you bet we had to find a way to stay with it;
+it was too good to leave! We weren't going to work in Wilbraham's mine<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span>
+just for our health and days' wages, when we'd struck our own gold. So
+we reckoned we'd just&mdash;disappear. But we didn't get out as sharp as we
+did simply on account of our own private affairs. Macartney-Hutton drew
+a gun the day we had the row he lied to you about, and I guess we just
+legged it out of Thompson's stope&mdash;by the front way!&mdash;in time to make
+the bush with our lives on us. Macartney thought he'd scared us, and
+we'd lit for Caraquet; but we lit back again after dark. We crawled in
+here by our back entrance you haven't seen yet, and here we've been ever
+since! We didn't confide in you, because you seemed pretty thick with
+Macartney, if you come to think of it; and it seemed a hefty kind of a
+lie, too, when you told Charliet you'd buried us. I rather think that's
+all, till to-night&mdash;&mdash;" his indifferent drawl stopped as if it were cut
+off with a knife. "My God, Stretton," he jerked, "I'd forgotten! Was it
+true&mdash;what Charliet told us to-night&mdash;about Dudley Wilbraham?"</p>
+
+<p>I was eating stuff the silent Dunn had supplied, but I put the meat
+down. "Wilbraham's killed," I heard my own voice say; and then told the
+rest of it. How Paulette had found Dudley's chewed, wolf-doped cap, and
+Marcia had found Dudley, silent in the silent bush, where the last wolf
+was sneaking away.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> I would not have known Collins's face as he asked
+what I meant about wolf dope now and when I thought I was swearing at
+Macartney in Thompson's stope.</p>
+
+<p>I told him, with my ears straining for Charliet and a girl creeping to
+us, through Collins's back way out. But all I heard was silence,&mdash;that
+thick, underground silence that fills the ears like wool. I had said I
+would wait ten minutes, and nine of them were gone. I don't think I
+spoke. Dunn muttered suddenly, "They're not coming!"</p>
+
+<p>Collins shook his head and coldly cursed himself and me for two fools
+who had lain low, when out in the open together we could have stopped
+Macartney from getting Dudley, if we couldn't have helped old Thompson.
+He never mentioned Paulette, or his trusted cook. But he rose, lit a
+second candle, and led the way out of his warm burrow by a dark hole
+opposite the one we had entered by, and into a cramped alley where we
+had to walk bent double. It felt as if it ran a mile before it turned in
+a sharp right angle. Collins pinched out his light and turned on me.
+"Just what&mdash;are you going to do?"</p>
+
+<p>"Get Paulette," said I.</p>
+
+<p>"M-m," said Collins. "Well, here's where we start. Get hold of my heels
+when I lie down and don't crowd me." And that was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> every word that came
+out of either of us as we dropped flat, and wormed head-first down a
+slope of smooth stone till cold, fresh air abruptly smote my face. In
+front of us was an opening, out of the bowels of the hill, into the
+night and the snow. Rooted juniper hung down over it in an impervious
+curtain, as it hung everywhere from the rocks at La Chance. Collins
+pushed it aside, and the two of us were out&mdash;out of Thompson's stope,
+where Macartney had meant me to lie till I died!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XVI</h2>
+
+<h3>IN COLLINS'S CARE</h3>
+
+
+<p>For two breaths I did not know where I was. It was still snowing, and
+the night was wild, such a night as we might not have again for weeks.
+Any one could move in it as securely as behind a curtain, for I could
+not see a yard before my face, and not a track could lie five minutes.
+But suddenly the familiarity of the place hit me, till I could have
+laughed out, if I had been there on any other business. Collins's long
+passage had wormed behind Thompson's stope, behind the La Chance
+stables; and it was no wonder he had found it easy enough to get
+supplies from Charliet. All he had to do was to cross the clearing from
+the jutting rock that shielded his private entrance and walk into
+Charliet's kitchen door. I moved toward it, and Collins grabbed at me
+through the smothering snow.</p>
+
+<p>"Hang on&mdash;you don't know who's there! Wait till I ring up Charliet,
+number one Wolf!" He stood back from me, and far, far off, with a
+perfect illusion of distance broken by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> the wind, I heard a wolf howl,
+once, and then twice again. If he had not stood beside me, I could not
+have believed the cry came from Collins's throat. But, remembering
+Dudley, it had an ill-omened sound to me.</p>
+
+<p>"Shut up!" I breathed sharply.</p>
+
+<p>Collins might have remembered Dudley too. "I wasn't going to do it
+again," he muttered, "but I've had to use it for a signal. It's been a
+fashionable kind of a sound around here, if I hadn't sense enough to
+know Macartney brought the beasts that made it. But Charliet knows my
+howl. He'll come out, if he's&mdash;&mdash;Drop, <i>quick</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>But both of us had dropped already. Some one had flung open the kitchen
+door and fired a charge of buckshot out into the night. I heard it
+scatter over my head, and a burst of uproar on its heels told me
+Charliet's kitchen was crowded with Macartney's men. Somebody&mdash;not
+Charliet&mdash;shouted over the noise, "What the devil's that for?" And
+another voice yelled something about wolves and firing to scare them.</p>
+
+<p>"The boss'll scare you&mdash;if you get to firing guns this night," the first
+voice swore; and a man laughed, insolently. Then the kitchen door
+banged, and Collins sprang up electrically.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't like this one bit," he muttered.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> "Macartney's not in the
+house, or his men wouldn't dare be yelling like that; and Charliet's not
+there, either, or he'd have been out. That devil must have got him
+somewhere&mdash;him and Miss Paulette! Can't you see there's not a light in
+the shack, bar the kitchen one? Come on!"</p>
+
+<p>But I was gone already, around the corner of the shack to Paulette's
+side of it, and I knew better. There was a light&mdash;in Paulette's
+room&mdash;shining through a hole in the heavy wooden shutters she had had
+made for her window, long before I guessed why she wanted them and their
+bars. It ran through me like fire that Macartney was in that room, deaf
+to any kind of yells from the kitchen, to everything but Paulette's
+voice; and nobody but a man who has had to think it can guess what that
+thought was like to me, out there in the snow. I made for my own window,
+but it was locked; and God knew who might be watching me out of it, as I
+had watched Macartney one night, before I knew he was Hutton. I thought:
+"By gad, Nick Stretton, you'll go in the front door!" For that&mdash;with me
+shut up to die in Thompson's stope, and not one other soul alive to
+interfere with him&mdash;was the last thing Macartney would think to lock!
+Nor had he. The latch lifted just as usual, and I walked in.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The long passage through the shack was dark; and, after the storm
+outside, dead silent. It was empty, too, as the living room was empty;
+but what I thought of was my dream girl's door. That was open a
+foot-wide space, and somebody inside it sobbed sickeningly. But if
+Macartney were there he was not speaking. I daresay I forgot I had no
+gun to kill him with. I crept forward in the soundless moccasins I had
+reason to thank heaven were my only wear and suddenly felt Collins
+beside me, in his stocking feet.</p>
+
+<p>"Hang on," he breathed; "I tell you he isn't there! If he were, you
+couldn't get him. One shout, and he'd have the whole gang out on us!"</p>
+
+<p>I knew afterwards that he'd stubbed his toe on Marcia Wilbraham's little
+revolver she'd dropped on the passage floor, and was ready to keep my
+back if the gang did come; but then I hardly heard him. I stood rooted
+at Paulette's door, staring in; for Paulette was not there&mdash;Macartney
+was not there! What I saw was Marcia Wilbraham with her back to me,
+crying hysterically, as I might have known Paulette would never cry, and
+flinging out of a trunk, as if Paulette were dead or gone, every poor
+little bit of clothes and oddments that were my dream girl's own!</p>
+
+<p>I can't write what that made me feel. Ribbons,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> bits of laces, little
+blue stockings, shoes, grew into a heap. And I would have been fool
+enough to jump in on Marcia and shake out of her how she dared to touch
+them, whether Paulette were dead or alive, if Collins had not gripped me
+hard.</p>
+
+<p>"The emeralds," he muttered. "She's rooting for them!"</p>
+
+<p>I had pretty well forgotten there ever were any emeralds, and I stared
+at him like a fool.</p>
+
+<p>"Van Ruyne's emeralds&mdash;she thinks Miss Paulette has 'em," Collins's lips
+explained soundlessly. "And they're round Macartney's own neck&mdash;I saw
+them! Dunn and I were going to swipe them, only we couldn't."</p>
+
+<p>I damned the emeralds. What I wanted of Marcia was to find out what had
+become of Paulette. But Collins gripped me harder. "Let her see you, and
+you'll never know," he breathed fiercely. "She'd give one yell, and we'd
+be done. Macartney's either got the girl and Charliet, or they're lost
+in the snow and he's hunting for them. Let's get some guns and go see
+which; we're crazy to stay here!"</p>
+
+<p>I nodded mechanically. I knew what it meant for a girl to be lost in the
+snow on such a night as I had just closed the shack door on, even with
+Charliet beside her; how Collins and I might tramp, search&mdash;yes, and
+call, too&mdash;uselessly, beside the very drift where she lay<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span> smothered.
+And then I realized I was a fool. Macartney would not give Paulette a
+chance to get lost. He had her somewhere, her and Charliet, and Collins
+and I had to take her from him. But something inexplicable stopped me
+dead as I turned for the shack door. Macartney had never been a winter
+at La Chance; he had no snowshoes. Charliet had some, I didn't know
+where. But I had two pairs in my own room. That inexplicable suggestion
+told me I needed them badly, though I knew it was silly; if Macartney
+had Paulette he would not be marching her through the snow. All the
+places I had to search for her were the stable and the assay office. And
+yet&mdash;&mdash;I backed Collins noiselessly past the room where Marcia was still
+pulling round Paulette's trunk, with a noise that covered any we could
+make, and the two of us ended up in my room in the black dark. I stood
+Collins at the door while I felt for my snowshoes. I knew it was crazy,
+and I was just obsessed, but I got them. I didn't get much else. I
+couldn't find my rifle I had hoped for, and only a couple of boxes of
+revolver cartridges were in my open trunk,&mdash;that I guessed Marcia had
+gone through too. I would have felt like wringing her neck, if it had
+not been for Paulette and Macartney. I had no room for outside emotions
+till I knew about those two. I slid back<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span> to my doorway to get Collins,
+and he was gone. Where to, I had no earthly idea. I looked to see if he
+had been cracked enough to tackle Marcia, and Marcia was alone on her
+knees, chucking all Paulette's things back into her trunk again. The
+place suddenly felt dead quiet. Marcia had stopped sobbing, and I
+believe she would have heard a mouse move,&mdash;there was that kind of a
+listening look about her. And it was that minute&mdash;that unsuitable,
+inimical minute&mdash;that <i>I</i> heard some one move! Outside, on the doorstep,
+somebody stumbled. The latch lifted, the door swung in,&mdash;and I jumped to
+meet Macartney with not one thing on me but some fool snowshoes and a
+pocketful of useless cartridges. But I brought up dead still, and rigid.</p>
+
+<p>"Charliet&mdash;oh, Charliet, come <i>quick</i>," whispered Paulette. She was snow
+from head to foot where she stood in the shack door. "I couldn't
+find&mdash;&mdash;" But she recoiled as she saw me, against the light Marcia had
+burning inside her own half-open door. "Oh, my God, <i>Nicky</i>!" she cried
+in a voice that brought my soul alive, that fool's soul that had lost
+her. She caught at me like a child, incredulously, wildly. "Oh, Nicky!"</p>
+
+<p>There was no time to ask where she'd been, nor even of Macartney. I
+think the unsuitable thing I said was "Marcia!" For I heard<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> Marcia jump
+and fall over Paulette's open trunk, before she was out of her door like
+one of the wolves Macartney was so fond of. I didn't think she saw us,
+but she did see Collins. The thing that cut her off was his rush out of
+somewhere. I heard her scream with furious terror; heard Paulette's door
+bang on her; and Collins was beside me with a rifle and some dunnage I
+scarcely saw in the sudden dark of the passage after that banged door.</p>
+
+<p>"Run," said he, through his teeth. "Gimme that stuff! Run!" he stuffed
+my snowshoes under the arm that held the rifle. "No, not that way! This
+way." He cut across the clearing in the opposite direction from the hole
+that led to his underground den, and it was time. Half of Macartney's
+men were tearing through the passage toward Marcia's screams, and the
+rest were pouring out of the kitchen door. In the storm we could only
+hear them. I was carrying Paulette like a baby, and with her head
+against me I could not see her face. All I could see was swirling,
+stinging snow in my eyes, and the sudden dark of the bush we brought up
+in. I kept along the edge of it, circling the clearing, and all but fell
+over the end of Collins's jutting rock. And this time I thanked God for
+the furious snow; in ten minutes there would be no sign of our tracks
+from the front door to the hold the rock<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> shielded, and there was no
+earthly chance of Macartney's men picking them up before we were safe.</p>
+
+<p>It felt like years before the three of us were inside the curtain of
+juniper, swarming up the smooth rock face, but Collins observed
+contrarily that he'd never done it so quickly. He led the way up to the
+passage angle where he had pinched out his light, put down the snowshoes
+and the rifle, laid something else on the ground with remarkable
+caution, and walked on some feet before he lit his candle.</p>
+
+<p>"Better travel light and get home. Dunn and I'll come back presently and
+bring up the dunnage," he observed as blandly as if the three of us had
+been for an evening stroll, and suddenly laughed as he saw me glance at
+his stockinged feet. "By golly, I've left my boots in the shack, and I
+haven't any others&mdash;but it was worth a pair of boots! I stubbed my toe
+on Miss Wilbraham's little revolver she must have dropped on the passage
+floor, and I've got it. Also, let alone her lost toy-dog gun, I got all
+her ammunition and her rifle, while she was grabbing in Miss Paulette's
+trunk.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"'Taffy went to my house,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Thought I was asleep.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I went to Taffy's house,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And stole a side of beef'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;as I learned when I was young. Come on,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> Stretton; I bet we'll be
+top-sides with Macartney-Hutton yet!"</p>
+
+<p>"He's out, looking for me&mdash;&mdash;" but Paulette's sentence broke in a gasp.
+"Why, it's Collins!" She stared incredulously in the candlelight.</p>
+
+<p>"Just that," imperturbably. "Stretton can tell you all about me
+presently, Miss Paulette. For now I imagine you'd sooner see a fire and
+something to eat. Put her in between us, Stretton, Indian file, and
+we'll take her down."</p>
+
+<p>Women are queer things. Tatiana Paulina Valenka had tramped the bush
+most of the day before looking for a dead man, had found him&mdash;a sight no
+girl should have looked on; had run for more than her life with me, and
+been through God knew what since; and she walked down that unknown, dark
+passage with Collins and me as if nothing had ever happened to her. She
+greeted Dunn, too; and then, as he and Collins disappeared to fetch down
+our snowshoes and rifle, went straight to pieces where she and I stood
+safe by their fire. "Oh, oh, oh, I thought you were dead! I saw them get
+you. I can't believe&mdash;can't believe&mdash;&mdash;" she gasped out in jerks, as if
+she fought for her very breath, and suddenly dropped flat on Dunn's old
+blanket. "Oh, Nicky," she moaned, "don't let me faint&mdash;now. <i>Nicky!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>There was something in her voice&mdash;I don't<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span> know&mdash;but it made me dizzy
+with sheer, clear joy. She had said my name as if I were the one man in
+the world for her, as if I had risen from the dead. But I dared not say
+so. I knew better than even to lift her head where she lay with closed
+eyes on Dunn's blanket, but I got Collins's old tin cup to her lips
+somehow and made her drink his strong coffee till it set her blood
+running, as it had set mine. After a minute she sat up dizzily, but she
+pushed away my bread and meat. "Presently&mdash;I'd be sick now," she
+whispered. "How did you get&mdash;out of Thompson's stope? And where&mdash;I mean
+I can't understand, about Collins and Dunn!"</p>
+
+<p>"They got me out," said I, and explained about them. But there was no
+particular surprise on Paulette's face. She never made an earthly
+comment, either, when I told her they'd always known all about her and
+Hutton, except, "I never thought they were dead; I told you that. I'd an
+idea, too, that Charliet didn't think so either."</p>
+
+<p>I had one arm round her by that time, feeding her with my other hand
+like a child, with bits of bread soaked in black coffee. If I had any
+thoughts they were only fear that she might move from me as soon as she
+really came to herself. But Charliet's name brought me back from what
+was next door to heaven.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> "Charliet," said I blankly; "where in the
+world is he? D'ye mean he hadn't told you about Collins and Dunn? Why,
+he was to bring you to them&mdash;here&mdash;hours ago!"</p>
+
+<p>"Charliet was? But&mdash;&mdash;" Suddenly, beyond belief, my dream girl turned
+and clung to me. God knows I knelt like a statue. I was afraid to stir.
+It was Dudley she loved: I was only a man who was trusted and a friend.
+"Oh, Nicky, you don't know," she cried, "you don't know! You and I ran
+straight <i>into</i> some of Dick Hutton's men when we raced out of the
+shack. And you threw me&mdash;just picked me up like a puppy and threw
+me&mdash;out of their way, into the deep snow. I heard them get you, but I
+was half smothered; I couldn't either see or speak. But I heard Dick
+shout from somewhere to 'chuck Stretton into Thompson's old stope!' I
+thought it meant they'd killed you; that it was another man I'd let&mdash;be
+murdered!"</p>
+
+<p>She caught her breath as if something stabbed her, and I know it stabbed
+me to think I was just "another man" to her. But I knelt steady. I had
+been a fool to think it was I she cared for, personally, and whether she
+did or not she needed my arm. "Well?" I asked. "Next?"</p>
+
+<p>"I was scrambling out of the snow," I felt her shiver against me, "only
+before I could<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> stand up Charliet raced up from somewhere and shoved me
+straight down in the drift again. He said Dick was looking for me, and
+to lie still, while he got him away; then to race for the shack and hide
+just outside the front door, till he came for me&mdash;but before he could
+finish Dick ran down on the two of us, with a lantern. He'd have fallen
+over me, if Charliet hadn't stopped him by yelling that I'd run for the
+bush. I think he grabbed the lantern&mdash;but anyhow, they both tore off. I
+got to the shack, but&mdash;&mdash;Oh, Nicky, I couldn't wait there. I&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Well?" It seemed to be the only word in my brain.</p>
+
+<p>"I went down to Thompson's stope. But I was too late. The men had walled
+you in with rocks, and I couldn't move them. I tried!" (I thought she
+must hear the leap my heart gave. I know I shut my jaws to keep my
+tongue between my teeth at the thought of her trying to dig her way in
+to me, the only friend she had in the world except a French-Canadian
+cook.) "I&mdash;&mdash;Oh, I thought if I could find Charliet we might do
+something! I went back to look for him, and I found <i>you</i>&mdash;&mdash;Oh, I found
+you!" Her arms were still on my shoulders as I knelt by her, and
+suddenly her voice turned low and anxious. "What do you suppose became
+of Charliet?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span> He's so faithful. We can't leave him for Dick to turn on
+when he can't find me!"</p>
+
+<p>I was not thinking of Charliet. I couldn't honestly care what had become
+of him, with my dream girl in my arms. I may as well tell the truth; I
+forgot Dudley, too. I don't know what mad words would have come out of
+my mouth if Paulette had not pushed me away violently. What was left of
+her coffee upset; I got to my feet with the empty cup in my hand, just
+as Collins and Dunn and their candle emerged round the boulder. I
+remembered long afterwards that it was before I had answered Paulette
+one word about myself, Thompson's stope, anything. But then all I did
+was to stare at something Collins was carrying carefully in his two
+hands. "What's that?" I said&mdash;just to say something.</p>
+
+<p>"Some new kind of high explosive Wilbraham got to try and never did,"
+Collins returned casually. "Saw it in his office to-night and thought it
+was better with us than with Macartney. Don't know just how it works, so
+I'm treating it gingerly." He moved on into the darkness of his own
+tunnel and came back empty-handed. "What are we going to do&mdash;first?" he
+inquired calmly.</p>
+
+<p>I took a look at Paulette. Whether it was from Collins's casual mention
+of Dudley's name or not, she was ghastly. Who she was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span> looking at I
+don't know; but it wasn't at me.</p>
+
+<p>"Sleep," said I grimly. "Two of us need it, if you and Dunn don't.
+Macartney can't get us to-night." Though of that I was none too sure.
+Charliet might get rattled any moment and give us away. But there was no
+good in sticking at trifles.</p>
+
+<p>But Collins was an astute devil. "He won't," he rejoined as calmly as if
+I had spoken of Charliet out loud. "He won't get hurt, either; you can
+bank on that. Make up that fire, Dunn, and we'll give Miss Paulette the
+blankets."</p>
+
+<p>We did, where she lay at one side. We three men dropped like dogs in a
+row in front of the fire. I was next Paulette, with the space of a foot
+or so between us. I had not known how dead weary I was till I stretched
+out flat. Collins and Dunn may have slept; I don't know; but Paulette
+certainly did, as soon as she got her head down. I thought I lay and
+watched the fire, but I must have slept, too. For I woke&mdash;with my heart
+drumming as if I'd heard the trump for the Last Judgment, and Paulette's
+hand in mine. I must have flung out my arm till I touched her, and her
+little fingers were tight round my hard, dirty hand, clinging to it. I
+lay in heaven, in the dark of a frowsy cave we might be hunted out<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span> of
+any minute, with the dying glow of the fire in my eyes and my dream
+girl's hand in mine. And suddenly, like a blow, I heard her whisper in
+her sleep, "Dudley! Oh, dear Dudley!"</p>
+
+<p>I was only Nicky Stretton, and a fool. I lay in the dark with a heart
+like a stone and a girl's warm, clinging hand in mine.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XVII</h2>
+
+<h3>HIGH EXPLOSIVE</h3>
+
+
+<p>There was nothing to tell of any handclasp when I woke in the morning.
+Paulette lay in her blankets with her back to me, as if she had lain so
+all night; Dunn was making up the fire; Collins was absent, till he
+appeared out of his tunnel where he had put Dudley's high explosive the
+night before and nodded to me. None of us spoke: we all had that chilly
+sort of stiffness you get after sleeping with your clothes on. As we ate
+our breakfast I took one glance at Paulette and looked away again. She
+was absolutely white, almost stunned looking, and her eyes would not
+meet mine. I had an intuition she had waked in the night after I slept
+and discovered what she had been doing; but if she were ashamed there
+was no need. God knows I would not have reminded her of the thing. I
+knew the dark hollows and the tear marks under her eyes were for Dudley,
+not for me. But I had to take care of her now, and Collins glanced at me
+as I thought it.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I suppose you realize Charliet's our only line of communication, and
+that he and all the La Chance guns are in the hands of the enemy," he
+observed drily. "What do you think of doing about it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Get Charliet; all the guns and ammunition he can steal; hold this place
+and harry Macartney," I supposed. "What do <i>you</i> think?"</p>
+
+<p>I had turned to Paulette, but she only shook her head with an, "I don't
+know, Mr. Stretton!" I had time to decide she had only called me Nicky
+by mistake six hours ago, before Collins disagreed with me flatly.</p>
+
+<p>"Stay here? Not much! Won't work&mdash;Macartney'd drop on us! Oh, I know he
+won't be able to find our real entrance to this place unless Charliet
+gives us away, and I'm not worrying about that! But, after he realizes
+Miss Valenka has vanished"&mdash;he said her real name perfectly
+casually&mdash;"and when Charliet and most of his guns vanish too, and his
+men begin to get picked off one by one, how long do you suppose it will
+be before Macartney connects the three things&mdash;and smells a rat? He'll
+sense Charliet and a girl can't be fighting him alone. For all we know
+he'll guess you must have got out of Thompson's stope somehow, and dig
+away his rock fence to see! And I imagine we'd look well in here if he
+did!"</p>
+
+<p>"It's just what we would look," said I.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span> "You ass, Collins, with
+Macartney ignorant of the real way in on us, and he and his gang digging
+open Thompson's tunnel against the daylight, with you and me and Dunn in
+the dark on that shelf in Thompson's stope we came in here by, we'd have
+the drop on the lot. Except&mdash;Marcia!" Her name jerked out of me. We
+would have to count Marcia in with Macartney's gang; and, remembering
+she had known me all her life, it made me smart.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Miss Wilbraham&mdash;I should let <i>her</i> rip!" Collins returned
+callously. "Listen, Stretton; what you say's all very well, only we
+can't count on holding this place when we're discovered, while it's a
+matter of <i>if</i> Charliet can get guns! Miss Marcia's rifle and her toy
+popgun aren't going to save us, and I doubt if Charliet can swipe any
+more. What I say is let's cut some horses out of the stable after dark,
+all four of us clear out on them to Caraquet, and set the sheriff and
+his men after Macartney. Unless," he turned boldly to her, "you don't
+want that, Miss Valenka?"</p>
+
+<p>But if she had been going to answer, which I don't think she was, I cut
+her off. "We can't let Marcia rip&mdash;don't talk nonsense, Collins! She's
+Dudley's sister, if she and Macartney are a firm. We can't clear out and
+leave her with a man like that!"</p>
+
+<p>"We can't take her to Caraquet," Collins<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span> argued with some point. "You
+own she doesn't know anything about Macartney's wolf dope; you haven't
+any witnesses to prove he tried it on your wagon, or to set the wolves
+on Dudley. Miss Marcia would just up and swear your whole story was a
+lie&mdash;and all Caraquet would believe her! Nobody alive ever heard of such
+a thing as wolf dope!"</p>
+
+<p>"That's just where you're wrong!" I remembered the boy I'd left cached
+in Skunk's Misery&mdash;and something else, that had been in my head ever
+since wolves and the smell of a Skunk's Misery bottle seemed to go
+together. "Two Frenchmen were run in for using wolf dope in Quebec
+province last winter, for I've an account of their trial somewhere that
+I cut out of an Ottawa paper. And as for a witness, I've a boy cached at
+Skunk's Misery who can prove Macartney made the same stuff there. The
+only thing we might get stuck on in Caraquet is the <i>reason</i> for all the
+murders he's done&mdash;with, and without it!"</p>
+
+<p>"I guess Miss Valenka knows the reason all right," Collins spoke as
+coolly as if she were not there, which may have been the wisest thing to
+do, for though she flushed sharply she said nothing. He went on with
+exactly what she had said herself. "But after Hutton came here to get
+her, he saw he'd be a fool not to grab the La Chance mine, too; and
+unless we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span> can stop him you bet he and his gang have grabbed it! They've
+disposed of Thompson, of all our own men who might have stood by us, of
+Wilbraham," categorically; "they think they've disposed of Dunn
+and me and buried you alive, and&mdash;except for having lost Miss
+Valenka&mdash;Macartney's made his game! Nobody'll know there's anything
+wrong at the mine till the spring, because there's no one interested
+enough to ask questions till Wilbraham's bank payments have stopped long
+enough to look queer. And by that time Macartney and his gang will be
+gone, and the cream of Wilbraham's gold with them. As for us, we can't
+fight him by sitting in this burrow <i>with</i> Miss Paulette, and without
+any guns, even if he doesn't end by nosing out Dunn's and my gold as
+well as Wilbraham's. Why, we depend on Charliet for our food, let alone
+anything else; and for all we know, Charliet may have squeaked on us by
+this time. I say again, let's get a sheriff and posse at Caraquet, and
+come back here and get Macartney! We could do it, if we took Miss
+Paulette and hit the trail to-night."</p>
+
+<p>"And Macartney'd get us, if we tried it!" I had thrashed all that out in
+my head before, while I was tying up Macartney with Charliet's
+clothesline. "We'd be stopped by his picket at the Halfway, if ever we
+got to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> Halfway, for the Caraquet road's likely drifted solid and
+you don't make time digging out smothering horses. No; we'll fight
+Macartney where we are! And the way to do it is with Charliet and guns."</p>
+
+<p>"If you'll tell me how we're to connect with either!" Collins was grim.
+"It's a mighty dangerous thing calling up Charliet on number one Wolf,
+with the whole of La Chance crawling with Macartney and his gang,
+hunting for Miss Paulette. But we can go up to the back door and try
+it!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no," Paulette burst out wildly, "I'm afraid! I mean I know we must
+find out first if Charliet's all right, but you mayn't get him&mdash;and
+you'll give yourselves away!"</p>
+
+<p>It was almost the first time she had spoken, and it was more to Collins
+than to me, but I answered. "We'll get Charliet all right," I began&mdash;and
+Collins gripped me.</p>
+
+<p>"I dunno," he drawled. "Strikes me some one's going to get us&mdash;first!"</p>
+
+<p>He snapped out our candle, which was senseless, since Dunn's red-hot
+fire showed us up as plain as day, and all four of us stood paralyzed.
+Somebody&mdash;running, slipping, with a hideous clatter of stones&mdash;was
+coming down the long passage Collins called his back door.</p>
+
+<p>"Macartney," said I, "and Charliet's given us away!" And with the words
+in my mouth<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span> I had Paulette around the waist and shoved out of sight
+behind the boulder that separated Collins's cave from his tunnel and the
+pierced wall of Thompson's stope. Macartney might be a devil, but there
+was no doubt the man was brave to come like that for a girl, through the
+dark bowels of the earth where Charliet must have warned him Dunn and
+Collins would be lurking. Only he had not got Paulette yet, and he would
+find three men to face before he even saw her. I stooped over her in the
+dark of Collins's tunnel, where just a knife-edge of the cave firelight
+cut over the boulder's top. "Keep still, Paulette&mdash;and for any sake
+don't move and kick Collins's devilish explosive he's got stuck in here
+somewhere," I said, exactly as if I were steady. Which I was not,
+because it was my unlooked for, heaven-sent chance to get square with
+Macartney. I sprang around the boulder to do it and saw Collins strike
+up the barrel of Marcia's rifle in Dunn's stretched left arm.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't shoot," he yelled. "You fool, it's Charliet!"</p>
+
+<p>I stood dead still. It was Charliet, but a Charliet I had never seen.
+His French-Canadian face was tallow white, as he tore into the cave,
+grinning like a dog with rage and excitement. He brushed Dunn and
+Collins aside like flies and grabbed my arm. "Come<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span> out," he panted.
+"Sacr&eacute; damn, bring Mademoiselle Paulette and <i>come out</i>! It is that
+Marcia! She sees you in the shack last night; sees you&mdash;alive and out of
+Thompson's stope where they buried you&mdash;carrying Mademoiselle away! She
+tells Macartney so this morning, when he and I get in after hunting for
+Mademoiselle all night&mdash;praying, me, that I might not make a mistake and
+find her, and that you might. Oh, I tell you I was crazy&mdash;dog crazy! I
+cannot get away from Macartney, I think she may be dead in the snow,
+looking for me who was not there, till first thing this morning we come
+in&mdash;and that she-devil tells Macartney Stretton takes Mademoiselle away!
+Not till now, till all are out of the house, do I have the chance to
+come and warn you what is coming! They&mdash;that Marcia, Macartney, all of
+the men&mdash;start now to dig you out of Thompson's stope they put you in.
+They think they left some hole you crawl out of in the snow and dark,
+that you come for Mademoiselle and take her back into. I could not get
+you even one small cartridge to hold this place, and&mdash;Macartney is
+clever! He will be in here, with all his guns, all his men. And then,
+<i>quoi faire</i>? Come now, all of you, while there is the one chance to
+come unseen, and get on horses and go away. Ah," the man's fierce voice
+broke, ran up imploringly,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span> "I beg you, Mademoiselle, like I would beg
+the Blessed Virgin, to make them come! Before Macartney, or that Marcia,
+finds&mdash;you!"</p>
+
+<p>I jumped around and saw Paulette, in the cave. I had left her safe in
+Collins's tunnel; and there she stood, come out into plain view at the
+sound of Charliet's voice. But she was not looking at him, or me, or any
+of us. Her eyes stared, sword-blue, at the hole where Charliet had
+rushed in from Collins's secret passage: I think all I realized of her
+face was her eyes. I turned, galvanized, to what she stared at,&mdash;and
+saw. Marcia Wilbraham was standing in the entrance from the long
+passage, behind us all, except Paulette; meeting Paulette's eyes with
+her small, bright brown ones, her lips wide in her ugly, gum-showing
+smile. I knew, of course, that she had picked up Charliet's track in the
+snow from his kitchen door to Collins's juniper-covered back door, had
+followed fair on his heels down the dark passage, instead of going with
+Macartney to dig me out of Thompson's stope; that in one second she
+would turn and run back again, to show Macartney Collins's back door.</p>
+
+<p>My jump was late. It was Dunn who saved us. He sprang matter-of-factly,
+like a blood-hound, and pulled Marcia down. She was as strong as a man,
+pretty nearly; she fought<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span> fiercely, till she heard the boy laugh. That
+cowed her, in some queer way. I heard Dunn say: "You'd better stay here
+a while, Miss Wilbraham. It's safer&mdash;than with Macartney;" saw Charliet
+run to help him, and the two of them placidly tie and gag Marcia
+Wilbraham with anything they could take off themselves. It was with a
+vivid impression of Charliet's none too clean neck-handkerchief playing
+a large part in Marcia's toilette that Collins and I jumped, with one
+accord, to Paulette. I don't know what he said to her. I saw her nod.</p>
+
+<p>I said, "We're done for if Macartney gets in on us through Thompson's
+stope and finds this place. He'll just send half his men to scout for
+the other entrance; they'll find it from Charliet's and Marcia's tracks
+and get at us both ways. You stay here with Charliet, while Collins and
+I meet Macartney in Thompson's stope. When&mdash;if&mdash;you hear we can't best
+him, run&mdash;with Charliet! Dunn'll look after Marcia."</p>
+
+<p>She gave me a stunned sort of look, as if I were deserting her, as if I
+didn't&mdash;care! I would have snatched her in my arms and kissed her,
+Dudley or no Dudley lying dead in the bush, but I had no time. Collins
+had me by the elbow, his fierce drawl close to my half-comprehending
+ear. We'd no guns but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span> Marcia's popgun and her rifle; two of us, even on
+the shelf in Thompson's stope, would do little good with those against
+all Macartney's men crowding into the stope and giving us a volley the
+second our fire from the shelf drew theirs. We might pick off half a
+dozen of them before our cartridges gave out. But there was no sense in
+that business. We would have to try&mdash;&mdash;But here I came alive to what
+Collins was really talking about.</p>
+
+<p>"That high explosive," he was saying. "It's a filthy trick, but God
+knows they deserve it! If we blow them back far enough at the very
+entrance of the tunnel, they may never come on again to get in."</p>
+
+<p>I daresay I'd have recoiled in cold blood. But my blood ran hot that
+morning. I did think, though; hard. I said, "Can't do it! No fuse."</p>
+
+<p>"Heaps. Dunn's and mine!" I heard Collins grabbling for it, somewhere in
+the dark of the tunnel.</p>
+
+<p>Behind me somebody lit a candle; who, I never looked to see. In the
+light of it I saw Collins pick up his bundle of blasting powder and
+warned him sharply.</p>
+
+<p>"Look out with that stuff! We don't know it; it may work anyway. If it
+bursts up in the air the stope roof'll be down on us. It<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span> may fire back,
+too&mdash;and we'd be hit behind the point of burst!"</p>
+
+<p>"We won't be," said Collins, between his teeth. "I'll burst it <i>out</i> the
+tunnel, and blow Macartney's gang to rags!"</p>
+
+<p>But that lighted candle at my back had shown me other than explosives:
+the silly, pointless snowshoes I had lugged from my own room in the
+shack. My conscious mind knew now what my subconscious mind had wanted
+them for, like a mill where some one had turned on the current. I swore
+out loud. "By gad, Collins, listen! If we don't smash Macartney, and he
+gets in on us, he'll get Paulette! I've got to stop that, somehow.
+Macartney doesn't <i>know</i> she's here yet; Marcia only guessed it.
+Supposing he were to see only me, alone in Thompson's stope, he might
+never know she was here too!"</p>
+
+<p>"Dunno what you mean," Collins snapped. And I snapped back:</p>
+
+<p>"I mean that if we blow a clean hole at the tunnel entrance, and I burst
+out of it and run, I can get the whole gang after me&mdash;and make time for
+you and Charliet to get Paulette away somewhere, by the back door."</p>
+
+<p>"But"&mdash;Collins halted where he swarmed up into Thompson's
+stope&mdash;"where'll you go? You can't, Stretton. It's death!"</p>
+
+<p>"It's sense," said I. "As for where I'll go,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> Lac Tremblant'll do for
+me; and I bet it will finish any man of Macartney's who tries to come
+after me! Get through into that stope with your fuse, man; I'll hand you
+the blasting stuff. Got it? All right. Here you, gimme that candle!" I
+turned and took it&mdash;out of Paulette's hand!</p>
+
+<p>I gasped, taken aback all standing, before I lied, "It's all right,
+Paulette. I'll be back in a minute." And though I knew she must have
+heard what I was going to do, I had no better sense than to stoop before
+the girl's blank eyes and snatch up my two pairs of snowshoes, that had
+been lying beside the explosive I had just passed up to Collins, before
+I clambered up through the hole into Thompson's stope, on to the shelf
+from whence I had first dropped into Collins's cave.</p>
+
+<p>Collins was down in Thompson's tunnel already, laying his fuse with
+deadly skill. Already, too, we could hear Macartney's men outside,
+leveraging away the boulders that had plugged up the tunnel entrance
+where I was to starve and die. Collins placed the stuff I carried down
+to him. I said, "My God, you can't use all that; the whole stope'll be
+down on us!" And he answered, "No; I've done it right." That was every
+word we uttered till we were back on our high shelf, with a lit fuse
+left behind us in the stope. The fuse burned<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> smooth as a dream, and
+Collins nudged me with fierce satisfaction. But I was suddenly sick with
+horror. Not at the thing we were doing&mdash;if it were devil's work we had
+been driven to be devils&mdash;but at the knowledge that Paulette was
+standing within reach of my feet, that were through the stope wall and
+were hanging down into Collins's tunnel,&mdash;that tunnel every bone in me
+knew was amateur, unsafe, a death trap. The shock of a big explosion in
+Thompson's stope might well bring its roof down on Paulette, standing
+alone in it, waiting,&mdash;trusting to me for safety. I turned my head and
+yelled at her as a man yells at a dog&mdash;or his dearest&mdash;when he is sick
+with fear for her: "Get back out of that into the cave! <i>Run!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>I heard her jump. Heard her&mdash;&mdash;But thought stopped in me, with one
+unwritable, life-checking shock. The whole earth, the very globe, seemed
+to have blown to pieces around me. The flash and roar were like a
+thousand howitzers in my very face; the solid rock shelf I was on leapt
+under me; and behind me the whole of Collins's tunnel collapsed, with a
+grinding roar. I heard Collins gasp, "Good glory"; heard the rocks and
+gravel in the stope before me settling, with an indescribable,
+threatening noise, between thunder and breaking china&mdash;and all I thought
+of was that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span> I'd warned my dream girl in time, that she'd answered me,
+that she was back in Collins's cave, and safe. Till, suddenly to eyes
+that had been too dazzled and seared to see it clearing, the smoke
+before me cleared, the choking fumes lessened, and I saw. Saw, straight
+in front of me, where a tunnel had been and was no longer, a clean hole
+like a barn door where Thompson's tunnel entrance had been but two-men
+wide; saw out, into furious, crimson color that turned slowly, as my
+sight grew normal, into the golden, dazzling glory of winter sun on
+snow.</p>
+
+<p>There was silence outside in the sun, all but some yells and moaning.
+How much damage we'd done I couldn't see; or where Macartney's men were,
+dead or alive. But now, while they were paralyzed with shock and
+surprise, now was my time to get through them. I lowered myself gingerly
+to the rubbish heap that had been the smooth floor of Thompson's stope;
+edged to the tunnel entrance; slipped my feet into the toe and heel
+straps of the snowshoes I had held tightly against me through all the
+unspeakable, hellish uproar of rending rock, and sprang,&mdash;sprang out
+into the sunlight, out on the clear snow, past wounded men, reeling men,
+dying men, and raced as I never put foot to ground before or since, for
+Lac Tremblant, glittering clear and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> free in front of me,&mdash;that Lac
+Tremblant I had thought of subconsciously when I carried snowshoes into
+Collins's cave.</p>
+
+<p>In the beginning of this story I said what Lac Tremblant was like. It
+was a lake that was no lake; that should have been our water-way out of
+the bush instead of miles of expensive road; and was no more practicable
+than a rope ladder to the stars. For the depth of Lac Tremblant, or its
+fairway, were two things no man might count on. It would fall in a night
+to shallows a child might wade through, among bristling rocks no one had
+ever guessed at; and rise in a morning to the tops of the spruce scrub
+on its banks,&mdash;a sweet spread of water, with never a rock to be seen.
+What hidden spring fed it was a mystery. But in the bitterest winter it
+was never frozen further than to form surging masses of frazil ice that
+would neither let a canoe push through them, nor yet support the weight
+of a man. It was on that frazil ice, that some people called lolly, that
+I meant to run for my life now, trusting to the resistance of the two
+feet of snow that lay on the lake in the mysterious way snow does lie on
+lolly, and to the snowshoes on my feet. And as I slithered on to the
+soft snow of the lake, from the crackling, breaking shell ice on the La
+Chance shore, I knew I had done well. Some&mdash;a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span> good many&mdash;of Macartney's
+men were killed or half-killed by our deadly blast, but not all. He had
+been more cautious than I guessed. I saw the rest of his men bunched
+some hundred feet from the smashed-out tunnel; saw Macartney, too,
+standing with them. But all I cared for was that he should see me and
+come out after me on the crust of snow and lolly over Lac
+Tremblant,&mdash;that would never carry him without the snowshoes he did not
+have&mdash;and give Paulette her chance to get away. I yelled at him and
+skimmed out over the trembling ice like a bird.</p>
+
+<p>Neither Macartney nor his men had stirred in that one flying glance I
+had dared take at them. But sheer tumult came out of them now. Then
+shots&mdash;shots that missed me, and a sudden howled order from Macartney I
+dared not turn my head or break my stride to understand. The giving
+surface under me was bearing, but a quarter-second's pause would have
+let me through. There was no sense in zigzagging. Once I was clear, I
+ran as straight as I dared for the other shore, five miles away;
+but&mdash;suddenly I realized I was not clear! I was followed.</p>
+
+<p>Somebody else on snowshoes had shot out of Thompson's tunnel, over the
+crackling shore ice on to the snow and frazil; was up to me, close
+behind me.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Run, Nicky," shrieked Paulette's voice. "<i>Run!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>I slewed my head around and saw her, running behind me!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XVIII</h2>
+
+<h3>LAC TREMBLANT</h3>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Across the ice that never froze<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The snow that never bore,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My love ran out to follow me&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To follow to the shore."<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4"><i>The Day the World Went Mad.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<p>It may be true that I swore aloud; but what I meant by it was more like
+praying. Over me was the blue winter sky and the gold sun; under me the
+treacherous spread of the lake that was no lake, that one misstep might
+send me through, to God knew what hideous depth of unfrozen water, or
+bare, bone-shattering stone; behind me were Macartney and Macartney's
+men; and close up to me, nearer every second, my Paulette, my dream girl
+who had never been mine. There was nothing to do for both of us but to
+keep on crossing Lac Tremblant. Missteps might be death, but turning
+back was worse&mdash;for her, anyway.</p>
+
+<p>I yelled, "Keep wide! Get abreast of me&mdash;don't take any direction you
+don't see me take. But <i>keep wide</i>!" Because what held<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span> one of us would
+never hold two, and behind me, running in my tracks&mdash;&mdash;Well, even a
+light girl would not run long!</p>
+
+<p>Paulette only screamed, "Yes. Keep on! They're coming!" She may have
+needed her breath, I don't know; but she didn't run like it. She ran
+like a deer, with my own flat, heel-dragging stride on the snowshoes I
+had not thought she knew how to use. One more shot came after us. I
+yelled again to her to keep wide and heard her sheer off a little to
+obey me; but she still ran behind me. God knows I didn't realize, till
+afterwards, that it was to keep Macartney from shooting me. I didn't
+even wonder why Collins and Dunn weren't firing into the brown of
+Macartney's men with Marcia's rifle and popgun. I was too busy watching
+the snow surfaces before me.</p>
+
+<p>There was a difference in them. I can't explain what, but a difference
+between where there was water to buoy the snow, and where it lay on
+shell ice. The open black holes where there was nothing at all any one
+could see, and I didn't worry over them. I only knew we must run over
+water, or the light stuff under us would let us through. I kept moving
+my hand in infinitesimal signals to Paulette, and God knows she was
+quick at understanding. My heart was in my mouth for her, but she never
+made a mistake, or a stumble where a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span> stumble would have meant the end.
+She called to me suddenly; something that sounded like, "They're
+coming!"</p>
+
+<p>I turned my head and saw out of the tail of my eye, as a man sees when
+he's riding a race. They <i>were</i> coming! Macartney's men, and&mdash;I
+thought&mdash;Macartney; but I knew better than to look long enough to make
+sure. His men, anyhow, had raced out on the lake as we had raced, and
+there was no need to watch what became of them. Their dying screams came
+to us, as they floundered and sank in their heavy boots through snow and
+frazil ice, to depths they would never get out of. I might have been
+sick anywhere else. I was fierce with joy out there in Lac Tremblant,
+running with a girl over the thin crust under which death lurked to
+snatch at us, as it had snatched at Macartney's men. Neither of us
+spoke. I was thinking too hard. I could have run indefinitely as we were
+running, but Paulette was just a girl. What of Paulette if she slackened
+with weariness, if I led her wrong by six inches, or missed a single
+threatening sign on the stuff we fled over?</p>
+
+<p>If I had been sure Macartney was drowned with his men, I might have
+taken her back to La Chance; but I was not sure. And, Macartney or no
+Macartney, the track I had led her out on the lake by was the only one I
+would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span> have dared trust to return on,&mdash;and it was all lumps of snowy
+lolly and blue water, where Macartney's men had broken through. I looked
+ahead of me with my mind running like a mill. We had done about half the
+five-mile crossing; we might do the rest if we could stop and breathe
+for ten minutes, for five, even for two. Only, in all the width of the
+lake that lay like cake icing in front of us, there was not one place
+where we could dare to stand. The water under us was higher than I had
+ever known it. Not one single dagger-toothed rock showed as they had
+showed when I crossed it in a canoe the night before it froze to the
+thick slush that was all it ever froze to. There was not one single
+place to&mdash;&mdash;But violently, out of the back of my memory, something came
+to me. There was one place in Lac Tremblant where, high water or low, a
+man might always stand&mdash;if I could hit it in the smothering, featureless
+snow.</p>
+
+<p>"The island!" I gasped out loud. Because there was one&mdash;a high, narrow
+island without even a bush on it&mdash;rising gradually, not precipitately
+like the rest of the rocks in Lac Tremblant, out of the uncertain water.
+But for half an hour I thought it might as well be non-existent. Stare
+as I might I could see no sign of it&mdash;and suddenly I all but fell with
+blessed shock. I was on it; on the highest end<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span> of it, with solid ground
+under my feet; solid ground and safety, breath and rest. I yelled to
+Paulette, "Jump to me!" and she jumped. That was all there was to it,
+except a man and a girl, panting, staggering, clinging together, till
+sense came to them, and they dropped flat in the snow.</p>
+
+<p>I said sense, but I don't know that I had any. I lay there staring at
+Paulette and her long bronze hair that had come down as she ran, till it
+was like a mantle over her and the snow round her. I had never thought
+women had hair like that. I cried out, "My God, Paulette, why did you
+come?"</p>
+
+<p>I may have sounded angry. I was, as a man always is angry when he has
+dragged a woman into his danger. Paulette panted without looking at me.
+"I&mdash;had to! The tunnel&mdash;caved in!"</p>
+
+<p>"I told you to get out of it!" I sat up where I had flung myself down
+and stared at her. She sat up, too, both of us crimson-faced and
+dishevelled. But neither of us thought of that. I stormed like a fool.
+"What possessed you to stay in the tunnel&mdash;or to follow me? I told you
+to jump for the cave!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I didn't!" Paulette stiffened as if she froze. "I hadn't time. I
+would have had to cross the tunnel. And I hadn't <i>time</i> to do anything
+but jump to you and Collins before<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span> your stuff blew up. I'd just got on
+your shelf when it went off, and it stunned me till I had just sense
+enough left to lie still and hold on. But afterwards, when I saw what
+you were going to do, I put on the snowshoes you'd left by the tunnel
+entrance and came after you. I'm sorry I did, now!"</p>
+
+<p>"But Collins&mdash;&mdash;" I looked blankly across the two miles of quivering
+death trap we still had to cross before we gained what safety there
+might be in the Halfway shore and the neighborhood of Macartney's
+picket, and my thoughts were not of Collins&mdash;"Why, in heaven's name,
+didn't Collins have sense enough to lug you back into his cave with him
+and Charliet, instead of letting you take a chance like this?"</p>
+
+<p>"Collins couldn't get back himself," Paulette retorted, as if I were
+unbearably stupid. "Nobody could get back! I told you the tunnel <i>caved
+in</i>, till it was solid between us and the others. Collins saw I had to
+follow you. In two more minutes Dick would have come to hunt Thompson's
+stope for me, and we had no guns to stave him off. You and Collins left
+them in the tunnel!" It was just what we had done, and I wasted good
+time in remembering it, guiltily. Paulette stood up and twisted back her
+streaming cloud of hair. "So, as I had to come with you," she resumed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span>
+without looking at me, "don't you think we'd better get on? If you're
+waiting for me to rest, you needn't."</p>
+
+<p>I wasn't, altogether. I stared back over the perilous way we had come.
+There was no black speck of any one following us on its treacherous
+face; no sound of shots; no anything from the shore we had left. Yet,
+"Where do you suppose Macartney is?" I asked involuntarily.</p>
+
+<p>"Dead." Her voice was almost indifferent, but she shivered. "Or he'd
+have gone on shooting at us."</p>
+
+<p>I nodded, but I would have felt easier if I had thought so. Somehow I
+didn't, I don't know why. I know nothing would have induced me to take
+Paulette back to La Chance, even if the trodden lolly would have borne
+us again. I had a pang about Collins, left alone there; but Collins
+could take care of himself, and Paulette's shiver had reminded me we
+should freeze to death if we loitered where we were. I pointed to the
+snowy lake between us and the Halfway shore. "Can you do two more miles
+of running, over that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she glanced down at her slim, trained body, rather superbly.
+"Only&mdash;there's no one following us! Have we got to be quite so quick?"</p>
+
+<p>"Quicker! We don't know about Macartney.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span> If he's alive he has a stable
+full of horses, and he knows where we're running to. He may try to cut
+us off." I half lied; he could not cut us off, since horses would be of
+no use to him in the heavy snow, and on foot it would take him two days
+to go round Lac Tremblant to the Halfway, where crossing the lolly could
+bring us in two hours. But I had no mind to air my real reason for
+haste.</p>
+
+<p>I should have known Paulette was too shrewd for me. "I'm a fool&mdash;Lac
+Tremblant never bears, of course," she said quite quietly. "Go on, Mr.
+Stretton. Only&mdash;don't stop, if anything goes wrong with me!"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing will go wrong," said I, just as if I believed it. If she had
+called me Nicky, as she had done by mistake the night before, when she
+slept with her hand clasping mine, if she'd even looked at me, I must
+have burst out that I loved her, past life and death, and out to the
+world to come. But it was no time to force love-making on a girl who had
+seen the man she meant to marry lie dead before her eyes. If she turned
+shaky, or cried, I could never save her. For the bit of lake in front of
+us was ten times worse than what we'd crossed. I knew that when I
+tightened up the snowshoes silently and led my dream girl out on it. I
+would have given half my life for a rope, such as people have on
+glaciers. But I had no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span> rope, and each of us would have to run, or sink,
+alone.</p>
+
+<p>I meant, of course&mdash;&mdash;But that's no matter. I got Paulette off the
+island and, inch by inch, feeling my way, back to the channel where
+buoyant water, at least, lay under us. I twisted and turned like a
+corkscrew, but I dared not leave it. Once I cautioned Paulette never to
+try a short cut, just to keep abreast of me; and twice my heart was in
+my mouth at a hollow, instant-long clatter under our shoes. But we got
+on over the stuff somehow, leaving holes of blue water in our tracks,
+with great gobbets of snow floating in them. The shore lay close in
+front of us, with a hard distinct edge of shell ice showing where the
+water stopped. I was just going to call out that in ten feet more we'd
+be safe over the lolly, when&mdash;smash&mdash;both of us went through! I thought
+I fell a mile before I hit the water that was going to drown us; hit it
+knees first, just as I'd gone through, and&mdash;I sprawled in icy slush that
+rose no higher than my waist. I was in a sort of pocket between two
+rocks that were holding up the lolly. There was an avalanche of caving
+snow and ice all round me, but I was not drowned or likely to be,&mdash;only
+I barely thought of it. For I could not see Paulette. Suddenly, past
+belief, I heard her scream: "Nicky!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I fought blindly to the sound of her voice, wormed between my screening
+rocks, and shouted as I stood up. She was not even in slush! She had
+gone through shell ice to bare ground, a long strip of bare ground that
+led straight to the Halfway shore; roofed, high above my head, with
+shell ice and lolly that filtered a silver-green light. My dream girl
+lay there in her little blue sweater with the wind knocked out of
+her&mdash;and that was all. I kicked off my snowshoes that were not even
+broken and carried her under the ice roof to the Halfway shore. I may
+have thanked God aloud; I don't know. Only I carried her, with my face
+close to hers, and the slush and snow from her falling over me as I
+stumbled under the ice roof to the blessed shore. I had just sense
+enough to drop her in the blinding daylight, and drop myself beside her.
+I couldn't speak, from dead cold fear, now that I had saved her, of what
+it would have been if I had not. For two gasping minutes we just lay
+there.</p>
+
+<p>Then Paulette said pantingly, "I'm so dreadfully sorry&mdash;I've been such a
+trouble! But I couldn't do anything but come, and&mdash;I forgot you couldn't
+want me!"</p>
+
+<p>I sat up and saw her, sitting on a cold, bare, wind-swept rock that was
+all the refuge I had to offer her. Half a mile farther on were food<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span> and
+shelter in the Halfway shack&mdash;and it might as well have been in Heaven,
+for with Macartney's men cached in it I naturally could not take her
+there. Behind that, twenty-seven miles off, was Caraquet; but even a
+girl with a trained body like Paulette's could never make twenty-seven
+miles on top of all we'd done.</p>
+
+<p>"It's no question of wanting you," I exclaimed angrily. "It is that I
+don't know what to do. But want you&mdash;when do you suppose I haven't
+wanted you, ever since the night I first saw you by Dudley's fire? What
+do you suppose I'd ever have been in this game <i>for</i>, if I hadn't wanted
+just you in all this world? My heart of hearts, don't you know I love
+you?" I lost my head, or I never would have said it, for I saw her
+flinch. That brought me back to myself in the snow and desolation round
+us that stood for God's world as nothing else would have done. I burst
+out in shame, "Oh, forgive me! I never meant to let that out. I know you
+never cared a hang for me; that you were going to marry Dudley, if he
+hadn't been killed!"</p>
+
+<p>For one solid minute Paulette never opened her mouth. She sat like a
+colored statue, with rose-crimson cheeks and gold-bronze hair, under the
+white January sun. Her eyes were so dark in her face that they looked
+like blue-black ink. "I&mdash;I never was engaged to Dudley,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span> she gasped at
+last, more as if it were jerked out of her than voluntarily. "I didn't
+think it was any business of yours, but I never was. We&mdash;Dudley and
+I&mdash;only said so, because it seemed the simplest way to manage Marcia,
+when Dudley brought me here to get me out of that emerald business. He
+was good to me, if ever a man was good to a girl he was only sorry for;
+I can't forget that brought him to his death. I'm sick with sorrow for
+him,&mdash;but I never was going to marry Dudley! He didn't even want me to.
+He&mdash;&mdash;Oh, <i>Nicky</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>Because I couldn't stand it; I'd seen her eyes. I had both her hands in
+mine, I think I was telling her over and over how I had always loved
+her, how I had stood out of Dudley's way, that I didn't expect, of
+course, that she could care about an Indian-faced fool like me,
+when&mdash;suddenly&mdash;I knew! Like roses and silver trumpets and shelter out
+there in the homeless snow, <i>I knew</i>! All Paulette said was, "Oh,
+Nicky," again. But the two of us were in each other's arms.</p>
+
+<p>I don't know how long we clung or what we said. But at last I lifted my
+Indian-dark head from her gold one and spoke abruptly out of Paradise.
+"By gad, I have it!"</p>
+
+<p>"Have what?" Paulette gasped. "Oh, you certainly have most of my hair;
+it's all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span> wound up in your coat buttons&mdash;if you mean that!"</p>
+
+<p>I didn't. "I meant I knew where we could go, and that's to Skunk's
+Misery," I harked back soberly, remembering the boy I had left there
+with a fire and shelter anyhow, if not food.</p>
+
+<p>"But you said it was a horrible place!"</p>
+
+<p>"So it is, when you have anywhere else to go. But we can't try the
+Halfway with Macartney's men in it, and neither of us could make
+Caraquet to-night. We've got to have shelter, darling."</p>
+
+<p>Paulette stopped plaiting her hair in a thick rope. "Say that again,"
+she ordered curiously.</p>
+
+<p>"What&mdash;Skunk's Misery?" But suddenly I understood, and used that word I
+had never said aloud before:</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Darling</i> darling, Skunk's Misery is our only chance. Get up and come
+on!"</p>
+
+<p>But she answered without moving.</p>
+
+<p>"Want to tell you something first. The tunnel falling in wasn't all the
+reason I ran after you. I thought&mdash;thought Dick might not dare to shoot
+at you if I were between you and him, so&mdash;&mdash;Oh, Nicky, <i>don't</i> kiss my
+horrid, chapped hands!"</p>
+
+<p>But I was glad to hide my humbled face on them, remembering how I had
+stormed at her.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span> I muttered, "Why didn't you tell me&mdash;out there on the
+lake?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you were pretty unpleasant, and"&mdash;as I kissed her, my dear love I
+had never thought to touch&mdash;"oh, Nicky, how could I tell you? I said
+everything to you last night but '<i>Nicholas Dane Stretton, I love
+you!</i>'&mdash;and all the notice you took was to kneel perfectly silent, with
+a face as long as your arm. You never even answered me, when I called
+you Nicky by mistake!"</p>
+
+<p>I hadn't dared. But it was no time to be talking of those things. Let
+alone that my wet breeches had frozen till I felt as if my legs didn't
+belong to me, we had landed exactly where old Thompson had been drowned.
+I wanted to get away from there, quickly; leaving no more trail than was
+necessary. I looked round me and saw how to do it.</p>
+
+<p>In front of us was the hole in the shore ice and all the smash and
+flurry where we had gone through. Where we had crawled on shore, from
+under the intact ice roof, was bare rock, wind-swept clean. It struck me
+that with a little management, and to a cursory inspector, it could look
+as though Paulette and I were drowned like Thompson. The snow had not
+piled on this side the lake as it had on ours. Detached rocks, few but
+practicable stepping-stones, lifted their bare bulk out of it, between<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span>
+us and the spruce bush we had to strike through to avoid the Halfway and
+Macartney's picket. Some kind of a trail we must leave to Skunk's
+Misery, but it need not begin here, in the first place Macartney would
+look, if he were alive to look anywhere. Paulette's eyes followed mine
+as I thought it, and she nodded. It was without a track of any sort,
+after the lake trail ended, that she and I stopped in the thick spruces
+and put on our snowshoes for the last lap of the way to Skunk's Misery.</p>
+
+<p>My dream girl's trained young body served her well. As she stepped out
+after me, I would never have guessed she had run a yard. It was easy
+enough to avoid the Halfway, and unlikely that Macartney's men would
+ever discover our devious track in the thick bush. Crossing the Caraquet
+road was the only place where we had to leave a track in the open. I did
+the best I could with it by picking up Paulette, and carrying her and
+her shoes into thick bush again; but I could not honestly feel much
+pleasure in the result. Any one with any sense would know my sunken shoe
+marks had carried double, but it was the best I could do. It was no
+pleasure to me either to hear Paulette exclaim sharply, as I set her
+down:</p>
+
+<p>"Nicky, I <i>forgot</i>! Dick can snowshoe after us, if he's alive. Charliet
+made a lot of snowshoes at odd times, to sell in Quebec if he ever<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span> went
+back there. They were piled up in the shed behind the kinty, and I
+believe Dick knew&mdash;though he didn't remember it in time to save his men.
+If he follows us I"&mdash;her lip curled in fear and hatred&mdash;"Oh, I hope he's
+dead!"</p>
+
+<p>So did I. Yet somehow I had never felt it. "Well, if he isn't," I said
+roughly, "he'll have to do twenty-two miles to catch up to our five, and
+then some to Skunk's Misery. He couldn't make good enough time round the
+lake to catch us to-night, supposing he knew where we were going; even
+on the chance of him, we've got to have one night's rest. And our only
+place to find it is Skunk's Misery!"</p>
+
+<p>Paulette nodded and stepped out after me once more. It was dead toil in
+the soft snow, and it was slow; for Macartney or no Macartney, there was
+no making time in the untrodden bush. I cut our way as short as I dared,
+but do the best I could it was dark when we came to that forlorn, evil
+hollow in the gap of desolate hills that Caraquet folk called Skunk's
+Misery. That had its points though, considering we needed to reach
+Macartney's old lean-to unseen, for the Skunk's Misery population was in
+bed, and as I said before, they had no dogs to bark at us. In dead
+silence, with Paulette holding to my coat and our snowshoes under our
+arms, we went Indian file through the maze of winding tracks Skunk's
+Misery used for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span> roads, under rocks and around them; and on the
+hard-trodden paths our feet left no trace. At least, I thought so: and
+it was just where I slipped up! If I had looked behind me, when Paulette
+would not let me carry her snowshoes, I would have seen the tails of
+them dragging a telltale cut in the snow behind her, as they sagged from
+her tired arm. But my eyes were straight before me, on the door of
+Macartney's lean-to. It hung open, as it had always hung, but I only
+glanced in to make sure it was empty. It was elsewhere I was going,
+around the huge boulder that backed the place, and down a gully that
+apparently brought up against blind rock&mdash;only I knew better. I found
+the opening of the rocky passage I had wormed down once before with my
+back scraping the living rock between me and the sky, and on my hands
+and knees, with Paulette after me, I went down it again. It ended
+without warning, just as I had known it would end, in an open cave. A
+glow of fire was ahead of me; and, stooping over it&mdash;what I had never
+imagined I should see with joy and gratitude&mdash;the boy I had left there,
+toasting a raw rabbit on a stick. That was all I saw. And what possessed
+me I don't know, but as I stood up I turned on Paulette with a sudden
+wave of stale jealousy overwhelming me, and a question I had kept back
+all the afternoon:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Paulette, you're sure&mdash;<i>sure</i>&mdash;it's me, and not Dudley? That you didn't
+love the poor chap best?"</p>
+
+<p>Paulette scrambled to her feet beside me. "It's you," she said clearly.
+"I told you Dudley never loved me, or I him. I'll mourn for him always,
+for he met his death through me. But he never wanted to marry me, and if
+he were alive, he'd be the first person to tell you so!"</p>
+
+<p>There was a pause, definite, distinct, while you could count five. The
+boy at the fire started to frozen attention at sight of us, as sharply
+as his distorted body could start. But before he could speak, or I did,
+another voice answered Paulette's from the dark of the cave behind the
+fire,&mdash;an unexpected, mind-shattering voice, that took me toward it with
+one bound. "By gad," it said, "he would, would he? Two things have to go
+to that!"</p>
+
+<p>I stood paralyzed where I had jumped. Paulette's snowshoes dropped
+clattering on the cave floor. Dudley Wilbraham, whom the wolves had
+eaten&mdash;little, fat, with a face more like an egg than ever, but whole
+and <i>alive</i>&mdash;stood in the dimness of the cave behind the fire and my
+Skunk's Misery boy!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XIX</h2>
+
+<h3>SKUNK'S MISERY</h3>
+
+
+<p>Paulette said, "Oh my heavens, Dudley!" and went straight to pieces.</p>
+
+<p>I don't know that I made much of a job of being calm myself. All I could
+get out was, "The wolves! We thought they'd eaten you&mdash;Paulette found
+your cap out by the Caraquet road."</p>
+
+<p>Dudley, for whom the whole of La Chance had beaten the bush all one
+livelong night, whom his own sister had sworn was killed and eaten,
+Dudley made the best show of the three. He had a flask, of course,&mdash;when
+had he not? He dosed Paulette and me with what was left in it, but even
+with the whisky limbering my parched throat I hadn't sense to ask a
+coherent question. Dudley looked from Paulette to me and spoke pretty
+collectedly to both of us.</p>
+
+<p>"I wasn't eaten, if that's what brought you two here&mdash;though judging
+from your conversation I imagine it wasn't. Thank the Lord you are here
+though, anyway. I've been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span> pretty wild, tied up here with this snow.
+But"&mdash;sharply&mdash;"where the devil's Marcia?"</p>
+
+<p>"Hidden away from Macartney, with Charliet to look after her." It was
+all I could bring myself to say, except that she thought Dudley was
+dead.</p>
+
+<p>"Does Macartney think so too?" the corpse demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"He worked hard enough to feel safe in thinking it," I returned
+bitterly, and came out with the whole story. How Macartney said the
+wolves had howled around the shack till their noise drove Dudley
+distracted, and he had slipped out after them unnoticed, with a gun;
+that Macartney, the two girls and half the men had gone to look for him,
+when he never returned, till Paulette found his wolf-doped cap torn up
+by the Caraquet road, and Marcia found him, in the bush&mdash;unrecognizable
+but for what rags of his sable-lined coat were left on his body. And
+Dudley's hard-boiled egg face never changed with one word of it.</p>
+
+<p>"So that was how it was worked," he reflected quite composedly. "And
+Macartney thinks it was I Marcia found! Well, it wasn't&mdash;though I
+daresay it was my coat, all right, just as it was my cap Paulette picked
+up by the road. But it damn well would have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span> been me, if it hadn't been
+for"&mdash;he paused casually, and pointed behind him&mdash;"Baker."</p>
+
+<p>"Baker! That good-for-nothing devil who was always trailing after you?
+Why, Macartney said&mdash;&mdash;" but I remembered Macartney had only said Baker
+was missing, too. I wheeled on the dimness of the inside cave and saw
+what I had missed in my flurry over Dudley. A second man&mdash;white-faced,
+black-eyebrowed, slim looking&mdash;was standing just where the fire glow did
+not reach him, staring at Paulette and me. I said, "Land of love,
+<i>Baker</i>!" And I may be forgiven if I swore.</p>
+
+<p>Baker nodded as undramatically as Dudley. "Yes, it was me. I had sense
+enough all along to guess Macartney was going to finish Mr. Wilbraham
+with the wolf dope he'd tried out on you, if the rest of the gang
+hadn't. And I wouldn't stand for sculduddery like that, for one thing;
+and for another I thought I'd come out better in the end by sticking to
+the boss, like you seen me doing often enough! So I just told him he was
+being lain for and brought him out here. I knew this cave was safe, for
+I lived here two months before me and the rest of us dribbled into La
+Chance. And I knew the Halfway wasn't&mdash;for the two men who turned Billy
+Jones out of it, with a sham letter from the boss, were the two who
+drowned old Thompson! I've played honest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span> in my way, Mr. Stretton, if
+you never thought so."</p>
+
+<p>"Shut up," Dudley interrupted him indignantly. "I'd be where Marcia
+thought she found me, if it hadn't been for you. Listen, Stretton! I got
+fussy after you left for Billy Jones's that afternoon; I'd been hitting
+it up the day before, and you know how that leaves me! I didn't see why
+in blazes I hadn't gone with you to Billy's instead of sitting around
+the house, and a couple of hours after you left I started out to get a
+horse and follow you. But it's a lie that I heard wolves, or thought of
+them: there wasn't one around the place. Macartney wasn't around,
+either. I guess he was out in the bush fixing up the wolf-baited ground
+that was to get me, for he'd fixed up my coat and cap with it before he
+started. I thought something smelt like the devil when I put them on,
+but I never guessed it was my own things. I went out to the stable just
+as I might on any other day, only nobody happened to see me go, and
+right there I ran on Baker. I told him to come for a ride with me, but
+he didn't seem to think much of the horse racket; said he knew a short
+cut to Billy's, and it would be better for my head if we just walked. It
+was Baker told me the devilish reek I smelled was coming from my own
+coat, and I chucked it down by the stable door. God<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span> knows which of
+Macartney's men picked it up and wore it after I left it, for Marcia to
+find," even Dudley looked sick, "but it wasn't me! I smelt my cap, too,
+after I'd walked some of the muzziness out of me, and I threw that
+away&mdash;where Paulette found it. We didn't leave a sign of a track, of
+course; it was long before there was any snow. If I'd known why Baker
+had me out there, walking away from La Chance, I'd have turned back and
+defied Macartney, or I'd never have started. But it wasn't till it was
+black dark, and I'd walked enough sense into myself to ask why we were
+not getting to Billy Jones's, that Baker took his life in his hands&mdash;for
+you may bet I was fighting mad at having seemed to run away&mdash;and told me
+that you and I and all of us were in a trap that was going to spring and
+get us, and give Macartney our mine. He let out about Thompson's murder,
+and you and the wolf dope; and that Macartney'd kicked Billy Jones out
+of the Halfway with a forged dismissal from me, and had his own men
+waiting there to get you while he limed the bush and my cap and coat,
+for the wolves to get <i>me</i>. And you know I'd have been dead sure to go
+out after them with a gun, just as he said I did, if I'd heard them come
+yowling around the shack while I was in it! I'd have gone back to face
+Macartney, even then, only&mdash;&mdash;Well,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span> you've had experience of
+Macartney's wolves, and you'd know I couldn't! We could hear the row
+they were making even where we stood, miles away. We set off on the dead
+run for Caraquet and help, but we had to break the journey somewhere. We
+couldn't face Macartney's men at Billy's, for neither of us had a
+gun&mdash;and that's another lie to Macartney&mdash;and it was no good leaving the
+devil to run into hell. So Baker brought me here."</p>
+
+<p>"But," I gasped, "I don't see how you missed me! I was here, too, that
+night!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, we weren't&mdash;till the morning," Dudley snapped in his old way. "It
+was just beginning to snow when we crawled down the burrow you'd crawled
+out of and found this place&mdash;and your boy."</p>
+
+<p>"But I told him&mdash;&mdash;D'ye mean he just <i>let</i> you find him?"</p>
+
+<p>"He did not," grimly. "He was hidden away somewhere, and I don't suppose
+he'd ever have come out, if I hadn't happened to use what seems to have
+been your password! I said out loud that I'd give twenty dollars to any
+one who'd get me some food; and out comes your friend, and says you told
+him to trust any one who said that, and where was the twenty? So, after
+that, we settled down!"</p>
+
+<p>"But&mdash;&mdash;" Dudley's selfishness had always been colossal, yet this time
+it beat even<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span> me. "What did you suppose was going to become of your
+sister and Paulette&mdash;left with Macartney when you'd disappeared, and the
+Halfway picket had got <i>me</i>?" I burst out.</p>
+
+<p>"My acquaintance with you made me hopeful they wouldn't get you," Dudley
+began drily, "and as for the girls&mdash;&mdash;" but his sham indifference broke
+down. "Don't talk of it, will you?" he bellowed. "I did think you'd be
+all right, but I was in hell for those girls till I could get to
+Caraquet and take back help for them! Only this cursed snow stopped me.
+We had to wait till it was packed enough for Baker to sneak down to the
+Halfway and steal a couple of my own horses, for us to ride to Caraquet.
+But that's how I'm here&mdash;and how Marcia found a half-eaten man in my
+top-coat, that she thought was me!"</p>
+
+<p>I was speechless. It was all so simple, even to Dudley's twenty dollars
+and my boy. But before I could say so, Dudley turned on me with his old
+vicious pounce. "Why in blazes don't you tell me what you left Marcia
+for, after bullying me because I did? And why are you and Paulette here,
+if you thought I was killed?"</p>
+
+<p>"We left her because we had to, with a thousand tons of earth between us
+and the only way we could have got back to her alive," said<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span> I
+wrathfully. "And as for why we're here,"&mdash;I poured out the whole story
+of my return to La Chance, from Dudley's own funeral procession that met
+me and my bootless fight with Macartney, to the resurrection of Collins
+and Dunn, and Paulette's and my race across Lac Tremblant. I left out
+Marcia's share in my defeat, but Dudley gave a comprehending sniff.</p>
+
+<p>"Marcia always was a fool about Macartney! But it's no matter, since she
+isn't with him&mdash;whether he's alive or dead. Only you were a worse fool,
+Stretton, to cross that lake with a girl in tow. I don't know why you
+weren't both drowned, like Thompson&mdash;&mdash;" but his voice broke. He was a
+good little man, under his bad habits, or he never would have done what
+he had for Paulette. He muttered something about all the decent men
+who'd met their death because he wouldn't listen to Paulette when she
+tried to tell him the truth about Macartney, damned him up and down, and
+turned to Paulette with a sweet sort of roughness:</p>
+
+<p>"You look done up, my girl! Here, get down by the fire and eat what our
+chef's got ready!" For the crippled boy had gone on with his cooking,
+regardless of the talk round him, and his rabbit was done.</p>
+
+<p>But Paulette never looked at the food Dudley held out to her. "You're
+not angry, Dudley?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span> she asked very low. "I mean&mdash;for what I said to
+Nicky as we came in?"</p>
+
+<p>"I was," but Dudley grinned in the half dark. "It was true enough, only
+nobody likes to hear their own obituary. But I knew about Stretton long
+ago, if you hadn't the sense to! You take him, my child, and my
+blessing. God knows I never asked you to marry an old soak like me!"</p>
+
+<p>He shoved Paulette's hand into mine and stared at the two of us for a
+second. Then&mdash;"By gad," he added, in a different voice, "I hope
+Macartney's got drowned, or he may walk in on the lot of us!"</p>
+
+<p>"How?" I demanded scornfully. "He couldn't do thirty-two miles in the
+time Paulette and I did fifteen, even if he knew where to do it to!"</p>
+
+<p>"He doesn't have to, my young son," Dudley stood musing on it. "Baker
+and I didn't do any twenty, coming here; and it was Macartney's own path
+we came by. That doesn't go round by any Halfway! If he takes a fancy to
+come here by it, and strikes your tracks as you two came into Skunk's
+Misery, the rest wouldn't take him long! I believe&mdash;hang on a minute,
+while I speak to Baker!" He wheeled suddenly and disappeared into the
+dark of the cave where Baker stood aloof.</p>
+
+<p>"You needn't worry about Macartney," I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span> said to Paulette. "We didn't
+leave any tracks, once we got into broken snow!"</p>
+
+<p>I turned at a rustle behind me and looked straight into the muzzle of
+Macartney's revolver and into Macartney's eyes!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XX</h2>
+
+<h3>THE END</h3>
+
+
+<p>The boy at the fire let out a yelp and dropped flat. Dudley and Baker,
+invisible somewhere, neither spoke nor stirred. And I stood like a fool,
+as near the death of Nicholas Dane Stretton as ever I wish to get.</p>
+
+<p>But Macartney only stood there, looking so much as usual that I guessed
+he must have rested outside the mouth of our burrow before he wormed
+down to tackle me.</p>
+
+<p>"You wouldn't have left any tracks," he said, picking up what I'd just
+said in his everyday manner, if it had not been for the dog's grin he
+always wore when he was angry, "if I hadn't run on single snowshoe
+tracks carrying double, where you crossed the Caraquet road. And if one
+of you hadn't trailed your shoe tails through Skunk's Misery&mdash;that
+doesn't wear them!"</p>
+
+<p>"How did you get here?" said I slowly, because I was calculating my
+spring to Macartney's gun hand.</p>
+
+<p>"I walked," and I thought he had not noticed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span> I was half a step nearer
+him. "If you meant me to drown myself following you over your lake, I
+didn't&mdash;thanks to the kind warning you made of my men. But I didn't
+imagine you'd drowned yourselves either&mdash;after I looked through a field
+glass! Charliet had plenty of snowshoes cached away; I was always
+quick on my feet; and after I struck your track the rest was
+simple&mdash;especially as you were fool enough to bring a girl here. I&mdash;&mdash;"
+but his level voice was suddenly thick with passion. "<i>Get back!</i> If you
+try to grab my gun I'll shoot you, and your boy too, like dogs! You'll
+stay still and listen&mdash;to what I've to say. I've an account to settle
+with you, Stretton; now that I've cleaned up Dudley's, and he's dead!"</p>
+
+<p>You could have heard a pin drop on the dead silence of that underground
+hole. Neither Dudley nor Baker stirred, and it hit me like a hammer that
+Macartney didn't know they were alive; <i>he didn't know!</i></p>
+
+<p>I stood as though I had been struck dumb; so did Paulette. Neither of us
+even flickered an eyelash toward the shadows behind us, where Dudley
+must be crouching, anything but dead, with Baker beside him. Perhaps it
+struck both of us, simultaneously, that Dudley had heard Macartney
+coming before we did and disappeared on purpose, thinking Macartney<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span>
+might speak naked truth to Paulette and myself, where he would have
+varnished it up to a mysteriously resurrected employer whom he might yet
+bamboozle as he always had bamboozled him. Anyhow, neither of us saw fit
+to give Dudley away. Macartney sneered into our silent faces.</p>
+
+<p>"There's not much fight in you," he commented contemptuously. "Though it
+was never any good to try to fight me! If you like to have it in
+black and white, <i>I've</i> been all the brains of the business
+here&mdash;single-handed! It was I got the secret of the wolf bait from the
+mother of your lame friend here," he pointed with his unoccupied hand to
+my grovelling boy, "when first I followed Paulette out from New York and
+laid up in Skunk's Misery to wait till I had a clear way to get to La
+Chance. That old ass Thompson gave me that, when I scooped him up on the
+road. After I'd used him, two of my men drowned him in Lac
+Tremblant&mdash;and you'd never have guessed a word about it, if it hadn't
+been for his cursed card they overlooked in the shack here, where you
+found it. It was I put that bottle in your wagon the day it broke there.
+I did it before I knew Paulette was going to drive with you; that was
+the only thing in the whole business that ever gave me a scare! It was I
+got rid of Collins and Dunn"&mdash;I saw<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span> that he believed it, just as he
+believed he was rid of Dudley&mdash;"and the most of your men who might have
+stuck by you if it came to a fight for the mine. I had to shoot the last
+four of them, as you <i>didn't</i> find out that night in the assay office! I
+baited the bush that rid me of Dudley Wilbraham, with his yells about
+emeralds and hunting down Thompson's murderer; and I've got your and his
+mine, in spite of your blowing up and drowning all the men I meant to
+hold it with. But you found out most of that, even if it was a little
+late. What you didn't find out, or Dudley either, was that he was right
+about Van Ruyne's emeralds!"</p>
+
+<p>Paulette leapt up like a wildcat. "You mean you took them?"</p>
+
+<p>"I took them," he nodded sneeringly, and I saw her eyes blaze. "I took
+them&mdash;to get you into a hole you'd have to come to me to get out of!"</p>
+
+<p>"But I didn't have to come to you! I&mdash;&mdash;" but she spoke with sudden
+cutting deliberation. "I don't believe you. You were never in the
+Houstons' house that night. I should have seen you."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, seen me!" Macartney grinned. I think the two of them forgot me,
+forgot everything but that they were facing each other at last with the
+masks off. I know neither of them heard a slow, creeping, nearing sound
+in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span> the long burrow behind Macartney, a sound that swung my blood up
+with the wild, furious hope that Collins and Dunn&mdash;anyhow Collins&mdash;was
+hot on Macartney's trail, as Macartney had been on Paulette's and mine,
+and was creeping down the burrow behind him now, ready to take him in
+the rear when I jumped at him from the front. I waited till whoever it
+was came close up; waited for the moment to grab Macartney, watching his
+triumphant, passionate eyes as he stared victoriously at Paulette.</p>
+
+<p>"Seen me?" he repeated, and I hoped the sound of his own voice would
+deafen him to that other sound, that was so loud to me. "You saw the
+Houstons' guests, and their servants! You never thought of seeing the
+expert who was down from New York about the heating of Mrs. Houston's
+new orchid houses! I left the real man dead drunk in New York, in a
+place he wouldn't leave in a hurry; and the week-end you spent at the
+Houstons' I, and my plans, had the run of Mrs. Houston's library, that
+neither she nor any one else ever goes into. And," he laughed outright,
+"it was next <i>your</i> sitting room, opening on the same upstairs balcony!
+I had only to put my hand through an open window to scoop Van Ruyne's
+emeralds out of their case while you had your back turned, writing the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span>
+note you sent <i>outside</i> the case, instead of inside! Remember?" But this
+time he did not laugh. "I missed fire about getting you that night,
+thanks to that fool Wilbraham happening round with his car. But now I'll
+take all I did this whole business for&mdash;and that's you,&mdash;Paulette
+Valenka!"</p>
+
+<p>Paulette never took her eyes from him. "That's a lie," she said quite
+evenly. "Oh, not that you took the emeralds; I believe that. But it was
+not only to get me into trouble. It was for themselves! You had to steal
+something. You hadn't one penny."</p>
+
+<p>"Not then!" Even in the gloom I saw two scarlet spots flare out like
+sealing-wax on the always dead blondeness of Macartney's cheeks. I
+thought I could hear his heart beat where I stood. "But I have now! With
+the emeralds, your late friend Dudley's mine, and <i>you</i>,"&mdash;his voice was
+unspeakably, insultingly significant, but that unheard rustle behind
+him, growing nearer, more unmistakable, kept me motionless. "By heaven,
+a man might call himself rich! Did you suppose Stretton here could fight
+me? Why, I've been the secret wolf he never had the <i>nous</i> to guess at!
+I&mdash;&mdash;" he swung around on me like light, his revolver six inches from my
+ear. "Stand there," he shouted at me, "and die like Wilbraham, you&mdash;&mdash;"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>His hand dropped, his jaw fell with the half-spoken words in it; his
+eyes, all pupils, stared over my shoulder. I turned and saw
+Dudley,&mdash;Dudley, silent, watching us both; saw him even before I grabbed
+the gun out of Macartney's hanging, lax hand. But Macartney never so
+much as felt me do it. He stared paralyzed at Dudley&mdash;little, fat, with
+a face like a hard-boiled egg&mdash;standing silent against the dark of the
+inner cave.</p>
+
+<p>Dudley had a nerve when you came through to it. "I've not died, yet," he
+snarled out suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>I had the only gun in the place and the drop on Macartney; but I never
+stirred. That long-heard rustle in the burrow was close on me: was&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"My God, Marcia!" said I. I never even wondered about Collins and Dunn
+letting her get away. Marcia stood up in the entrance from the burrow,
+panting, purple-faced, exhausted. Marcia sprang to Macartney&mdash;not
+Dudley, I doubt if she even saw Dudley&mdash;with a cry out of her very soul.</p>
+
+<p>"Mack, you're not Hutton&mdash;you never took those emeralds&mdash;and for that
+girl! Say it's a lie, and it's <i>I</i> you love! Mack, say you love me
+still!"</p>
+
+<p>Macartney flung back a mechanical hand and swept her away from him like
+a fly. She<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span> fell and lay there. None of us had said a word since Dudley
+came out and faced Macartney. None of us said a word now. I saw, almost
+indifferently, Collins burst out of the burrow behind Macartney, as
+Marcia had burst out, and grab me. "Stretton," he gasped, "thank
+God&mdash;found your tracks. But that she-devil Marcia got away from me,
+and&mdash;&mdash;" But in his turn he jerked taut where he stood, at sight of
+Dudley, and stood speechless.</p>
+
+<p>But I never looked at him. I looked at nothing but Macartney's face.</p>
+
+<p>It was rigid, as if it were a mask that had frozen on him. The
+sealing-wax scarlet on his cheeks had gone out like a turned-out lamp.
+His eyes went from Dudley to Collins and back again, as if they were the
+only living part of his deathly face.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah," said Macartney, "A-ah!" He dropped on the floor all in one piece,
+like a cut-down tree.</p>
+
+<p>Collins made a plunge for him. I sent Collins reeling.</p>
+
+<p>"Let him alone, you young fool," I swore. "We've got him, and he's
+fainted. I've seen him like this before&mdash;the night he shot our own men
+in the assay office. It's only his old fainting fits."</p>
+
+<p>"It's his new death," said Dudley, quite<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span> quietly. He came forward and
+bent over Macartney, laid a hand on his breast. "Can't you see the man's
+gone, Stretton? It killed him: the run here&mdash;the shock of seeing me. He
+must have had a heart like rotten quartz!"</p>
+
+<p>Paulette, Collins, Baker, all of us, stood there blankly. We had not
+struck a blow, or raised a voice among the whole lot of us; Macartney's
+gun was still warm from his grasp whence I had snatched it; and
+Macartney&mdash;the secret wolf at La Chance, masquerader, thief,
+murderer&mdash;lay dead at our feet. I heard myself say out loud: "His heart
+was rotten: that was why he fainted in the assay office. But&mdash;&mdash;Oh, the
+man was mad besides! He must have been." And over my words came another
+voice. It was Marcia's, and it made me sick.</p>
+
+<p>"Macartney," she was screaming, "Macartney!" She ran round and round
+like a hen in a road, before me, Dudley, all of us; then flung herself
+on her brother as if she had only just realized him. "You're
+alive&mdash;you're not dead! Can't you see he never stole any emeralds nor
+loved that girl, any more than he killed you? You made up lies about
+him, all of you! And you stand here doing nothing for him. He&mdash;&mdash;Oh,
+Mack, speak to me! <i>Mack!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>She sprang to Macartney; dropped on her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span> knees by the dead, handsome
+length of him; tore open his coat and shirt. But she knelt there, rigid,
+with her hand on his quiet heart.</p>
+
+<p>Macartney had never stolen Van Ruyne's emeralds: she had just said it.
+There, around Macartney's bared throat, lying on the white skin of his
+chest, green lights in the dull fire-glow of the cave, were Van Ruyne's
+emeralds, that Paulette Brown&mdash;whose real name was Tatiana Paulina
+Valenka&mdash;had never seen or touched since she put them back into Van
+Ruyne's velvet case!</p>
+
+<p>I will say Marcia Wilbraham knew when she was beaten. She cowered back
+to Dudley and began to cry; but it was with her arms round his neck. And
+the fat little man held her to his queer, kind heart. I turned my back
+sharply on the pair of them, and&mdash;&mdash;My eyes met Paulette's!</p>
+
+<p>There would be all sorts of fuss and unpleasantness to go through with
+the sheriff from Caraquet, over what was left of Macartney; there was
+old Thompson's death to be accounted for; Van Ruyne's emeralds to be
+returned to him, so that Tatiana Paulina Valenka, and not Paulette
+Brown, could marry that lucky, Indian-dark fool who was Nicky Stretton.
+There was Dudley's mine, too, all safe again, and such an incredible
+mine that even I would be passably rich out of it,&mdash;but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span> I barely, just
+barely, thought of all those things. My dream girl's blue eyes were like
+stars in mine, under the burnt gold of her silk-soft hair. The clear
+carnation rose in her cheeks as I looked at her, where she stood close
+to me, all mine, as I had always dreamed she would be,&mdash;till I met her
+and was sick with doubt of it. She was mine! As far as I was concerned,
+this story had ended at Skunk's Misery,&mdash;where it had begun, if I had
+only guessed it. I gave an honest start as Collins jogged my elbow.</p>
+
+<p>"We can't stay here, with <i>that</i>," he whispered, nodding at Macartney.
+"What do you think about getting out of this? We could leave&mdash;him&mdash;here,
+with Baker and the boy for a guard, till we can get the Caraquet people
+to come and see him. We've our snowshoes, and mine and the girls',
+besides Macartney's, that I guess he's done with. I think we could
+manage along as far as the Halfway in the morning, if we made a travois
+of boughs for Wilbraham!"</p>
+
+<p>"But," I stared at him, "Macartney's picket's there!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Charliet and Dunn were going to clear them out with Miss
+Wilbraham's rifle, while I got after her, when she broke away on to
+Macartney's track here," Collins returned calmly. "I expect that's all
+right, and they've run.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span> Anyhow, you've got Macartney's gun! You can go
+ahead and see."</p>
+
+<p>But I had no need to. An abandoned picket has a way of knowing when the
+game is up, and Macartney's men had cleared out on the double, even
+before Charliet's first rifle bullet missed them. We caught them
+afterwards, half dead in the bush,&mdash;but that doesn't come in here. I
+walked into the Halfway with my dream girl beside me, and both of us
+jumped as Dudley suddenly poked his pig-eyed face between us.</p>
+
+<p>"You needn't hop, you two," he commented irritably; "you can have your
+Old Nick, Paulette, for all me! What I'm thinking of's that boy&mdash;and
+Baker! I guess they saved my life all right between them, and I'm going
+to set them up for what's left of theirs. Got anything to say against
+that, hey?" with his old snarl.</p>
+
+<p>"Not much," I returned soberly. But Paulette clasped both Dudley's podgy
+hands in hers.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, <i>dear</i> Dudley," she said softly. But there were tears in her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>I know; for I kissed them away afterwards, when we were alone.</p>
+
+<h4>THE END</h4>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The La Chance Mine Mystery, by Susan Carleton Jones
+
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+</body>
+</html>
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+Project Gutenberg's The La Chance Mine Mystery, by Susan Carleton Jones
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The La Chance Mine Mystery
+
+Author: Susan Carleton Jones
+
+Illustrator: George W. Gage
+
+Release Date: November 9, 2008 [EBook #27209]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LA CHANCE MINE MYSTERY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by D Alexander, Josephine Paolucci and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net. (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE LA CHANCE MINE MYSTERY
+
+BY
+
+S. CARLETON
+
+WITH FRONTISPIECE BY
+
+GEORGE W. GAGE
+
+BOSTON
+
+LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
+
+1920
+
+_Copyright, 1920_,
+BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.
+
+_All rights reserved_
+
+Published March, 1920
+
+[Illustration: "I STOOD UP AND DROVE FOR ALL I WAS WORTH, AND THE GIRL
+BESIDE ME SHOT,--AND HIT!" FRONTISPIECE. _See page 76._]
+
+
+
+
+THE LA CHANCE MINE MYSTERY
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER                                                 PAGE
+
+I. I COME HOME: AND THE WOLVES HOWL                        1
+
+II. MY DREAM: AND DUDLEY'S GIRL                           16
+
+III. DUDLEY'S MINE: AND DUDLEY'S GOLD                     30
+
+IV. THE MAN IN THE DARK                                   46
+
+V. THE CARAQUET ROAD: AND THE WOLVES HOWL ONCE MORE       56
+
+VI. MOSTLY WOLVES: AND A GIRL                             71
+
+VII. I FIND LITTLE ENOUGH ON THE CORDUROY ROAD,
+      AND LESS AT SKUNK'S MISERY                          86
+
+VIII. THOMPSON!                                          100
+
+IX. TATIANA PAULINA VALENKA!                             116
+
+X. I INTERFERE FOR THE LAST TIME                         134
+
+XI. MACARTNEY HEARS A NOISE: AND I FIND FOUR DEAD MEN    148
+
+XII. THOMPSON'S CARDS: AND SKUNK'S MISERY                164
+
+XIII. A DEAD MAN'S MESSENGER                             182
+
+XIV. WOLVES--AND DUDLEY                                  199
+
+XV. THE PLACE OF DEPARTED SPIRITS                        218
+
+XVI. IN COLLINS'S CARE                                   231
+
+XVII. HIGH EXPLOSIVE                                     247
+
+XVIII. LAC TREMBLANT                                     265
+
+XIX. SKUNK'S MISERY                                      283
+
+XX. THE END                                              293
+
+
+
+
+THE LA CHANCE MINE MYSTERY
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+I COME HOME: AND THE WOLVES HOWL
+
+    I am sick of the bitter wood-smoke,
+      And sick of the wind and rain:
+    I will leave the bush behind me,
+      And look for my love again.
+
+
+Little as I guessed it, this story really began at Skunk's Misery. But
+Skunk's Misery was the last thing in my head, though I had just come
+from the place.
+
+Hungry, dog-tired, cross with the crossness of a man in authority whose
+orders have been forgotten or disregarded, I drove Billy Jones's old
+canoe across Lac Tremblant on my way home to Dudley Wilbraham's gold
+mine at La Chance, after an absence of months. It was halfway to dark,
+and the bitter November wind blew dead in my teeth. Slaps of spray from
+flying wave-crests blinded me with gouts of lake water, that was oddly
+warm till the cutting wind froze it to a coating of solid ice on my
+bare hands and stinging face, that I had to keep dabbing on my paddling
+shoulder to get my eyes clear in order that I might stare in front of my
+leaky, borrowed canoe.
+
+To a stranger there might have seemed to be nothing particular to stare
+at, out on a lake where the world was all wind and lumpy seas and
+growing November twilight; but any one who had lived at La Chance knew
+better. By the map Lac Tremblant should have been our nearest gold route
+to civilization, but it was a lake that was no lake, as far as transport
+was concerned, and we never used it. The five-mile crossing I was making
+was just a fair sample of the forty miles of length Lac Tremblant
+stretched mockingly past the La Chance mine toward the main road from
+Caraquet--our nearest settlement--to railhead: and that was forty miles
+of queer water, sown with rocks that were sometimes visible as
+tombstones in a cemetery and sometimes hidden like rattlesnakes in a
+blanket. For the depth of Lac Tremblant, or its fairway, were two things
+no man might ever count on. It would fall in a night to shallows a child
+could wade through, among bristling needles of rocks no one had ever
+guessed at; and rise in a morning to the tops of the spruce scrub on its
+banks,--a sweet spread of water with not a rock to be seen. What hidden
+spring fed it was a mystery. But in the bitterest winter it was never
+cold enough to freeze, further than to form surging masses of frazil ice
+that would neither let a canoe push through them, nor yet support the
+weight of a man. Winter or summer, it was no thoroughfare--and neither
+was the ungodly jumble of swamp and mountains that stopped me from
+tapping the lower end of it--or I should not have spent the last three
+months in making fifty miles of road through untrodden bush to Caraquet,
+over which to transport the La Chance gold to a post-road and a railway:
+and it was no chosen return route of mine to La Chance now, either.
+
+If I could draw you a map I should not have to explain the country. But
+failing that I will be as clear as I can.
+
+The line of Lac Tremblant, and that of the road I had just made from
+Caraquet to La Chance, ran away from each other in two sides of a
+triangle,--except that the La Chance mine was five miles down the far
+side of the lake from Caraquet, and my road had to half-moon round the
+head of Lac Tremblant to get home--a lavish curve, too, by reason of
+swamps.
+
+But it was on that half-moon road that I should have been now, if my
+order to have a horse meet me at the Halfway stables I had built at the
+beginning of it had not been forgotten or disregarded by some one at La
+Chance.
+
+Getting drenched to the skin with lake water was no rattling good
+exchange for riding home on a fresh horse that felt like a warm stove
+under me, but a five-mile short cut across the apex of the road and lake
+triangle was better than walking twenty-two miles along the side of it
+on my own legs--which was the only choice I had had in the matter.
+
+I was obliged to get home, for reasons of my own; but when I walked in
+on Billy Jones, the foreman at the Halfway stables, that afternoon,
+after months of absence and road-making, there was not even a team horse
+in his stables, let alone my own saddle mare. There was not a soul about
+the place, either, but Billy himself, blandly idle and sprawling over a
+grubby old newspaper in front of the stove in his shack.
+
+His welcome was heartening, but his intelligence was not. No one had
+told him a word about me or my mare, he informed me profanely; also that
+it was quite impossible for me to ride over to La Chance that night.
+There were not any work horses at the Halfway, because he had doubled up
+the teams for some heavy hauling from Caraquet, according to my orders
+sent over from Caraquet the week before, and no horses had been sent
+back from La Chance since. He guessed affably that some one might be
+driving over from the mine in the morning, and that after tramping from
+Caraquet I had better stay where I was for the night.
+
+I hesitated. I was dog-tired for once in my life, but I had not done any
+tramp from Caraquet that day, if I had told the bald truth. Only I had
+no idea of telling it, nor any wish to explain to Billy Jones that I had
+been making a fool of myself elsewhere, doing a solid week of hospital
+nursing over a filthy boy I had found on my just-finished road the
+morning I had really left Caraquet. From the look of him I guessed he
+had got hurt cutting down a tree and not getting out of the way in time,
+though he was past telling me that or anything else. But I had also
+guessed where he lived, by the dirt on him, and was ass enough to carry
+him home to the squalid, half-French, half-Indian village the Caraquet
+people called Skunk's Misery.
+
+It lay in the bush, in a slanting line between Caraquet and Lac
+Tremblant: a nest of thriftless evil stuck in a hollow you might pass
+within twenty yards of, and never guess held a house. Once there I had
+no choice but to stay and nurse the boy's sickening pain, till his
+mother came home from some place where she was fishing eels for the
+winter; for none of the rest of the population of fat-faced,
+indifferent women--I never saw a man, whether they were away in the
+lumber woods or not--would lay a hand on him. I will say plainly that I
+was more than thankful to hand him over to his mother. I had spilt over
+myself a bottle of some nameless and abominable brew that I'd mistaken
+for liniment, and my clothes smelt like carrion; also the lean-to I had
+lived in was so dirty that I scratched from suspicion all day long,
+except when I was yawning from a week of hardly closing my eyes.
+Altogether, as I said, I was dog-tired, if it were not from walking, and
+I might have stayed at Billy Jones's if I had not been crazy to get rid
+of my dirt-infected clothes. The worst reek had gone from them, but even
+out in the open air they smelt. I saw Billy Jones wrinkle up his nose to
+sniff innocently while he talked to me, and that settled me.
+
+"I have to get home," I observed hastily. "Wilbraham expected me a week
+ago. But I don't walk any twenty-two miles! I'll take your old canoe and
+a short cut across the lake."
+
+I was the only man who ever used Lac Tremblant, and the foreman of the
+Halfway stables cast a glance on me. "If it was me, I'd walk," he
+remarked drily. "But take your choice. The lake's a short cut right
+enough, only I wouldn't say where _to_--in my crazy old birchbark this
+kind of a blowing-up evening!"
+
+That, and a few more things he said as he squinted a weather-wise eye on
+the lake, came back to me as I fought his old canoe through the water.
+And fighting it was, mind you, for the spray hid the rocks I knew, and
+the wind shoved me back on the ones I didn't know. Also the canoe was
+leaking till she was dead logy, and the gusts were so fierce I could not
+stop paddling to bail her. The short, vicious seas that snapped at me
+five ways at once were the color of lead and felt as heavy as cold
+molasses. But, for all that, crossing Lac Tremblant was saving me
+twenty-two miles on my feet, and I was not wasting any dissatisfaction
+on the traverse. Only, as I shoved the canoe forward, I was nearer to
+being played out, from one thing on top of another, than ever I was in
+my life. I pretended the paddle that began to hang in spite of me was
+only heavy with freezing spray and that the dead ache in my back was a
+kink. But I had to put every ounce there was in my six feet of weary
+bones into lightning-change wrenches to hold the old canoe head on to
+the splattering seas and keep her from swamping. I was very near to
+thinking I had been a fool not to have stayed with Billy Jones,--when I
+was suddenly aware of absolute, utter calm in the air that felt as warm
+on my face as if I'd gone into a house; of tranquil water under the
+forefoot of the canoe that had jumped forward under me as the resistance
+of the wind ceased; and of the lake shore--dark, featureless,
+silent--within twenty feet of me. I was across Lac Tremblant and in the
+shelter of the La Chance shore!
+
+There is no good in denying that for five minutes all I did was to sit
+back and breathe. Then I lit my pipe, that was dry because it was inside
+my shirt; bailed the unnecessary water out of the canoe and the
+immediate neighborhood of my legs; and, without meaning to, turned a
+casual eye on the shore at my right hand.
+
+It might have been because I was tired, but that shore struck me as if I
+had never seen it before; and on a November evening it was not an
+inviting prospect. Bush and bush, and more bush, grew down to the very
+verge of the water in a mass that spoke of heavy swamp and no landing.
+Behind that, I knew, was rising land, country rock, and again swamp and
+more swamp,--and all of it harsh, ugly, and inhospitable. But the queer
+thought that came over me was that it was more than inhospitable: it was
+forbidding. High over my head poured the bitter wind in a river of sound
+through the bare tree tops; close at hand it rustled with a flurry of
+dead leaves that was uncannily like the bustle of inimical businesses
+pursued insolently in the dark, at my very elbow; and suddenly, through
+and over all other sounds, there rose in the harsh gloom the long,
+ravening cry of a wolf.
+
+Heaven knows I was used to the bush, and no howling was much to me; but
+you know how things come over you sometimes. It came over me then that I
+was sick of my life at La Chance; sick of working with Wilbraham and
+sicker still of washing myself in brooks and sleeping on the
+ground,--for I had not been in a house since August. Before I knew it I
+was speaking out loud as men do in books, only it was something I had
+thought before, which in books it generally isn't: "Scott, I'm a fool to
+stay here. I'd sooner go and work on day's wages somewhere and have a
+place _to go home to!_" And then I felt my face get red in the dark, for
+I knew what I meant, if you do not.
+
+There was nothing to go home to at Wilbraham's, except a roof over my
+head, till circumstances sent me out into the bush again. In the daytime
+there were the mine and the mill. At night there was the bare living
+room of Wilbraham's shack, without a book, or a paper, or a decent
+chair; Wilbraham himself, fat, pig-headed, truculent, stumping the
+devil's sentry-go up and down the bare floor, talking eternally about
+himself and the mine, till a saint must have loathed the two of them;
+Thompson, the mine superintendent, silent, slow and stupid, playing
+ghastly solitaire games in a corner with a pack of dirty cards; and me,
+Nick Stretton, hunching myself irritably on a hard chair till I could
+decently go to bed. Even the bush was better than night after night of
+that,--and suddenly I felt my thoughts bursting out, even if I had sense
+enough to keep my mouth shut.
+
+I was as sick of the bush as I was of the shack. I wanted a place of my
+own and a life of my own: and I was going to have it. There was nothing
+but old friendship to tie me to Wilbraham's; I could do as well anywhere
+else, and I was going there--to-morrow; going somewhere, anyhow, so that
+when my day's work was over I could go home to a blazing fire on a wide
+hearth, instead of Wilbraham's smelly stove where no one ever cleaned
+the creosote out of the pipe,--and where the girl I had had in my head
+for ten years would be waiting for me.
+
+Don't imagine it was any girl I knew that I was thinking of; it was just
+a dream girl I meant to marry, when I found her. I'd never met such a
+girl anywhere, and it sounds like a fool to say I knew I was going to
+meet her: that she was waiting somewhere in the world for me, just as I
+was looking for her. I knew exactly what she must be like. She would
+have that waving bronze-gold hair that stands out in little separate,
+shining tendrils; eyes that startled you with their clear blue under
+dark, level eyebrows--I never look twice at a girl with arched
+brows--the rose-white, satin-smooth skin that goes with all of them, and
+she would move like----Well, you've seen Pavlova move! Her
+voice--somehow one of the most important things I knew about her seemed
+to be her voice--would be the clear, carrying kind that always sounds
+gay. I was certain I should know my dream girl--first--by that. And that
+was the girl--I forgot it was all made-up child's play--who somewhere in
+the world was waiting for me, Nick Stretton; a fool with nothing on
+earth but six feet of a passably good body, and a dark, high-nosed face
+like an Indian's, who was working in the bush for Wilbraham instead of
+sieving creation for her. Well, I would start to-morrow; and, where the
+clean heavens meant me to, I should find her!
+
+And with the words I came alive to the dark lake, and the leaky canoe I
+sat in, and the knowledge that all I had been thinking about a
+bronze-haired girl was just the cracked dream of a lonely man. Even if
+it had not been, and I could have started to look for a real girl
+to-morrow, I had to get back to Wilbraham's to-night. My drenched
+clothes were freezing on me, and I was hungrier than the wolf who had
+just howled again, as I picked up my slippery paddle and started for the
+La Chance landing.
+
+There was no light there, naturally, since no one ever used the lake
+except myself, and I had been away for months; but as I rounded the
+point between the canoe and the landing, and slipped into the dark of
+its shadow, the lamplight from Wilbraham's living room shone out on me
+in a narrow beam, like a moon path on the water. As I crossed it and
+beached the canoe I must have been in plain sight to any one on the
+shore, though all I saw was the dark shingle I stepped upon. I stooped
+to lift the canoe out of water,--and I did what you mean when you say
+you nearly jumped out of your skin.
+
+Touching my shoulder, her hand fiercely imperative in the dark, was a
+girl--at La Chance, where no girl had ever set foot!--and she was
+speaking to me with just that golden, carrying voice I knew would belong
+to my own dream girl, if she were keeping it down to a whisper.
+
+"So you're here," was what she said; and it would have fitted in with
+the fool's thoughts I had just come out of, if it had not been for her
+tone. That startled me, till all I could do was to nod in the dark I
+could just see her in. I could not discern what she looked like, for her
+head was muffled in a shawl; and I never realized that all she could see
+of me was my height and general make-up, since my face must have been
+invisible where I stood in the shadow.
+
+"You!" her golden voice stabbed like a dagger. "I won't have you staying
+here--where I am! I told you I'd speak to you when I could, and I'm
+speaking. You kept your word and disgraced me once, if I don't know how
+you did it; but I won't run the chance of _that_ again! I'm safe here,
+except for you; and you've got to let me alone. If you don't, I--I----"
+she stammered till I knew she was shaking, but she got hold of herself
+in the second. "You won't find it safe to play any tricks with the gold
+here--or me--if that's what you came for," she said superbly, "and
+you've given me a way to stop it. _That's_ why I've sneaked out to meet
+you: not because I care for you. You must go away, or--I'll tell that
+you're here! Do you hear? I don't care what promises you make me--they
+always came easily to you. If you want me to hold my tongue about you,
+you've got to go. Go and betray me, if you like--but _go_!"
+
+There was dead, cold hatred in it, the kind a woman has for a man she
+once cared for, and it staggered what wits I had left. I nodded like a
+fool, just as if I had known what she was talking about, and went on
+lifting the canoe ashore. Whether I really heard her give a terrified
+gasp I don't know; perhaps I only thought so. But as I put the canoe on
+the bank I heard a rustle, and when I looked up she was gone. There was
+nothing to tell me she had really even been there. It was just as
+probable that I was crazy, or walking in my sleep, as that a girl who
+talked like that--or even any kind of a girl--should be at La Chance.
+The cold, collected hatred in her voice still jarred me, since it was no
+way for even a dream girl to speak. But what jarred me worse was that
+the whole thing had been so quick I could not have sworn she had been
+there at all. I was honestly dazed as I walked up the rough path to
+Wilbraham's and my shack. I must have stood in front of it a good five
+minutes, with my wet clothes freezing as hard as a board, and the noise
+of the men in the bunk house down by the mine coming up to me on the
+night wind.
+
+"'If I be I, as I should be, I've a little dog at home, and he'll know
+me,'" I said to myself at last like the old woman in the storybook, only
+with a grin. For when I went into the house there would be the neglected
+living room with the smelly stove, and Wilbraham walking up and down
+there as usual; and Dudley Wilbraham's conversation would bring any man
+back to his senses, even if he needed it worse than I did. I opened the
+shack door and went in,--and in the bare passage I jerked up taut.
+
+The living room faced me,--and there was no stove in it. And no
+Wilbraham, walking up and down and talking to himself. There was a
+glowing, blazing log fire in a stone fireplace that must have been built
+while I was away; and, sitting alone before it, exactly as I had always
+thought of her, was my dream girl,--that I had meant to hunt the world
+for to welcome me home!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+MY DREAM: AND DUDLEY'S GIRL
+
+
+All I could do was to stand in the living room doorway and stare at her.
+
+There she sat by the fire, in a short blue skirt that showed her little
+feet in blue stockings and buckled shoes, and a blue sweater whose
+rolling collar fell away from the column of her soft throat. And she was
+just exactly what I had known she would be! There was a gold crest to
+every exquisite, warm wave of her bronze hair; her level eyebrows were
+about five shades darker, and her curled-up eye-lashes darker still,
+where she sat with her head bent over some sort of sewing. And even
+before she looked up and I saw her eyes, the beauty of her caught me at
+my heart. I had never thought even my dream girl could be as lovely as
+she was. But there was more to her face than beauty. It was so young and
+sweet and gay, and--when you looked hard at her--so sad, that I forgot I
+ought either to speak up or go away. Of who she was or how she came to
+be at La Chance, I had no earthly clue. I knew, of course, that it was
+she who had met me at the landing, and common sense told me she had
+taken me for some one else: but I had no desire to say so, or to go away
+either. And suddenly she looked up and saw me.
+
+Whoever she was she had good nerves, for she never even stared as women
+do at a strange man. I could have been no reassuring vision either,
+standing there in moccasined feet that had come in on her as silently as
+a wolf or an Indian; with dirty, frozen clothes; and a face that the
+Lord knows is dark and hard at its best, and must have been forbidding
+enough that night between dirt and fatigue. But that girl only glanced
+at me as quietly as if she had known I was there.
+
+"Did you----Were you looking for any one?" she asked. And the second I
+heard her voice I knew she guessed she had spoken to me a quarter of an
+hour ago in words she would probably have given all she possessed to
+prevent a stranger from knowing she had need to speak to any one.
+
+Only that was not the reason I half stammered, "Not exactly." It was
+because I could see her eyes,--and they were like sapphires, and the
+sea, and the night sky with the first stars in it. I snatched off my cap
+that I had forgotten, and bits of melting ice fell off it and tinkled
+on the floor. The sharp little sound brought my wits back to me. Perhaps
+I had never really thought my dream girl would come true, but once I had
+found her I never meant to lose her. And I knew, if I cared a straw for
+my life and the love that was to be in it, that I must meet her now _for
+the first time_; that nothing, not even if she told me so herself, must
+make me admit she had come to me at the lake by mistake, or that I had
+ever heard her voice before.
+
+I said, easily enough, "I'm afraid I startled you. I'm Stretton,
+Wilbraham's partner"--which I was to the extent of a thousand
+dollars--"I've just come home."
+
+And crazy as it sounds, I felt as if I had come home, for the first time
+in my life. For the girl of my dreams came to her feet with just that
+lovely, controlled ease you see in Pavlova, and with the prettiest
+little gesture of welcome.
+
+"Oh, you're frozen stiff," she said with a kind of dismayed sympathy.
+"And I heard Mr. Wilbraham say some one had forgotten to send out your
+horse for you, and that you'd probably walk--the whole way from
+Caraquet! You must be tired to death. Please come to the fire and get
+warm--now you've come home!"
+
+I thought of the queer smell that clung to my stained old coat and the
+company I had kept at Skunk's Misery--though if I had guessed what that
+wretched boy was going to mean to me I might have grudged my contact
+with him less--and I would not have gone near my dream girl for a
+fortune. "I think I'll get clean first," I began, and found myself
+laughing for the first time in a week. But as I turned away I glanced
+back from the dark passage where Charliet, the French-Canadian cook, was
+supposed to keep a lamp and never did, and saw the girl in the living
+room look after me,--with a look I had never seen in any girl's eyes, if
+I'd seen a hunted man have it.
+
+"Gad, she knows I know she met me--and she doesn't mean to say so," I
+thought vividly. What the reason was I couldn't see, or whom there could
+be at La Chance that such a girl should find it necessary to tell that
+she would not have him disgrace her, and that he must go away. It made
+me wrathy to think there could be any one she needed to hit out at like
+that. But we had a queer lot at the mine, including Dunn and Collins, a
+couple of educated boys who had not been educated enough to pass as
+mining engineers, and had been kicked out into the world by their
+families. It might have been either of those two star failures in the
+bunk house. The only person it could not have been was Dudley
+Wilbraham; since aside from the fact that she could easily speak to him
+in the shack she could not have told him he must go away from his own
+mine. Which reminded me I'd never even asked where Dudley was or one
+thing about the mine I'd been away from so long.
+
+But my dream girl, where no girl had ever been, was the only thing I
+could think of. I had meant to get some food and go to bed, but instead
+I threw my Skunk's Misery clothes out of the window, and got ready to go
+out to supper and see that girl again. Who under heaven she could be was
+past me, as well as how she came to be at La Chance. I would have been
+scared green lest she was the wife of some man at the mine, only she had
+no wedding ring on the slim left hand that had beckoned me to the fire.
+Yet, "She can't just be here alone, either, and I'm blessed if I see who
+she can have come with," I thought blankly. And I opened my room door
+straight on Marcia Wilbraham,--Wilbraham's sister!
+
+"_Well_," I said. It was the only thing that came to me. I knew
+immediately, of course, that the girl in the living room must have come
+out with Marcia; but it knocked me silly to see Marcia herself at La
+Chance. I had known Marcia Wilbraham, as I had known Dudley, ever since
+I wore blue serge knickerbockers trimmed with white braid. She never
+went anywhere with Dudley. She had money of her own, and she spent it
+on Horse Show horses, and traveling around to show them. But here she
+stood in front of me, in a forsaken backwoods mine that I should not
+have expected even Dudley himself to stay at if I had not known his
+reasons.
+
+"I don't wonder you say 'well,'" Marcia returned crisply. She was
+good-looking in a big way, if you did not mind brown eyes that were too
+small for her face and a smile that showed her gums. I had never liked
+or disliked her especially, any more than you do any girl about your own
+age whom you've always known. "I've been here for three months! I was
+very near going home a month ago--but I don't think I'll go now. I
+believe I'll try a winter here."
+
+"A winter!" I thought of Marcia "trying a winter," and I laughed.
+
+"Oh, you needn't throw back your handsome Indian head to grin at me,
+Nicky Stretton," said she crossly. "I'm tired of always doing the same
+thing. And anyhow, the stable lost money, and I had to sell out!"
+
+"But why stay here--with Dudley?" I let out. The two of them had always
+fought like cats.
+
+"I'm going to do some shooting--and wolf hunting," Marcia smiled the
+ugly smile I never could stand. "I'm going to stay, anyhow; so you'll
+have to bear it, Nicky!"
+
+"I'm--charmed!" I thought like lightning that my dream girl would do
+whatever Marcia did, and I blessed my stars she was staying; though I
+knew she would be all kinds of a nuisance if she insisted on turning out
+to hunt wolves. She was all but dressed for it even then, in a horrid
+green divided skirt that made her look like a fat old gentleman. But it
+was not Marcia I meant to talk about.
+
+"Have you brought the--other girl--to hunt wolves, too?" I inquired, as
+we moved on down the passage; there was no upstairs to the shack.
+
+"No," said Marcia quite carelessly, if I had not caught the snap in her
+eyes. "She's come to hunt Dudley! She's going to marry him."
+
+"She's _what_?" I was suddenly thankful we had left the light from my
+open door and that Charliet despised keeping a lamp in the passage. The
+bland idea that I had found my dream girl split to bits as if a half-ton
+rock had landed on it. For her to be going to marry any one was bad
+enough; but _Dudley_, with his temper, and his drink, and the drugs I
+was pretty sure he took! The thing was so unspeakable that I stopped
+short in the passage.
+
+Marcia Wilbraham stopped short too. "I don't wonder you're knocked
+silly," she said. "Here, come out of this; I want to speak to you, and
+I may as well do it now!" She pushed me into the office where Dudley did
+his accounts--which was his name for sitting drinking all day, and never
+speaking to any one--and shut the door. "Look here, Nicky, if you're
+thinking that girl is a friend of mine, she isn't! I don't know one
+thing about her. Except that this summer I had reason to oblige Dudley,
+and one day he came to me--you know he was in New York for nearly two
+months----"
+
+I nodded. I had not cared where he was, so that he was away from La
+Chance, where he and old Thompson would drive a tunnel just where I knew
+it was useless.
+
+"Well, he came to me in the first of August, and said he was going to
+marry a girl called Paulette Brown,--and he wanted me to bring her out
+here! Why he didn't marry her straight off and bring her out here
+himself, I don't know; he only hummed and hawed when I asked him. But
+anyhow, I met Paulette Brown, _for the first time_, at the station, when
+we started up here--she and I and Dudley. And she puzzled me from the
+second we got into the Pullman, and I saw her pull off the two veils
+she'd worn around her head in the station! And she puzzles me worse
+now."
+
+"Why?" I might have been puzzled myself, remembering Paulette Brown's
+speech to me in the dark, but it was none of Marcia's business.
+
+"Because I know I've seen her before," Marcia returned calmly, "only
+with no 'Paulette Brown' tacked on to her. I've seen her dance
+somewhere, but I can't think _where_--and that's the first thing that
+puzzles me."
+
+"I don't see why," I said disagreeably, "considering that every one
+dances somewhere all day long just now."
+
+"It wasn't that kind of dancing. It was rather--wonderful! And there was
+some story tacked on to it," Marcia frowned, "only I can't think what!
+And the second thing that puzzles me about Paulette Brown--I tell you,
+Nicky, I believe she can't _bear_ Dudley, and that she doesn't want to
+marry him!"
+
+It was the first decent thing I had heard from her, and I could have
+opened my mouth and cheered. But I said, "Then why's she here?"
+
+"Just because it suits her for some reason of her own," Marcia was
+earnest as I had never seen her. "Nicky, I don't think she's anything in
+the world but some sort of an adventuress--only what I can't understand
+about her is what she wants of Dudley! It isn't money, for I know he's
+tried to make her take it, and she wouldn't. Yet I know, too, that she
+hadn't a cent coming up here, and she hasn't now--or even any clothes
+but summer things, and a blue sweater she wears all the time. She never
+speaks about herself, or where she comes from----"
+
+"I don't see why there should be any mystery about that!" It was a lie,
+but I might not have seen, if she had not spoken to me incomprehensibly
+in the dark. "Dudley probably knows all about her people."
+
+"A girl called Paulette Brown doesn't have any people," scornfully.
+"Besides, her name isn't Brown, or Paulette--she used to forget to
+answer to either of them at first; and if Dudley knows what it really
+is, I'm going to know too--before I'm a month older! I tell you I've
+seen her before, and I know there was some kind of an ugly story tacked
+on to her and her dancing. That, and her real name, are up in the attic
+of my brain somewhere, and some day they'll come down!"
+
+"Well, they won't concern me," I cut in stolidly. Whoever Paulette Brown
+was, if she were going to marry Dudley Wilbraham ten times over, she was
+the one girl in the world who belonged to me,--and I was not going to
+have her discussed by Marcia behind a shut door.
+
+But Marcia's retort was too quick for me. "They may interest you, all
+the same, if that girl's what I think she is! Don't make any mistake,
+Nicky; she's no chorus girl out of work. She's a lady. Only--she's been
+something else, too! You watch how she uses a perfectly trained body."
+
+I all but started. I had seen it already, when I thought she moved like
+Pavlova. "Anything else?" I inquired disagreeably.
+
+"Yes," said Marcia quietly. "She's afraid for her life, or Dudley's--I
+can't make out which. Wait, and you'll see. Come on; we'll be late for
+supper. It would have been over hours ago if Dudley and I hadn't been
+out shooting this afternoon. We've only just come in."
+
+But I was not thinking about supper. The Wilbrahams had been out, and
+Paulette Brown, left alone, had taken her chance to speak to some one.
+That she had happened to mistake her man and spoken to me made no
+difference in the fact, and it came too aptly on Marcia's suspicions
+about her. But "My good heavens, I won't care what she did," I thought
+fiercely. My dream girl's eyes were honest, if they were deep blue lakes
+a man might drown his soul in, too. If she were Dudley's twice over I
+was going to stand by her, because by all my dreams of her she was more
+mine. "I haven't time, or chances, to be watching pretty ladies," I said
+drily, "and I wouldn't bother over it myself if I were you. I'd let it
+go at plain Paulette Brown!"
+
+"If you could," said Marcia, just as drily. And over her words, close
+outside the window, a wolf howled.
+
+It startled me, as it had startled me once before that evening, only
+this time I knew the reason. "Scott, I never knew the wolves to be
+coming out so early in the season!" I was thankful to be back to things
+I could exclaim about. "And down here, beside the house, I never saw
+any!"
+
+"No; so Dudley said," Marcia returned almost absently. She opened the
+door for herself, because I had forgotten it, and stood looking at the
+lighted living room at the end of the passage by the front door. "But
+the wolves have been round for a week--that was what I meant when I said
+I was going to have some wolf hunts! The mine superintendent's going to
+take me."
+
+"Thompson!" I let out. Then I chuckled. Marcia was likely to have a
+great wolf hunt with Thompson, who knew no difference between a shotgun
+and a rifle, and would have legged it from a fox if he had met it alone.
+"Marcia Wilbraham, I'll pay you five dollars if you ever get out wolf
+hunting with Thompson. Why, the only thing he _can_ do for diversion is
+to play solitaire!"
+
+"Oh, him--yes," said Marcia carelessly and without grammar. "But I
+didn't mean old Thompson. He's been gone for a month, and we've a new
+man. His name's Macartney, and he's been here two weeks."
+
+It was news to me, if it was also an example of the way Dudley Wilbraham
+ran his mine. But before I could speak Marcia nodded significantly down
+the passage to the living room door. I had been looking into the room
+myself, as you do at the lighted stage in a theatre, and I had seen only
+one thing in it: my dream girl--whose name might or might not be
+Paulette Brown, whom Dudley Wilbraham had more right to than I
+had--sitting by the fire as I had left her, that fire I had dreamed I
+should come home to, just myself alone, and talking to Dudley. But
+Marcia had been looking at something else, and now my gaze followed
+hers.
+
+A tall, lean, hard, capable-looking man stood on the other side of the
+fire. He was taking no share in the conversation between Dudley and the
+girl who had only lived in my dreams till to-night. He was watching the
+living room door, quite palpably, and it struck me abruptly that I had
+not far to seek for Marcia Wilbraham's reason for staying the winter at
+La Chance. But I might have taken more interest in that and in
+Macartney, the new mine superintendent, too, if the girl sitting by the
+fire had not seen Marcia in the doorway and risen to her feet.
+
+For she floated up, effortlessly, unconsciously, to the very tips of her
+toes, and stood so--like Pavlova!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+DUDLEY'S MINE: AND DUDLEY'S GOLD
+
+    I have stared my eyes blind for her,
+      Bridled my body alive for her,
+    Starved my soul to the rind for her--
+      Do I lose all?
+
+    _The Lost Lover._
+
+
+I could feel Marcia's satisfied, significant smile through the back of
+my neck as I shook hands with Dudley, and was introduced in turn to Miss
+Brown--the last name for her, even without the affected Paulette, though
+I might not have thought of it but for Marcia--and to Macartney, the new
+incumbent of Thompson's shoes. Dudley, little and fat, in the dirty
+boots he had worn all day, and just a little loaded, told me to wait
+till the morning or go to the devil, when I asked about the mine.
+Charliet banged the food on the table for supper--Marcia despised
+housekeeping, and if the living room had been reformed nothing else
+had--and I sat down in silence and ate. At least I shovelled food into
+my famished stomach. My attention was elsewhere.
+
+Paulette Brown sat beside Dudley. She was just twice as pretty as I had
+realized, even when the first sight of her struck me dumb. Her eyes were
+as dark as indigo, in the lamplight, and a marvellous rose color flitted
+in her cheeks as she spoke or was silent. She had wonderful hands, too,
+slim and white, without a sign of a bone at the wrists; but I had a
+curious feeling that they were the very strongest hands I had ever seen
+on a girl. Remembering Dudley, it hurt me to look at her; and suddenly
+something else hurt me worse, that I had been a fool not to have thought
+of before. Macartney, the mine superintendent, was new there; I knew no
+more of him than I did of Paulette Brown--not so much, perhaps, thanks
+to Marcia--and it came over me that he might have been the man for whom
+she had taken me to-night, and that it was he she had crept out into the
+dark to speak to in secret. I looked at him over my coffee cup, and
+there was something about him I did not like.
+
+He was a tall man, very capable-looking, as I said; extremely fair and
+rather handsome, with hard, grayish eyes that looked straight at you
+when he spoke. He had a charming laugh--yet when he laughed I saw
+suddenly what it was that I did not like about him; and it was nothing
+more nor less than a certain set look about his eye muscles. Some
+gamblers have it, and it did not strike my fancy in the new mine
+superintendent at La Chance. But watch as I might, I saw no sign of an
+understanding between him and my dream girl. It was impossible to be
+sure, of course, but I was nearly sure. She spoke to him as she spoke to
+Marcia and Dudley--she never addressed one word to me--just easily and
+simply, as people do who live in the same house. Macartney himself
+talked mostly to Marcia, which was no business of mine. Only I was
+somehow curiously thankful that it had not been Macartney whom Paulette
+had meant to meet in the dark. There was something about his eyes that
+said he was no safe customer for any girl to speak to with
+hatred,--especially a girl whom another girl was watching, as Marcia was
+watching Paulette Brown. I decided it must have been either Dunn or
+Collins--our two worthless Yale boys at the mine--whom she had wanted to
+get rid of, and I felt better; for it would be easy enough to save her
+trouble by doing that myself. They might just have come back to La
+Chance like me, for all I knew, because Dudley had a trick of sending
+the men heaven knew where to prospect.
+
+It was rot, anyhow, to be taking a girl's affairs so seriously. I looked
+at my dream girl's clear eyes, and thought that if she knew what Marcia
+and I were thinking about her she might have good reason to be angry.
+Also that Dudley probably knew all about her evening stroll and what she
+was doing at La Chance, if Marcia did not. And Dudley's self-important
+voice cut through my thoughts like a knife:
+
+"Where on earth were you this evening, Paulette?" he was demanding
+irritably. "I couldn't see a sign of you when Marcia and I went out, and
+you weren't anywhere when we came in!"
+
+"I don't know"--the girl began--and I saw the color go out of her face,
+and it made me angry.
+
+"I can tell you where Miss Brown was," I said deliberately, "if she's
+ashamed to own it. She was good and settled by this fire."
+
+Why I lied for her I could not say. But the glance she turned on me gave
+me a flat sort of feeling, as if Marcia might be right and she was there
+for reasons of her own that I had all but stumbled on by accident. I was
+a fool to care; but then I had been a fool all day with my silly
+thoughts of leaving La Chance to chase the world for an imaginary girl,
+and more fool still to think I had found her there waiting for me. I
+said something about being tired and went off to bed. I was tired, right
+enough, but I was something else too. All that business about the girl I
+meant to find and marry may sound like a child's silly game to you, but
+it had been more than a game to me. It had been a solid prop to hold to
+in ugly places where a man might slip if he had not clean love and a
+girl in his head. And now, at seven-and-twenty, I wanted my child's game
+to come true: just my own fire, and my own girl, and a life that held
+more than mere slaving for money. And it had come true, as far as the
+fire and the welcome home; only the girl was another man's.
+
+I knew what I ought to do was to get out of La Chance, but I could not
+screw myself up to the acceptance of the obvious fact that there were
+other girls in the world than Paulette Brown. I told myself I was too
+dead tired to care. I stumbled to my window to open it--Charliet's lamp
+had burned out while I was at supper and the room was stifling--and a
+sudden queer sense that some one or something was under my window made
+me stand there without raising it. And there was some _thing_, anyway.
+The windows in the shack were about a yard above the ground. There was a
+glimpse of the moon through the wind-tortured clouds, now on the rough
+clearing, now on the thick spruces round the edge of it,--for my window
+looked on the bush, not toward the bunk house and the mine. And as the
+moonlight flickered back on the clearing I saw my clothes I had worn at
+Skunk's Misery and tossed out for Charliet to burn because they
+smelled,--and something else that made me stare in pure surprise.
+
+There was a wolf--gaunt, gray, fantastic in the moonlight--rolling on my
+clothes; regardless of the human eyes on him and within ten feet of the
+house. It was so crazy that I almost forgot the girl Marcia had said was
+only "called" Paulette Brown. I jerked up the window and stood waiting
+for the wolf to run. And it did not take the least notice of me. I could
+have shot it ten times over, but the thing was so incredible that I only
+stood staring; and suddenly my chance was gone. The beast picked up my
+coat, as a dog does a bone, and disappeared with it like a streak into
+the black bush.
+
+"Scott, I never saw a wolf behave like that!" I thought. But one more
+impossibility in an impossible day did not matter. I left the window
+open and tumbled into bed.
+
+I would have forgotten the thing in the morning, only that when I got up
+_all_ my Skunk's Misery clothes had disappeared, and Charliet had not
+taken them, because I asked him. I did not mention last night's wolf to
+him, because I was in a hurry to catch Dudley and tell him I meant to
+leave La Chance. But I did not tell him, for when I thought of leaving
+my dream girl to him it would not come to my tongue. An obstinate,
+matter-of-fact devil got up in my heart instead and prompted me to stay
+just where I was. I looked at Dudley--little, fat, pompous, and so
+self-opinionated that it fairly stuck out of him--and thought that if I
+had a fair chance I could take my dream girl from him. I might be dark
+as an Indian and without a cent to my name except the few dollars I had
+sunk in the mine, but I did not drink or eat drugs; and I knew Dudley
+did one and guessed he did the other. Interfering with him was out of
+the question, of course; it was not a thing any man could do to his
+friend, deliberately. I supposed he would be good to the girl, according
+to his lights. But, all the same, I decided to stay at La Chance. I saw
+Dudley was brimming over with something secret, and I hoped to heaven it
+was not his engagement, and that I should not have to stand my own
+thoughts of a girl translated into Dudley's. But he did not mention her.
+He hooked his fat wrist into my elbow and trotted me down to the mine.
+
+It was an amateur sort of mine, as you may have gathered. Dudley had no
+use for expert assistance or for advice. And it was a simple looking
+place. The shore of Lac Tremblant there ran back flat to a hill, a
+quarter of a mile from the water, with a solid rock face like a cliff.
+Along that cliff face came first Dudley's shack, then Thompson's tunnel,
+then--a good way farther down--the bunk house, the mill, and a shanty
+Dudley called the assay office. But I stared at a new hole in the cliff,
+farther down even than the assay office.
+
+"Why, you've driven a new tunnel," I exclaimed.
+
+"Yes, my young son," said Dudley; and then he burst out with things.
+Macartney had run that new tunnel as soon as he came and struck quartz
+that was solid for heaven knew how far, and carrying thick, free gold
+that assayed incredibly to the ton. The La Chance mine, whose name had
+been more truth than poetry--for when I made fifty miles of road that
+cost like the devil, to haul in machinery and a mill it was pitch and
+toss if we should ever need it--had turned out a certainty while I was
+away.
+
+I stood silent. It meant plenty to me, who had only a trifle in the
+thing, but I was the only soul in the world who knew what it meant to
+Dudley. Stocks, carelessness, but chiefly bull-headed extravagance, had
+run through every cent he had, and La Chance had saved him from having
+to live on Marcia's charity,--if she had any. There was no fear, either,
+of his being interfered with in the bonanza he had struck; for leaving
+out my infinitesimal share, Dudley was sole owner,--and he had bought a
+thousand acres mining concession from the Government for ten dollars an
+acre, which is the law when a potential mining district in unsurveyed
+territory is more than twenty miles by a wagon road from a railway. All
+he had to do with would-be prospectors was to chuck them out. He had got
+in ten stamps for his mill over the road I had built from Caraquet,
+and--since Macartney arrived--was milling stuff whose net result made me
+stare, after the miserable, two-dollar ore old Thompson had broken my
+heart with.
+
+"So you see, we're made," Dudley finished simply. "Macartney struck his
+vein first go off, and we'll be able to work it all winter. You'd better
+start in to-day and get some snowsheds built along the face of the
+workings--they ought to have been started a week ago. Why in the
+devil"--drink and drugs do not make a man easy to work with, and you
+never knew when Dudley might turn on you with a face like a
+fiend--"didn't you get back from Caraquet before? You'd nothing to keep
+you away this last week!"
+
+"I'd plenty," I returned drily. "And I may remind you that I didn't
+propose to have to walk back!" It was the first time I had mentioned my
+missing horse. I did not mention my stay in Skunk's Misery: it was a
+side show of my own, to my mind, and unconnected with Dudley,--though I
+ought to have known that nothing in life is ever a side show, even if
+you can't see the door from the big tent.
+
+"Oh, your horse," said Dudley more civilly. "I didn't think I'd
+forgotten about it, but I suppose I must have. I was a good deal put out
+getting Thompson off."
+
+"What happened about him?" I had had no chance to ask before.
+
+"Oh, I never could stand him," and I knew it was true. "Sitting all the
+evening playing cards like a performing dog! And he wasn't fit for his
+work, either. I told him so, and he said he'd go. He went out to
+Caraquet nearly a month ago--I thought you knew. D'ye mean you didn't
+see him going through?"
+
+I shook my head. It was a wonder I had not, for I had spent most of last
+month fussing over some bad places on the road, by the turn where I had
+found my boy from Skunk's Misery, and I ought to have seen Thompson go
+by. But the solution was simple. There was one Monday and Tuesday I had
+my road gang off in the bush, on the opposite side from the Skunk's
+Misery valley, getting stuff to finish a bit of corduroy. In those two
+days I could have missed seeing Thompson, and I said so.
+
+"You didn't miss much," Dudley returned carelessly. "This Macartney's a
+long sight better man."
+
+"Where'd you get him?" I was pretty sure it was not Macartney for whom
+my dream girl had mistaken me in the dark, but there was no harm in
+knowing all I could about him.
+
+Dudley knocked the wind straight out of my half suspicion.
+
+"Thompson sent him," he returned with a grin. "I told him to get
+somebody. Oh, we parted friends all right, old Thompson and I! He saw,
+just as I did, that he wasn't the man for the place. Macartney struck
+that vein first go off, and that was recommendation enough for me. But
+here's Thompson's, if you want to see it!" He extracted a folded letter
+from a case.
+
+It was written in Thompson's careful, back-number copperplate, perhaps
+not so careful as usual, but his unmistakably. And once and for all I
+dismissed all idea that it could have been Macartney who was tangled up
+with Paulette Brown. Old Thompson's friends were not that sort, and he
+vouched for knowing Macartney all his life. He was a well-known man,
+according to Thompson, with a long string of letters after his name.
+Thompson had come on him by accident, and sent him up at once, before he
+was snapped up elsewhere.
+
+"Thompson seems to have got a move on in sending up his successor,"
+said I idly. "When did he write this?" For there was no envelope, and
+only Montreal, with no date, on the letter.
+
+"Dunno--first day he got to Montreal, it says," carelessly. "Come along
+and have a look at the workings. I want you to get log shelters built as
+quick as you can build them--we don't want to have to dig out the new
+tunnel mouth every time it snows. After that you can go to Caraquet with
+what gold we've got out and be gone as long as you please. Now, we may
+have snow any day."
+
+I nodded. The winter arrives for good at La Chance in November, and
+besides the exposed tunnel mouth, there was no shelter over the ore
+platform at the mill. This year the snow was late, but there was no
+counting on that. And I blinked as I went out of the white November
+sunshine into Macartney's new tunnel, and the candlelight of his humming
+stope. One glance around told me Dudley was right, and the man knew his
+business; and it was the same over at the mill. It seemed to me
+superintendent was a mild name for Macartney, and general manager would
+have fitted better. But I said nothing, for Dudley considered he was
+general manager himself. Another thing that pleased me about the new man
+was that he seemed to be doing nothing, till you saw how his men jumped
+for him, while Thompson had never been able to keep his hands off the
+men's work. There was none of that in Macartney; and if he had struck me
+as capable the night before he looked ten times more so now, as he
+placidly ran four jobs at once.
+
+He was a good-looking figure of a man, too, in his brown duck working
+clothes, and I did not wonder Marcia Wilbraham had taken a fancy to him.
+Dudley would probably be blazing if he caught her philandering with his
+superintendent, but it was no business of mine. And anyhow, Macartney
+had my blessing since it could not be he to whom Paulette Brown had
+meant to speak the night before. That ought to have been none of my
+business either, and to get it out of my head I turned to Dudley,
+fussing round and talking about tailings. And one omission in all he and
+Macartney had shown me hopped up in my head. "Where's your gold?" I
+demanded.
+
+"That's one thing we don't keep loose on the doorsteps," Macartney
+returned drily, and I rather liked him for it, since he knew nothing of
+my share in the mine.
+
+But Dudley snapped at him: "Why can't you say it's in the house--in my
+office? Stretton's going to take it into Caraquet; there's no sense in
+making a mystery to him. Come on, Stretton, and have a look at it now!"
+He stuck his fat little arm through mine, and we went back to the house
+by the back door and Charliet's untidy kitchen. It was the shortest way,
+and it was not till afterwards that I remembered it was not commanded by
+the window in his office, like the front way. I was not keen on going;
+later I had a sickly feeling that it was because I had a presentiment of
+seeing something I did not want to see. Then all I thought was that I
+had a hundred other things to do, and though I went unwillingly, I went.
+
+"The gold's in my safe, in boxes," Dudley said on the way, "and that I'm
+not going to undo. But I've a lump or two in my desk I can show you."
+
+"Lying round loose?" I shrugged my shoulders.
+
+"No, it's locked up. But no one ever comes in here but me, and"--he gave
+a shove at the office door that seemed to have stuck,--"and Miss Brown!"
+
+But I was speechless where I stood behind him. There was the bare
+office; Dudley's locked desk; Dudley's safe against the wall. And
+turning away from the safe, in her blue sweater and blue skirt and
+stockings and little buckled shoes, was my dream girl!
+
+Something in my heart turned over as I looked at her. It was not that
+she had started, for she had not. She just stood in front of us, poised
+and serene, and some sort of a letter she had been writing lay half
+finished on Dudley's desk. But something totally outside me told me she
+had been writing no letter while we were out; that she knew the
+combination of the safe; had opened it; had but just shut it; and--_that
+she had been doing something to the boxes of gold inside it_.
+
+There was nothing in her face to say so, though, and my thought never
+struck Dudley. He gave her a nod and a patronizing: "Well, nice girl,"
+without the least surprise at seeing her there. But I had seen a pin dot
+of blue sealing wax on the glimpse of white blouse that showed through
+the open front of her sweater, and something else. I stooped, while
+Dudley was fussing with the lock of his desk, and picked up a curious
+little gold seal that lay on the floor by the safe.
+
+Whether I meant to speak of it or not I don't know; for quick as light,
+the girl held out her hand for it. I said nothing as I gave it to her.
+Dudley did not see me do it; and, of course, it might have been a seal
+of his own. But, if it were, why did not Paulette Brown say so,--or say
+something--instead of standing dead white and silent till I turned away?
+
+I knew--as I said "Oh" over Dudley's gold, and my dream girl slipped out
+of the room--that I had helped her to keep some kind of a secret for
+the second time. And that if she had any mysterious business at La
+Chance it was something fishy about Dudley's gold!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE MAN IN THE DARK
+
+
+It sounded crazy, for what could a girl like that do to gold that was
+securely packed? But women had been mixed up in ugly work about gold
+before, and somehow the vision of my dream girl standing by the safe
+stuck to me all that day. Suppose I had helped her to cover up a theft
+from Dudley! It was funny; but the ludicrous side of it did not strike
+me. What did was that I must see her alone and get rid of the poisonous
+distrust of her that she, or Marcia, had put into my head. But that day
+went by, and two more on top of it, and I had no chance to speak to
+Paulette Brown.
+
+Part of the reason was that I had not a second to call my own. La Chance
+had been an amateur mine when we began it, and it was one still. There
+was only Dudley--who did nothing, and was celebrating himself stupid
+with drugs, or I was much mistaken--Macartney, and myself to run it;
+with not enough men even to get out the ore, without working the mill
+and the amalgam plates. It had been no particular matter while the whole
+mine was only a tentative business, and I had been having half a fit at
+Dudley's mad extravagance in putting up a ten-stamp mill when we had
+nothing particular to crush in it. But now, with ore that ran over a
+hundred to the ton being fed into the mill, and Macartney and I doing
+the work of six men instead of two, I agreed with Dudley when he
+announced in a sober interval that we required a double shift of men and
+the mill to crush day and night, instead of stopping at dark,--besides a
+cyanide plant and a man to run it.
+
+But Macartney unexpectedly jibbed at the idea. He returned bluntly that
+he could attend to the cyanide business himself, when it was really
+needed; while as to extra men he could not watch a night shift at the
+plates as well as a day one, and he would have to be pretty sure of the
+honesty of his new amalgam man before he started in to get one.
+Also--and it struck me as a sentiment I had never heard from a mine
+superintendent before--that if we sent out for men half of those we got
+might be riffraff and make trouble for us, without so much as a sheriff
+within a hundred miles. "I'd sooner pick up new men one at a time," he
+concluded, "even if it takes a month. We've ladies here, and if we got
+in a gang of tramps----" he gave a shrug and a significant glance at
+Dudley.
+
+"Why, we've some devils out of purgatory now," I began scornfully, and
+stopped,--because Dudley suddenly agreed with Macartney. But the waste
+of time in making the mine pay for itself and the stopping of the mill
+at night galled me; and so did the work I had to do from dawn to dark,
+because any two-dollar-a-day man could have done it instead.
+
+Macartney seemed to be made of iron, for he took longer hours than I
+did. But he could talk to Marcia Wilbraham in the evenings, while Dudley
+stood between me and the dream girl I thought had come true for me when
+first I came to La Chance.
+
+I watched her, though; I couldn't help it. There were times when I could
+have sworn her soul matched her body and she was honest all through; and
+times when a devil rose up in me and bade me doubt her; till between
+work and worry I was no nearer finding out the kind she really was than
+to discovering the man she had meant to speak to in the dark the night
+she blundered on me. Yet I had some sort of a clue there, if it were not
+much of one. Dunn and Collins, our two slackers who had been kicked out
+of Yale to land in our bunk house, evidently had some game on. Dunn I
+was not much bothered about: he was just a plain good-for-nothing, with
+a perennial chuckle. But Collins was a different story. Tall, pale,
+long-eyelashed, his _blase_ young face barely veiled a mind that was an
+encyclopaedia of sin,--or I was much mistaken. And he and Dunn had
+suddenly ceased to raise Hades in the bunk house every night and
+developed a taste for going to bed with the hens. At least, the snoring
+bunk house thought so. If they went abroad instead on whatever they were
+up to, I never caught them at it; but I did catch them watching _me_,
+like lynxes, whenever they were off shift. I never saw either of them
+speak to Miss Brown, but I got a good growing idea it was just Collins
+she had meant to interview the night she spoke to me: and it fitted in
+well enough with my doubts about her and Dudley's gold, for I would have
+put no gold stealing past Collins. As for Paulette Brown herself, I
+could see no earthly sense in Marcia's silly statement that "she was
+afraid for her life--or Dudley's." She was afraid _of_ Dudley, I could
+see that; for she shrank from him quite often. But on the other hand, I
+saw her follow him into his office one night, when he was fit for no
+girl to tackle, and try to get him to listen to something. From outside
+I heard her beg him to "please listen and try to understand"--and I made
+her a sign from the doorway to come away before he flew at her. I asked
+her if there were anything I could do, and she said no; it was only
+something she wanted to tell Dudley. But suddenly she looked at me with
+those clear eyes of hers. "You're very--good to me," she said rather
+piteously.
+
+I shook my head, and that minute I believed in her utterly. But the next
+night I had a jar. I was starting for Caraquet the morning after, with
+the gold Dudley had in his office, so I was late in the stable, putting
+washers on my light wagon, and came home by a short cut through the
+bush, long after dark. If I moved Indian-silent in my moccasins it was
+because I always did. But--halfway to the shack clearing--I stopped
+short, wolf-silent; which is different. Close by, invisible in the dark
+spruces, I heard Paulette Brown speaking; and knew that once more she
+was meeting a man in the dark, and, this time, the right one! I could
+not see him any more than I could hear him, for he did not speak; but I
+knew he was there. I crouched to make a blind jump for him--and my dream
+girl's voice held me still.
+
+"I don't care how you threaten me: you've got to _go_," she said
+doggedly. "I know I've my own safety to look after, but I'll chance
+that. I'll give you one week more. Then, if you dare to stay on here,
+and interfere with me or the gold or anything else, I'll confess
+everything to Dudley Wilbraham. I nearly did it last night. I _won't_
+trust you--even if it means your giving away my hiding place to the
+police!"
+
+Whoever she spoke to moved infinitesimally in the dark. He must have
+muttered something I could not hear, for the girl answered sharply: "As
+for that, I'm done with you! Whether you go or don't go, this is the
+last time I'll ever sneak out to meet you. When you dare to say you love
+me"--and once more the collected hatred in her voice staggered me, only
+this time I was thankful for it--"I could die! I won't hear of what you
+say, remember, but I'll give you one week's chance. Then--or if you try
+anything on with me and the gold--I'll tell!"
+
+There was no answer. But my blood jumped in me with sheer fury, for
+answer or no answer, I knew who the man beside her was. Close by me I
+heard Dunn's unmistakable chuckle: and where Dunn was Collins was too. I
+behaved like a fool. I should have bounced through the bush and grabbed
+Dunn at least, which might have stopped some of the awful work that was
+to come. But I stood still, till a sixth sense told me Collins was gone,
+just as I could have gone myself, without sound or warning. Yet even
+then I paused instead of going after him. First, because I had no
+desire to give my reason for dismissing him next morning; second,
+because I had a startling, ghastly thought that I'd heard Macartney's
+quiet, characteristic footstep moving away,--and if a hard, set-eyed man
+like our capable superintendent had been out listening to what a girl
+said to Collins, as I had, I didn't know how in the devil I was to make
+him hold his tongue about it. And in the middle of that pleasant thought
+my dream girl spoke again, to herself this time: "Oh, I can't trust him!
+I'll have to get hold of the gold myself--at least all I've marked."
+
+On the top of her words a wolf howled startlingly, close by. It was
+evidently the last touch on what must have been a cheerful evening, for
+Paulette Brown gave one appalled spring and was gone, fleeing for the
+kitchen door. I am not slow on my feet. I was in the front way before
+she struck the back one. From the front door I observed the living room,
+and what I saw inside it before I strolled in there made me catch my
+breath with relief and comforting security for the first time that
+night. Macartney could not have been out listening in the dark, if I
+had. He sat lazily in the living room, talking to Marcia, with his feet
+in old patent leather shoes he could never have run in, even if it had
+not been plain he had not been out-of-doors at all. Marcia had
+evidently not been spying either, which was a comfort; and Dudley was
+out of the question, for he dozed by the fire, palpably half asleep. But
+suddenly I had a fright. The girl who entered the living room five
+minutes behind me had very plainly been out; and I was terrified that
+Marcia would notice her wind-blown hair. I spoke to her as she passed
+me. "You're losing a hairpin on the left side of your head," was all I
+said. And much I got for it. My dream girl tucked in her wildly flying
+curl with that sleight of hand women use and never even looked at me.
+But the thing was done, and I had covered up her tracks for the third
+time.
+
+I decided to fire Collins before breakfast the next morning and get off
+to Caraquet straight after. But I didn't; and I did not fire Collins,
+either. When I went to the bunk house and then to the mine, where he was
+a rock man, he had apparently fired himself, as Paulette had told him
+to. He was nowhere to be found, anyhow, or Dunn either. I wasted an hour
+hunting for him, and after that Macartney wanted me, so that it was late
+afternoon before I could load up my gold and get off. And as I opened
+the safe in Dudley's office I swore.
+
+There were four boxes of the stuff; small, for easy handling; and if I
+had had time I would have opened every hanged one of them. Even as it
+was, I determined to do no forwarding from Caraquet till I knew what
+something on them meant. For on each box, just as I had expected even
+before I heard Paulette Brown say she had marked them, was a tiny seal
+in blue wax!
+
+The reason for any seal knocked me utterly, but I couldn't wait to worry
+over it. No one else saw it, for I loaded the boxes into my wagon
+myself, and there was nobody about to see me off. Dudley was dead to the
+world, as I'd known he was getting ready to be for a week past; Marcia,
+to her fury, had had to retire to bed with a swelled face; and Macartney
+was the only other person who knew my light wagon and pair of horses was
+taking our clean-up into Caraquet,--except Paulette Brown!
+
+And there was no sign of her anywhere. I had not expected there would
+be, but I was sore all the same. I had helped her out of difficulties
+three times, and all I'd got for it was--nothing! I saw Macartney coming
+up from the mill, and yelled to him to come and hold my horses, while I
+went back to my room for a revolver. This was from sheer habit. The snow
+still held off, and before me was nothing more exciting than a cold
+drive over a bad road that was frozen hard as a board, a halt at the
+Halfway stables to change horses, and perhaps the society of Billy
+Jones as far as Caraquet,--if he wanted to go there. The only other
+human being I could possibly meet might be some one from Skunk's Misery,
+though that was unlikely; the denizens of Skunk's Misery had few errands
+that took them out on roads. So I pocketed my gun mechanically. But as I
+went out again I stopped short in the shack door.
+
+My dream girl, whom I'd never been alone with for ten minutes, sat in my
+wagon, with my reins in her hands. "My soul," I thought, galvanized,
+"she can't be--she must be--coming with me to Caraquet!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE CARAQUET ROAD: AND THE WOLVES HOWL ONCE MORE
+
+    Why comest thou to ride with me?
+      "The road, this night, is dark."
+    Dost thou and thine then side with me?
+      "Ride on, ride on and hark!"
+
+    _The Night Ride._
+
+
+There she sat, anyhow, alone except for Macartney, who stood at the
+horses' heads. Wherever she was going, I had an idea he was as surprised
+about it as I was, and that he had been expostulating with her about her
+expedition. But, if he had, he shut up as I appeared. I could only
+stammer as I stared at Paulette, "You--you're not coming!"
+
+"I seem to be," she returned placidly. And Macartney gave me the
+despairing glance of a sensible man who had tried his best to head off a
+girl's silly whim, and failed.
+
+"It's as you like," he said--to her, not to me. "But you understand you
+can't get back to-night, if you go to Caraquet. And--Good heavens--you
+ought _not_ to go, if you want the truth of it! There's nothing to
+see--and you'll get half frozen--and you mayn't get back for days, if it
+snows!"
+
+Paulette Brown looked at him as if he were not there. Then she laughed.
+"I didn't say I was going to Caraquet! If you want to know all about my
+taking a chance for a drive behind a pair of good horses, Miss Wilbraham
+wants Billy Jones's wife to come over for a week and work for her. I'm
+going to stay all night with Mrs. Jones and bring her back in the
+morning. She'll never leave Billy unless she's fetched. So I really
+think you needn't worry, Mr. Macartney," she paused, and I thought I saw
+him wince. "I'm not going to be a nuisance either to you or Mr.
+Stretton," and before he had a chance to answer she started up the
+horses. I had just time to take a flying jump and land in the wagon
+beside her as she drove off.
+
+Macartney exclaimed sharply, and I didn't wonder. If he had not jumped
+clear the near wheels must have struck him. I lost the angry, startled
+sentence he snapped out. But it could have been nothing in particular,
+for my dream girl only turned in her seat and smiled at him.
+
+I had no smile as I took the reins from her. I had wanted a chance to be
+alone with her, and I had it: but I knew better than to think she was
+going to Billy Jones's for the sake of a drive with me. The only real
+thought I had was that behind me, in the back of the wagon, were the
+boxes of gold she had marked inexplicably with her blue seal, and that I
+had heard her say the night before that she "would have to get that
+gold!"
+
+How she meant to do it was beyond me; and it was folly to think she ever
+_could_ do it, with six feet of a man's strength beside her. But
+nevertheless, when you loved a girl for no other earthly reason than
+that she was your dream of a girl come true, and even though she
+belonged to another man, it was no thought with which to start on a
+lonely drive with her. I set my teeth on it and never opened them for a
+solid mile over the hummocky road through the endless spruce bush,
+behind which the sun had already sunk. I could feel my dream girl's
+shoulder where she sat beside me, muffled in a sable-lined coat of
+Dudley's: and the sweet warmth of her, the faint scent of her
+gold-bronze hair, made me afraid to speak, even if I had known what I
+wanted to say.
+
+But suddenly she spoke to me. "Mr. Stretton, you're not angry with me
+for coming with you?"
+
+"You know I'm not." But I did not know what I was. Any one who has read
+as far as this will know that if ever a plain, stupid fool walked this
+world, it was I,--Nicholas Dane Stretton. Put me in the bush, or with
+horses, and I'm useful enough,--but with men and women I seem to go
+blind and dumb. I know I never could read a detective story; the clues
+and complications always made me feel dizzy. I was pretty well dazed
+where I sat beside that girl I knew I ought to find out about, and her
+nearness did not help me to ask her ugly questions. If she had not been
+Dudley's,--but I broke the thought short off. I said to myself
+impersonally that it was impossible for a girl to do any monkey tricks
+about the La Chance gold with a man like me. Yet I wondered if she meant
+to try!
+
+But she showed no sign of it. "I had to come," she said gently. "Marcia
+really wants Billy Jones's wife: she won't let me wait on her, and of
+course Charliet can't do it. You believe me, don't you? I didn't come
+just for a drive with you!"
+
+I believed that well enough, and I nodded.
+
+"Then," said my dream girl quietly, "will you please stop the horses?"
+
+I looked round. We were miles from the mine, around a turn where the
+spruce bush ceased for a long stretch of swamp,--bare, featureless, and
+frozen. Then, for the first time, I looked at Dudley's girl that I was
+fool enough to love.
+
+"What for?" I demanded. "I mean, of course, if you like," for I saw she
+was white to the lips, though her eyes met mine steadily, like a man's.
+"Do you mean you want to go back?"
+
+She shook her head almost absently. "No: I think there's something
+bumping around in the back of the wagon. I"--there was a sharp, nervous
+catch in her voice--"want to find out what it is."
+
+I had packed the wagon, and I knew there was nothing in it to bump. But
+I stopped the horses. I wondered if the girl beside me had some sort of
+baby revolver and thought she could hold me up with it, if I let her get
+out; and I knew just what I would do if she tried it. I smiled as I
+waited. But she did not get out. She turned in her seat and reached
+backwards into the back of the wagon, as if she had neither bones nor
+joints in her lovely body. Marcia was right when she said it was
+perfectly educated and trained. For a moment I could think of nothing
+but the marvellous grace of her movement as she slid her hand under the
+tarpaulin that covered the gold; then I thought I heard her catch her
+breath with surprise. But she turned back with an exquisite lithe grace
+that made me catch mine, and slid down in her seat as if she had never
+slid out of it.
+
+"It's a bottle," she said lightly. But it was with a kind of startled
+puzzle too, as if she had sooner expected dynamite. "I can't think why;
+I mean, I wonder what's in it!"
+
+"A bottle!" I jerked around to stare at a whisky bottle in her hands. It
+was tightly sealed and full of something colorless that looked like gin.
+I was just going to say I could not see where it had come from, seeing I
+had packed the wagon myself, and I would have gone bail there was no
+bottle in it. But it came over me that she might be pretending
+astonishment and have put the thing there herself while I was in my room
+getting my revolver; since there had been no one else near my wagon but
+Macartney, and he could not have left the horses' heads. It flashed on
+me that the baby beside me, being used to Dudley, might have drugged a
+little gin, thinking I would take various drinks on the way; and I
+nearly laughed out. But I said: "Back there was no place for a bottle.
+It's a wonder it didn't smash on the first bump!"
+
+"Yes," said Paulette slowly. "Only I wonder--I mean I can't see----" and
+she paused, staring at the bottle with a thoughtful sort of frown. "I
+believe I'll hold it on my lap."
+
+I was looking at the bottle too, where she held it with both fur-gloved
+hands; and I forgot to wonder if she were lying about it or not. For
+the gloves she wore were Dudley Wilbraham's, as well as the coat,--and
+that any of Dudley's things should be on my dream girl put me in a
+black, senseless fury. I wanted to take them straight off her and wrap
+her up in my own belongings. I grabbed at anything to say that would
+keep my tongue from telling her to change coats with me that instant,
+and the bottle in her hand was the only thing that occurred to me. It
+brought a sudden recollection back to me anyhow, and I opened my lips
+quite easily.
+
+"Scott, that looks like some of the brew I spilled over my clothes at
+Skunk's Misery!"
+
+"Skunk's Misery!" Paulette exclaimed sharply. "What on earth is Skunk's
+Misery?"
+
+"A village--at least, a den--of dirt, chiefly; off this road, between
+Caraquet and Lac Tremblant." I was thankful to have something to think
+about that was neither her, or me, or Dudley. I made as long a story as
+I could of my stay in Skunk's Misery when I took home the half-killed
+boy; of the filthy stuff I had spilled on my clothes, and how I had seen
+a wolf carry them off. "By George, I believe he _liked_ the
+smell--though I never thought of that till now!"
+
+"What?" Paulette gave a curious start that might have been wonder, or
+enlightenment. "And you got the stuff at Skunk's Misery, out of a
+bottle like this? Oh, I ought to have guessed"--but she either checked
+herself, or her pause was absolutely natural--"I should have guessed
+you'd had some sort of a horrible time that night you came home. You
+looked so tired. But what I meant to say was I don't see how such poor
+people would have a bottle of _anything_. Didn't they say what it was?"
+
+"Didn't ask! It looked like gin, and it smelt like a sulphide factory
+when it got on my clothes. They certainly had that bottle."
+
+"Well, Skunk's Misery hasn't got _this_ bottle, anyhow!" I could see no
+reason for the look on her face. It was not gay any more; it was stern,
+if a girl's face can be stern, and it was white with angry suspicion.
+Suddenly she laughed, rather fiercely. "I'm glad I thought of it before
+the jolting broke it in the wagon! I want to get it safely to Billy
+Jones's."
+
+The reason why beat me, since she had pretended to know nothing of it,
+so I said nothing. After a long silence Paulette sighed.
+
+"You've been very kind to me, Mr. Stretton," she said, as if she had
+been thinking. "I wish you could see your way to--trusting me!"
+
+"I don't know how I've been kind," I left out the trusting part. "I
+have hardly seen you to speak to till to-night, except," and I said it
+deliberately, "the first time I ever saw you, sitting by the fire at La
+Chance. You did speak to me then."
+
+"Was that--the first time you saw me?" It might have been forgetfulness,
+or a challenge to repeat what she had said to me by the lake in the
+dark. But I was not going to repeat that. Something told me, as it had
+told me when I came on her by Dudley's fire--though it was for a
+different reason, now that I knew she was his and not mine--that I would
+be a fool to fight my own thoughts of her with explanations, even if she
+chose to make any. I looked directly into her face instead. All I could
+see was her eyes, that were just dark pools in the dusk, and her mouth,
+oddly grave and unsmiling. But then and there--and any one who thinks me
+a fool is welcome to--my ugly suspicions of her died. And I could have
+died of shame myself to think I had ever harbored them. If she had done
+things I could not understand--and she had--I knew there must be a good
+reason for them. For the rest, in spite of Marcia and her silly
+mysteries, and even though she belonged to Dudley, she was my dream
+girl, and I meant to stand by her.
+
+"That was the first time I spoke to you," I said, as if there had been
+no pause. "After that, I picked up a seal for you, and I told you your
+hair was untidy before Marcia could. I think those are all the
+enormously kind things I've ever done for you. But, if you want
+kindness, you know where to come!"
+
+"Without telling you things--and when you don't trust me!"
+
+"Telling things never made a man trust any one," said I. "And besides,"
+it was so dark now, as we crawled along the side of the long rocky hill
+that followed the swamp, that I had to look hard to see her face, "I
+never said I didn't trust you. And there isn't anything you could tell
+me that I want to know!"
+
+"Oh," Paulette cried as sharply as if I had struck her, "do you mean
+you're taking me on trust--in spite of everything?"
+
+"In spite of nothing." I laughed. I was not going to have her think I
+knew about Collins, much more all the stuff Marcia had said. But she
+turned her head and looked at me with a curious intentness.
+
+"I'll try," she began in a smothered sort of voice, "I mean I'm not all
+you've been thinking I was, Mr. Stretton! Only," passionately, and it
+was the last thing I had expected her to say, "I wish we were at Billy
+Jones's with all this gold!"
+
+I did not, whether she had astonished me or not. I could have driven all
+night with her beside me, and her arm touching mine when the wagon
+bumped over the rocks.
+
+"We're halfway," I returned rather cheerlessly. "Why? You're not afraid
+we'll be held up, are you? No human being ever uses this road."
+
+"I wasn't thinking of human beings," she returned simply. "I was
+thinking of wolves."
+
+"Wolves?" I honestly gasped it. Then I laughed straight out. "I can't
+feel particularly agitated about wolves. I know we had some at La
+Chance, but we probably left them there, nosing round the bunk-house
+rubbish heap. And anyhow, a wolf or two wouldn't trouble us. They're
+cowardly things, unless they're in packs." I felt exactly as if I were
+comforting Red Riding Hood or some one in a fairy tale, for the Lord
+knows it had never occurred to me to be afraid of wolves. "What on earth
+put wolves in your head?"
+
+"I--don't know! They seemed to be about, lately."
+
+"Well, I never saw any on this road! I've a revolver, anyhow."
+
+"I'm g-glad," said Paulette; and the word jerked out of her, and my arms
+jerked nearly out of me. In the dark the wagon had hit something that
+felt like nothing but a boulder in the middle of my decent road. The
+wagon stopped dead, with an up-ending lurch, and nothing holding it to
+the horses but the reins. Why on earth they held I don't know. For with
+one almighty bound my two young horses tried to get away from me,--and
+they would have, if the reins had not been new ones. As it was I had a
+minute's hard fighting before I got them under. When they stood still
+the girl beside me peered over the front of the wagon into the dark.
+"It's the whiffletree, I think," she said, as if she were used to
+wagons.
+
+I peered over myself and hoped so. "Mercy if it is," said I. "If it's a
+wheel we're stuck here. Scott, I wonder if I've a bit of rope!"
+
+Paulette Brown pulled out ten feet of spun yarn from under her coat; and
+if you come to think of it, it was a funny thing for a girl to have. It
+struck me, rather oddly, that she must have come prepared for accidents.
+"There," she said, "I expect you can patch us up if I hold the horses.
+Here's a knife, too, and"--I turned hot all over, for she was putting
+something else into my hand, just as if she knew I had been wondering
+about it since first we started; but she went on without a
+break--"here's my revolver. Put it in your pocket. I'd sooner you kept
+it."
+
+I was thankful I had had the decency to trust her before she gave the
+weapon to me. But I was blazingly angry with myself when I got out of
+the wagon and saw just what had happened. Fair in the middle of my new
+road was a boulder that the frost must have loosened from the steep
+hillside that towered over us; and the front of the wagon had hit it
+square,--which it would not have done if I had been looking at the road
+instead of talking to a girl who was no business of mine, now or ever. I
+got the horses out of the traces and the pole straps, and let Paulette
+hold them while I levered the boulder out of the way, down the hillside.
+I was scared to do it, too, for fear they would get away from her, but
+she was evidently as used to horses as to wagons: Bob and Danny stood
+for her like lambs, while I set to work to repair damages. The pole was
+snapped, and the whiffletree smashed, so that the traces were useless. I
+did some fair jury work with a lucky bit of spruce wood, the
+whiffletree, and the axle, and got the pole spliced. It struck me that
+even so we should have to do the rest of the way to Billy Jones's at a
+walk, but I saw no sense in saying so. I got the horses back on the
+pole, and Paulette in the wagon holding the reins, still talking to the
+horses quietly and by name. But as I jumped up beside her the quiet flew
+out of her voice.
+
+"The _bottle_," she all but shrieked at me. "_Mind the bottle!_"
+
+But I had not noticed she had put it on my seat when she got out to
+hold the horses. I knocked it flying across her, and it smashed to
+flinders on the near fore wheel, drenching it and splashing over Danny's
+hind legs. I grabbed the reins from Paulette, and I thought of skunks,
+and a sulphide factory,--and dead skunks and rotten sulphide at that.
+Even in the freezing evening air the smell that came from that smashed
+bottle was beyond anything on earth or purgatory, excepting the stuff I
+had spilt over myself at Skunk's Misery. "What on earth," I began
+stupidly. "Why, that's that Skunk's Misery filth again!"
+
+Paulette's hand came down on my arm with a grip that could not have been
+wilder if she had thought the awful smell meant our deaths. "Drive on,
+will you?" she said in a voice that matched it. "Let the horses _go_, I
+tell you! If there's anything left in that bottle it may save us for
+a--I mean," she caught herself up furiously, "it may save me from being
+sick. I don't know how you feel. But for heaven's sake get me out of
+that smell! Oh, why didn't I throw the thing away into the woods, long
+ago?"
+
+I wished she had. The stuff was on Danny as well as on the wheel, and we
+smelt like a procession of dead whales. For after the first choking
+explosion of the thing it reeked of nothing but corruption. It was the
+Skunk's Misery brew all right, only a thousand times stronger.
+
+"How on earth did Skunk's Misery filth get in my wagon?" I gasped. And
+if I had been alone I would have spat.
+
+"I--can't tell you," said Paulette shortly. "Mr. Stretton, can't you
+hurry the horses? I----Oh, hurry them, please!"
+
+I saw no particular reason why; we could not get away from the smell of
+the wheel, or of Danny. But I did wind them up as much as I dared with
+our kind of a pole,--and suddenly both of them wound themselves up, with
+a jerk to try any pole. I had all I could do to keep them from a dead
+run, and if I knew the reason I trusted the girl beside me did not. It
+had hardly been a sound, more the ghost of a sound. But as I thought it
+she flung up her head.
+
+"What's that?" she said sharply. "Mr. Stretton, what's that?"
+
+"Nothing," I began; and changed it. "Just a wolf or two somewhere."
+
+For behind us, in two, three, four quarters at once rose a long wailing
+howl.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+MOSTLY WOLVES: AND A GIRL
+
+    Oh, what was that drew screaming breath?
+      "A wolf that slashed at me!"
+    Oh, who was that cried out in death?
+      "A man who struck at thee!"
+
+    _The Night Ride._
+
+
+The sound might have come from a country hound or two baying for sheer
+melancholy, or after a cat: only there were neither hounds nor cats on
+the Caraquet road. I felt Paulette stiffen through all her supple body.
+She whispered to herself sharply, as if she were swearing--only
+afterwards I knew better, and put the word she used where it belonged:
+"The devil! Oh, the devil!"
+
+I made no answer. I had enough business holding in the horses,
+remembering that spliced pole. Paulette remembered it too, for she spoke
+abruptly. "How fast do you dare go?"
+
+"Oh, not too fast," my thoughts were still on the pole. "They're not
+after us, if you're worrying about those wolves."
+
+But she took no notice. "How far are we from Billy Jones's?"
+
+We were a good way. But I said, "Oh, a few miles!"
+
+"Well, we've got to make it!" I could still feel her queerly rigid
+against my arm; perhaps it was only because she was listening.
+But--quick, like life, or death, or anything else sudden as
+lightning--she had no need to listen; nor had I. A burst of ravening
+yells, gathering up from all sides of us except in front, came from the
+dark bush. And I yelled myself, at Bob and Danny, to keep them off the
+dead run.
+
+It was rot, of course, but I had a queer feeling that wolves _were_
+after us, and that it was just that Skunk's Misery stuff that had
+started them, as it had drawn the wolf that had taken my clothes. I
+could hear the yelping of one after another grow into the full-throated
+chorus of a pack. The woods were full of them.
+
+"I didn't think he'd dare," Paulette exclaimed, as if she came out of
+her secret thoughts.
+
+But it did not bring me out of mine, even to remember that young devil
+Collins. I had pulled out my gun to scare the wolves with a shot or
+two,--and there were no cartridges in it! I could not honestly visualize
+myself filling it up the night before, but I was sure I had filled it,
+just as I was sure I had never troubled to look at it since. But of
+course I could not have, or it would not have been empty now. I inquired
+absently, because I was rummaging my pockets for cartridges, "Who'd
+dare? _Whoa_, Bob! What he?"
+
+"They," Paulette corrected sharply. "I meant the wolves. I thought they
+were cowards, but--they don't sound cowardly! I--Mr. Stretton, I believe
+I'm worried!"
+
+So was I, with a girl to take care of, a tied-on pole and whiffletree,
+and practically no gun; for there was not a single loose cartridge in my
+pockets. I had been so mighty secure about the Caraquet road I had never
+thought of them. I cursed inside while I said disjointedly, "Quiet, Bob,
+will you?--There's nothing to be afraid of; you'll laugh over this
+to-night!" Because I suddenly hoped so--if the pole held to the
+Halfway--for the infernal clamor behind us had dropped abruptly to what
+might have been a distant dog fight. But at a sudden note in it the
+sweat jumped to my upper lip.
+
+"Dunn and Collins!" I thought. They had been missing when we left.
+Paulette had said she did not trust Collins, and since he had had the
+_nous_ to get hold of the Skunk's Misery wolf dope, he or Dunn could
+easily have stowed it in my wagon in the night, and been caught by it
+themselves where they had started out to waylay us by the boulder they
+put in my road. But all I said was, "The wolves have stopped!"
+
+"Not they," Paulette retorted, and suddenly knocked me silly with
+surprise. "Oh, I haven't done you a bit of good by coming, Mr. Stretton!
+I thought if I were with you I might be some use, and I'm not."
+
+I stared stupidly. "D'ye mean you came to fight wolves?"
+
+"No! I came----" but she stopped. "I was afraid--I mean I hated your
+going alone with all that gold, and Marcia really wanted Mrs. Jones."
+
+Any other time I would have rounded on her and found out what she was
+keeping back, but I was too busy thinking. The horses had calmed to a
+flying trot up the long hill along whose side we had been crawling when
+the pole went. Once over the crest of it we should have done two miles
+since we heard the first wolf howl; which meant we were nearer to Billy
+Jones's than I had remembered. If the pole held to get us down the other
+side of the long hill there was nothing before us but a mile of corduroy
+road through a jungle-thick swamp of hemlock, and then the one bit of
+really excellent going my road could boast,--three clear miles, level as
+a die, straight to the Halfway stables.
+
+"We haven't far now," said I shortly. "And it doesn't matter why you
+came; you've been useful enough! I couldn't have held the horses and
+patched the wagon too." I omitted to say I could have tied them to a
+wheel. "But if you're nervous now, there's one thing we could do. Can
+you ride?"
+
+"_Ride?_" I thought she laughed. "Yes! Why?"
+
+"We could cut the horses loose and ride them in to the Halfway."
+
+"What? And leave the gold out here, as we were m----" I knew she cut off
+"meant to." "I won't do it!"
+
+"Wolves wouldn't eat it--and there's no one to steal it," I returned
+matter-of-factly--because if Collins had meant to, the sinister flurry
+behind us had decided me his career was closed. "However, it would be
+wasting trouble to leave the stuff; there's no sign of any pack after us
+now." And a ravening yell cut the words off my tongue.
+
+The brutes must have scoured after us in silence, hunting us in the dark
+for the last mile. For as we stood out, a black blot on the hilltop
+against the night sky, they broke out in chorus just behind us, for all
+the world like a pack of hounds who had treed a wildcat; and too close
+for any fool lying to occur to me.
+
+"Paulette," I blurted, "there's not a cartridge in my gun! Yours is so
+little I'm afraid of it. But it may scare them. Take these reins!"
+
+But she turned in her seat and knelt there, looking behind us. If I
+could have got her on Danny's back and let her run clear five minutes
+ago it was impossible now. No human being could have pulled up Bob or
+him.
+
+"See them?" I snapped. "By heaven, I wish the brutes would stop that
+yelling; they're driving the horses crazy! See them?"
+
+"No. But--yes, yes," her voice flashed out sharp as a knife. "They're on
+us! Give me the revolver, quick! I can shoot; and I've cartridges. You
+couldn't do any good with it: it throws low--and it's too small for your
+hand. And I wouldn't dare drive. I might get off the road, and we'd be
+done."
+
+It was so true that I did not even turn my head as I shoved over her
+little gun. I had no particular faith in her shooting; my trust was in
+the horses' speed. We were getting down the hill like a Niagara of
+galloping hoofs and wheels over a road I had all I could do to see; with
+that crazy pole I dared not check the horses to put an ounce on. I stood
+up and drove for all I was worth, and the girl beside me shot,--and hit!
+For a yell and a screaming flurry rose with every report of her
+revolver. It was a beastly noise, but it rejoiced me; till suddenly I
+heard her pant out a sickened sentence that made me gasp, because it was
+such a funny thing to say.
+
+"My heavens, I never thought I could be cruel to animals--like this. But
+I've got to do it. I"--her voice rose in sudden disjointed triumph--"Mr.
+Stretton, I believe I've stopped them!"
+
+"I believe you have," I swore blankly,--and one leapt out of the dark by
+the fore wheel as I spoke, and she shot it.
+
+But it was the last; she _had_ stopped them. And if I had not known that
+to have turned even one eye from my horses as we tore down that hill
+would have meant we were smashed up on one side of it, I would have been
+more ashamed than I was of being fought for by a girl. "You're a
+wonder--just a marvellous wonder," I got out thickly. "We're clear--and
+it's thanks to you!" And ahead of us, in the jungle-thick hemlock that
+crowded the sides of the narrow road I had corduroyed through the swamp
+for a ricketty mile, a single wolf howled.
+
+It had a different, curious note, a dying note, if I had known it; but I
+did not realize it then. I thought, "We're done! They've headed us!" I
+said, "Look out ahead for all you're worth. If we can keep going, we'll
+be through this thicket in a minute."
+
+But Paulette cut out my thought. "We _are_ done, if they throw the
+horses!" And instantly, amazingly, she stood up in the bumping, swaying
+wagon as if she were on a dancing floor and shed Dudley Wilbraham's
+coat. She leaned toward me, and I felt rather than saw that she was in
+shirt and knickerbockers like a boy. "Keep the horses going as steady as
+you can, and whatever you do, don't try to stop them. I'm going to do
+something. Mind, keep them _galloping_!"
+
+I would have grabbed her; only before I knew what she was going to do
+she was past me, out over the dashboard, and running along the smashed
+pole between Bob and Danny in the dark.
+
+It was nothing to do in daylight. I've done it myself before now, and so
+have most men. But for a girl, in the dark and on a broken pole, with
+wolves heading the horses,--I was so furiously afraid for her that the
+blood stopped running in my legs, and it was a minute before I saw what
+she was after. She had not slipped; she was astride Danny--ducking under
+his rein neatly, for I had not felt the sign of a jerk--but only God
+knew what might happen to her if he fell. And suddenly I knew what she
+had run out there to do. She was shooting ahead of the horses, down the
+road; then to one side and the other of it impartially, covering them.
+Only what knocked me was that there was no sign of a wolf either before
+or beside us on the narrow, black-dark highway,--and that she was
+shooting into the jungle-thick swamp hemlocks on each side of it at the
+breast height of a man!
+
+And at a single ghastly, smothered cry I burst out, "By gad, it _is_
+men!" For I knew she had shot one. I listened, over the rattling roll of
+the wheels on the corduroy, but there was no second cry. There was only
+what seemed dead silence after the thunder of the wheels on the uneven
+logs, as we swept out on the level road that led straight to the Halfway
+stable. It was light, too, after the dead blackness of the narrow swamp
+road. I saw the girl turn on Danny carelessly, as if she were in a
+saddle, and wave her hand forward for me to keep going. But the only
+thought I had was to get her back into the wagon. Not because I was
+afraid of a smash, for if the mended pole had held in that crazy,
+tearing gallop from the top of the hill it would hold till the Halfway.
+I just wanted her safe beside me. I had had enough of seeing a girl do
+stunts that stopped my blood. "Come back out of that," I shouted at her;
+"I'm going to stop the horses--and you come _here_!"
+
+She motioned forward, crying out something unintelligible. But before I
+could pull up the horses, before I even guessed what she meant to do, I
+saw her stand up on Danny's back, spring from his rump, and,--land
+lightly in the wagon!
+
+It may be true that I damned her up in heaps from sheer fright; I know I
+asked fiercely if she wanted to kill herself. She said no, quite coolly.
+Only that that pole would not bear any more running on it, or the jerk
+of a sudden stop either: it was that she had called out to me.
+
+"Neither can I bear any more--of tricks that might lose your life to
+save me and my miserable gold," I said angrily. "Sit down this minute
+and wrap that coat round you." I had ceased to care that it was
+Dudley's. "It's bitter cold. And there's the light at the Halfway!"
+
+"What I did wasn't anything--for me," my dream girl retorted oddly. "And
+I don't know that it was altogether to save you, Mr. Stretton, or your
+gold either, that you thought I meant to steal. I was pretty afraid for
+myself, with those wolves!"
+
+I was too raging with myself to answer. Of course it had not been she
+who had meant to steal my gold; and no matter how she had known some one
+meant to get at me, with wolves or anything else. It had been just
+Collins--and the sheer gall of it jammed my teeth--Collins and Dunn,
+two ne'er-do-well brats in our own mine. I had realized already that
+they had been missing from La Chance quite early enough for me to thank
+them for the boulder on my good road, and Collins----But I hastily
+revised my conviction that it was Collins I had heard the wolves chop in
+the bush as hounds chop a fox: Collins had too much sense. It had more
+likely been Dunn; he was the kind to get eaten! Collins must have legged
+it early for my corduroy road, where Paulette had expected him enough to
+shoot at him; while Dunn stayed round La Chance to put the wolf bait in
+my wagon and got caught by it himself on his way to join Collins.
+
+As for the genesis of the wolf dope, its history came to me coherently
+as letters spelling a word, beginning with the bottle of mixed filth I
+had spilt on myself at Skunk's Misery. The second I and my smelly
+clothes reached shore the night I returned to La Chance, a wolf had
+scented me and howled; had followed me to the shack and howled again
+while I was talking to Marcia about Paulette Brown; and another had
+carried off those very clothes under my own eyes where I stood by my
+window, as if the smell on them had been some kind of bait it could not
+resist. Wherever Dunn and Collins had got it, the smell from the broken
+bottle had been exactly the same, only twenty times stronger: and it
+had been meant to smash at the boulder on my road and turn me into a
+living bait for wolves!
+
+The theory may sound crazy, but it happens to be sane. There is a wolf
+dope, made of heaven knows what, except that it contains certain
+ingredients that have to be put in bottles and ripened in the sun for a
+month. Two Frenchmen were jailed this last June in Quebec province for
+using it around a fish and game club, and endangering people's lives.
+That same wolf bait had been put in my wagon by somebody,--and the human
+cry out of the swamp at Paulette's shot suddenly repeated itself in my
+ears. I was biting my lip, or I would have grinned. Paulette had hit the
+man who was to have put me out of business, if the wolves failed when
+that bottle smashed and the boulder crippled my wagon. Collins, who,
+laid up in the swamp, was to have reaped my gold and me if I got
+through! The cheek of him made me blaze again, and I turned on Paulette
+abruptly.
+
+"Look here, do you know you shot a man in the swamp?"
+
+"I hope I killed him," returned that same girl who had disliked being
+cruel to wolves,--and instantly saw what I was after. "That's nonsense,
+though! There couldn't have been any man there, Mr. Stretton. The
+wolves would have eaten him!"
+
+"Only one wolf got by you," I suggested drily.
+
+She shrugged her shoulders. "They'd have shot at us--men, I mean!"
+
+I made no answer. It struck me forcibly that Collins certainly would
+have; unless he was not out for shooting, but merely waiting to remove
+the gold from my wagon as soon as the wolves had disposed of my horses
+and me. Even then I did not see why he had held his fire, unless he had
+no gun. But the whole thing was a snarl it was no good thinking about
+till the girl beside me owned how much she knew about it. I wondered
+sharply if it had been just that knowledge she was trying to give Dudley
+the night I stopped her. The lights at the Halfway were very close as I
+turned to her.
+
+"If I've helped you at all, why can't you tell me all the trouble,
+instead of Dudley?" I asked, very low.
+
+"I don't know anything," but I thought she checked a sob, "that I--can
+tell. I just thought there might be trouble to-night, but I imagined it
+would happen before you started. That was why I marked that gold. Don't
+take any, _ever_, out of the safe, if it hasn't my seal on it."
+
+"You can't prevent Collins from changing the boxes--forever," I said
+deliberately; because, unless he were dead, as I hoped, she couldn't.
+But Paulette stared at me, open-lipped, as we drove into the Halfway
+yard, and Billy Jones ran out with a lantern.
+
+"Collins?" she repeated, as if she had never heard his name, much less
+met him secretly in the dark. "I don't know anything about any Collins,
+nor any one I could--put a name to! I tell you I don't know who was in
+the swamp!"
+
+She had not said she did not know who was responsible for the bottle in
+my wagon. But if I am Indian-dark I can be Indian-silent too. I said
+nothing about that. "Well, it doesn't matter who did anything," I
+exclaimed suddenly, "so long as there's trust between you and me!"
+Because I forgot Dudley and everything but my dream girl who had fought
+for me, and I suddenly wondered if she had not forgotten Dudley, too.
+For Bob and Danny stood still, played out and sweating, and Paulette
+Brown sat staring at me with great eyes, instead of moving.
+
+But she had forgotten nothing. "You're very kind--to me, and Dudley,"
+she said quietly, and slipped out of the wagon before I could lift her
+down. A sudden voice kept me from jumping after her.
+
+"By golly," said Billy Jones, sniffing at my fore wheel. "Have you run
+over a hundred skunks?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+I FIND LITTLE ENOUGH ON THE CORDUROY ROAD, AND LESS AT SKUNK'S MISERY
+
+
+I told Billy Jones as much as I thought fit of the evening's
+work,--which included no mention of wolf dope, or shooting on the
+corduroy road.
+
+If he listened incredulously to my tale of a wolf pack one look at Bob
+and Danny told him it was true. They had had all they wanted, and we
+spent an hour working over them. The wagon was a wreck; why the spliced
+pole had hung together to the Halfway I don't know, but it had; and I
+let the smell on it go as a skunk. I lifted the gold into the locked
+cupboard where Billy kept his stores. It had to be put in another wagon
+for Caraquet, anyhow; and besides, I was not going on to Caraquet in the
+morning. The gold was safe with Billy, and there were other places that
+needed visiting first. There was no hope of getting at the ugly business
+that had brewed up at La Chance through Paulette Brown, or Collins
+either; since one would never tell how much or how little she knew, and
+the other would lie, if he ever reappeared. But the wolf bait end I
+could get at, and I meant to. Which was the reason I sat on one of the
+horses I had sent over to the Halfway--after my one experience when it
+held none--when my dream girl and Mrs. Jones came out of Billy's shack
+in the cold of a November dawn.
+
+"I'm riding some of the way back with you," I observed casually.
+
+Paulette stopped short. She was lovelier than I had ever seen her, with
+her gold-bronze hair shining over the sable collar of Dudley's coat. I
+fancied her eyes shone, too, for one second, at seeing me. But there I
+was wrong.
+
+"I thought you'd started for Caraquet," she exclaimed hastily. "You
+needn't come with us. There won't be any wolves in the daytime, and--you
+know there's no need for you to come!"
+
+There was not. Even if her voice had not so significantly conveyed the
+fact that there was no bottle in her wagon this time, Mrs. Billy
+Jones--to put a hard fact politely--was about the most capable lady I
+had ever met. She was big-boned, hard-faced and profane; and usually
+left Billy to look after the house while she attended to a line of
+traps, or hunted bears for their skins. No wolves would worry the
+intrepid and thoroughly armed Mrs. Jones. But all the same I was riding
+some of the way back to La Chance.
+
+There was not a thing to be seen on the corduroy road through the swamp,
+or on the hill we had come down at the dead run; and I had not expected
+there would be. But on the top of the hill I bade good-by to my dream
+girl,--who was not mine, and was going back to Dudley. It was all I
+could manage to do it, too. I did not know I was biting my lip until it
+hurt; then I stopped watching her out of sight and turned back on the
+business that had brought me.
+
+You could ride a horse down the hill into the swamp if you knew how; and
+I did. I tied him to a tree and went over each side of the corduroy road
+on my feet. It was silent as death there in the cold gray morning, with
+the frost-fog clinging in the somber hemlocks, and the swamp frozen so
+solid that my moccasins never left a mark. No one else's feet had left a
+mark there, either, and I would have given up the idea that a man had
+been cached by the road the night before, if it had not been for two
+things.
+
+One was a dead wolf, with a gash in his throat in which the knife had
+been left till he was cold; you could tell by the blood clots round the
+wound: the other I did not find at once. But wolves do not stab
+themselves, and I remembered that the lone wolf cry ahead of us on that
+road had been a dying cry, not a hunting one. If Collins had killed the
+beast he had waited there long enough to let an hour pass before he took
+his knife out of its throat: so he had been there when we raced
+by,--which was all I wanted to know, except where he had gone since. As
+for the other thing I found, it was behind the hemlocks when I quartered
+the sides of the road in the silence and the frost-fog: and it was
+nothing but a patch of shell ice. But the flimsy, crackling stuff was
+crushed into two cup-like marks, as plainly telltale as if I had seen a
+man fall on his knees in them. And by them, frozen there, were a dozen
+drops of blood.
+
+I knew angrily that if it were Collins's blood he had not missed it
+particularly, for he had moved away without leaving a sign of a trail.
+Where to I had no means of knowing, till five minutes later I found
+another spatter of blood on my corduroy road,--and as I looked at it my
+own blood boiled. There was not only no one but that young devil Collins
+who could have lain in wait for me; but he had had the nerve to walk
+away on my own road! Where to, beat me; but considering what I knew of
+his easy deviltry it was probably back to La Chance and a girl who was
+daring to fight him.
+
+If I were worried for that girl I could not go back to her. I had to get
+my gold to Caraquet. Besides, I had a feeling it might be useful to do a
+little still hunting round Skunk's Misery. If Collins had had that
+bottle of devil's brew at La Chance he had got it from Skunk's Misery:
+probably out of the very hut where I had once nursed a filthy boy. And I
+had a feeling that the first thing I needed to do was to prove it.
+
+As I rode back to Billy Jones's I would have given a deal for any kind
+of a motor car that would have reduced the twenty-seven miles to
+Caraquet into nothing, instead of an all-day job,--which it proved to
+be.
+
+Not that I met a soul on the road. I didn't. But it took my wagon four
+hours to reach Caraquet over the frozen ruts of that same road; and
+another hour to hand over Dudley's gold to Randall, a man of my own who
+was to carry it on the mail coach to the distant railway.
+
+I had no worry about the gold, once Randall had charge of it: no one was
+likely to trouble him or the coach on the open post road, even if they
+had guessed what he convoyed. I was turning away, whistling at being rid
+of the stuff, when he called me back to hand over a bundle of letters
+for La Chance. There were three for Marcia, and one--in old Thompson's
+back-number copperplate--for Dudley. There were no letters for Paulette
+Brown or myself, but perhaps neither of us had expected any. I know I
+hadn't. I gave the Wilbraham family's correspondence the careless glance
+you always bestow on other people's letters and shoved it into my inside
+pocket. After which I left my horses and wagon safe in Randall's stable
+and started to walk back to Skunk's Misery and the Halfway stables.
+
+It seemed a fool thing to do, and I had no particular use for walking
+all that way; but there was no other means of accomplishing the twenty
+miles through the bush from Caraquet to Skunk's Misery. Aside from the
+fact that I had no desire to advertise my arrival, there was no wagon
+road to Skunk's Misery. Its inhabitants did not possess wagons,--or
+horses to put in them.
+
+It was black dark when I reached the place, and for a moment I stood and
+considered it. I had never really visualized it before, any more than
+you do any place that you take for granted as outside your scheme of
+existence. I was not so sure that it was, now. Anyhow, I stood in the
+gap of a desolate hill and looked into the hollow before me that--added
+to the dirt no skunk could stand--had earned the place its name. It was
+all stones: gravel stones, little stones, stones as big as cabs and as
+big as houses; and, hunched up among them like lean-tos, hidden away
+among the rocks and the pine trees growing up from among the rocks
+wherever they could find root-hold, were the houses of the Skunk's
+Misery people. There was no pretense of a street or a village: there
+were just houses,--if they deserved even that name. How many there were
+I could not tell. I had never had the curiosity to explore the place.
+But if it sounds as though a narrow, stone-choked valley were no citadel
+for a man or men to have hidden themselves, or for any one to conduct an
+industry like making a secret scent to attract wolves, the person who
+said so would be mistaken. There was never in the world a better place
+for secret dwelling and villainy and all the rest than Skunk's Misery.
+
+In the first place, you could not see the houses among the rocks. The
+valley was just like a porcupine warren. No rock stood out alone: they
+were all jumbled up together, big and little, with pine trees growing on
+the tops of them and in between them, up from the earth that was twelve,
+twenty, or sometimes forty feet below. The whole hollow was a maze of
+narrow, winding tracks, between rocks and under them, sometimes a foot
+wide and sometimes six, that Skunk's Misery used for roads. What its
+citizens lived on, I had never been able to guess. Caraquet said it was
+on wolf bounties,--which was another thing that had set me thinking
+about the bottle I had spilt on my clothes. If Collins or Dunn had got a
+similar bottle there I meant to find out about it: and I had the more
+heart for doing it since Paulette Brown knew nothing of Skunk's Misery.
+You can tell when a girl has never heard of a place, and I knew she had
+never heard of that one. I settled down the revolver I had filled up at
+Billy Jones's, and trod softly down the nearest of the winding alleys,
+over the worn pine needles, in the dark.
+
+There were just twenty houses, when I had counted all I could find.
+There might have been twenty more, under rocks and behind rocks I could
+not make my way around; but I was no porcupine, and in the dark I could
+not stumble on them. There was not a sign of a stranger in the place, or
+a soul about. And judging from the darkness and the quiet, all the
+fat-faced, indifferent women were in bed and asleep, and the shiftless
+rats of men were still away. There were no dogs to bark at me: I had
+learned that in my previous sojourn there. Dogs required food, and
+Skunk's Misery had none to spare. I went back through the one winding
+alley that was familiar to me, found the hut where I had nursed the boy,
+and walked in.
+
+There was not any Collins there, anyhow. The boy and his mother were in
+bed, or what went for being in bed. But at the sound of my voice the
+woman fairly flung herself at me, saying that her son was recovered
+again, and it was I who had saved him for her. She piled wood on the
+fire that was built up against the face of the rock that formed two
+sides of her house, and jabbered gratitude as I had never thought any
+Skunk's Misery woman could jabber. And she did not look like one,
+either; she was handsome, in a haggard, vicious way, and she was not
+old. I did not think myself that her son looked particularly recovered.
+He lay like a log on his spruce-bough bed, awake and conscious but
+wholly speechless, though his mother seemed satisfied. But I had not
+come to talk about any sick boys. I asked casually where I could find
+the stranger who had been in Skunk's Misery lately. But the woman only
+stared at me, as if the idea would not filter into her head. Presently
+she said dully that there had been no stranger there; I was the only one
+she had ever seen.
+
+It was likely enough; a Skunk's Misery messenger had more probably taken
+the wolf dope to Collins. I asked casually if she had any more of the
+stuff I had spilt on my clothes, and where she had got it,--and once
+more I ran bang up against a stone wall. The woman explained
+matter-of-factly that she had not got it from any one. She had found it
+standing in the sun beside one of the rocks, and stolen it, supposing it
+was gin. When she found it was not she took it for some sort of
+liniment; and put it where I had knocked it over on myself. She had
+never seen nor heard of any more of it. But of course it might have
+belonged to any one in the place, only I could understand she could not
+ask about it: which I did, knowing how precious a whole bottle of
+anything was in those surroundings. As to where she had found it, she
+could not be sure. She thought it was by the new house the Frenchwoman's
+son had built that autumn and never lived in!
+
+I pricked up my ears. The Frenchwoman's son was one of the men arrested
+in Quebec province for using wolf dope: a handsome, elusive devil who
+sometimes haunted the lumber woods at the lower end of Lac Tremblant,
+trapping or robbing traps as seemed good to him, and paying back
+interruptions with such interest that no one was keen to interfere with
+him. If the Frenchwoman's son were in with Collins in trying to hold up
+the La Chance gold, and was at Skunk's Misery now, I saw
+daylight,--anyhow about the wolf dope.
+
+But the woman by the fire knocked that idea out of me, half-made. The
+Frenchwoman's son had not been there for two months past and had only
+come there at all to build a house. It was empty now, but no one had
+dared to go into it. She could show it to me, but she was sure he had
+had nothing to do with that liniment, if I wanted any more. After which
+she relapsed into indifference, or I thought so, till I showed her what
+little money I had in my pocket. She rose then, abruptly, and led the
+way out of her hut to the deserted house the Frenchwoman's son had built
+for caprice and never lived in.
+
+It was deserted enough, in all conscience. The door was open, and the
+November wind free to play through the place as it liked. I stood on the
+threshold, thinking. I had found out nothing about any wolf-bait,
+excepting the one bottle the Frenchwoman's son might or might not have
+left there; certainly nothing about Collins ever having got hold of any;
+and if I had meant to spend the rest of the night in Skunk's Misery I
+saw no particular sense in doing it. I had a solid conviction that the
+boy's mother would not mention I had ever been there, for fear she might
+have to share what little I had given her--which, as it fell out, was
+true--and turned to go.
+
+But when the woman had left me to creep home in the dark, while I made
+my own way out of the village, I altered my mind about going. I cut
+down enough pine boughs to make a bed under me, shut the door of the
+deserted house--that I knew enough of the Frenchwoman's son to know
+would have no visitors--had a drink from my flask, and slept the sleep
+of the hunting dog till it should be daylight.
+
+And, like the hunting dog, I went on with my business in my dreams; till
+my legs jerked and woke me, to see a waning moon peering in from the
+west, through the hole that served the hut for a chimney, and I rose to
+go back to Billy Jones. For I dreamed there was a gang of men in a
+cellar under the very hut I slept in, with a business-like row of
+wolf-bait bottles at their feet, where they sat squabbling over a poker
+game. But as I said, it was the waning morning moon that woke me, and
+the hut was silent as the grave. I picked up the pine-bough bed I had
+slept on and carried it into the bush with me far enough to throw it
+down where it would tell no tales--I did not know why I did it, but I
+was to be glad--tightened up my belt, and took a short cut through the
+thick bush to Billy Jones's stables, with nothing to show for my day's
+and night's work but a dead wolf, a stained bit of shell ice, and a few
+drops of blood on the logs of my corduroy road. I was starving, and it
+was noonday, when I came out of the bush and tramped into the Halfway,
+much as I had done that first time I came from Skunk's Misery and went
+home to La Chance. Only to-day Billy Jones was not sitting by his stove
+reading his ancient newspaper. He was standing in the kitchen with two
+teamsters from La Chance, looking down at a dead man.
+
+As I opened the door and stood staring, the teamsters jumped as if they
+had been shot. But Billy only turned a stolid white face on me.
+
+"My God, Mr. Stretton," he said, stolidly too, "what do you make of
+this?"
+
+All I could see from where I stood was a rigid hand, that had said death
+to me the second I opened the door. I gave a sort of spring forward.
+What I thought was that here was the man who had left the blood in the
+swamp when Paulette's bullet hit him, and that I had got Collins. I had
+nearly burst out that he had what he deserved. But instead I stopped,
+paralyzed, where my spring had left me.
+
+"My God," I said in my turn, "I don't know!"
+
+For the man who lay in front of me, stone dead in water-soaked clothes
+that were frozen to his stark body, was Thompson, our old
+superintendent, who only six weeks ago had left the La Chance mine;
+whose letter to Dudley, with its careful, back-number copperplate
+address, lay in my pocket now.
+
+"It's Thompson!" was the only thing I could say.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THOMPSON!
+
+
+Thompson it was, if it seemed incredible. And Billy Jones exclaimed, as
+he pointed to him, "He can't have been dead longer than since last
+night! And I can't understand this thing, Mr. Stretton! It's but six
+weeks since Thompson _left_ here; and from what he said he didn't mean
+to come back. He told me he was in a hurry to get away, because he was
+taking a position in a copper mine in the West. I remember I warned him
+you hadn't got all your swamps corduroyed, and likely he couldn't drive
+clear into Caraquet; so he left his wagon here and borrowed a saddle
+from me to ride over. And a boy brought his horse back next day, or day
+after,--I forget which. I remember Thompson forgot to send me a tin of
+tobacco he promised to get me off Randall, at Caraquet!"
+
+"D'ye mean you think he never went to Caraquet?" It was a stupid
+question, for, of course, I knew he had gone there, and farther, or he
+could not have sent Macartney to La Chance, or a letter to Dudley now.
+But what I was really thinking of was that I had been right about the
+date old Thompson left the mine, and that he had gone over my road on
+one of the two days I was away with all my road men, getting logs out of
+the bush.
+
+Billy Jones scattered my thoughts impatiently: "Oh, he went there all
+right. It's his--coming back--that beats me!"
+
+It beat me too, for reasons Billy knew nothing about. Why Thompson had
+come back was his own business; but it was plain he had been dead a
+scant twenty-four hours, and the only place I could think of where he
+was likely to have been killed was on my corduroy road the night before.
+Only I did not see how Thompson's clothes could have got water-soaked in
+a frozen swamp; and I did not see, either, what a decent man like
+Thompson could have been doing out there like a wolf, with wolves. I had
+more sense than to think he could have had any truck with Collins about
+our gold. I nodded back at the teamsters: "Where did they find him?"
+
+"They didn't find him," returned Billy simply, "it was my hound dog. He
+was yelling down at the lake shore this morning, like he'd treed a
+wildcat, and when I went down it was Thompson he'd found,--lying right
+on shore in the daylight! You know how that fool Lac Tremblant behaves;
+the water in it had gone down to nothing this morning, and on the bare
+stones it had left was Thompson. Only I don't see how he ever _got_
+there unless he was coming back, from wherever he'd been outside, by Lac
+Tremblant instead of your road!"
+
+"Where was his canoe?"
+
+"He didn't have any! But you know that lake--it might have smashed his
+canoe on him like an egg, and then--just by chance--put him ashore!" I
+did know: I had had all I wanted to keep from being smashed myself the
+night I crossed to La Chance. I nodded, and Billy choked. "It--it kind
+of sickened me this morning; I _liked_ Thompson, Mr. Stretton!"
+
+So had I, if I had laughed at his eternal solitaire. Billy and I laid
+him on the bed, decently, after we had done what we could for him. And I
+was ashamed to have even wondered if he had been the man Paulette had
+shot at on the La Chance road; for there was not a mark on him, and a
+fool could have told he had just been drowned in Lac Tremblant. There
+was nothing in his pockets to tell how he had got there: only a single
+two-dollar bill and a damp pack of cards in a wet leather case.
+Thompson's solitaire cards! Somehow the things gave me a lump in my
+throat; I wished I had talked more to Thompson in the long evenings.
+The letter in my pocket from him was Dudley's, and I did not mention it
+to Billy. I said I would try to find out where the dead man had come
+from, and anything else I could, before he buried him. And with that I
+left old Thompson lying on Billy's bed with his face covered, and rode
+home to La Chance.
+
+When I got in, Dudley and Macartney were in the living room, talking.
+Any other time I might have wondered why Dudley looked so jumpy and
+bad-tempered, but all I was thinking of then was my ugly news. But
+before I could tell it, Dudley flew at me. "Where the devil have you
+been all day? And what's happened to my gold?"
+
+I don't know why, but I had a furious, cold qualm that either Dudley or
+Macartney had _found out_,--I don't mean about Collins so much as about
+Paulette having been mixed up with him. Till I knew I was damned if I'd
+mention him.
+
+"I don't understand," I said shortly. "The gold's in Caraquet. But the
+reason I didn't get home this morning is that Thompson's back!"
+
+"What?" Macartney never spoke loud, yet it cracked out.
+
+I nodded. "I mean he's dead, poor chap! They found his body in Lac
+Tremblant this morning." And suddenly I knew I was staring at
+Macartney. His capable face was always pale, but in one second it had
+gone ghastly. It came over me that he had known old Thompson all his
+life, and I blurted involuntarily, "I'm sorry, Macartney!"
+
+But he took no notice.
+
+"They found Thompson's body," he said heavily, as a man does when he is
+sick with shock. "Who found it? Why,--he wasn't _here_! What in hell do
+you mean?"
+
+I told him. Dudley sat and goggled at the two of us, but Macartney
+stared at the floor, his face still ghastly. "I beg your pardon,
+Stretton," he muttered as if he were dizzy. "Only Thompson was about the
+oldest friend I had. I thought----" But he checked himself and exclaimed
+with a sudden sharp doubt, "It can't be old Thompson, Stretton; you must
+be mistaken! He couldn't be here--he was going out West. I was expecting
+a letter from him any day, to say he'd started."
+
+"It's here. At least, I mean there's _a_ letter from him, that I got in
+Caraquet, only it's for Mr. Wilbraham. And I wasn't mistaken, Macartney.
+I wish I were!"
+
+Macartney could not speak. I was surprised; I had not suspected him of
+much of a heart. I pulled out the letter, and Dudley opened it.
+
+"Down and out--the poor old devil," said he slowly, staring at it, "and
+came back. Well, poor Thompson!" He read the thing again and handed it
+to Macartney. But Macartney only gave one silent, comprehensive stare at
+it, in the set-eyed way that was the only thing I had never liked about
+him, and pushed the letter across the table to me.
+
+It was dated and postmarked Montreal. There was no street address, which
+was not like Thompson. But its precise phrases, which _were_ like him,
+sounded down and out all right.
+
+     "DEAR MR. WILBRAHAM: I write to inquire if you will take me
+     back at La Chance. There is no work here, or anywhere, and
+     the British Columbia copper mine, where I intended to go,
+     has shut down. I have nothing else in view, and I am
+     stranded. If by to-morrow I cannot obtain work here I see
+     nothing between me and starvation but to return to La
+     Chance. I trust you can see your way to taking me back, in
+     no matter how subordinate a position, at least till I can
+     hear of something else. If I am obliged to chance coming to
+     you I will take the shortest route, avoiding Caraquet, and
+     coming by Lac Tremblant.
+
+    "Yours truly,
+
+        "WILLIAM D. THOMPSON."
+
+"That's funny," I let out involuntarily. And Dudley snapped at me that
+it wasn't; it was ghastly.
+
+"I don't mean the letter," I said absently. "It's that about Lac
+Tremblant. Thompson was scared blue of that lake; he used to beg me not
+to go out on it. And by gad, Dudley, I don't see how he could have come
+that way! He couldn't paddle a canoe!"
+
+"What?" Macartney started, staring at me. "You're right: he couldn't,"
+he said slowly. "That does make it queer--except that we don't know he
+meant to paddle up the lake. He might have intended to walk here along
+its shore, and strayed or slipped in or something, in the dark. But what
+troubles me is--can't you see he'd gone crazy? This letter"--he put a
+finger on it, eloquently--"isn't sane, from a self-contained man like
+Thompson! He must have been off his head with worry before he wrote it,
+or started back to a place he'd left for----"
+
+"Incompetency, if you want the brutal truth," Dudley broke in not
+unkindly. "He was too old-fashioned to make good elsewhere, I expect;
+and if he found it out, I don't wonder if he did go off his head."
+
+I glanced over Dudley's shoulder at the letter he and Macartney were
+studying. It did not look crazy, with its Gaskell's Compendium
+copperplate and its careful signature. I don't know why I picked up the
+envelope from where it lay unnoticed on the table by Dudley and fiddled
+with it scrutinizingly, but I did. The outside of it looked all right,
+with its address in Thompson's neat copperplate. But it wasn't well
+glued or something, for as I shoved my fingers inside, the whole thing
+opened out flat, like a lily. I looked down mechanically as I felt it
+go, and--by gad, the inside of it _didn't_ look right! There was nothing
+on the glued-down top flap, but the inside back of the envelope wasn't
+blank, as it should have been. It wasn't written on in Thompson's neat
+copperplate or in his neat phrases, either. A pencil scrawl stared at
+me, upside down, as I gripped the lower flap of the envelope
+unconsciously, under the ball of my big thumb. "Why, here's some more,"
+I exclaimed like an ass, glaring at the envelope's inside back. "'Take
+care--something----' What's this? What on earth did the old man mean?"
+
+Macartney caught the splayed-out envelope from my hand, so sharply that
+the flap I didn't know I held tore away, and stayed in my fist as he
+gazed on the rest of the reversed envelope with his set-eyed stare.
+"'Take care, Macartney! Gold, life, everything--in danger!'" he read out
+blankly. "Why, it's some kind of a crazy warning to _me_! Only--nobody
+wants my life, and I've no gold--if that's what he means! I----" but he
+broke down completely. "Old Thompson must have gone stark mad," he
+muttered. "I--it makes me heartsick!"
+
+"I don't know," Dudley snapped unexpectedly. "It fits about the gold,
+perhaps. Thompson might have suspected something before he left here!"
+
+He looked at Macartney significantly, and I remembered the question he
+had rapped at me when I came in. Something inside me told me to hold my
+tongue concerning my adventures on the Caraquet road till I knew what
+Paulette had said about them,--which I was pretty certain was mighty
+little. But once again I had that cold fear that Macartney might have
+found out something about the seal she had put on all our gold, or her
+talking to Collins in the dark, for the question Dudley flung at me was
+just what I had been expecting:
+
+"You didn't see anything of Dunn or Collins between here and
+Caraquet--or hear from Billy Jones that they'd gone by the Halfway?"
+
+"No," I fenced with a bland, lying truth. "I saw two of our teamsters at
+the Halfway!"
+
+Dudley shook his head. "Not them--I knew about them! But Dunn and
+Collins cleared out the day you left, and I thought----" he broke off
+irrelevantly. "What the dickens possessed you to take Paulette with you
+that night? She might have been killed--I heard you'd the dog's own
+trouble on the road!"
+
+That something inside me stiffened up. Whatever he'd heard, I was pretty
+certain was not all; and I was hanged if I were coming out with the full
+story of that crazy drive till I knew whether Paulette came into it. I
+had no desire to talk before Macartney either, in spite of what he might
+have found out, or guessed; no matter what Paulette might have been
+mixed up in I was not going to have a stern-faced, set-eyed Macartney
+put her through a catechism about it. Or Dudley either, for that matter.
+I had no real voucher for the terms he and Paulette were on, except
+Marcia's word; and Dudley was no man to trust not to turn on a girl.
+
+"We shot a few wolves, if that's what you mean," I said roughly. "I
+don't see why that should have worried you about Miss Paulette--or what
+it has to do with Dunn and Collins!"--which was a plain lie.
+
+"Few wolves! I know all about them!" Dudley retorted viciously. "Billy
+Jones's wife came out with the plain truth--that you'd been chased by a
+pack! And as for what Dunn and Collins had to do with my worrying about
+the gold you carried, it's simple enough. They----" but he stopped,
+chewing two fingers with a disgusting trick he had. "By gad," he looked
+up suddenly, "I believe it was them the wolves were after to begin with,
+Stretton--before they got started on you! And it wasn't what they left
+La Chance for!"
+
+"What d'ye mean?"
+
+Dudley was chewing his fingers again, but Macartney answered with his
+usual set-eyed openness. "The gold," he supplied. "I got an idea those
+two deserters might have laid up beside the Caraquet road somewhere, to
+wait for you and get it. I had trouble with them over some drilling the
+morning you left; and when I went back to the stope after seeing you and
+Miss Paulette off, they'd cleared out. They must have gone a couple of
+hours before you did. They let out something about hold-ups while I was
+having the trouble with them, and Wilbraham and I got worried they might
+have managed to get over the road before you, and be lying up for you
+somewhere."
+
+"They only left--two hours before I did," said I, with flat irrelevance.
+I must have stared at Macartney like a fool, but he had knocked the wind
+clean out of me as to Collins having been the man in the swamp. With
+only two hours' start neither he nor Dunn, nor any man, for matter of
+that, could have legged it over my road in time to lie up in the only
+place I knew some one had laid up,--on the corduroy road.
+
+"Well, they didn't get me, and I never saw them," I began,--and suddenly
+remembered that ghastly noise, like the last flurry of a dog fight, that
+had halted the wolves on my track. My first thought of it, and of Dunn
+and Collins, had been right. "By gad, I believe I heard them though," I
+exclaimed, "and if they were on that road they're killed and eaten! But
+I didn't have any trouble about the gold."
+
+It was true to the letter, for my side had attended to all the trouble,
+if my side was only a girl who would not have shot without need. But
+when I explained the noise that might have accounted for Dunn and
+Collins, Dudley shook his head.
+
+"They didn't get eaten; not they! And your having no trouble with the
+gold isn't saying you won't have any. If no one saw Dunn and Collins
+going out to Caraquet I bet they're laid up somewhere on your road yet,
+waiting for your next trip! And as if that wasn't worry enough, poor old
+Thompson has to go out of his mind and come back here to be found
+dead--and I mean to find out how!" He was working himself up into one of
+his senseless rages, and he turned on Macartney furiously. "You knew
+him before I did! Write to his people and find out how he got here,
+anyhow. I'm not going to have any man come back, and just be found dead
+like a dog, if it is only old Thompson! I'm going to have him traced
+from the time he left Montreal."
+
+"He had no people," said Macartney blankly. "As far as I know, he was
+just a bit of driftwood. And as for finding out anything about his
+journey here, I don't suppose we ever can! All we'll get at was that he
+came back--and was found dead." And something made me look past him and
+Dudley, sitting with their backs to the living-room door, and the blood
+jumped into my face.
+
+Paulette Brown stood in the doorway, motionless, as if she had been
+there some time. I didn't know if she were merely knocked flat about the
+wolves and Collins, or scared Macartney might have found out something
+about her. But she was staring at Macartney's unconscious back as you
+look at a chair or anything, without seeing it, and if he were pale she
+was dead white,--except her mouth that was arched to a piteous crimson
+bow, and her eyes that looked dark as pools of blue ink. But she did not
+speak of Dunn or Collins.
+
+"Do you mean Thompson's been found dead?--the quiet man who was here
+when I came?" she stammered, as if it choked her. And I had an ungodly
+fright she was going to say she must have shot him on the corduroy road!
+
+"Billy Jones found him drowned in Lac Tremblant; it was an accident," I
+exclaimed sharply, before she could come out with more about shooting
+and wolf bait, and perhaps herself, than I chose any one to know,--till
+I knew it first. And I saw the blood flash into her face as it had
+flashed into mine at the sight of her.
+
+"Oh, I thought Mr. Macartney meant he'd been--murdered," she returned
+faintly. "I'm glad--he wasn't. But if he had been, I suppose it would be
+sure to come out!"
+
+"Crime doesn't always come out, Miss Paulette," said Macartney.
+
+But Paulette only answered listlessly that she was not sure, one never
+could tell; and moved to her usual seat by the fire.
+
+I was knocked endways about Collins; for who could have been on the
+corduroy road if he had not. I would have given most of the world for
+ten minutes alone with my dream girl and explanations. But Dudley began
+the whole story of Thompson over again, and Macartney stood there, and
+Marcia--whom I had not seen since she went to bed with a swollen
+face--came in, dressed in her hideous green tweed, and stood on tiptoe
+to chuck me under the chin, with a "Hullo, Nicky, you're back again!"
+
+There was no earthly hope of speaking to my dream girl alone. I shoved
+the mystery of Collins into the back of my head and went off to my room
+before I remembered I was still unconsciously holding that torn-off flap
+of poor old Thompson's envelope in my shut fist. I dropped it on my
+floor,--and grabbed it up again, to stare at it for a full minute.
+Because there was writing on _it_, too.
+
+"For God's sake, search my cards--my cards--my cards," Thompson had
+scrawled across the three-cornered envelope flap Macartney's grab had
+left in my hand: and, knowing Thompson, it was pitiful. He was the sort
+who must have been crazy indeed before he spoke of the Almighty and
+cards in the same breath.
+
+I remembered taking his measly solitaire pack out of his pocket at the
+Halfway, and wished I had brought them along with me. But it was simple
+enough to go and get them from Billy Jones. Meantime I had no desire to
+speak to Macartney of them or the scrawled, torn-off flap from
+Thompson's envelope: he was sick enough already about old Thompson's
+aberration, without any more proofs of it. It hurt even me to remember I
+had always laughed at the poor devil and his forlorn cards. I had no
+heart to burn the scrap of his envelope either, while old Thompson lay
+unburied. I put it away in my letter case, and locked it up.
+
+Which seemed a tame ending; I had not sense enough to know it was not
+tame at all!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+TATIANA PAULINA VALENKA!
+
+
+Poor old Thompson seemed a closed incident. There was nothing to be
+found out about him, even regarding his departure from La Chance. Nobody
+remembered his going through Caraquet, or even the last time he had been
+there. He was not a man any one would remember, anyhow, or one who had
+made friends. We put a notice of his death and the circumstances in a
+Montreal paper, and I thought that was the end of it all, till Dudley,
+to my surprise, stuck obstinately to his idea of tracing Thompson from
+Montreal. He told Macartney and me that he had written to a detective
+about it, and I think we both thought it was silly. I know I did; and I
+saw Macartney close his lips as though he kept back the same thought.
+But we gave old Thompson the best funeral we could, over at the Halfway,
+with a good grave and a wooden cross. All of us went except Marcia. She
+said she had never cared about the poor old thing, and she wasn't going
+to pretend it.
+
+It was a bitter day, with no snow come yet. Macartney looked sick and
+drawn about the mouth as he stood by the grave, while Dudley read the
+prayers out of Paulette's prayer book. I saw her notice Macartney when I
+did, and I think neither of us had guessed he had so much feeling. I
+stayed a minute or two behind the others, because I'd ridden over,
+instead of driving with them; and just before I started for La Chance I
+remembered that torn scrap of paper in my room there. I turned hastily
+to Billy Jones.
+
+"Those solitaire cards of Thompson's," said I, from no reason on earth
+but that to find them had been the last request of the dead man, even if
+it did sound crazy. "I'd like them!"
+
+Billy nodded and went into his shack. Presently he came out and said the
+cards were gone. He thought he'd put them away somewhere, but they
+weren't to be found. It was queer, too, because he remembered replacing
+them in their prayer-book sort of case after he'd spread them by the
+stove to dry with Thompson's clothes. But his wife said she would find
+them and send them over. Which she never did, and I forgot them.
+Goodness knows I had reason to.
+
+I did an errand instead of going straight home from Thompson's funeral
+that took me into the bush not far from where the boulder had been
+placed on my road. It was there or near by I had heard wolves pull down
+a man or men; and after I'd tied my horse and done a little looking
+around, I found the spot. It was not the scattered bones of two men that
+sickened me, or even that the long thighs and shanks of one of them were
+the measure of Collins. It was the top of a skull, with the hair still
+on it. I did not need the face that was missing. Dunn, with his eternal
+chuckle, had had stubbly fair hair without a part in it, clipped close
+till it stood on end,--and the same fair hair was on the top of the
+skull that lay like a round stone in the frozen bush. Whether the two
+had set out to rob me I didn't know. I did know they had not done it,
+and that the man Paulette had shot at in the swamp was more of a mystery
+than ever.
+
+The ground was too hard to do any burying. I made the bones into a
+decent heap and piled rocks into a cairn over them. If I said a kind of
+a prayer, too, it was no one's business but that of the God who heard
+me; the boys had been young, and they were dead while I lived, which was
+enough to make a man pray. I felt better when I had done it.
+
+But when I got home to La Chance the bald story I told Dudley was
+wasted. He swore I was a fool, first, for burying two skulls with no
+faces and imagining they belonged to Dunn and Collins; and next that
+they were still alive and meaning to run a hold-up on us. From where, or
+how, he couldn't say. But he kept on at the thing; and the minute he had
+half a drink in him--which was usually the first thing in the
+morning--he began to worry me to go out and find where they were cached
+and hike them out of it; and he kept at it all day. That would not have
+worried me much since it was only Dudley, and Macartney and the others
+believed my story; but everything else at La Chance began to go crooked,
+and every one's nerves got edgy. Marcia was unpleasantly silent, except
+when Macartney was there, when she sat in his pocket and they talked low
+like lovers,--only that I was always idiotically nervous they might be
+talking about Paulette Brown. That was seldom enough though, for half
+the time Macartney never showed up, even for meals. He was working like
+ten men over the mine, and good, solid, capable work at that. Whatever
+had made poor Thompson send him to us he was worth his weight in the
+gold he was getting out of La Chance in----Well, in chunks! Which was
+one of the reasons he had to work so hard, and brings me to the naked
+trouble at La Chance.
+
+We were deadly short of men. Not only were Dunn and Collins dead, but
+their grisly end seemed to have scared the others. Not a day went by
+that three or four of them did not come for their time, chiefly rockmen
+and teamsters,--for we had no ore chute at La Chance. Macartney thought
+it was Dudley's fault, for nagging around all the time, and was sore
+over it. Dudley said it was Macartney's, though when I pressed him he
+said, too, that he did not know why. The men I spoke to before they left
+just said they'd had enough of La Chance, but I could feel a sulky
+underhand rebellion in the bunk house. I ran the ore hauling as best I
+could, and Macartney doubled up the work in the mill. The ore-feeder
+acted as crusher-man, too, the engineer was his own fireman, which, with
+the battery man and the amalgamator, brought the mill staff down to
+four,--but they were the best of our men. The others Macartney turned to
+with the rockmen, and in the course of a fortnight he got a few more men
+from somewhere he wrote to outside. They were a rough lot; not
+troublesome, but the kind of rough that saves itself backache and elbow
+grease. Personally, I think they would not have worked at all, if
+Macartney had not put the fear of death in them. I caught him at it, and
+though I did not hear what he said in that competent low voice of his,
+there was no more lounging around and grinning from our new men. But the
+trouble among the old men kept on till we had none of them left except
+the four in the mill. It did not concern me particularly, except that I
+had to work on odd jobs that should not have concerned me either, and I
+did not think much about it. What I really did think about--and it put
+me out of gear more than anything else at La Chance--was Paulette Brown!
+
+It had been all very well to call her my dream girl and to think I'd got
+to heaven because she'd taken the trouble to drive to the Halfway with
+me and fight wolves. But she had hardly spoken to me since. And--well,
+not only the bones and skull I'd buried had smashed up my theory that it
+was only Collins who'd meant to hold up my gold, but I'd smashed it up,
+for myself, for a reason that made me wild: Paulette Brown, whose real
+name Marcia swore was something else, was still meeting a man in the
+dark! Where, I couldn't tell, but I knew she did meet him; and naturally
+I knew the man was not Collins, or ever had been. I did my best to get a
+talk with her, but she ran from me like a rabbit. I was worried good and
+hard. For from what I'd picked up, I knew the man she met could be
+nobody at La Chance,--and any outsider who followed a girl there likely
+had a gang with him and meant business, not child's play like Collins.
+
+The thing was serious, and I had no right to be trusting my dream girl
+and keeping silence to Dudley, but I went on doing it. There is no sense
+in keeping things back. I was mad with love for her, and if she had
+given me a chance I would have brushed Dudley out of my way like a
+straw. I had to grip all the decency I had not to do it, anyway. But if
+you think I just made an easy resignation of her and sat back meekly,
+you're wrong. I sat back because I was helpless and too stupid to
+formulate any way to deal with the situation. I don't know that I was
+any more silent than I always am, though Marcia said so. I did get into
+the way of pretending to write letters in the evenings, while Marcia and
+Macartney talked low, and Dudley went up and down the room in his
+eternal trudge of nervousness, throwing a word now and then to Paulette
+seated sewing by the fire,--that I kept my back to so that the others
+could not see my face.
+
+But one night, nearly a month after Thompson was buried, I came in after
+supper, and Paulette was in my usual place. She was writing a letter or
+something, and Dudley was preaching to Macartney about the shortage of
+men in the bunk house. Marcia, cross as two sticks because she was only
+there to talk to Macartney herself, had Paulette's seat by the fire. I
+sat down by the table where Paulette was writing, more sideways than
+behind her.
+
+If I had chosen to look I could have read every word she was writing.
+But naturally I was not choosing to, for one thing, and for another my
+eyes were glued to her face. Something in the look of her gave me a sick
+shock. She was deadly pale, and under the light of Charliet's
+half-trimmed lamp I saw the blue marks under her eyes, and the tight
+look round the nostrils that only come to a woman's face when she is
+fighting something that is pretty nearly past her, and is next door to
+despair. She looked hunted; that was the only word there was for it. It
+struck me that look must stop. If I had to march her out into the bush
+with me by force next morning, I meant to get a solitary talk with her;
+find out what her mysterious business was at La Chance with a man who
+had laid up for our gold; and, with any luck, transfer the hunted look
+to the face of the man who was hounding her,--for I felt certain he was
+still hanging around La Chance.
+
+After that--but there could be no after that to matter to me, with a
+dream girl who scooted to Dudley every time I tried to speak to her! I
+took a half-glance at him, and it was plain enough he would be no good
+to her in the kind of trouble that was on now. If I couldn't have
+her--since she didn't want me--I was the only person who could help
+her. She was angel-sweet to Dudley, heaven knows, and he was charming to
+her when he was himself. When he was not, he had a patronizing,
+half-threatening way of speaking to her, as if he knew something ugly
+about her, as Marcia had insinuated, that made me boil. She never
+resented it either, and that made me boil too. If I had ever seen her
+even shrink from him, I don't know that the curb bit I had on myself
+would have held. I wished to heaven she _would_ shrink and give me a
+chance to step in between her and a man who might love her, as Marcia
+said, but who loved drink and drugs better, or he would not have been
+talking between silliness and sobriety, as he was that night. And I was
+so busy wishing it that Marcia spoke to me three times before I heard
+her.
+
+"Nicky, do make Dudley shut up," she repeated, "he won't let any one
+else speak! He's been preaching the whole evening that Collins and Dunn
+aren't dead, only laid up somewhere round and making the other men
+desert, and you ought to go and find them--and now he's worrying us
+about that old idiot Thompson, who got himself drowned! For heaven's
+sake tell him no one would have bothered to murder the old wretch!"
+
+"Nobody ever thought he was murdered, and I buried Dunn and Collins
+right enough," said I absently, with my thoughts still on Paulette. But
+Dudley whisked around on me.
+
+"Marcia's talking rot," he exclaimed, his little pig's eyes soberer than
+I expected. "I don't mean about those two boys, for I bet they're no
+more dead than I am, and it would be just like them to lie low and set
+up a smothered strike among the men as soon as you were ass enough to be
+taken in by some stray bones! But I do mean it about Thompson. There's
+no sense in saying there was nothing queer about the way he came back
+and was found dead--because there was! It was natural enough that the
+police couldn't trace him in Montreal, for I hadn't a sign of data to
+give them: but it's darned unnatural that _I_ can't trace him in
+Caraquet. I've sieved the whole place upside down, and nobody ever saw
+Thompson after he left Billy Jones's that morning on his way to
+Caraquet!"
+
+Macartney stared at him for a minute; then he put down the pipe he was
+smoking. "If I thought that, I'd sieve the whole place upside down,
+too," he said so quietly that I remembered Thompson had been his best
+friend, and that he had looked deadly sick beside his grave. "But I
+don't. What it comes to with me is that no one remembers seeing Thompson
+in Caraquet that particular time, but no one says he wasn't there!"
+
+"Then where's the----" But Dudley checked himself quick as light. If I
+had been quite sure he was himself I should have been curious about what
+he had meant to say. But all he substituted was: "Well, nobody remembers
+seeing him that day, anyway, except Billy Jones!"
+
+"Seems to me that narrows poor Thompson's potential murderers down to
+Billy Jones," said Macartney ironically, since Billy Jones would not
+have murdered the meanest yellow pup that ever walked, and Macartney
+knew it as well as I did. But Dudley made the two of us sit up.
+
+"Who's to say he didn't?" he demanded. "What darned thing do we know
+about him to say that he mightn't have waylaid poor old Thompson for
+what money he had on him, and kept him shut up till he had a chance to
+say he found him drowned?"
+
+Macartney and I stared at each other. The very thought was so monstrous
+that it must have struck him, as it did me, that it was born of Dudley's
+drugs and not his intelligence. But it had to be stopped, or heaven knew
+whom Dudley would be accusing next.
+
+"For God's sake, Wilbraham, shut up," said Macartney curtly. "You make
+me sick. Isn't it enough to have the old man dead, without saying
+innocent people killed him!"
+
+"Yes, if they are innocent," Dudley returned so quietly that it
+surprised both of us. "But I tell you this, Macartney, and Stretton
+too--if any one within a hundred miles of this mine did murder Thompson,
+Billy Jones or any one else, it'll come out!" and he jerked his head
+around. "Don't you think so, Paulette?"
+
+"I? I never thought of poor old Thompson having been murdered!" She
+answered as if she were startled, but she did not turn. "If he was
+murdered I pray God it will be found out," she added unexpectedly. She
+had made two false starts at her letter and torn them up, but she had
+evidently finished it to her liking now, for she sat with the pen poised
+over the blank end of the sheet to sign her name. Yet she did not sign
+it. She only sat there abstractedly, with her hand lifted from the
+wrist.
+
+"There, you see," Dudley crowed triumphantly. "Paulette's no fool: it's
+facts she and I are after, Macartney. Why, you take the history of
+crimes generally--murders--jewel robberies--kidnapping for money--half
+of them with not nearly so much to them as this thing about
+Thompson--they're always found out!"
+
+"If you're going to talk this rubbish, I'm going to bed," Marcia burst
+out wrathfully. I saw her pause to catch Macartney's eye, but for once
+his set gaze was on the floor. She got up, which I don't think she had
+meant to do, and flounced out of the room. I had no idea I was going to
+be deadly thankful.
+
+Macartney answered Dudley as the door shut behind her. "I don't know
+that crimes are always found out, in spite of your faith--and Miss
+Paulette's," he argued half crossly. "I could remind you of one or two
+that weren't. What about the Mappin murder, way back in nineteen-five?
+And that emerald business at the Houstons' country house this spring,
+with that dancing and circus-riding girl who used to be at the
+Hippodrome--the Russian, who did Russian dancing on her horse's back?
+What was her name? I ought to remember. I knew a poor devil of a cousin
+of hers out in British Columbia who was engaged to her when it happened,
+and he talked about her enough. Oh, yes, Valenka! She had a funny
+Christian name too, sort of half Russian, only I forget it. But when
+that Valenka girl got away with an emerald necklace from the Houstons'
+house no one ever found out how it was done! You must have heard about
+her, Stretton?"
+
+I had. Every one had: Macartney need not have troubled to hunt his
+memory for her Christian name, though it had only reached me in the
+wilderness through a stray New York paper. But before I could say so
+Dudley burst out with the same truculence he had used about Billy Jones:
+
+"What d'ye mean Stretton must have heard?"
+
+"Only that Mrs. Houston took a fancy to Valenka and had her down to ride
+and dance at a week-end party at her house in Long Island; that on
+Sunday morning, Jimmy Van Ruyne, one of the guests, was found in
+Valenka's room, soaked with morphine and robbed--not only of the cash in
+his pocket in the good old way, but of an emerald necklace he had just
+bought at Tiffany's; and that, to this day, no one has ever laid eyes on
+that necklace nor on Valenka. She's free and red-handed somewhere, if no
+one ever found out who railroaded her and Van Ruyne's emeralds out of
+the United States!"
+
+What sent Dudley into a blazing rage was beyond me. But he fairly yelled
+at Macartney.
+
+"Free she may be, but when you say 'red-handed' you say a lie! If Jimmy
+Van Ruyne was fool enough to think so, it was because no Van Ruyne ever
+could see a. b. spelled ab. D'ye know him? Well," as Macartney shook his
+head, "he's a rotter, if ever there was one! Got more money than he
+knows what to do with and always chasing after women. As for Valenka,
+if you think she came out of a circus and was fair game, that's a lie,
+too! She was a lady, born and bred. Her mother was American, a Miss
+Bocqueraz; and her father was one of the best known men in Petrograd,
+and _persona grata_ with one of the Grand Dukes till he got into some
+sort of political disgrace and died of it. His daughter came to America
+and danced and rode for her living. First because she was beggared; and
+second because she'd been taught dancing in the Imperial School at
+Petrograd and riding in the Grand Duchess Tatiana's private ring for
+_haute manege_; and was a corker at both. She called herself plain
+Valenka, and Jimmy Van Ruyne went crazy about her--though Mrs. Houston
+didn't know it, or she never would have asked the nasty little cad to a
+spring week-end party."
+
+"To lose an emerald necklace and be stabbed and drugged," commented
+Macartney drily. "Oh, I'm not saying the Valenka girl wasn't a
+marvellous sight on a horse! But what Van Ruyne told the police was that
+he gave his string of emeralds to her on the Saturday afternoon, and got
+a note from her just after dinner saying that she returned them; only
+the case--in the time-honored method this time--was empty when he opened
+it! He was blazing. He went straight up to Valenka's room when he found
+it out, which was at two in the morning, and said he wanted his
+emeralds; and she flew at him with a dagger. After which he knew nothing
+at all till a servant came in at eight and found him lying unconscious
+in her empty room that she'd just walked out of with his emeralds in her
+pocket. And no one's ever laid eyes on her, or on Van Ruyne's emeralds
+ever since."
+
+"That's what Van Ruyne says," Dudley began hotly--and went on in a
+different voice. "The Valenka girl never stole his emeralds! She may
+have cut him across the wrist with one of those knife-things women will
+use for paper cutters; I don't say she didn't. Any girl would have been
+justified when a man forced his way into her bedroom--for I bet Van
+Ruyne didn't let out the whole story of that, if he did let out that he
+bullied her when he found her alone! And he didn't lay any stress,
+either, on the fact that he was found with the cut artery in his
+wrist--that was all the stabbing that ailed him--bound up as a surgeon
+would have done it; or that he'd been given just enough morphine to keep
+him from wriggling off his bandage and bleeding to death before anybody
+came: not Van Ruyne!"
+
+"All that doesn't explain how Valenka got away--or what became of her,"
+said Macartney obstinately. "That's the mystery I began on."
+
+I was bored stiff with the whole thing. And whether she had Van Ruyne's
+emeralds or not I saw no particular mystery in the Valenka girl's
+disappearance: she had probably had some one outside who had taken her
+clear away in a motor car. I said so, more because Dudley was glaring at
+Macartney like a maniac than anything else. And Dudley caught me up
+short. "I won't have either of you say one more word about Valenka in my
+house. She was as good as she was pretty; and if some one helped her
+away she--deserved it!"
+
+There was something so like honest passion in the break in his voice
+that involuntarily I glanced at Paulette, to see if by any chance she
+was startled at Dudley's evidently intimate knowledge of a girl none of
+us had even heard him speak of--and it took every bit of Indian quiet I
+owned not to stare at her so hard that Dudley and Macartney must have
+noticed. She was listening, as motionless as if she were a statue. Her
+lifted hand still held her pen poised over her unfinished letter; but it
+was rigid, as the rest of her was rigid. Whether it was from anger,
+surprise, or jealousy of Dudley, I had no idea, but she sat as if she
+had been struck dumb. And suddenly I was not sure if she were perfectly
+collected,--or absolutely abstracted. For--without even a glance to
+show she felt my eyes on her--the carved lines of her poised hand fell
+to the level of her wrist that lay flat on the table, and she began to
+write the signature to her unfinished letter. I could see every separate
+character as she shaped it; and with the blazing enlightenment of what
+she set down on paper only a merciful heaven kept my wits in my skull
+and my tongue quiet in my head.
+
+For the signature she wrote as plainly as I write it now was not
+Paulette Brown. It was Tatiana Paulina--that "queer Christian name, half
+Russian too," of the dancing circus-rider, that no one had ever
+mentioned,--_Tatiana Paulina Valenka_!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+I INTERFERE FOR THE LAST TIME
+
+    "Must I go now--in the moonlight clear?
+      Would God that it were dark,
+    That I might pass like a homeless hound
+      Men neither miss nor mark."
+
+    _The Ransom._
+
+
+TATIANA PAULINA VALENKA!
+
+I sat as still as if I had been stabbed. It was no wonder she had
+laughed when I asked her if she could ride, no wonder I had thought she
+moved like Pavlova. Paulette Brown, whom Dudley had brought to La
+Chance, was Tatiana Paulina Valenka, who had or had not stolen Van
+Ruyne's emeralds! But the blood sprang into my face at the knowledge,
+for--by all the holy souls and my dead mother's name--she was my dream
+girl too! And I believed in her.
+
+All the same, I was thankful Marcia had flounced out of the room before
+Dudley let loose. It was no wonder she had thought she had seen Paulette
+Brown before. The wonder was that she had ever forgotten how she had
+seen her--dancing at the Hippodrome on her four horses as no girl ever
+had danced--or forgotten the story about her that she had said was
+"queer"! If Marcia's eyes had fallen on the signature mine were on now,
+I knew her first act would have been to write to Jimmy Van Ruyne; that
+even if she had only heard Dudley defending an ostensibly absent Valenka
+she would have written--for Marcia was no fool. Then and there I made up
+my mind that Marcia should never guess the whole of what she already
+half-guessed about Paulette Brown; there were ways I could stop _that_.
+
+As for Dudley----But a sudden tide of respect for Dudley, in spite of
+his drink and all his queerness, rose flood-high in me. It had been
+Dudley, of course, who had got Paulette away,--for I could not think of
+her as Tatiana Paulina. How, I did not know; I knew he had not been one
+of the Houstons' week-end party; but he had done it somehow, and
+spirited Paulette out to La Chance. As for the rest, a fool could have
+told that he respected and believed in her. If it had been risky
+bringing Marcia out into the wilderness with her, it had been clever
+too, because it was so bold that Marcia had never suspected it. Even I
+never would have, if Macartney had not brought up Miss Valenka's name. I
+knew he had done it merely to get Dudley off his cracked idea that
+Billy Jones might have murdered Thompson, but I was suddenly nervous
+that Dudley's fool vehemence over a missing girl might have set
+Macartney on the track of things,--and heaven knows that, except he was
+a competent mine superintendent, I knew little enough how far it would
+be safe to trust Macartney. But suddenly one thing I did know flashed
+over me. Macartney and Marcia were a firm, or going to be; and I was
+instantly scared blue that he might turn around and see that name
+Paulette Brown had signed to her letter, lying plain under the
+living-room lamp! I knew I had to wake Paulette up to what she had done
+and shut up Dudley before he let out any more intimate details the
+public had never known, like Van Ruyne's bandaged wrist. I yawned and
+got up, with one hand on the table, and my forefinger pointing straight
+to that black signature of Tatiana Paulina Valenka that ought to have
+been Paulette Brown.
+
+"I'm like Marcia, Miss Paulette; I'm going to bed unless you can turn
+off Dudley's eloquence. Oh, I'm so sorry--I'm afraid I've blotted your
+letter," I said. I tapped my finger on it soundlessly--and she looked
+down,--and saw!
+
+I said once before that my dream girl had good nerves; she had iron
+ones. I need not have been afraid she would exclaim. She said quite
+naturally: "No, it's all right. And it wasn't a letter, anyhow. It was
+only something I wanted to make clear." She picked it up, folded it
+small, gathered up the bits of paper she had written on and torn up, and
+turned round to Dudley. "What are you talking about all this time?"
+
+But if her glance warned him to hold his tongue, as heaven knows her
+mere presence would have warned me, Dudley was too roused to care. "I
+was talking about that liar, Van Ruyne," he said, glaring at Macartney.
+
+"He may be a liar, all right," said Macartney rather unpleasantly.
+"Only, if that Valenka girl didn't steal his emeralds, Mr. Wilbraham,
+who did?"
+
+"That cousin of hers you said you knew; Hutton, or whatever you said his
+name was," Dudley retorted, like a fool, for Macartney had never
+mentioned the man's name. "How, I don't know, but I'm certain of it. He
+was more in love with her than Van Ruyne, and more dangerous, for all
+you say he was a good sort. Why, he was the kind to stick at nothing.
+Miss Valenka had had the sense to turn him down hard; and I believe he
+stole that necklace of Van Ruyne's from her during the short time she
+had it--either just to get her into trouble and be revenged on her, or
+to get her into his power. Whichever it was--to blackmail her--for he'd
+cadged on her for money before her father died--or to scare her into
+going to him for help--I'd like to hunt the worthless hound down for it.
+And I'd never stop till I got him!"
+
+"Like poor old Thompson's murderer," Macartney commented rather drily,
+"and with no more foundation." But the thought of Thompson seemed to
+have brought his self-command back to him; he tried to smooth Dudley
+down. "I don't honestly believe old Thompson could have been murdered,"
+he said gently, "or that Miss Valenka's cousin could have stolen those
+jewels, for any reason. He seemed a pretty good sort when I knew him in
+British Columbia. He was a clever mining engineer, too."
+
+"He might have been the devil for all I care! Only if ever I come across
+him I'll get those emeralds out of his skin," Dudley exploded. Paulette
+gave one glance at him. It would have killed me; but even Dudley saw how
+he was giving himself away to a stranger.
+
+"Why under heaven do you work me up about abstract justice, Macartney?"
+he growled. "You know how I lose my temper. Talk about something else,
+for goodness sake!"
+
+"Not I--I'm going to bed," Macartney returned casually. Dudley always
+did work himself up over things that were none of his business, and the
+Valenka argument evidently had not struck his superintendent as anything
+out of the ordinary. He nodded and went out. Paulette strayed to the
+fireplace, and I saw her handful of papers blaze up before she moved
+away. I was thankful when that signature of Tatiana Paulina Valenka was
+off the earth, even if Macartney had gone out of the room. Paulette said
+good night, and went out on his heels.
+
+I heard Macartney ask her something as she passed him where he stood in
+the passage, getting on his coat to go over to the assay office, where
+he slept. I thought it was about Marcia, from the tone of his voice, and
+from Paulette's answer, cursory and indistinct through the closed door:
+"I know. I'm going to." She added something I could not hear at all, but
+I heard Macartney say sharply that to-morrow would be too late.
+
+Paulette said "yes," and then "yes" again, as though he gave her a
+message. Then she spoke out clearly: "There's nothing else to say. I'll
+do it now." I heard her move away, I thought to Marcia's door. Macartney
+went out the front door, banging it.
+
+I had no desire to go to bed. I felt as if I had walked from Dan to
+Beersheba and been knocked down and robbed on the way. I knew my dream
+girl was not mine, now or ever, because she was Dudley's, but I had
+never thought of her being anything like Tatiana Paulina Valenka. It was
+not the jewel story that hit me: I knew she had not stolen Van Ruyne's
+old necklace, no matter how things looked. It was that she must care for
+Dudley, or she would never have let him bring her out here. And another
+thing hit me harder still, and that was Hutton,--the cousin Macartney
+said was engaged to her, and Dudley said cadged on her, till he ended by
+branding her as a thief and getting away with the spoils. And the crazy
+thought that jumped into my head, without any earthly reason, was that
+it was just Hutton who had been hounding her at La Chance; that, while I
+had been addling my brains with suspecting Collins, it was Hutton that
+Paulette Brown--whose real name was Valenka--had stolen out to meet in
+the dark!
+
+Once I thought of it, I was dead sure Hutton had followed her to La
+Chance. I knew from my own ears that she hated and distrusted the man
+for whom she had once mistaken me, that it was he from whom she had
+tried to protect my gold; and I wondered with a horror that made me too
+sick to swear, if it were Hutton himself, and not Dunn nor Collins, who
+had cached that wolf dope in my wagon! If it were, he had not cared
+about wolves killing the girl who drove with me, so long as he got my
+gold. But there I saw I was making a fool of myself, for he could not
+have known she was going. I steadied my mind on the thing, like you
+steady a machine.
+
+If Hutton had been hanging around La Chance, either from so-called love,
+or to get Paulette into a mess with our gold, as Dudley swore he had
+with Van Ruyne's emeralds, he could not have been seen about the
+mine,--for Macartney would have recognized him and given him away. He
+must be cached in the bush somewhere, waiting his chance to grab our
+gold and incriminate Paulette, as common sense told me she expected. I
+was sure as death he had a gang somewhere, for no outsider would try to
+run that business alone; Collins and Dunn might have been on their way
+to join it the night they got scuppered, very likely: they were just
+devils enough. But if they had started out to meet Hutton at my corduroy
+road they had never got there, and I was pretty sure the rest of the
+gang hadn't either, and Hutton--alone--had been scared to shoot at us
+and give himself away.
+
+That thought assured me of two things. It was Dunn and Collins who had
+hidden the wolf bait in my wagon, for Hutton could never have done it
+and reached the corduroy road before us; and Paulette must really hate
+Hutton savagely, for she must have known whom she was shooting at on my
+swamp road! That made me feel better--a little--but there was something
+I wanted to know. I turned on Dudley for it.
+
+"Look here, I never heard anything about Valenka but newspapers'
+stories, till to-night. But, if you know the inside of the business, how
+did that cousin Macartney was talking of ever get hold of that emerald
+necklace? Didn't Macartney imply he was in British Columbia?"
+
+"He was more likely anywhere than where he'd have to work--if he could
+get money out of a girl," Dudley snapped. "What I think is that he was
+masquerading as a servant in the Houstons' house--a chauffeur,
+perhaps--anything, that would let him hang round and drive a girl half
+wild. He was a plain skunk. I don't know how he managed the thing, but I
+know he was there in the Houstons' house, somehow, if Paulette doesn't
+think so"--he forgot all about the Valenka--"and that he took those
+emeralds; left the girl powerless even to think so; and disappeared. I
+never saw him; don't even know what he looks like. But if ever I get a
+chance I'll hand him over to the law as I'd hand a man I caught throwing
+a bomb at a child!"
+
+I said involuntarily: "Shut up!" I knew it was silly, but I felt as if
+walls might have ears in a house that sheltered Paulette Brown,--though
+I knew Marcia was in bed and asleep, and there was no one else who could
+hear. "You're never likely to see him here, anyhow," I added, since I
+meant to see him myself first, somehow; after which I trusted he was not
+likely to matter. And I thought of something to change the subject.
+"What were you going to say to-night about no one having seen poor old
+Thompson--when you cut yourself off?"
+
+"Oh, that," Dudley replied almost carelessly. "It mayn't amount to
+anything, and I only shut up because I didn't want Macartney to take the
+wind out of my sails by saying so. It was just that if Thompson ever
+went to Caraquet it ought to be simple enough to find the boy who took
+his horse back to Billy Jones, and--there's apparently no such boy in
+Caraquet! What set me on Billy Jones first was that he stammered and
+stuttered about not knowing him, till I don't believe there ever was any
+such boy. He's never been heard of since, any more than if he'd gone
+into the ground. And what I want to know is _why_?--if it's all straight
+about Thompson and Billy Jones!"
+
+I was silent, remembering--I don't know why--the half-dead boy I had
+carried home to Skunk's Misery. There was no cause to connect him with
+the return of Thompson's horse to the Halfway, yet somehow my mind did
+connect him with it, obstinately. I had never really discovered how he
+had been hurt by a falling tree, and without reason some animal instinct
+told me the two things belonged together and that they were queer. But
+before I could say so, Dudley burst into unexpected speech, his little
+pig's eyes as fierce as a tiger's: "Look here, Stretton! I'm going to
+find out who drowned Thompson, and who took Van Ruyne's emeralds--and
+hand them both over to the law, if I die for it. And when I say that you
+know I mean it!"
+
+I did. But once more I made no answer, for I thought I heard Marcia in
+the passage. I am quick on my feet, and I was outside the door before I
+finished thinking it. But it was not Marcia outside; it was only
+Macartney. Yet I stopped short and stared at him, for it was a Macartney
+I had never seen. He was close to the living-room door, just as if he
+had been listening to Dudley, and his face was the face of a devil. I
+never want to see set eyes like his again. But all the effect they had
+on me was to make me furiously angry, and I swore at him.
+
+"What the devil's the matter with you, Macartney? What do you want?"
+
+"My keys," roughly. "I left them somewhere around this passage and I had
+to come back for them; I couldn't get into my office. As for what's the
+matter"--he lowered his voice and motioned me some feet away, out of the
+light from the living-room door--"I heard all Wilbraham said just now,
+and by gad, the man's crazy! We've got to get him off all that rot about
+Billy Jones, or any one else, murdering Thompson; it's stark madness.
+Both of us know Billy wouldn't murder a cat! And there's another thing,
+too! I heard all Wilbraham said about that Valenka girl's cousin, and I
+wish you'd tell him to go slow on it. I was in too much of a rage, or
+I'd have gone in and told him myself. Dick Hutton was a friend of mine;
+no matter how much he was in love with a girl who'd got sick of him for
+Van Ruyne, he wasn't the kind to sneak round the Houstons' house as a
+servant. I won't let any one say that with impunity. It's no use my
+telling Wilbraham so in the state he's in to-night, but you might gently
+hint it when you've a chance. I wish to heaven he'd give up drink and
+drugs and being an amateur detective!" He shrugged his shoulders with a
+complete return to his ordinary manner. "I'm sorry I startled you just
+now, but I was too cursed angry to say I was here. Oh, there are my
+keys!" He stooped, picked them up off the floor, and went out with a
+careless good night.
+
+"Was that Macartney?" Dudley inquired as I went back to him. "I thought
+he'd gone!"
+
+"Forgot the office key and came back for it." I felt no call to enter on
+Macartney's embassy regarding Hutton. "Going to bed?"
+
+Dudley gulped down a horn of whisky that would have settled any two men
+in the bunk house, nodded, and shut the door behind him. I put out the
+light and sat on in the living room alone, how long I don't know. I had
+nothing pleasant to think of, either. It was no use my trying to imagine
+that Tatiana Paulina Valenka was not going to marry Dudley, whatever I
+had hoped about Paulette Brown. As far as any chance of her loving me
+was concerned, I had lost my dream girl forever. She was none of my
+business any more, except that--"By gad, she _is_ my business," I
+thought in a sudden bitter fury, "as far as Hutton and our gold! If I'm
+right, and he's hiding round here, I'll put a stopper on any more
+hold-ups. And I'll make good and sure she never goes out to meet him
+again, too!"
+
+As I swore it I turned away from the dead fire and the dark room, that
+looked as if we'd all deserted it hours ago, and went Indian-silent
+into the hallway. And my heart contracted in a hard, tight lump.
+
+The passage was light as day, with the moon full on the window at the
+end of it. And wrapped in a shawl, with her back to me, stood my dream
+girl, undoing the front door as noiselessly as I had come into the
+passage.
+
+I let her do it. The hallway on which Marcia's bedroom door opened, let
+alone Dudley's, was no place for Paulette Brown and myself to talk. But
+I was just three feet behind her as she slid around the corner of the
+shack, toward the bush that lay dark against the cold winter moon. And I
+rustled with my feet on purpose, so that she turned and saw me, with the
+moon full on my face.
+
+"You sha'n't do it," I said. I did not know I had made a stride to her
+till I felt her arm under my hand. "You sha'n't go!"
+
+My dream girl, who had two names and belonged to Dudley anyhow, said
+nothing at all. She and I, who had really nothing to do with one
+another, if I would have laid my soul under her little feet, stood still
+in the cold moonlight, looking inimically into one another's eyes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+MACARTNEY HEARS A NOISE: AND I FIND FOUR DEAD MEN
+
+
+We must have stood silent for a good three minutes. I think I was
+furious because Paulette did not speak to me. I said, "You're not to
+go--you're _never_ to go and meet Hutton again, as long as you live!"
+And for the first time I saw my dream girl flinch from me.
+
+"What?" she gasped so low I could hardly hear. "You know that? What am I
+going to do? My God, what am I going to do?"
+
+"You're coming back into the shack with me!" We were on the blind side
+of the house for Marcia and Dudley, but we were in plain view from
+Charliet's window, and I was not going to have even a cook look out and
+see Paulette talking to a man in the middle of the night. Her despair
+cut me; I had never seen her anything but valiant before, and I had a
+lump in my throat. But I spoke roughly enough. "I didn't know the whole
+of things till to-night, but now I do, you'll have to trust me. Can't
+you see I mean to do all I can to help you--and Dudley?" If it were
+tough to have to add Dudley I did it. But I felt her start furiously.
+
+"Dudley?" she repeated almost scornfully. "Nobody can help Dudley but
+me--and there's only one way! Mr. Stretton, I promise you I'll never ask
+again, but--for God's sake let me go to meet Dick Hutton to-night!"
+
+"Not blindly," said I brutally. "If you tell me why, perhaps--but we
+can't talk here. If you'll come into the house and trust me about what
+you want to do, I may let you go--just this once--if I think it's the
+right way!"
+
+"I've only half an hour before it's too late--for any way!" But she
+turned under the hand I had never lifted from her arm.
+
+I led her noiselessly into the office. I was afraid of the living room.
+Marcia might come back to it for a book or something. No one but Dudley
+ever went near the office, and he was safely dead to the world, judging
+from the horn of whisky he had gone to bed on. The place was freezing,
+for the inside sash was up, leaving only the double window between us
+and the night; and it was black-dark too, with the moon on the other
+side of the house. But there were more things than love to talk about in
+the dark,--to a dream girl you would give your soul to call your own,
+and know you never will. And I began bluntly, "You've never had any
+reason to distrust me. I've helped you----"
+
+"Three times," sharply. "I know. I've been--grateful."
+
+It was four, counting to-night when I had warned her to hide her
+signature from Macartney; but I was not picking at trifles. I said:
+"Well, I've trusted you, too! I knew the first night I came back here
+that you were meeting some man secretly, in the dark. But it was none of
+my business and I held my tongue about it; then, and when you met him
+again--when it was my business."
+
+"Again?" I heard the little start she gave, if I could not see it.
+
+"The night before you and I took the gold out," I answered practically,
+"when I told you your hair was untidy. I suppose you only thought I knew
+you had been out of doors, but I heard the man you met leave you and
+heard you say to yourself that you'd have to get hold of the gold. I
+didn't know whether you were honest or not then, or when I gave you back
+your little seal; and not even when you started for Billy Jones's with
+me. I knew by the time I got there, if I was fool enough to believe it
+was Collins you were fighting instead of helping. But any fool must see
+now that Hutton was the only man likely to have followed you out here! I
+suppose he told you some lie about giving you up for Van Ruyne's
+necklace, unless you made silence worth while with Dudley's gold?" and
+her assent made me angry clear through.
+
+"My soul, girl," I burst out, "you balked him about that, even when you
+knew he'd put that wolf dope in my wagon, and you were risking your
+life--you put a bullet in him in the swamp--I can't see why you should
+be worrying to conciliate him by meeting him to-night!"
+
+But she caught me up almost stupidly. "Put a bullet in him? I
+didn't--you must know I didn't!"
+
+"There was blood in the swamp and on the road!"
+
+I felt her staring at me in the dark. "It wasn't Dick's," she said
+almost inaudibly. "It must have been some one else's. And--he doesn't
+know it was he I shot at that night!"
+
+"It might do him good if he did!" I felt like shaking her, if I had not
+wanted to take her in my arms more. "Can't you see you've no reason to
+worry about Hutton? If Dudley told the truth to-night, and he stole
+those emeralds and shifted the crime on to you, it's you who have the
+whip hand of him!"
+
+"But he didn't," Paulette exclaimed wildly. "He wasn't near the
+Houstons' house! It's mad of Dudley to think so. I know he believes it,
+but--oh, it's mad all the same! And even if Dick did take those
+emeralds--though I can't see how it was possible--it wouldn't clear me!
+It would only mean he was able to drag me into it, somehow."
+
+"But you never touched the necklace!" For I knew that.
+
+"No," simply, "but I'm afraid of Dick all the more. If he did take it,
+to get me into his power"--she caught my arm in her slim hands I had
+always known were so strong--"can't you see he's _got_ me?" she said
+between her teeth, "and that, next thing, he'll get the La Chance gold?
+If you don't let me meet him to-night I'll be helpless. I----Oh, can't
+you see I'll be like a rat in a trap?--not able to do anything? I can
+make him go away, if I meet him! Otherwise"--the passion in her voice
+kept it down to a whisper--"it's not only that I'm afraid he can make
+things look as if I stole from Dudley as well as from Van Ruyne: I'm
+afraid--_for Dudley_!"
+
+The two last words gave me a jar. I would have given most of the world
+to ask if she loved Dudley, but I didn't dare: I suppose a girl could
+love a man with a face like an egg, if she owed him enough. But whether
+she cared for him or not, "By gad, you've got to tell Dudley that
+Hutton's here," I said roughly, because I was sick with the knowledge
+that anyhow she did not love me.
+
+"Tell him?" Paulette gasped through the dark that was like a curtain
+between us. "I've told him twenty times--all I dared. And he wouldn't
+listen to a word I said. Ask him: he'll tell you that's true!"
+
+I had no doubt it was. Even on business Dudley's brain ran on lines of
+its own; you might tell him a thing till you were black in the face, and
+he would never believe it. Lately, between drugs and drink, he was past
+assimilating any impersonal ideas at all. Macartney was so worried about
+him that he'd told off Baker, one of his new men, to go wherever Dudley
+went. I had no use for the man: he was a black and white looking devil
+and slim as they make them, in my opinion, though Dudley took to him as
+though he were a long-lost brother luckily,--how luckily I couldn't
+know. But I wasn't thinking about Baker that night.
+
+"We can't worry over Dudley," I said shortly, "he'll have to take care
+of himself. But you won't be helpless with Hutton, if I meet him
+to-night--in your place!"
+
+"You? I couldn't bear you to be in it!" so sharply that I winced.
+
+"It won't hurt you to take that much from me!" It wasn't till long
+afterwards that I knew I'd been a fool not to have said it with my arms
+round her, while I told her why--but since I didn't do it there's no
+sense in talking about it. I went on baldly: "I've got to be in it! I'm
+not concerned with post-mortems and your past. All I know, personally,
+is that Hutton's hiding somewhere round this mine to hold up our gold
+shipments and get even with Dudley; and if you'll tell me where to meet
+him to-night I can stop both--and be saved the trouble of looking for
+him from here to Caraquet, let alone getting you some peace of mind
+instead of the hell you're living in."
+
+"Oh, my God," said Paulette, exactly as if she were in church. "I can't
+take peace of mind like blood-money--I can't tell you where to find
+Dick, if you don't know now," and I should have known why if I had had
+any sense, but I had none. "It's no use, Mr. Stretton, I must go to
+Dick, alone. I----" But suddenly she blazed out at me: "I won't let you
+see him! And I'm going to him--now. Take your hand off me!"
+
+I tightened it. "You'll stay here! _Please!_ And you can't go on
+preventing me from meeting Hutton, either. What about the first time I
+take any gold out over the Caraquet road--and he and his gang try a
+hold-up on me?"
+
+I said gang without thinking, for I was naturally dead sure he had one.
+But I was not prepared to have the cork come straight out of the bottle.
+Paulette clutched me till I bit my lip to keep steady.
+
+"His gang's what I'm afraid of--for Dudley," she gasped, which certainly
+steadied me--like a bucket of ice. "Look here, when first I met Dick, he
+told me things, to frighten me--that he'd eighteen or twenty men laid up
+between here and Caraquet--enough to raid us here, even, if he chose. It
+was because I knew they were waiting somewhere on the road that night
+that I drove to Billy Jones's with you. It was one of them I shot when
+we tore through the swamp. But something went wrong with them; either
+they'd no guns, or they didn't want to give themselves away by shooting
+when they saw we were ready--I don't know. But anyhow, something went
+wrong. And Dick was black angry. He--the last time I spoke to him--he
+wouldn't even tell me what he'd done with his gang; just said he had
+them somewhere safe, in the last place you or Dudley would ever look for
+them. Oh, you needn't hold me any more; I've given in; I'm not going to
+meet Dick to-night. But I had to tell you about his gang, if I can't
+about him. And listen, Mr. Stretton. I've tried every possible way to
+get it out of him, but Dick won't even answer when I taunt him for a
+coward who has to be backed up. I know he has men somewhere, but he
+won't tell me where they are, or who they are--now. I believe----" but
+her voice changed sharply. "Those two boys, Dunn and Collins! You don't
+think Dudley can be right and they _are_ still alive--and have joined
+Dick's gang?"
+
+"They're dead!" I was about sick of Dunn and Collins, and anyhow I was
+wondering where the devil Hutton's gang could have gone after their
+fiasco in the swamp. "They may have meant to join Hutton. But I found
+what the wolves left--and that was dead, right enough!"
+
+"I don't believe they're dead," said Paulette quietly.
+
+I shrugged my shoulders. But I never even asked her why. For
+suddenly--with that flat knowledge you get when you realize you should
+have put two and two together long ago--I knew where Hutton's gang was
+now and always had been. "Skunk's Misery," I thought dumbfounded. "By
+gad, Skunk's Misery!" For the thing I should have added to the Skunk's
+Misery wolf dope was my dream of men talking and playing cards under the
+very floor where I slept in the new hut the Frenchwoman's son had built
+and gone away from,--because it had been no dream at all. I had actually
+heard real men under the bare lean-to where I lay; and knowing the
+burrows and runways under the Skunk's Misery houses, I knew where--and
+that was just in some hidden den under the rocks the new house had been
+built on--that house left with the door open, ostentatiously, for all
+the world to see!
+
+I was blazing, as you always are blazing when you have been a fool. But
+I could start for Skunk's Misery the first thing in the morning and
+start alone, with my mouth shut. None of our four old men could be
+spared from the mill, and I had no use for any of Macartney's new ones;
+or for Macartney either, for he was no good in the bush. As for Dudley,
+nerves and a loose tongue would do him less harm at home. Besides, any
+ticklish job is a one-man job and I was best alone: once I got hold of
+Hutton there would be no trouble with his followers. But I had no
+intention of mentioning Skunk's Misery to the girl beside me; she was as
+capable of following me there as of fighting wolves for me, and with no
+more reason.
+
+"It's late, and neither you nor I are going to meet Hutton to-night," I
+said rather cheerlessly. "You'd better go to bed."
+
+"I want to say something first," slowly, as if she had been thinking.
+"What Macartney said to-night--that I was engaged to Dick Hutton when
+Mr. Van Ruyne said I took those emeralds--wasn't true! I never was
+engaged to Dick. I was sorry for him once, because I knew he did--care
+for me. But I always hated him--I can't tell you how I hated him! I
+didn't think I could ever love any man till--just lately."
+
+It made me sick to know she meant Dudley. I would have blurted out that
+shrinking from the mere touch of his hand was a queer way to show it;
+only I was afraid to speak at all, for fear I begged her for God's sake
+not to speak of love and Dudley to me! And suddenly something banged
+even that out of my head. "Listen," I heard my own whisper. "Somebody's
+awake--walking round!"
+
+It was only the faintest noise, more like a rustle than a footstep, but
+it sounded like Gabriel's trumpet to a man alone in the middle of the
+night with a girl he had no shadow of right to. If it were Marcia,--but
+I knew that second it was not Marcia, or even Dudley; though I would
+rather have had his just fury than Marcia's evil thoughts and tongue.
+
+"By gad, it's outside," I breathed. "Look out!" But suddenly I changed
+my mind on it. There was only one person who could be outside, and that
+was Hutton, sick of waiting for Paulette and come to look for her. I had
+no desire for her to see how I met him instead, and my hands found her
+shoulders in the dark. "Get back, in the corner--and don't stir!" As
+she moved under my hands the faint sweet scent of her hair made me catch
+my breath with a sort of fierce elation. The gold and silk of it were
+not for me, I knew well enough, but at least I could keep Hutton's hands
+off it. I slipped to the side of the window and stared out into the dark
+shadow of the house, that lay black and square in the white moonlight.
+On the edge of it was a man--and the silly elation left my heart as the
+gas leaves a toy balloon when you stick a pin in it. It was not Hutton
+outside. It was--for the second time that night--only Macartney!
+
+I stood and stared at him like a fool. It was a good half minute before
+I even wondered what had brought Macartney out of his bed in the assay
+office. I watched him stupidly, and he moved; hesitated; and then turned
+to the house door. My heart gave a jump Hutton never could have brought
+there. Macartney in the house with a light, coming into the office for
+something, for all I knew, and finding Paulette and me, would be merely
+a living telephone to Marcia! I tapped at the office window.
+
+Macartney had good ears, I praised the Lord. He turned, not startled,
+but looking round him searchingly, and I stuck my head out of the hinged
+pane of the double window, thanking the Lord again that I had not to
+shove up a squeaking inside sash. "What's brought you back again?" I
+kept my voice down, remembering Marcia. "Anything gone wrong?"
+
+"What?" said Macartney rather sharply. He came close and stared at me.
+"Oh, it's you, Stretton? I thought it was Wilbraham, and he wouldn't be
+any good. It was you I wanted. I've got a feeling there's some one
+hanging round outside here."
+
+I hoped to heaven he had not seen Hutton, waiting for an appointment a
+girl was not going to keep, and I half lied: "I haven't seen any one.
+D'ye mean you thought you did?"
+
+Macartney nodded. "Couldn't swear to it, but I thought so. And I'd too
+much gold in my safe to go to bed; I cleaned up this afternoon. I was
+certain I glimpsed a strange man slipping behind the bunk house when I
+went down an hour ago, and I've been hunting him ever since. I half
+thought I saw him again just now. But, if I did, he's gone!"
+
+"I'll come out!"
+
+But Macartney shook his head sententiously. "I'm enough. I've guns for
+the four mill men who sleep in the shack off the assay office, and
+you've a whack of gold in that room you're standing in; you'd better not
+leave it. Though I don't believe there's any real need for either of us
+to worry: if there was any one around I've scared him. I only thought
+I'd better come up and warn you I'd seen some one. 'Night," and he was
+gone.
+
+I had a sudden idea that he might be a better man in the woods than I
+had thought he was, for he slid out of the house shadow into the bush
+without ever showing up in the moonlight. And as I thought it I felt
+Paulette clutch me, shivering from head to foot. It shocked me, somehow.
+I put my arm straight around her, like you do around a child, and spoke
+deliberately, "Steady, sweet, steady! It's all right. Hutton's gone by
+now. Anyhow, Macartney and I'll take care of you!"
+
+"Oh, my heavens," said Paulette: it sounded half as if she were sick
+with despair, and half as if I were hopelessly stupid. "Take care of
+me--you can't take care of me! You should have let me go. It's too late
+now." She pushed my arm from her as if she hated me and was gone down
+the passage to her room before I could speak.
+
+I shut the office window, with the inside sash down this time, and took
+a scout around outside. But Macartney was right; if any one had been
+waiting about he was gone. I could not find hide or hoof of him
+anywhere, and the moon went down, and I went in and went to bed. In two
+minutes I must have been asleep like a log,--and the first way I knew it
+was that I found myself out of bed, dragging on my clothes and grabbing
+up my gun.
+
+Whatever the row was about it was in the assay office. I heard Macartney
+yell my name through a volley of shots and knew we had both been made
+fools of. I had stopped Paulette meeting Hutton, and Hutton had dropped
+on Macartney and the assay office gold! I shook Dudley till he sat up,
+sober as I never could have been in his shoes, saw him light out in his
+pyjamas to keep guard in his own office that Paulette and I had only
+just left, and legged it for the assay office and Macartney.
+
+I didn't see a soul on the way, except the men who were piling out of
+the bunk house at the sound of a row, as I had piled out of bed; and I
+thought Macartney had raised a false alarm. But inside his office door I
+knew better. The four mill men who slept in the shack just off it were
+all on the office floor, dead, or next door to it. Their guns were on
+the floor too, and Macartney stood towering over the mess.
+
+"Get those staring bunk-house fools out of here," he howled, as the men
+crowded in after me. "I haven't lost any gold, only somebody tried to
+raid me. Why didn't you come and cut them off when I yelled for you?
+They--they got away!"
+
+And suddenly, before I even saw he was swaying, he keeled over on the
+floor.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THOMPSON'S CARDS: AND SKUNK'S MISERY
+
+
+For that second I thought Macartney was dead. But as I jumped to him I
+saw he had only fainted, and that nothing ailed him but a bullet that
+had glanced off his upper arm and left more of a gouge than a wound. Why
+it made him faint I couldn't see, but it had. I left him where he had
+dropped and turned to the four men he had been standing over. But they
+were past helping. They were decent men too, for they were the last of
+our own lot,--and it smote me like a hammer that they might have been
+alive still if I had not interfered with Paulette that night and kept
+her from meeting Hutton.
+
+I knew as I knew there was a roof over my head that it was he who had
+fallen on Macartney, and I would have chased straight after him if
+common sense had not told me he would be lying up in the bush for just
+that, and all I should get for my pains would be a bullet out of the
+dark that would end all chance of me personally ever catching Hutton. I
+took stock of things where I stood, instead. Whether he had a gang or
+not, I knew he had been alone in the thing to-night, and he had done a
+capable job. Our four men had been surprised, for they were all shot in
+the back, as if they had been caught coming in the office door.
+
+Whether Macartney had been surprised or not I could not tell. The
+revolver he had dropped as he fainted lay beside him empty, and there
+were slivers out of the doorpost behind the dead men. None of them
+seemed to have been much help to him. Three had not fired a shot; the
+fourth had just one cartridge missing from his revolver, where he lay
+with his face to the door--and I saw it accounted for by a tearing slash
+in a blue print stuck on the wall to the left of the doorway. I turned
+to the inside wall to see where the bullet that had glanced off
+Macartney had landed, and as I swung round he sat up.
+
+"You may well look--it was one of our own men got me," he said thickly,
+and his curse turned my stomach; I never knew any good come of cursing
+the dead. I told him to shut up and tell how the thing had happened. And
+he grinned with sheer rage.
+
+"It was plain damn foolery! I told you I believed I'd seen some one
+spying around the mine, and after I'd left you I didn't feel so sure
+that I'd cleared him out. I woke those fools up," his glance at the dead
+matched his curse at them, "and said if they heard any one prowling
+round my door they were to lie low in their own shack, let him get in at
+me here, and then bundle out and cut him off from behind. And what they
+did was to lose their heads. They heard some one or they didn't--I don't
+know. But the crazy fools piled out of their shack and ran in to me; and
+a man behind them--_behind_ them, mind you--came on their heels and
+plugged every son of them before they were more than inside my door! It
+was then I yelled for you."
+
+"D'ye mean you saw him--when he shot them?"
+
+"I didn't see what he _looked_ like," scornfully, "with four yelling,
+tumbling men between him and me. But I guess he was the man I'd been
+looking for. I fired and missed him, and when I lit for him over the men
+he'd killed he was gone. I emptied my gun into the dark on chance and
+yelled some more for you, and it was then I got it myself. As I turned
+around in the doorway, Sullivan," he pointed to the only man whose gun
+had been fired, "that I thought was _dead_, sat up and let me have it in
+the arm." He pointed to the ripped blue print. "You see what I'd have
+got if it had caught me straight! And that's all there was to it."
+
+"D'ye mean"--I bit back Hutton's name. I had no time to hatch up a lie
+about him, and I was not going to drag in Paulette--"that--whoever was
+there, never even fired at you?"
+
+"How do I know who he fired at?--I couldn't see inside of his head! I
+know he _hit_ those chumps who could have got him if they had obeyed
+orders--let alone that if they'd stayed out I'd have got him clean
+myself when he came in. As it was, he cleared out before I could do it,"
+said Macartney blackly, but the excitement had gone from his voice.
+"Call a couple of the bunk-house men to carry these four back to their
+shack and clean up this mess, will you? And come into my room while I
+tie up this cut. It's no good going after whoever was here now."
+
+I knew that: also that I could get after him better single-handed at
+Skunk's Misery, where he would not expect me; or I would have been gone
+already. But I didn't air that to Macartney as I followed him into the
+partitioned-off corner he called his room. He had the last two clean-ups
+in his safe there, and he nodded to it as he hauled off his shirt for me
+to bind up his arm.
+
+"With what's there, and what you and Wilbraham have in his office, we've
+too much around to be healthy," he observed succinctly, "and I guess
+some one's got wind of it. I don't know that it'll be any healthier for
+you to try running it out to Caraquet and get held up on the road! But I
+suppose it's got to go."
+
+I nodded. I knew it was hand to mouth with Dudley: he had no cash to
+call on but the mine output, and immediate payments had to be made on
+the machinery we were using. But I was not excited about being held up
+on the Caraquet road,--after I'd once been to Skunk's Misery. I was not
+red-hot about hurrying there, either; I wanted to give Hutton time to
+get back to his lair and feel easy about pursuit after his abortive
+raid. "I expect we'll worry along," I said idly. "Gimme that clean rag
+for your arm!"
+
+But Macartney cast down the handkerchief in his hand. "This fool thing's
+too short! Open that box, will you? There's a roll of bandage just
+inside."
+
+There was. But there was something else just inside, too. I stared at a
+worn leather case, that pretended to be a prayer-book with a brass clasp
+and tarnished gilt edges, a case I had seen too often to make any
+mistake about. "By gad," I cried blankly. "Why, you've got old
+Thompson's cards!"
+
+Macartney was poking at his wounded arm, and he winced. "Hurry up, will
+you? I can't stop this silly blood. Of course I have Thompson's cards;
+I can't help it if you think I'm an ass. I liked the old man, and I
+didn't fancy the Billy Joneses playing cribbage with the only thing in
+the world he cared for. I took the cards the day we buried him--saw them
+lying in the kitchen."
+
+"I expect you needn't have worried about Billy," I commented absently.
+"He was going to give those cards to me, only he and I couldn't find
+them."
+
+"Do come on," snapped Macartney. He was set-eyed as usual, but I guessed
+he was ashamed to have had me find him out in a sentimental weakness.
+"I'd have told you I had them if I'd known you cared. You can take the
+things now, if you want them."
+
+It was not till that minute that I remembered Macartney could not know
+why I wanted them, nor anything about the sort of codicil I'd torn off
+the envelope of Thompson's letter to Dudley: for there had been nothing
+about cards in what he'd read in it, or in the letter itself. But as the
+remembrance of both things shot up in me, I didn't confide them to
+Macartney, any more than I had to Dudley himself. I had a queer sort of
+idea that if Thompson's pencilled scrawl had meant anything more than
+the wanderings of a distressed mind, I'd better get hold of it myself
+first. I said: "All right," and pocketed Thompson's cards. Then I did
+up Macartney's arm, and the two of us went up the road to Dudley. He and
+his dry nurse, Baker, who'd promptly arrived from the bunk house,
+stumped straight back to the assay office with Macartney to fuss over
+the men who'd been killed. I was making for my own room, to see if
+Thompson's resurrected cards would shed any light on his crazy scrawls,
+when I heard a poker drop in the living room. Somebody was in there,
+raking up the fire.
+
+Charliet had gone after Macartney, with Dudley and Baker. I guessed
+Paulette had got up and was trying to start the fire,--for she was
+always working to keep things comfortable--if I haven't mentioned
+it--even for me. I once caught her darning my rags of socks and crying
+over them--the Lord knew why! I went in to stop her now--and it was I
+who stopped dead in the doorway. It was not Paulette inside: it was
+Marcia! Marcia in a velvet dressing gown, poking the ashes all over the
+hearth. I could have sworn I had seen Paulette burn the letter she had
+signed with Tatiana Paulina Valenka's name, but all the same the look of
+Marcia's back turned me sick. And her face turned me sicker as she flung
+around on me, with her fingers all ashes,--and Paulette's letter in her
+hand!
+
+I kept back a curse at the raw fool that was me. I might have seen it
+was not a tightly folded wad of stiff paper I had watched burn up, but
+just the light torn scraps Paulette had thrown in with it. What was
+more, I had been alone with the thing under my very nose in the light
+ashes into which it must have sunk and never had the sense to burrow for
+it. It was too late even to snatch for it: Marcia had read it! She held
+it up to me now,--and Tatiana Paulina Valenka, black on the yellow of
+the scorched paper, hit me on the eyes.
+
+"Who was right, Nicky Stretton?" she demanded triumphantly. "I told you
+I'd seen _Paulette Brown_ before! Only I never thought of the Houston
+business. I could kill Dudley; how dare he bring me out here with a
+thief! I won't have her here another day."
+
+"What thief?" I snapped. "I don't know what you mean! Why on earth are
+you poking in the ashes? What are you up for?"
+
+"Only a Paulette Brown could stay asleep, with Dudley yelling at you and
+Macartney," scornfully. "But if you want to know what I was poking in
+the ashes for, I had no matches, and my fire was out, so I came in here
+for a log to light it up. And I found this!"
+
+"Well, burn it," said I furiously. But she had begun to read it out, and
+I would have been a fool to stop her, for what Marcia knew I had to
+know. But it knocked me silly. The something Paulette had "wanted to
+make clear" was just a letter to Hutton! And the Lord knows it made me
+more set than ever on getting to Skunk's Misery before Hutton could know
+that Tatiana Paulina Valenka had given in! Because she had. She was not
+only going to meet him; she was going away with him, Marcia's hard voice
+read out baldly, if only he would give up the plan in his head. But it
+was the last sentence that bit into me:
+
+"Oh, Dick, have some mercy! I know you hate me now, but have some
+mercy; don't do what I'm afraid of. I'll give you all you
+want--myself--everything--if only you'll let that be. Go away, as I
+begged you, and I'll leave Dudley for you, and go too." And it was
+signed, as I knew Paulette Brown had not meant to sign anything,
+"Tatiana Paulina Valenka."
+
+I never even wondered how she had meant to get it to Hutton, if she had
+not supposed she burned it. Every drop of my blood boiled in me with the
+determination that she should never pay Hutton's price with her lips
+against his that she hated, and his cheek on her soft hair I had never
+touched; all the gold Dudley Wilbraham could ever mine was not worth
+that. But I kept a cold eye on Marcia. "A half-burnt letter--that
+wasn't going to be sent--isn't anything but girl's nonsense," I swore
+contemptuously.
+
+"Isn't it? We'll see--when Dudley reads it!" Marcia looked like a devil
+hunched up in her dressing gown, with her gums showing as she grinned.
+"I told you she never meant to marry him. Now we'll see if he marries
+her--when she writes letters like this!"
+
+"I won't let you show it to Dudley!"
+
+"You are like--everybody: cracked about a Paulette Brown!" Marcia
+retorted; and if I had only known what the "everybody" was going to mean
+I think I could have managed her, even then, by coming out with it. But
+I didn't know, and I did the best I could.
+
+"Marcia Wilbraham, if you dare to show that thing to Dudley, or so much
+as speak of it, I'll pay you out,--so help me," I said; and if it was in
+a voice no decent woman knows a man can use, I meant it to be. It scared
+Marcia, anyhow, though heaven knew I didn't see how I could ever pay her
+out, no matter what she did. She let go of the letter, which she had to,
+for I had her by the wrist. I would have burnt it up, only I had no
+match. Marcia leaned forward suddenly, electrically, and tapped the "Oh,
+Dick" in the last sentence, that was the only name in the letter.
+
+"Well, I'm damned," said she coolly. "Why, the thing's to you! Do you
+mean you're going to run away with that--that girl?"
+
+"No," I said furiously and then saw I was an ass, "I mean, not now!"
+
+"Since I know about you," Marcia cut me off sweetly. But she stared at
+me calculatingly. "H--m," said she, "I beg your pardon for mistaking
+your N for a big, big D, Nicky darling, but you see I never heard any
+one call you plain, short Nick! I don't exactly see why she had to write
+with you in the house, either, but you needn't be nervous. I'm not going
+to use my cinch on you--not now, anyway! I've changed my mind about
+telling Dudley. It won't do me any harm to keep something up my sleeve
+against you, if ever I want to do anything you don't admire. It wasn't
+the least bit of use for you to snatch that letter; I learned it off by
+heart before you came in on me. And I can always threaten Dudley now
+that I'll tell who Paulette Brown really is, if he tries to bully me
+about any one I have a fancy for!"
+
+Of course I knew she was thinking of Macartney. I didn't believe Dudley
+would have cared if she had married him ten times over. But he might
+have been making some unreasonable objection to Macartney, at that, for
+all I knew.
+
+"I don't care one straw about your knowing I was going to take Paulette
+Brown out of this. But if you don't hold your tongue on it, I'll know
+it, so you mind that," I observed with some heat. Yet I was easier. She
+could not talk that night, anyhow, and she was welcome to come out with
+her crazy lie about Paulette and myself, once Hutton was dead,--because
+he and a snake would be all one to me, once I got my hands on him. After
+that I had no qualms about being able to make Dudley see the truth
+concerning that letter, and that it had been written to save his
+gold,--and his life, likely enough! I let Marcia believe the name in the
+letter was mine, and that Paulette had been going off with me. All I
+wished was that she had been. I went off to my room and left Marcia
+sitting over the dead fire,--not so triumphant as she'd meant to be, for
+all the good face she put on it.
+
+Paulette's letter had pretty well knocked out all the interest I had in
+old Thompson's cards, but I got out the torn scrap of paper I'd put
+away. There was nothing on it but what I'd read before: "For God's sake
+search my cards--_my cards!_"--and it looked crazier than ever with the
+things in my hand. The cards had been water-soaked and were bumpy and
+blistery where Billy Jones had dried them, even though they were
+flattened out again by the pressure of their tight case; but there was
+nothing _to_ them, except that they were old Thompson's beyond a doubt.
+If I had thought there might be writing on them there was not so much as
+the scratch of a pencil. There seemed to be a card missing. I thought it
+was the deuce of hearts; but I was too sick over Marcia's discovery
+about Paulette to really examine the things and make sure. I shoved them
+into my coat pocket beside what was there already, just as Dudley came
+into my room.
+
+He had enough to worry him without hearing that Marcia had found out
+about Paulette. He sat on my bed, biting his nails; and said--what
+Macartney had said--that we had too much gold at La Chance to run the
+risk of losing it by a better organized raid on it: and--what I had
+known for myself--that the mine output represented his only ready money
+for notes that were past renewing, and that it had to go out to
+Caraquet. When I said why not, he bit his nails some more, and said he
+was afraid of a hold-up: what he wanted me to do was to ride over to the
+Halfway and scout around from there to clear the Caraquet road, before I
+started out from La Chance with an ounce of gold.
+
+The idea suited me well enough. It would cover my expedition to Skunk's
+Misery. But I did not mention that, or Hutton, to Dudley; and never
+guessed I was a criminal fool! I did not mean to waste any time in
+scouting around the road, either, when I knew just where my man would be
+sitting, with the half dozen wastrels he had probably scraped up. But
+first I wanted five minutes, even two minutes, with Paulette, to warn
+her of what Marcia knew. So I said the afternoon would be time enough to
+start.
+
+But Dudley would not hear of it and blazed out till I had to give up all
+idea of warning Paulette, and get out. And as I rode away from La Chance
+the last person I saw was Macartney, though I might not have remembered
+it, if I had not turned my head after I passed and caught the same grin
+on his face he had worn there the night his own man shot him. I rode
+back and asked him what the mischief he was grinning at.
+
+"Grinning--because I'm angry," Macartney returned with his usual set
+stare. "I'd sooner go with you than stay here, burying men and talking
+to Wilbraham. I'm sick of La Chance, if you'd like to know. I came here
+to mine, not to play in moving pictures. But I guess I've got to stick,
+unless I can hurry up my job here. So long--but I don't expect you'll
+see anything of last night's man on the Caraquet road!"
+
+Neither did I, nor of any one else. But I was not prepared to find the
+Halfway stable empty, when I rode in there just at dark. The house was
+as deserted as the stable, though the fire was alive in the stove, and
+taking both things together, I decided Billy and his wife had taken a
+four-horse team into Caraquet for a load. I had meant to borrow one of
+his horses to go on to Skunk's Misery,--for this time I intended to ride
+there. But with no horse to borrow, there was nothing to do but to ride
+my own, and it was toward ten that night when I left him to wait for me
+in a spruce thicket, within half a mile of the porcupine burrows that
+Skunk's Misery called houses.
+
+As I turned away, the cold bit a hundred times worse for the lack of
+snow in the woods, and the bare ground made the pat of my moccasins
+sound louder than I liked; but on the other hand I should leave no track
+back to my waiting horse, if I had to clear out without getting Hutton.
+The thought made me grin, for I had no fear of it.
+
+Hutton would be asleep, judging from the look of things; for as I got
+fairly into Skunk's Misery, it lay still as the dead. The winding tracks
+through it were deserted; silent between and under the great rocks and
+boulders; slippery in the open with droppings from the pine trees that
+grew in and on the masses of huddled rocks. The wind rose a little,
+too, and soughed in the pine branches, to die wailing among the stones.
+It did not strike me as a cheerful wind for a man in Hutton's shoes, for
+it covered the light sound of my feet as I went past the hut of the boy
+I had nursed and through the maze of tracks his mother had shown me, to
+the new log lean-to the Frenchwoman's son had built and never used. But,
+as I reached it, I was suddenly not so sure Hutton was there!
+
+The lean-to looked all right. The door was open, just as I had left it.
+But, as I crossed the threshold, I knew I was too late, and there was
+nobody inside, or in the cave underneath it where men had been when I
+slept there. The place had that empty feeling of desertion, or late
+occupancy and a cold lair, that even a worse fool than I could not
+mistake now. I shut the door on myself without sound, all the same;
+snapped my pocket lantern; and stared,--at just what I had known I was
+going to find.
+
+There was nothing in the place now but the bare lean-to walls and the
+rock they backed on; but twenty men had been living there since I left
+it. The black mark of their fire was plain against the rock face; the
+log floor was splintered by heavy boots with nails in them--which did
+not speak of the moccasined return of the Frenchwoman's son--and in the
+place where I had once made a bed of pine boughs and carried it away
+with me there lay a flurry of litter that spoke volumes: for among it
+was a corned-beef can that was no product of Skunk's Misery, where meat
+meant squirrels and rabbits, and--a corked bottle of wolf dope! That I
+laid gingerly aside till I had poked around in the rest of the mess, but
+there was not much else there besides kindling. I got up to leg it for
+the underground cave, blazing that I had missed Hutton and half hoping
+he might be there,--but I dropped flump on my knees again, dumbfounded.
+
+Underneath the displaced litter, stuck sideways in a crack of the log
+floor, was a shiny, dirty white playing card. I pulled it out. And in
+the narrow white beam of my electric lantern I saw the missing two of
+hearts out of Thompson's pack!
+
+I saw more, too, before I even wondered how one of Thompson's cards had
+ever got to Skunk's Misery. The deuce of hearts was written on--closely,
+finely and legibly--with indelible pencil. And as I read the short
+sentences, word by word, I knew Thompson had never got to Caraquet,
+never got anywhere but to the cave under the very lean-to I knelt
+in--till he had been brought up from it, here--to be taken away and
+drowned in Lac Tremblant, as a decent man would not drown a dog! And I
+knew--at last--where Hutton and his gang were, and who Hutton was!
+
+But I made no move to go underground to the cave to look for them. And
+the only word that came to my tongue was: "_Macartney!_"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+A DEAD MAN'S MESSENGER
+
+
+For the written message on Thompson's lost card was plain. Macartney
+was--Hutton! And Hutton's gang were just the new, rough men Macartney
+had dribbled in to the La Chance mine!
+
+It was Macartney--our capable, hard-working superintendent--for whom
+Paulette had mistaken me in the dark, that first night I came home to La
+Chance and the dream girl, who was no nearer me now than she was then;
+Macartney from whom she had sealed the boxes of gold, to prevent him
+substituting others and sending me off to Caraquet with worthless
+dummies; Macartney I had heard her tell herself she could not trust;
+Macartney who had put that wolf dope--that there was no longer any doubt
+he had brought from Skunk's Misery--in my wagon; Macartney who had had
+that boulder stuck in the road to smash my pole, by the same men who
+were posted by the corduroy road through the swamp to cut me off there
+if the wolves and the broken wagon failed; and Macartney who had been
+balked by a girl I had left at La Chance to fight him alone now!
+
+The thing seemed to jump at me from six places at once, now that I knew
+enough to see it was there at all. But what sickened me at my own utter
+blindness was not the nerve of the man, but just the risk he had let
+Paulette run on the Caraquet road, and--old Thompson! For Thompson had
+never sent Macartney to La Chance, and Macartney had had him murdered in
+cold blood!
+
+If my eyes fogged as I stared at the dead man's two of hearts, it was
+only half with fury. Old Thompson had been decent, harmless, happy with
+his unintelligent work and his sad solitaire,--and he had been through
+seven hells before he wrote what I read now:
+
+     "Wilbraham--Stretton--pray God one of you saw all I could
+     put inside envelope of last letter Macartney forced me to
+     write. I never sent him to La Chance. I never saw the man
+     till he waylaid me between Halfway and Caraquet, and brought
+     me here. Do not know where it is, am prisoner underground.
+     Wrote you two letters to save my miserable life; know now I
+     have not saved it. Your lives--gold--everything--in danger
+     too. For any sake get Macartney before he gets you. No use
+     to look for me. Tried to warn you inside envelope, but
+     suppose was no use. Good-by. _Take care, take care!_ There
+     was a boy Macartney sent off with my horse; was kind; said
+     he would come back. When he does, takes this to you----He
+     has not come. Been brought up into lean-to, am gagged, feel
+     death near. Forgive treachery--life was dear--get Macar----"
+
+But the scrawl broke off in a long pencil line, where death had jerked
+Thompson's elbow, and his card had fallen from his hand.
+
+I sat on the floor and saw the thing. Macartney, hidden in Skunk's
+Misery, making plans to get openly and with decent excuse to La Chance,
+had fallen on Thompson and used him. And for Thompson, writing lying
+letters in Skunk's Misery in fear of the death that had come to him in
+the end, there had been no rescue. His scribbled envelope, even if
+Dudley or I had understood it, had come too late. The boy who took his
+horse to Billy--whoever he was--had never come back. Thompson had not
+even had time, in the end, to slip his written-over card into the cased
+pack I had found in his almost empty pockets, before Macartney's
+men--for of course Macartney himself had never been near the place since
+he got his wolf dope there and left it for good--had taken him off and
+made away with him. Once his last letter was written and posted under
+cover from Caraquet to be reposted to Dudley from Montreal by some
+unknown hand, Macartney had no more use for Thompson, and a screen
+against betrayal on two sides: either by his own men, or that chance
+finding of Thompson's body that had actually happened; for Thompson's
+own letter would clear his murderer.
+
+As for Thompson's envelope! It's an easy enough thing to do if you just
+slip your pencil inside an envelope and write blindly, but it made me
+sick to think of poor old Thompson scrawling in the inside of his
+envelope, furiously, furtively, while the ink of his neat copperplate
+dried on the outside, and Macartney likely stood by poring over the
+actual letter, wondering if there was any flaw in it that could show out
+and damn him. And the desperate scrawl in the envelope had been _no
+good_, thanks to the fool brain and tongue of myself, Nicky Stretton! It
+had done more to warn Macartney than either Dudley or me, since if
+Thompson had written in the reverse of the envelope he was also likely
+to have written on anything that would take a pencil.
+
+It was no wonder Macartney had stood stunned over that envelope, till
+Dudley and I believed him heartsick for his friend, for it must have
+been then that he remembered Thompson's cards,--that I guessed the old
+man had just sat and played with, day in and day out, while he was a
+prisoner and about to die. Thompson could have written on them; and
+Macartney must have feared it, or he never would have stolen them from
+Billy Jones. I hoped grimly that he had been good and worried before he
+got his chance to do it and set his mind at ease. And at ease it must
+have been, for he had actually known nothing about the cards; he could
+only have taken them on chance, from sheer terror, and found them
+harmless. He had probably never even noticed one was missing--and
+whatever Thompson had not been wise about he had been wise when he took
+out a deuce, and not one of the four aces the most casual eye must
+miss--or he would never have let me have them, contemptuously, as one
+lets a child play with a knife without a blade.
+
+Only I was not so sure this particular knife had no blade,--for
+Macartney!
+
+He knew nothing of the desperate scrawl on the bottom flap of that
+envelope that his own hasty grab had jerked off and left in my fist;
+nothing of the deuce of hearts that made its crazy inscription pitifully
+sane to me now; and nothing in particular about me, Nicky Stretton. But
+when I came to think of all I knew about Macartney, that was no
+remarkable consolation; for--except his never noticing that the bottom
+flap of Thompson's envelope was missing, and taking it for granted it
+had been blank like the top one--he had made a fool of me all along the
+line!
+
+I had stopped Paulette from going away with him the night before, after
+she thought she had burned the note she had meant to slip into his hand;
+but he must have told her, outside in the passage, when I thought he was
+sending a message to Marcia, that if she did not go with him then--in
+the next hour--he would begin trouble that very night for Dudley and La
+Chance.
+
+And he had! It was Paulette he was waiting for, when he lied to me about
+a strange man. And he had gone straight down to the assay office, done
+his own alarm of a robber, and killed four men to give it artistic
+truth. It was no wonder he had said he was sick of playing in moving
+pictures and grinned at me when I left La Chance to search the Caraquet
+road for nobody else but himself.
+
+As for his gang, the very bunk-house men he had told me to order out of
+the assay office, were just Macartney's own gang from Skunk's Misery,
+come over when they had silenced Thompson forever; at Macartney's elbow
+whenever he chose to murder the lot of us and commandeer the La Chance
+mine. I wished, irrelevantly, that Dunn and Collins _had_ got to
+Macartney, instead of being killed on the way; they might have been
+chancy young devils about stealing gold, but they would never have stood
+for murdering old Thompson! It was no good thinking of that, though.
+
+I stowed away Thompson's deuce of hearts, that no boy had ever come for,
+in the case with those other pitiful cards he had told me to search, and
+got on my feet with only one thought in my head,--to get back to La
+Chance and my dream girl that Macartney was alone with, except for
+Dudley,--Dudley whom he hated, who had threatened him for Paulette
+Valenka, for Thompson, till it was no wonder I had found him with the
+face of a devil where he lurked eavesdropping in the shack hall. And
+there something else hit me whack. Baker, Dudley's jackal, was one of
+Macartney's gang: told off, for all I knew, to put him out of the way! I
+wheeled to get out of that damn lean-to quicker than I had got in; and
+instead I stood rooted to the floor. _Below me, somewhere underground,
+somebody was moving!_
+
+Naturally, I knew it could not be Macartney, because he could not have
+got there, even if he had not had other fish to fry at home. But one of
+his gang might have been left at Skunk's Misery and could have the life
+choked out of him. There was no way leading underground directly from
+the lean-to, or I would have been caught the night I slept there and
+believed real voices were a dream. I slid out of the door, around the
+boulder that backed the place, and was afraid of my lantern. I went down
+on my hands and knees to feel for a track and found one, down a gully
+that ran in under a blind rock. I crawled down it, all but flat, as I
+burrowed like a rabbit, with my back scraping against the living rock
+between me and the sky, and my head turned to the place where I knew the
+lean-to stood. I was under it with no warning whatever; in a natural,
+man-high cellar I could stand up in, with half a dozen bolt holes
+running off it: and I had no need to flash up my lantern to see them.
+There was a light in the place already from a candle-end Macartney's men
+must have left behind; and beside it, not looking at me, not even
+hearing my step, because he was sobbing his heart out, lay the boy I had
+carried home from the Caraquet road!
+
+"Thompson's boy, who took his horse to Billy--who never came back!" I
+said to myself. God knows I touched him gently, but he screamed like a
+shot rabbit till he saw my face.
+
+"You?" said I. "What's the matter with you? Brace up; it's only me!"
+
+Brace up was just what he did not do. He sank back with every muscle of
+him relaxed. "Bon Dieu, I thought you was him come back," he gasped in
+his bastard French Indian, "that man that half killed me on the Caraquet
+road! But it wasn't him I was crying about. It was the other man--that
+promised me two dollars for something."
+
+"To come back and take a letter--where you had taken his horse?"
+
+The boy--I did not even know his name--nodded, with a torrent of sullen
+patois. He had never come for his two dollars, and now the man was gone
+and he would never get it. But it was not his fault. The first man--the
+one who had sent him to the Halfway with the horse--had caught him
+crawling back for the letter, had told him the man who was going to pay
+him had gone away long ago, and had taken him out to chop firewood and
+let a tree fall on him. How the lad had ever crawled out to the Caraquet
+road I did not ask. I think the thing that stabbed me was that I had
+been within five hundred yards of Thompson all the time I was nursing
+this very boy, that the knowledge of it had lain behind unconscious lips
+within a hand's breadth of me, that I had gone away ignorant, leaving
+Thompson robbed of the only help he could ever have had.
+
+"Why didn't you tell me all that--the night I came over to your
+mother's?" I groaned.
+
+The boy said shortly that his mother would have gone straight off and
+told I'd been there, if he had come out with the truth. It was all lies
+she had told me about the Frenchwoman's son; he had never been near the
+place. It was the man who had half killed him who had built the lean-to,
+and his mother had said she would finish the business if ever he opened
+his mouth about it, or let out the truth about the same man sending him
+to the Halfway with a horse, or the smelling stuff she had helped him
+make.
+
+"You're sure she didn't go and tell that man about me, anyway?" I
+remembered Macartney's grin.
+
+But the boy shook his head. "She didn't worry; she said you were too big
+a fool to matter!" After which wholesome truth he announced listlessly
+that he was done with his mother. She had turned him out of her house
+now, anyway. She said he was no good to her, now that he could only
+crawl, and could not even trap enough rabbits to live on, and she had
+another man living in her house who would do it for her. So he had come
+here to find the man who had promised him two dollars--that solitary
+bill that had been all the money in Thompson's pockets--and when he
+found him gone and the place empty he had stayed there to hide, and
+because he had nowhere else to go.
+
+I thought of his mother's haggard, handsome face and hard mouth.
+Macartney had certainly found a good ally while he was laid up in
+Skunk's Misery waiting for his chance to fall on Paulette. But all that
+did not matter now. What did matter was that I had found the missing
+link between Thompson's cards and Macartney in the boy who had taken
+Thompson's horse back to the Halfway. I had no mind to produce him now
+though; for there were other things to be looked to than showing up old
+Thompson's murder. And the boy was safe where he was, for one glance at
+him had told me he could not walk half a mile.
+
+"Are you safe from your mother here--and can you get food for yourself?"
+I demanded abruptly, and the boy nodded the head I knew would never be
+other than a cripple's. "Well, you stay here," I told him, because if
+ever I needed the poor little devil for a witness against Macartney he
+would be no good lying dead somewhere in the bush, "and I'll come back
+and pay you ten times two dollars for just waiting here till I come. But
+you'll have to hide if that man comes back who sent you out with the
+horse!" I knew Macartney would kill him in good earnest, if he came back
+and found him with a living tongue in his head. "Don't you trust any one
+but me--or some one who comes and gives you twenty dollars," I added
+emphatically, just because that was the only absolutely unlikely event I
+could think of. "And even then, you stay here till you see me!
+Understand?"
+
+He said he did; it was easy enough to creep out after dark and rob
+rabbit traps; he was doing it now. And from the greed a fortune of
+twenty dollars had lit in his wretched eyes, I knew he would go on doing
+it till I came back. Of what wildly unexpected use he was to be to me in
+his waiting, heaven knows I had no thought. I crept out of his burrow as
+I had crept in, got back to my half-frozen horse, and rode hell for
+leather back to the Halfway. And just there was where I slumped.
+
+My horse had to be fed and rested; he was dead beat when I led him into
+the unlocked stable, and when I had seen to him I meant to rouse up
+Billy Jones and tell him all the ugly stuff I had unearthed--and seen
+too--for the killing of four innocent men was hot in my mind. But I did
+not, for the excellent reason that Billy was not back. His house was
+dark, and his four horses still away from their vacant stalls. I sat
+down on a heap of clean straw to wait for him, and I said I slumped. I
+went sound, dead asleep. If I was hunting for excuses I might say it was
+two in the morning, and I had been up most of the night before. But
+anyhow, I did it. And I sat up, dazed, to see a lantern held in front
+of my eyes and one of Macartney's men from La Chance staring at me.
+
+It struck me even then that it was not he who was surprised; and the
+sleep jerked out of me like wine out of a glass. "What are you doing
+here? And where the devil's Billy?" I snapped, without thinking.
+
+I saw the man grin. "Billy's fired," he returned coolly. "Him and his
+wife got it in a note from Wilbraham, day before yesterday, when your
+teamsters stopped here on their way to Caraquet. They doubled up their
+teams with Billy's and took him and his wife along, and all their stuff.
+And I guess they'd been fired too, for they ain't come back. Mr.
+Macartney sent me over to see. Anything I can do for you?"
+
+"Take that lantern out of my eyes, and hustle me up some breakfast.
+I--I'm sorry about Billy!" I was not; I was startled,--and worse. It had
+not been Dudley who had dismissed him, asinine as he had been about
+Billy and old Thompson, or he would have told me. It had been Macartney,
+getting rid of him and my teamsters under my very nose; and--as
+Macartney's parting grin recurred to me--if his man had any one with him
+in Billy's vacant shack they had been put there to get rid of _me_.
+
+"Get me a bucket of water and make coffee, if you haven't done it," I
+said, yawning. "I'll come in--as soon as I've fed my horse."
+
+But I did neither. I stopped yawning, too. Through the frosty window, as
+the man disappeared for the shack, I saw a light in its doorway and two
+more of Macartney's men standing in it, black between the lamp and the
+gray morning glimmer. I stirred some meal into the water Macartney's man
+had brought, drank a mouthful before I let my horse have just enough to
+rinse his throat with, and threw on his saddle. It was flat on his neck
+that I came out the stable door, and what Macartney's men meant to have
+done I don't know, for I was down the road toward La Chance like a
+rocket. And before I had made a mile I knew I had got off none too soon,
+for we were going to have snow at last, and have it hard.
+
+Before I cleared the corduroy road it cut my face in fine stinging
+flakes, and by the time I was halfway to La Chance it was blinding me.
+It came on a wind, too, and I cursed it as I faced it, with my horse
+toiling through the heavy, sandy stuff that was too cold and dry to
+pack. The twenty-two miles home took me most of the day. It was close on
+dusk when I fumbled through drifting, hissing snow and choking wind, to
+the door of the La Chance stable. And the second I got inside I knew
+Macartney's man had told the truth, and Macartney had fired my
+teamsters with Billy Jones. There was not a soul about the place, and
+ten hungry horses yelled at me at once as I stamped my half-frozen feet
+on the floor. I would have shouted for Charliet if it had not seemed
+quicker to feed them myself. I yanked down a forkful of hay for each of
+them, after I saw to my own horse. And if you think I was a fool to
+worry over dumb beasts, just that small delay made a difference in my
+immediate future that likely saved my life. If I had raced off for the
+house at once I might have met with----Well, an accident! But that comes
+in later.
+
+As it was I was a good twenty minutes in that stable. When I waded out
+into the swirling white dusk of snow and wind between me and the shack I
+was just cautious enough, after the Halfway business, to stare hard
+through the blinding storm at the house I was making for, though I did
+not think Macartney was ripe to dare anything open against me at La
+Chance. But with that stare I knew abruptly that he was! Massed just
+inside the open door of Dudley's shack, that was black dark but for one
+light in the living-room window, were a crowd of men that looked like
+nothing in the world but our own miners, that I knew now for
+Hutton's--or Macartney's--gang! How he dared have them there, instead of
+in the bunk house, beat me,--but it was them, all right. The wind was
+clear of snow for one second, and I saw them plainly. And they saw me.
+Without one sound the whole gang jumped for me. I had my gun out, and I
+could have stopped the leaders before I had to get back against the
+stable door; but there was no need.
+
+There was a shout behind me. The men checked, sprawling over each other
+in the snow--ludicrously, if I had been seeing much humor in things--and
+it was then it struck me that I should have had an accident if I had
+bolted straight into a dark house, instead of delaying in the stable
+till Macartney's gang got tired of waiting for me and bundled out
+themselves to see where I was. But I only wheeled, with my gun in my
+fist, to Macartney's voice.
+
+What I had expected to see I don't know. What I did see, stumbling
+through the drifts to me, was an indistinguishable figure that turned
+out to be two. For it was Macartney, carrying Marcia Wilbraham. And
+behind him, short-skirted to her knees, and with no coat but her
+miserable little blue sweater, came my dream girl.
+
+I forgot Macartney could not know I knew he was Hutton, or all the rest
+that I did know. I said, "What hell's trick are you up to now?"
+
+But Macartney only turned a played-out face to me. "Take her from me,
+will you?" he snapped. "I'm done." He let Marcia slip down into the
+snow. "Wilbraham's killed!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+WOLVES--AND DUDLEY
+
+
+It was cleverly done. So was the desperate gesture of Macartney's hand
+across his blood-shot, congested eyes. If I had not had Thompson's deuce
+of hearts in my pocket I might have doubted if Macartney really were
+Hutton, or had had any hand in the long tale of tragedy at La Chance.
+But as it was I knew, in my inside soul, bleakly, that if Dudley were
+dead Macartney had killed him,--as only luck had kept him from killing
+me.
+
+I saw him give a quick, flicking sign to his men with the fingers of the
+hand that still covered his eyes, and I knew I was right in the last
+thing, anyhow, for the men straggled back from us, as to an order. They
+were to do nothing now, before Paulette and Marcia, if their first
+instructions had been to ambush inside the shack to dispose of me when I
+got back from the Halfway,--which I had not been meant to do. I did not
+drop my gun hand, or fling the truth at Macartney. But I made no move
+to pick up Marcia. I said, "How d'ye mean Dudley's killed? Who killed
+him?"
+
+"Wolves!" If Macartney meant me to think he was too sick to answer
+properly he was not, for he spoke suddenly to the bunk-house men. "There
+is no good in your waiting round, or looking any more. They've got Mr.
+Wilbraham, and"--he turned his head to me again--"they damn nearly got
+me!"
+
+Later, I wished sincerely that they had, for it would have saved me some
+trouble. At that minute all I wanted was to get even with Macartney
+myself. I said, "Pick up Marcia and get into the house. You can talk
+there!"
+
+Macartney glanced at me. Secretly, perhaps, neither of us wanted to give
+the other a chance by stooping for a heavy girl; I knew I was not going
+to do it. But Paulette must have feared I was. She sprang past me and
+lifted Marcia with smooth, effortless strength, as if she were nothing.
+
+Macartney started, as though he realized he had been a fool not to have
+done it himself, and wheeled to walk into the house before us, where he
+could have slipped cartridges into his gun; I knew afterwards that it
+was empty. But Paulette had moved off with Marcia and a peremptory
+gesture of her back-flung head that kept Macartney behind her. I came
+behind him. And because he had no idea of all I knew about him, he took
+things as they looked on the surface. With Paulette leading, and me on
+Macartney's heels, we filed into the living room. There was a light
+there, but the fire was out. I guessed Charliet was hiding under his
+bed,--in which I wronged him. But I was not worrying about Charliet or
+cold rooms then. Paulette laid Marcia down on the floor, and I stood in
+the doorway. I did not believe the bunk-house men would come back till
+an open row suited Macartney's book, but there was no harm in commanding
+the outside doors of the shack, all the same. And the sudden thought
+that we were all in the living room but Dudley, and that he would never
+come back to it, gripped my soul between fury and anguish. "Get it
+out--about Dudley," I said; and I did not care if my voice were thick.
+
+Macartney looked over at me just as an honest, capable superintendent
+ought to have looked. "I can't; because I don't know it. All I do know's
+this. After you went off yesterday Wilbraham got to drinking; the wolves
+began to howl round the place after dark, and he said they drove him
+mad. He got a gun and went out after them--and he never came back. I
+didn't even know he was gone till midnight. I thought he'd shut himself
+in his office as he often does, till I heard shots outside, and found
+he wasn't in the house. I turned out the bunk-house men to look for him
+that instant, and when the lot you saw waiting in the shack for me came
+home toward morning, and said they couldn't find a sign of Wilbraham,
+and the bush was so full of wolves they were scared to go on looking, I
+went myself----"
+
+"And took _girls_"--I remembered the reek of my wolf-doped clothes till
+I fancied I could smell the stuff there in the room, thought of a half
+drunk man walking out on a like baited track, and two girls taken over
+it to look for him--"into bush like that!"
+
+"They followed me," curtly. "I didn't know it till it was too late to
+turn them back! I couldn't have sent Miss Wilbraham back, anyhow; she
+was nearly crazy. And if you're thinking of wolves, it was getting
+daylight, and----" he hesitated, and I could have filled in the pause
+for myself, remembering how that wolf dope acted: two lambs could have
+moved in the bush with safety, so long as they kept away from where it
+was smeared on the ground. But Macartney filled it in differently. "And,
+anyhow, it was well they did come. It was Marcia--found Wilbraham!"
+
+I don't think I had really believed Dudley was dead till then. I stared
+at Marcia, lying on the floor as purple in the face from over-exertion
+and fright as if she had had an apoplectic fit, and at Paulette stooping
+over her, silent, and white around the mouth. She looked up at me, and
+her eyes gave me fierce warning, if I had needed it.
+
+"Marcia got afraid and bolted for home--the wrong way," she spoke up
+sharply. "When I ran after her she was standing in some spruces,
+screaming and pointing in front of her. I saw the blood on the ground,
+and----Here's Dudley's cap! I found it, all chewed, close by." She
+pulled out a rag of fur from under her snow-caked sweater; and as the
+stale reek of the Skunk's Misery wolf dope rose from the thing, I knew
+the smell in the room had been no fancy, and how Dudley Wilbraham had
+died. I wheeled and saw Macartney's face,--the face of a man who took me
+for a fool whose nose would tell him nothing.
+
+"D'ye mean _that_ was all you found?" I got out.
+
+"No! The rest was there. But it was--unrecognizable! Even I couldn't
+look at it. It was--pretty tough, for girls. I shot one wolf we scared
+off it, but I couldn't do anything more. I couldn't lift--it;
+but--Dudley's coat was on it." He had turned so white that I remembered
+his faint in the assay office, like you do remember things that don't
+matter. I would have thought him chicken-hearted for a wholesale
+murderer, if it had not been for the cold hate in his eyes.
+
+"D'ye mean you left Dudley--out there in the bush? Where the devil was
+Baker, that black and white weasel you set to look after him? I'll bet
+he saved _his_ skin! Where is he?"
+
+"Baker's missing, too," simply; and I did not believe it. "And I don't
+see what else I could have done but leave Dudley. None of the men were
+with me to carry him in; it had begun to snow; and in another hour I
+couldn't have kept the track back to La Chance. As it was, Miss Marcia
+played out; I had to carry her most of the way. And that's all there is
+to it," with sudden impatience, "except that Wilbraham's dead and
+Baker's missing. If he wasn't, he would have brought Dudley in."
+
+"Yes," I said. I saw Charliet's head poke around the corner of the
+kitchen door and called to him to carry Marcia to her room, and to get
+fires going and something to eat; for the queer part of it was that
+there seemed to be two of me, and one of them was thinking it was
+starving. It saw Charliet and my dream girl take Marcia out, and the
+other me turned on Macartney.
+
+"By gad, there's one thing more," I said slowly. "You don't have to go
+on playing moving pictures, Dick Hutton, or using an alias either!
+You've killed Dudley and Thompson, and for a good guess Dunn and
+Collins, if I can't be sure--and you'd have had me first of all, if your
+boulder and your wolf dope hadn't failed you on the Caraquet road!"
+
+Macartney's furious, surprised oath was real. "I don't know what you
+mean! Who on earth"--but he stammered on it--"Who d'ye mean by Hutton?"
+
+"You," said I. "And if you're not he, I don't know why! There's no one
+else who would have followed Paulette Valenka out here. I don't believe
+what you've done's been all revenge on the girl you tried to get into
+trouble about Van Ruyne's emeralds, or scare that Dudley would worm out
+the truth about that, either: but if it was to jump the La Chance mine
+too, you're busted! Your accident serial story won't go down. I knew
+about your wolf dope business long ago, and do you suppose _this_," I
+shoved Dudley's cap under his nose, "doesn't tell me how you limed the
+trap you set for Dudley last night, or what you smeared on his clothes
+when he was too drunk to smell it? I know what brought the wolves to
+howl around this house, if I don't know how you shoved Dudley out to
+them. I know it was a home-made raid you had down at the assay office,
+and--I've been to Skunk's Misery!"
+
+"Well?" said Macartney thickly.
+
+"Well enough! I have Thompson's deuce of hearts you didn't see was
+missing, when you gave me back his pack! With any luck I'll pay you out
+for that, and our four mill men, _and_ Dudley; not here, where you can
+fight and die quick, but outside--where they've things like gallows! Oh,
+you would, would you?"
+
+For his empty gun just missed me as he made a lightning jump to bring it
+down on my head, and my left hand stopped him up just under the ear. I
+ought to have shot him. I don't know why I held back. I was so mad with
+rage when he dropped that I could have jumped on him like a lumberman
+and tramped the heart out of him. But I only lit for the kitchen, and
+Charliet's clothesline. As I got back and knelt down by the man who had
+called himself Macartney, Thompson rose up before me, as he had sat in
+that very room, playing his lonely solitaire; and the four dead men in
+the assay office; and Dudley--only I had no grief for Dudley, because it
+was drowned in rage. I bound Macartney round and round with the
+clothesline, whether he was really Hutton or not,--and I meant to have
+the truth out of him about that and everything else before I was done.
+But when I had him gagged with kitchen towels while he was still knocked
+out, I sat back on my heels to think; and I damned myself up and down
+because I had not shot Macartney out of hand.
+
+I had Macartney all right; but I had next door to nothing else, unless I
+could find a safe place to jail him while I disposed of his men. Now, if
+they chose to rush me, I could not hold the eight shack windows against
+them, if Paulette and I might each hold a door. If I took to the bush
+with Paulette and Marcia, _and_ Macartney, I had nowhere on earth to go.
+There could be no piling that ill-assorted company on horses and putting
+out for Caraquet, with the road choked with snow, even if I could have
+got by Macartney's garrison at the Halfway. Crossing Lac Tremblant, that
+by to-morrow would be lying sweetly level under a treacherous scum of
+lolly and drifted snow, ready to drown us all like Thompson,--I cursed
+and put that out of the question. That lake that was no lake offered
+about as good a thoroughfare as rats get in a rain-barrel. Whereas, to
+hold Macartney at La Chance till I downed his gang----
+
+"By gad," I flashed out, "I can do it--in Thompson's abandoned stope!"
+It was not so crazy as it sounds. Thompson's measly entrance tunnel
+would only admit one man at a time, and I could hold it alone till
+doomsday. Macartney could be safely jailed inside the stope till I had
+wiped out his men; Paulette would be safe; and there remained no
+doubtful quantities but Marcia and Charliet the cook. I guessed I could
+scare Marcia and that Charliet would probably be on my side, anyway. If
+he were and sneaked down now to provision the stope, the thing would be
+dead easy, even to firewood, for Thompson had yanked in a couple of
+loads of mine props and left them there. I lit out into the passage to
+hunt Charliet and find out where the bunk-house men had gone to. But
+there was no sign of either in the wind and snow outside the shack. I
+bolted the door on the storm, turned for the kitchen, and saw my dream
+girl standing outside Marcia's room.
+
+She was dead white in the dim candlelight that shone through Marcia's
+half-open door. I thought of that as I jumped to her, and I would have
+done better to have thought of Marcia. I could see her from the passage,
+lying on her bed, purple-faced still, and with her eyes shut. But one
+glance was all I gave to Marcia. I said:
+
+"For heaven's sake, Paulette, don't look like that! I'm top-sides with
+Macartney now. Got him tied up. Come into the kitchen till I speak to
+you. I want Charliet----" But as I pushed Paulette before me, into the
+kitchen just across the passage from Marcia's room, I stopped speaking.
+She was holding out Thompson's case of cards,--open, with that scrawled
+two of hearts on the top!
+
+"Charliet's gone--run away somewhere." Her chest labored as if she were
+making herself go on breathing, "and you dropped--this! I ran out from
+Marcia to see what you were doing with Macartney," she hesitated on the
+name, "and you'd dropped this. I----You know Macartney killed Dudley,
+really. Does this mean he killed _Thompson_, too?"
+
+"You can say Macartney's real name," I snapped bitterly. "I've known he
+was Dick Hutton ever since last night."
+
+But Paulette only gasped, as if she did not care whether I knew it or
+not, "Where--how--did you get these cards?"
+
+I told her, and she gave a queer low moan. "Dudley's dead, and I'm past
+crying." Her voice never rose when she was moved; it went down, to D
+below the line on a violin. "I'm past everything, but wishing I was
+dead, too, for I'm the reason that brought Dick Hutton here as
+Macartney. Oh, you should have let me meet him that night! I wasn't only
+going to meet him; I meant to go away with him before morning. It would
+have been too late for poor, innocent old Thompson, but it would have
+saved the four mill men--and Dudley!" She had said she was past crying,
+but her voice thrilled through me worse than tears; and it might have
+thrilled Marcia in her room across the passage, if I'd remembered
+Marcia. "God knows Dudley was good to me--but it's no use talking of
+that now. What have you done with Macart--with Dick Hutton--that you
+said you had him safe for now?"
+
+"Knocked him out; and tied him up with the clothesline, in the living
+room--till I can take him out to Caraquet to be hanged!"
+
+"You ought to have killed him," Paulette answered very slowly. "I would
+have, when we found Dudley, only he'd taken my gun. At least, I believe
+he had: he said I'd lost it. And I'm afraid, without it--while Dick
+Hutton's alive!"
+
+I looked at her ghastly face and behaved like a fool for the hundredth
+time in this history; for I shoved my own gun into her hand and told her
+to keep it, that I'd get another. I would have caught her in my arms if
+it had not been for remembering Dudley, who was dead because the two of
+us had held our tongues to him. "Look here," I said irrelevantly. "D'ye
+know Marcia thinks Macartney wants to marry her?"
+
+"He doesn't want to marry any one--except me," Paulette retorted
+scornfully; and once more I should have remembered Marcia across the
+passage, only I didn't. "He's made love to Marcia, of course, for a
+blind, like he did everything else. If we could make her realize that
+and that he killed Dudley as surely as if he'd lifted his own hand to
+him----"
+
+But I cut her off. "By gad, Paulette, what sticks me is what Macartney
+did all this _for_!"
+
+"Me," said Paulette very bitterly. "At least, at first; I'm not so sure
+about it now. When I first met Dick we were in Russia. He'd got into
+trouble over a copper mine--you've heard Macartney talk of the
+Urals?"--if we both spoke of him as though he were two different men
+neither of us noticed. "He came to me in Petrograd, penniless, and I
+helped him. But when I came to America, alone, I turned him out of my
+flat. He may have loved me, I don't know; but when I wouldn't marry him,
+he said he'd make me; that he'd hound me wherever I went and disgrace
+me, till I had to give in and come to him. And he _must_ have done it at
+the Houstons', if I don't know how; for the police would take me now for
+those emeralds I never stole, if they knew where I was. I can't see
+where Dick could have been or how he managed the thing, but all the rest
+Dudley told you and him about that night at the Houstons' was true. I
+did give Van Ruyne sleeping stuff to keep him quiet while I got away,
+but it was because it came over me--the second I knew those emeralds
+were gone--that Dick must be in that house!--that if I didn't run away,
+he'd come in and threaten me till I had to go with him. And I'd have
+died first. I slipped out of the house unseen; and it was just the
+Blessed Virgin," simply, "who made me find Dudley's car stalled outside
+the Houstons' gate!"
+
+"D'ye mean you'd known Dudley before?"
+
+She nodded. "I'd met him: and I liked him, because he never made love to
+me. He hadn't been at the Houstons' that night; he was only coming back
+from Southampton alone, without any chauffeur. I knew no one would ever
+think he'd helped me, so I just got into his car. But I never should
+have let him bring me here," bitterly; "I should have known Dick would
+find me, and play gold robberies here to pay Dudley out. He told me he
+would, unless I'd go away with him--that first night you heard me
+talking to him--but I didn't see how he could work it. I thought I could
+tire him out by always balking him--till that night I didn't meet him,
+and he killed those four men. Then I knew I couldn't fight him; and the
+reason was that Dick's a finished mining engineer who never ran straight
+in his life!"
+
+"What?" I knew both things, only I saw no connection with Paulette.
+
+But she nodded. "He could get good work anywhere, but he won't work
+honestly. All he cares for is the excitement of big things he can get
+at crookedly. That was why he tried a _coup_ with that copper mine in
+the Urals and had to clear out of Russia. And the La Chance mine that he
+came to contemptuously, and just to get hold of me, is a big thing too.
+No--listen! You don't know how big, for you've been kept in the dark.
+But Dick knows; and that's how I first knew I couldn't manage him any
+more, and why I don't think it is I he has done all he has for, nor that
+it was even to pay out Dudley. I believe it was to _get the mine_!"
+
+"Then why, in heaven's name, didn't you tell Dudley who he was?"
+
+"I couldn't make Dudley listen, at first. Then," very low, "I didn't
+dare; I knew it would mean that Dudley would get killed. I never thought
+that--would happen, anyway."
+
+"There was me." I was stung unbearably. "You must have known ever since
+the night I first came here that there was always me!"
+
+"Y-you," she stumbled oddly on it. "I couldn't tell _you_! Can't you see
+I was afraid, Nicky, that you might--get killed for me, too?"
+
+For the first time that night she looked at me as if she saw me--me,
+Nicky Stretton, dark, fierce and dirty--and not Dudley Wilbraham and the
+dead. My name in that voice of hers would have caught me at my heart,
+if I had dared to be thinking of her. But I was not. It had flashed
+through me that Marcia's door had been half open when we went into the
+kitchen,--and that now it was shut!
+
+It was a trifling thing to make my heart turn over; but it did. I
+covered the passage in two jumps to the living-room door. But as I flung
+it open, all I had time to see was that the window was open too; with
+Marcia standing by it in her horrible green shooting clothes, just as
+she had lain on her bed, and a crowd of bunk-house men swarming through
+the open sash behind her and Macartney,--Macartney, standing on his feet
+without any clothesline, with his gun in his hand!
+
+I saw, like you do see things, how it had all happened. I had misjudged
+Macartney's intellect about the bunk-house men; he had had them within
+call. But it was no one but Marcia who had let them in, and she had
+freed Macartney. She had overheard Paulette and me in the kitchen, had
+shut her door, slipped out of her own window and into the living room,
+and cut Macartney's rope. She had no earthly reason to connect him with
+Dudley's death, except the scraps of conversation she had overheard from
+Paulette and me; she knew nothing of the bottle of wolf dope that had
+been meant to smash in my wagon, or that Dudley--so full up with drink
+and drugs that he could not have smelled even that mixture of skunks and
+sulphide--could easily have been sent out reeking with it, into bush
+that reeked of it too. And that second she screamed at me: "You lie,
+Nicky Stretton; you, and that girl! He's not Hutton--he's Macartney!"
+
+But Macartney fired full in my face.
+
+It was Marcia's flying jump that made him miss me. Even though his very
+cartridge was one of hers that she always carried in her pockets, and
+must have been given to him the first thing, I don't think she had been
+prepared to see me killed. I didn't wait to see. I was down the passage
+to Paulette before Macartney could get in a second shot. As he, and some
+of the bunk-house men tore out of the living room after me, I fired into
+the brown mass of them with my own gun, that I snatched from Paulette. I
+thought it checked them, and lit out of the kitchen door, into the wind
+and the dark and the raving, swirling snow, with my dream girl's hand
+gripped in mine. We plunged knee-deep, waist-deep through the drifts,
+for our lives,--for mine, anyhow.
+
+"Thompson's stope," I gasped; and she said yes. I couldn't see an inch
+before me, but I think we would have made it, since Macartney could not
+see, either. I knew we were far ahead of him, but that was all I did
+know, till I heard myself shout to Paulette, "_Run!_"--and felt my legs
+double under me. If something hit me on the head like a ton of brick I
+had no sense of what had happened, as people have in books. I only
+realized I had been knocked out when I felt myself coming to. Somehow it
+felt quite natural to be deadly faint and sick, and lying flat, like a
+log,--till I put out my hand and touched hard rock.
+
+"I don't see how it's rock," I thought dully; "it ought to be snow!
+Something hit me--out in the snow with Paulette!" And with that sense
+came back to me, like a red-hot iron in my brain. I _had_ been out in
+the snow with Paulette; one of Macartney's men must have hit me a swipe
+on the head and got her from me. But--where in heaven's name was
+Paulette now? The awful, sickening thought made me so wild that I
+scrambled to my knees to find out in what ungodly hole I had been put
+myself. I had been carried somewhere, and the rock under me felt like
+the mine. But somehow the darkness round me did not smell like a mine,
+where men worked every day. It smelt cold, desolate, abandoned, like----
+
+And suddenly I knew where Macartney's men had carried me when I was
+knocked out! It was no comfort to me that it was to the very place where
+I had meant to jail Macartney and hide Paulette, where Charliet and I
+were to have stood off Macartney's men.
+
+"Thompson's stope," I gasped. "It's there Macartney's put me!" I
+crawled, sick and dizzy, to what ought to have been the tunnel and the
+tunnel entrance, opening on the storm out of doors. The tunnel was
+there, all right. But as I fumbled to what ought to have been the open
+entrance, stillness met me, instead of a rush of wind; piled rock met my
+groping hands, instead of piled snow. I was in Thompson's abandoned
+stope all right,--only Macartney had sealed up the only way I could ever
+get out! I shoved, and dug, and battered, as uselessly as a rat in a
+trap, and suddenly knew that was just what I was! Macartney had not even
+taken the trouble to kill me,--not to avoid visible murder at this stage
+of the game, when only the enemy was left, if you did not count a duped
+woman and a captured one; but for the sheer pleasure of realizing the
+long, slow death that must get me in the end.
+
+"Die here--I've got to die here," I heard my own voice in my ears.
+"While----My God, Paulette! Macartney's got Paulette!"
+
+And in the darkness behind me somebody slipped on a stone.
+
+I had not thought I could ever feel light and fierce again. I was both,
+as I swung round.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE PLACE OF DEPARTED SPIRITS
+
+    Every man carries his skull under his face, but
+    God alone knows the marks on it.
+
+    _Indian Proverb._
+
+
+For a man moved, silent and furtive, in the tunnel between me and the
+stope!
+
+At the knowledge something flared up in me that had been pretty well
+burnt out: and that was Hope. That any one was in the place showed
+Macartney had either put a guard on me--which meant Thompson's abandoned
+stope was not sealed so mighty securely as I thought--or else it was he
+himself facing me in the dark, and I might get even with him yet. I let
+out a string of curses at him on the chance. There was not one single
+thing he had done--to me, Paulette, or any one else--that I did not put
+a name to. And I trusted Macartney, or any man he had left in the
+ink-dark stope, would be fool enough to jump at me for what I said.
+
+But no one jumped. And out of the graveyard blackness in front of me
+came a muffled chuckle!
+
+It rooted me stone still, and I dare swear it would have you. For the
+chuckle was Dunn's: Dunn's,--who was dead and buried, and Collins with
+him! But suddenly I was blazing angry, for the chuckle came again,
+and--dead man's or not--it was mocking! I jumped to it and caught a live
+throat, hard. But before I could choke the breath out of it a voice that
+was not Dunn's shouted at me: "Hold your horses, for any sake, Stretton!
+It's us."
+
+A match rasped, flared in my eyes, and I saw Dunn and Collins! Saw
+Dunn's stubbly fair hair, clipped close till it stood on end, as it had
+on the skull I'd said a prayer over and buried; saw Collins standing on
+the long shank bones I knew I had buried in the bush!
+
+I stared, dazed, facing the two boys I could have sworn were dead and
+buried. And instead Dunn gasped wheezingly from the rock where I had let
+him drop, and Collins drawled as if we had met yesterday:
+
+"We heard we were dead! But it wasn't us you buried, or any of Hutton's
+men either, for he'd have missed 'em. I expect you'd better put your
+funeral down to two stray prospectors, and let it go at that!" He looked
+curiously into my face. "You don't seem to have got much yourself by
+playing the giddy goat with Hutton!"
+
+In the dying flicker of his match I saw his young, sneering eyes, as he
+called Macartney "Hutton," and realized furiously that Paulette had been
+right, not only that Dunn and Collins were alive, but that they were on
+Macartney's side. I blazed out at the two of them:
+
+"So you've been in with Hutton all along, you young swine! I've been a
+blank fool; I ought to have guessed Hutton had bought you!"
+
+Dunn let out a sharp oath, but Collins only threw down the glowing end
+of his match. "I wouldn't say we were on Hutton's pay roll exactly,
+since you seem to have found out Macartney's real name at last," he
+retorted scornfully. "We've been on our own, ever since we saw fit to
+disappear and bunk in here. Though by luck Hutton hasn't guessed it, or
+we wouldn't be here now!"
+
+"I don't know that it's any too clear why you are here," I flung out
+hotly. "D'ye mean to say you've been living here, _hiding_, ever since
+you cleared out, and I thought the wolves ate you? That you knew all
+along who Macartney was--and never told me?"
+
+"Not exactly here, if you mean Thompson's old stope you're corked up in;
+but of course we knew Macartney was Hutton," Collins returned
+categorically. "As for telling you about him--well, we weren't any too
+sure you weren't Hutton's man yourself--till to-night!"
+
+"_What?_" said I.
+
+But Collins apologized calmly. "We were asses, of course; but we
+couldn't tell we'd made a mistake. We didn't have as much fun as a bag
+of monkeys while we were making it, either, especially when there was
+that--trouble--in the assay office. We came in on the tail-end of that,
+only we'd no guns, and it was too late to help our poor chaps, anyway.
+Besides, we thought you----" but he checked abruptly. "It's too long to
+explain in this freezing hole. Let's get out! You're not corked up here
+so dead tight as Hutton-Macartney thinks," and in the dark I knew he
+grinned. "Only I imagine we'd better decide what we're going to do
+before he discovers that!"
+
+"Do? I've got to get Paulette!" But I lurched as I turned back to the
+blocked tunnel entrance, and Collins caught me by the shoulder.
+
+"You can't get her," said he succinctly, "unless we help you! Going to
+trust us?"
+
+It didn't seem to me that I had any choice; so I said yes. Then I gaped
+like a fool. Dunn and Collins had me by the arms and were marching me
+through the dark, not toward the tunnel where I'd been slung in, but
+back through Thompson's black, abandoned stope, as if it had been
+Broadway, till the side wall of it brought us up. "Over you go," said
+Collins gruffly. He gave me a boost against the smooth wall of the
+stope, and my clawing fingers caught on the edge of a sharp shelf of
+stone. I swung myself up on it, mechanically, and felt my feet go
+through the solid stope wall, into space. There was an opening in the
+living rock, and as Collins lit another match where he stood below me, I
+saw it: a practicable manhole, slanting down behind my shelf so sharply
+that it must have been invisible from Thompson's stope, even in
+candlelight. Collins and Dunn swarmed up beside me, and the next second
+we all three slid through the black slit behind our ledge, and
+out--somewhere else. Collins lit a candle-end, and I saw we were in a
+second tunnel, a remarkably amateur, unsafe tunnel, too, if I'd been
+worrying about trifles, but not Thompson's!
+
+The thing made me start, and Collins grinned. "More convenient exit than
+old Thompson's, only we don't live here! If you'll come on you'll see."
+He and his candle disappeared round a loose looking boulder into a dark
+hole in the tunnel side, and his voice continued blandly as I stumbled
+after. "Natural cave, this tunnel was, when we found it; this second
+cave leading out of it; and a passage from here to--outside!" He waved
+his hand around as I stood dumb. "Our little country home!"
+
+What I saw was a small round cave, the glow of a fire under a shaft that
+led all betraying smoke heaven knew where into the side of the hill, and
+two spruce beds with blankets. The permanent look of the place was the
+last straw on my own blind idiocy of never suspecting Macartney, and I
+burst out, "Why the deuce, with all you knew, couldn't you have brought
+Paulette here and hidden her?"
+
+"Charliet said we should have." Collins nodded when I stared. "Oh, yes,
+there's more to that French Canadian than just cook! He's been in the
+know about us here all this time, or we'd have been in a nice hole for
+grub. Mind, I don't say he's brave----"
+
+"He was under his bed when I wanted him to-night," I agreed with some
+bitterness.
+
+"Was he?" Collins exclaimed electrically. "He was here, giving us the
+office about you! He tore down and told us you'd got Hutton, and we'd
+better light out and help you: but when we turned out it looked more as
+if Hutton had got _you_! When you and Miss Paulette rushed out of the
+kitchen door you must have run straight into an ambush of his men, and
+I guess one of them landed you a swipe on the head. Anyhow, Dunn and I
+met a procession with you frog-marched in the middle of it, that was
+more than we could manage without guns. So we kind of retired and let
+the men cork you into Thompson's stope to die. And you bet they did it.
+Not six of us could have got you out, ever, if we hadn't known a private
+way."
+
+I cursed him. "My God, stop _talking_! It's not me I want to hear about.
+Where was Paulette? D'ye mean you followed me and left her--left a
+girl--to Macartney? I--I've got to go for her!"
+
+But Collins caught me as I turned. "Macartney hadn't got her--she wasn't
+there! We hoofed Charliet off to find her, first thing; he'll bring her
+here, as soon as it's safe to make a get-away. We'd have brought her
+ourselves, only the show would have been spoiled if Hutton had spotted
+us. And we had to hustle, too, to get back here and waltz you out of
+Thompson's mausoleum. It'll be time enough for you to go for Miss
+Paulette when she doesn't turn up. You're not fit now, anyway." I felt
+him staring into my face. "Had anything to eat all day, except a hard
+ride and a fight?" he demanded irrelevantly, in a voice that sounded
+oddly far off.
+
+I shook my head; and the smell of coffee smote my famished nostrils as
+he took a tin pot off the fire. I knew how nearly I had been done when
+the scalding stuff picked me up like brandy. But--"You're sure about
+Paulette?" I gasped. "Remember, Macartney was bound to get her!"
+
+"Well, he didn't," Collins returned composedly. "I bet he's looking for
+her right now, and I'm dead sure he won't find her. Charliet wasn't born
+yesterday: he'll bring her here all right."
+
+"I'll wait ten minutes," I gave in abruptly, and because I knew I
+couldn't do anything else till I had filled my empty stomach. But there
+was something I wanted to know. "What did you mean, just now, about not
+being sure of me--with Hutton?"
+
+Dunn spoke up for the first time. "It was Miss Paulette; we thought it
+was you we heard her talking to, two nights in the dark. So when she
+drove off to Caraquet with you and the gold, after we'd heard her say
+she couldn't trust you--at least, the man we thought was you--we didn't
+know whether you were in with Hutton or not, or what kind of a game you
+were playing."
+
+"Me?" I swore blankly. "I suppose it never struck you that _I_ believed
+the man playing the game was Collins--till you both disappeared, and I
+decided it must be some one who never was employed around this mine!"
+
+"Well, I'm hanged," said Collins, and suddenly knocked the wits out of
+me by muttering that at least we'd both had sense enough to know that
+Miss Valenka was square.
+
+"Valenka? D'ye mean you knew who she was, too?" I stuttered.
+
+"Dunn did," Collins nodded. "I only knew Hutton. But I knew more than my
+prayers about him, and Dunn told me about the girl. So we sort of kept
+guard for her and watched you and Hutton--till the day we had the row
+with him."
+
+"In the mine! He told me." Only half of me heard him. The rest was
+listening for the sound of footsteps. But the place was still.
+
+"In Thompson's stope," Collins corrected drily. "You see, we thought you
+and Macartney-Hutton were working together, and we didn't see our way to
+tackling the two of you at once. So when you went off to Caraquet with
+Miss Paulette, we thought we'd get Hutton cleared out of this before you
+got back again. We kind of let him see us leave work in the mine and
+sneak into the old stope. When he came after us, we dropped on him with
+what we knew about him; and between us we knew a deal. We gave him his
+choice about leaving the neighborhood that minute, or our going
+straight to Wilbraham and telling who he was and what he was there
+for--which was where we slipped up! He'd the gall to tell us to our
+faces that we'd no pull over him, because we were doing private work in
+Thompson's stope and stealing Wilbraham's gold out of it. And--that
+rather gave us the check."
+
+"But--why? There wasn't six cents' worth of gold there to steal!"
+
+Collins smiled with shameless simplicity. "I know. But stealing gold was
+exactly what we were doing, only it wasn't in Thompson's old stope. We'd
+have been caught with the goods on us though, if any one had fussed
+round there to investigate. We found our way in here," he jerked his
+head toward his amateur tunnel, "by accident, in Thompson's time, one
+day when the stope happened to be empty; and we burrowed on to what
+looked like the anticlinal, before we heard the stope shift coming and
+had to slide out. But we'd seen enough to keep us burrowing. We couldn't
+do much, even after Hutton ran the other tunnel half a mile down the
+cliff and caught gold there; but we kind of slipped in, evenings, when
+you missed us out of the bunk house"--he grinned again--"and got the
+bearings of that vein. And you bet we had to find a way to stay with it;
+it was too good to leave! We weren't going to work in Wilbraham's mine
+just for our health and days' wages, when we'd struck our own gold. So
+we reckoned we'd just--disappear. But we didn't get out as sharp as we
+did simply on account of our own private affairs. Macartney-Hutton drew
+a gun the day we had the row he lied to you about, and I guess we just
+legged it out of Thompson's stope--by the front way!--in time to make
+the bush with our lives on us. Macartney thought he'd scared us, and
+we'd lit for Caraquet; but we lit back again after dark. We crawled in
+here by our back entrance you haven't seen yet, and here we've been ever
+since! We didn't confide in you, because you seemed pretty thick with
+Macartney, if you come to think of it; and it seemed a hefty kind of a
+lie, too, when you told Charliet you'd buried us. I rather think that's
+all, till to-night----" his indifferent drawl stopped as if it were cut
+off with a knife. "My God, Stretton," he jerked, "I'd forgotten! Was it
+true--what Charliet told us to-night--about Dudley Wilbraham?"
+
+I was eating stuff the silent Dunn had supplied, but I put the meat
+down. "Wilbraham's killed," I heard my own voice say; and then told the
+rest of it. How Paulette had found Dudley's chewed, wolf-doped cap, and
+Marcia had found Dudley, silent in the silent bush, where the last wolf
+was sneaking away. I would not have known Collins's face as he asked
+what I meant about wolf dope now and when I thought I was swearing at
+Macartney in Thompson's stope.
+
+I told him, with my ears straining for Charliet and a girl creeping to
+us, through Collins's back way out. But all I heard was silence,--that
+thick, underground silence that fills the ears like wool. I had said I
+would wait ten minutes, and nine of them were gone. I don't think I
+spoke. Dunn muttered suddenly, "They're not coming!"
+
+Collins shook his head and coldly cursed himself and me for two fools
+who had lain low, when out in the open together we could have stopped
+Macartney from getting Dudley, if we couldn't have helped old Thompson.
+He never mentioned Paulette, or his trusted cook. But he rose, lit a
+second candle, and led the way out of his warm burrow by a dark hole
+opposite the one we had entered by, and into a cramped alley where we
+had to walk bent double. It felt as if it ran a mile before it turned in
+a sharp right angle. Collins pinched out his light and turned on me.
+"Just what--are you going to do?"
+
+"Get Paulette," said I.
+
+"M-m," said Collins. "Well, here's where we start. Get hold of my heels
+when I lie down and don't crowd me." And that was every word that came
+out of either of us as we dropped flat, and wormed head-first down a
+slope of smooth stone till cold, fresh air abruptly smote my face. In
+front of us was an opening, out of the bowels of the hill, into the
+night and the snow. Rooted juniper hung down over it in an impervious
+curtain, as it hung everywhere from the rocks at La Chance. Collins
+pushed it aside, and the two of us were out--out of Thompson's stope,
+where Macartney had meant me to lie till I died!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+IN COLLINS'S CARE
+
+
+For two breaths I did not know where I was. It was still snowing, and
+the night was wild, such a night as we might not have again for weeks.
+Any one could move in it as securely as behind a curtain, for I could
+not see a yard before my face, and not a track could lie five minutes.
+But suddenly the familiarity of the place hit me, till I could have
+laughed out, if I had been there on any other business. Collins's long
+passage had wormed behind Thompson's stope, behind the La Chance
+stables; and it was no wonder he had found it easy enough to get
+supplies from Charliet. All he had to do was to cross the clearing from
+the jutting rock that shielded his private entrance and walk into
+Charliet's kitchen door. I moved toward it, and Collins grabbed at me
+through the smothering snow.
+
+"Hang on--you don't know who's there! Wait till I ring up Charliet,
+number one Wolf!" He stood back from me, and far, far off, with a
+perfect illusion of distance broken by the wind, I heard a wolf howl,
+once, and then twice again. If he had not stood beside me, I could not
+have believed the cry came from Collins's throat. But, remembering
+Dudley, it had an ill-omened sound to me.
+
+"Shut up!" I breathed sharply.
+
+Collins might have remembered Dudley too. "I wasn't going to do it
+again," he muttered, "but I've had to use it for a signal. It's been a
+fashionable kind of a sound around here, if I hadn't sense enough to
+know Macartney brought the beasts that made it. But Charliet knows my
+howl. He'll come out, if he's----Drop, _quick_!"
+
+But both of us had dropped already. Some one had flung open the kitchen
+door and fired a charge of buckshot out into the night. I heard it
+scatter over my head, and a burst of uproar on its heels told me
+Charliet's kitchen was crowded with Macartney's men. Somebody--not
+Charliet--shouted over the noise, "What the devil's that for?" And
+another voice yelled something about wolves and firing to scare them.
+
+"The boss'll scare you--if you get to firing guns this night," the first
+voice swore; and a man laughed, insolently. Then the kitchen door
+banged, and Collins sprang up electrically.
+
+"I don't like this one bit," he muttered. "Macartney's not in the
+house, or his men wouldn't dare be yelling like that; and Charliet's not
+there, either, or he'd have been out. That devil must have got him
+somewhere--him and Miss Paulette! Can't you see there's not a light in
+the shack, bar the kitchen one? Come on!"
+
+But I was gone already, around the corner of the shack to Paulette's
+side of it, and I knew better. There was a light--in Paulette's
+room--shining through a hole in the heavy wooden shutters she had had
+made for her window, long before I guessed why she wanted them and their
+bars. It ran through me like fire that Macartney was in that room, deaf
+to any kind of yells from the kitchen, to everything but Paulette's
+voice; and nobody but a man who has had to think it can guess what that
+thought was like to me, out there in the snow. I made for my own window,
+but it was locked; and God knew who might be watching me out of it, as I
+had watched Macartney one night, before I knew he was Hutton. I thought:
+"By gad, Nick Stretton, you'll go in the front door!" For that--with me
+shut up to die in Thompson's stope, and not one other soul alive to
+interfere with him--was the last thing Macartney would think to lock!
+Nor had he. The latch lifted just as usual, and I walked in.
+
+The long passage through the shack was dark; and, after the storm
+outside, dead silent. It was empty, too, as the living room was empty;
+but what I thought of was my dream girl's door. That was open a
+foot-wide space, and somebody inside it sobbed sickeningly. But if
+Macartney were there he was not speaking. I daresay I forgot I had no
+gun to kill him with. I crept forward in the soundless moccasins I had
+reason to thank heaven were my only wear and suddenly felt Collins
+beside me, in his stocking feet.
+
+"Hang on," he breathed; "I tell you he isn't there! If he were, you
+couldn't get him. One shout, and he'd have the whole gang out on us!"
+
+I knew afterwards that he'd stubbed his toe on Marcia Wilbraham's little
+revolver she'd dropped on the passage floor, and was ready to keep my
+back if the gang did come; but then I hardly heard him. I stood rooted
+at Paulette's door, staring in; for Paulette was not there--Macartney
+was not there! What I saw was Marcia Wilbraham with her back to me,
+crying hysterically, as I might have known Paulette would never cry, and
+flinging out of a trunk, as if Paulette were dead or gone, every poor
+little bit of clothes and oddments that were my dream girl's own!
+
+I can't write what that made me feel. Ribbons, bits of laces, little
+blue stockings, shoes, grew into a heap. And I would have been fool
+enough to jump in on Marcia and shake out of her how she dared to touch
+them, whether Paulette were dead or alive, if Collins had not gripped me
+hard.
+
+"The emeralds," he muttered. "She's rooting for them!"
+
+I had pretty well forgotten there ever were any emeralds, and I stared
+at him like a fool.
+
+"Van Ruyne's emeralds--she thinks Miss Paulette has 'em," Collins's lips
+explained soundlessly. "And they're round Macartney's own neck--I saw
+them! Dunn and I were going to swipe them, only we couldn't."
+
+I damned the emeralds. What I wanted of Marcia was to find out what had
+become of Paulette. But Collins gripped me harder. "Let her see you, and
+you'll never know," he breathed fiercely. "She'd give one yell, and we'd
+be done. Macartney's either got the girl and Charliet, or they're lost
+in the snow and he's hunting for them. Let's get some guns and go see
+which; we're crazy to stay here!"
+
+I nodded mechanically. I knew what it meant for a girl to be lost in the
+snow on such a night as I had just closed the shack door on, even with
+Charliet beside her; how Collins and I might tramp, search--yes, and
+call, too--uselessly, beside the very drift where she lay smothered.
+And then I realized I was a fool. Macartney would not give Paulette a
+chance to get lost. He had her somewhere, her and Charliet, and Collins
+and I had to take her from him. But something inexplicable stopped me
+dead as I turned for the shack door. Macartney had never been a winter
+at La Chance; he had no snowshoes. Charliet had some, I didn't know
+where. But I had two pairs in my own room. That inexplicable suggestion
+told me I needed them badly, though I knew it was silly; if Macartney
+had Paulette he would not be marching her through the snow. All the
+places I had to search for her were the stable and the assay office. And
+yet----I backed Collins noiselessly past the room where Marcia was still
+pulling round Paulette's trunk, with a noise that covered any we could
+make, and the two of us ended up in my room in the black dark. I stood
+Collins at the door while I felt for my snowshoes. I knew it was crazy,
+and I was just obsessed, but I got them. I didn't get much else. I
+couldn't find my rifle I had hoped for, and only a couple of boxes of
+revolver cartridges were in my open trunk,--that I guessed Marcia had
+gone through too. I would have felt like wringing her neck, if it had
+not been for Paulette and Macartney. I had no room for outside emotions
+till I knew about those two. I slid back to my doorway to get Collins,
+and he was gone. Where to, I had no earthly idea. I looked to see if he
+had been cracked enough to tackle Marcia, and Marcia was alone on her
+knees, chucking all Paulette's things back into her trunk again. The
+place suddenly felt dead quiet. Marcia had stopped sobbing, and I
+believe she would have heard a mouse move,--there was that kind of a
+listening look about her. And it was that minute--that unsuitable,
+inimical minute--that _I_ heard some one move! Outside, on the doorstep,
+somebody stumbled. The latch lifted, the door swung in,--and I jumped to
+meet Macartney with not one thing on me but some fool snowshoes and a
+pocketful of useless cartridges. But I brought up dead still, and rigid.
+
+"Charliet--oh, Charliet, come _quick_," whispered Paulette. She was snow
+from head to foot where she stood in the shack door. "I couldn't
+find----" But she recoiled as she saw me, against the light Marcia had
+burning inside her own half-open door. "Oh, my God, _Nicky_!" she cried
+in a voice that brought my soul alive, that fool's soul that had lost
+her. She caught at me like a child, incredulously, wildly. "Oh, Nicky!"
+
+There was no time to ask where she'd been, nor even of Macartney. I
+think the unsuitable thing I said was "Marcia!" For I heard Marcia jump
+and fall over Paulette's open trunk, before she was out of her door like
+one of the wolves Macartney was so fond of. I didn't think she saw us,
+but she did see Collins. The thing that cut her off was his rush out of
+somewhere. I heard her scream with furious terror; heard Paulette's door
+bang on her; and Collins was beside me with a rifle and some dunnage I
+scarcely saw in the sudden dark of the passage after that banged door.
+
+"Run," said he, through his teeth. "Gimme that stuff! Run!" he stuffed
+my snowshoes under the arm that held the rifle. "No, not that way! This
+way." He cut across the clearing in the opposite direction from the hole
+that led to his underground den, and it was time. Half of Macartney's
+men were tearing through the passage toward Marcia's screams, and the
+rest were pouring out of the kitchen door. In the storm we could only
+hear them. I was carrying Paulette like a baby, and with her head
+against me I could not see her face. All I could see was swirling,
+stinging snow in my eyes, and the sudden dark of the bush we brought up
+in. I kept along the edge of it, circling the clearing, and all but fell
+over the end of Collins's jutting rock. And this time I thanked God for
+the furious snow; in ten minutes there would be no sign of our tracks
+from the front door to the hold the rock shielded, and there was no
+earthly chance of Macartney's men picking them up before we were safe.
+
+It felt like years before the three of us were inside the curtain of
+juniper, swarming up the smooth rock face, but Collins observed
+contrarily that he'd never done it so quickly. He led the way up to the
+passage angle where he had pinched out his light, put down the snowshoes
+and the rifle, laid something else on the ground with remarkable
+caution, and walked on some feet before he lit his candle.
+
+"Better travel light and get home. Dunn and I'll come back presently and
+bring up the dunnage," he observed as blandly as if the three of us had
+been for an evening stroll, and suddenly laughed as he saw me glance at
+his stockinged feet. "By golly, I've left my boots in the shack, and I
+haven't any others--but it was worth a pair of boots! I stubbed my toe
+on Miss Wilbraham's little revolver she must have dropped on the passage
+floor, and I've got it. Also, let alone her lost toy-dog gun, I got all
+her ammunition and her rifle, while she was grabbing in Miss Paulette's
+trunk.
+
+    "'Taffy went to my house,
+      Thought I was asleep.
+    I went to Taffy's house,
+      And stole a side of beef'
+
+--as I learned when I was young. Come on, Stretton; I bet we'll be
+top-sides with Macartney-Hutton yet!"
+
+"He's out, looking for me----" but Paulette's sentence broke in a gasp.
+"Why, it's Collins!" She stared incredulously in the candlelight.
+
+"Just that," imperturbably. "Stretton can tell you all about me
+presently, Miss Paulette. For now I imagine you'd sooner see a fire and
+something to eat. Put her in between us, Stretton, Indian file, and
+we'll take her down."
+
+Women are queer things. Tatiana Paulina Valenka had tramped the bush
+most of the day before looking for a dead man, had found him--a sight no
+girl should have looked on; had run for more than her life with me, and
+been through God knew what since; and she walked down that unknown, dark
+passage with Collins and me as if nothing had ever happened to her. She
+greeted Dunn, too; and then, as he and Collins disappeared to fetch down
+our snowshoes and rifle, went straight to pieces where she and I stood
+safe by their fire. "Oh, oh, oh, I thought you were dead! I saw them get
+you. I can't believe--can't believe----" she gasped out in jerks, as if
+she fought for her very breath, and suddenly dropped flat on Dunn's old
+blanket. "Oh, Nicky," she moaned, "don't let me faint--now. _Nicky!_"
+
+There was something in her voice--I don't know--but it made me dizzy
+with sheer, clear joy. She had said my name as if I were the one man in
+the world for her, as if I had risen from the dead. But I dared not say
+so. I knew better than even to lift her head where she lay with closed
+eyes on Dunn's blanket, but I got Collins's old tin cup to her lips
+somehow and made her drink his strong coffee till it set her blood
+running, as it had set mine. After a minute she sat up dizzily, but she
+pushed away my bread and meat. "Presently--I'd be sick now," she
+whispered. "How did you get--out of Thompson's stope? And where--I mean
+I can't understand, about Collins and Dunn!"
+
+"They got me out," said I, and explained about them. But there was no
+particular surprise on Paulette's face. She never made an earthly
+comment, either, when I told her they'd always known all about her and
+Hutton, except, "I never thought they were dead; I told you that. I'd an
+idea, too, that Charliet didn't think so either."
+
+I had one arm round her by that time, feeding her with my other hand
+like a child, with bits of bread soaked in black coffee. If I had any
+thoughts they were only fear that she might move from me as soon as she
+really came to herself. But Charliet's name brought me back from what
+was next door to heaven. "Charliet," said I blankly; "where in the
+world is he? D'ye mean he hadn't told you about Collins and Dunn? Why,
+he was to bring you to them--here--hours ago!"
+
+"Charliet was? But----" Suddenly, beyond belief, my dream girl turned
+and clung to me. God knows I knelt like a statue. I was afraid to stir.
+It was Dudley she loved: I was only a man who was trusted and a friend.
+"Oh, Nicky, you don't know," she cried, "you don't know! You and I ran
+straight _into_ some of Dick Hutton's men when we raced out of the
+shack. And you threw me--just picked me up like a puppy and threw
+me--out of their way, into the deep snow. I heard them get you, but I
+was half smothered; I couldn't either see or speak. But I heard Dick
+shout from somewhere to 'chuck Stretton into Thompson's old stope!' I
+thought it meant they'd killed you; that it was another man I'd let--be
+murdered!"
+
+She caught her breath as if something stabbed her, and I know it stabbed
+me to think I was just "another man" to her. But I knelt steady. I had
+been a fool to think it was I she cared for, personally, and whether she
+did or not she needed my arm. "Well?" I asked. "Next?"
+
+"I was scrambling out of the snow," I felt her shiver against me, "only
+before I could stand up Charliet raced up from somewhere and shoved me
+straight down in the drift again. He said Dick was looking for me, and
+to lie still, while he got him away; then to race for the shack and hide
+just outside the front door, till he came for me--but before he could
+finish Dick ran down on the two of us, with a lantern. He'd have fallen
+over me, if Charliet hadn't stopped him by yelling that I'd run for the
+bush. I think he grabbed the lantern--but anyhow, they both tore off. I
+got to the shack, but----Oh, Nicky, I couldn't wait there. I----"
+
+"Well?" It seemed to be the only word in my brain.
+
+"I went down to Thompson's stope. But I was too late. The men had walled
+you in with rocks, and I couldn't move them. I tried!" (I thought she
+must hear the leap my heart gave. I know I shut my jaws to keep my
+tongue between my teeth at the thought of her trying to dig her way in
+to me, the only friend she had in the world except a French-Canadian
+cook.) "I----Oh, I thought if I could find Charliet we might do
+something! I went back to look for him, and I found _you_----Oh, I found
+you!" Her arms were still on my shoulders as I knelt by her, and
+suddenly her voice turned low and anxious. "What do you suppose became
+of Charliet? He's so faithful. We can't leave him for Dick to turn on
+when he can't find me!"
+
+I was not thinking of Charliet. I couldn't honestly care what had become
+of him, with my dream girl in my arms. I may as well tell the truth; I
+forgot Dudley, too. I don't know what mad words would have come out of
+my mouth if Paulette had not pushed me away violently. What was left of
+her coffee upset; I got to my feet with the empty cup in my hand, just
+as Collins and Dunn and their candle emerged round the boulder. I
+remembered long afterwards that it was before I had answered Paulette
+one word about myself, Thompson's stope, anything. But then all I did
+was to stare at something Collins was carrying carefully in his two
+hands. "What's that?" I said--just to say something.
+
+"Some new kind of high explosive Wilbraham got to try and never did,"
+Collins returned casually. "Saw it in his office to-night and thought it
+was better with us than with Macartney. Don't know just how it works, so
+I'm treating it gingerly." He moved on into the darkness of his own
+tunnel and came back empty-handed. "What are we going to do--first?" he
+inquired calmly.
+
+I took a look at Paulette. Whether it was from Collins's casual mention
+of Dudley's name or not, she was ghastly. Who she was looking at I
+don't know; but it wasn't at me.
+
+"Sleep," said I grimly. "Two of us need it, if you and Dunn don't.
+Macartney can't get us to-night." Though of that I was none too sure.
+Charliet might get rattled any moment and give us away. But there was no
+good in sticking at trifles.
+
+But Collins was an astute devil. "He won't," he rejoined as calmly as if
+I had spoken of Charliet out loud. "He won't get hurt, either; you can
+bank on that. Make up that fire, Dunn, and we'll give Miss Paulette the
+blankets."
+
+We did, where she lay at one side. We three men dropped like dogs in a
+row in front of the fire. I was next Paulette, with the space of a foot
+or so between us. I had not known how dead weary I was till I stretched
+out flat. Collins and Dunn may have slept; I don't know; but Paulette
+certainly did, as soon as she got her head down. I thought I lay and
+watched the fire, but I must have slept, too. For I woke--with my heart
+drumming as if I'd heard the trump for the Last Judgment, and Paulette's
+hand in mine. I must have flung out my arm till I touched her, and her
+little fingers were tight round my hard, dirty hand, clinging to it. I
+lay in heaven, in the dark of a frowsy cave we might be hunted out of
+any minute, with the dying glow of the fire in my eyes and my dream
+girl's hand in mine. And suddenly, like a blow, I heard her whisper in
+her sleep, "Dudley! Oh, dear Dudley!"
+
+I was only Nicky Stretton, and a fool. I lay in the dark with a heart
+like a stone and a girl's warm, clinging hand in mine.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+HIGH EXPLOSIVE
+
+
+There was nothing to tell of any handclasp when I woke in the morning.
+Paulette lay in her blankets with her back to me, as if she had lain so
+all night; Dunn was making up the fire; Collins was absent, till he
+appeared out of his tunnel where he had put Dudley's high explosive the
+night before and nodded to me. None of us spoke: we all had that chilly
+sort of stiffness you get after sleeping with your clothes on. As we ate
+our breakfast I took one glance at Paulette and looked away again. She
+was absolutely white, almost stunned looking, and her eyes would not
+meet mine. I had an intuition she had waked in the night after I slept
+and discovered what she had been doing; but if she were ashamed there
+was no need. God knows I would not have reminded her of the thing. I
+knew the dark hollows and the tear marks under her eyes were for Dudley,
+not for me. But I had to take care of her now, and Collins glanced at me
+as I thought it.
+
+"I suppose you realize Charliet's our only line of communication, and
+that he and all the La Chance guns are in the hands of the enemy," he
+observed drily. "What do you think of doing about it?"
+
+"Get Charliet; all the guns and ammunition he can steal; hold this place
+and harry Macartney," I supposed. "What do _you_ think?"
+
+I had turned to Paulette, but she only shook her head with an, "I don't
+know, Mr. Stretton!" I had time to decide she had only called me Nicky
+by mistake six hours ago, before Collins disagreed with me flatly.
+
+"Stay here? Not much! Won't work--Macartney'd drop on us! Oh, I know he
+won't be able to find our real entrance to this place unless Charliet
+gives us away, and I'm not worrying about that! But, after he realizes
+Miss Valenka has vanished"--he said her real name perfectly
+casually--"and when Charliet and most of his guns vanish too, and his
+men begin to get picked off one by one, how long do you suppose it will
+be before Macartney connects the three things--and smells a rat? He'll
+sense Charliet and a girl can't be fighting him alone. For all we know
+he'll guess you must have got out of Thompson's stope somehow, and dig
+away his rock fence to see! And I imagine we'd look well in here if he
+did!"
+
+"It's just what we would look," said I. "You ass, Collins, with
+Macartney ignorant of the real way in on us, and he and his gang digging
+open Thompson's tunnel against the daylight, with you and me and Dunn in
+the dark on that shelf in Thompson's stope we came in here by, we'd have
+the drop on the lot. Except--Marcia!" Her name jerked out of me. We
+would have to count Marcia in with Macartney's gang; and, remembering
+she had known me all her life, it made me smart.
+
+"Oh, Miss Wilbraham--I should let _her_ rip!" Collins returned
+callously. "Listen, Stretton; what you say's all very well, only we
+can't count on holding this place when we're discovered, while it's a
+matter of _if_ Charliet can get guns! Miss Marcia's rifle and her toy
+popgun aren't going to save us, and I doubt if Charliet can swipe any
+more. What I say is let's cut some horses out of the stable after dark,
+all four of us clear out on them to Caraquet, and set the sheriff and
+his men after Macartney. Unless," he turned boldly to her, "you don't
+want that, Miss Valenka?"
+
+But if she had been going to answer, which I don't think she was, I cut
+her off. "We can't let Marcia rip--don't talk nonsense, Collins! She's
+Dudley's sister, if she and Macartney are a firm. We can't clear out and
+leave her with a man like that!"
+
+"We can't take her to Caraquet," Collins argued with some point. "You
+own she doesn't know anything about Macartney's wolf dope; you haven't
+any witnesses to prove he tried it on your wagon, or to set the wolves
+on Dudley. Miss Marcia would just up and swear your whole story was a
+lie--and all Caraquet would believe her! Nobody alive ever heard of such
+a thing as wolf dope!"
+
+"That's just where you're wrong!" I remembered the boy I'd left cached
+in Skunk's Misery--and something else, that had been in my head ever
+since wolves and the smell of a Skunk's Misery bottle seemed to go
+together. "Two Frenchmen were run in for using wolf dope in Quebec
+province last winter, for I've an account of their trial somewhere that
+I cut out of an Ottawa paper. And as for a witness, I've a boy cached at
+Skunk's Misery who can prove Macartney made the same stuff there. The
+only thing we might get stuck on in Caraquet is the _reason_ for all the
+murders he's done--with, and without it!"
+
+"I guess Miss Valenka knows the reason all right," Collins spoke as
+coolly as if she were not there, which may have been the wisest thing to
+do, for though she flushed sharply she said nothing. He went on with
+exactly what she had said herself. "But after Hutton came here to get
+her, he saw he'd be a fool not to grab the La Chance mine, too; and
+unless we can stop him you bet he and his gang have grabbed it! They've
+disposed of Thompson, of all our own men who might have stood by us, of
+Wilbraham," categorically; "they think they've disposed of Dunn
+and me and buried you alive, and--except for having lost Miss
+Valenka--Macartney's made his game! Nobody'll know there's anything
+wrong at the mine till the spring, because there's no one interested
+enough to ask questions till Wilbraham's bank payments have stopped long
+enough to look queer. And by that time Macartney and his gang will be
+gone, and the cream of Wilbraham's gold with them. As for us, we can't
+fight him by sitting in this burrow _with_ Miss Paulette, and without
+any guns, even if he doesn't end by nosing out Dunn's and my gold as
+well as Wilbraham's. Why, we depend on Charliet for our food, let alone
+anything else; and for all we know, Charliet may have squeaked on us by
+this time. I say again, let's get a sheriff and posse at Caraquet, and
+come back here and get Macartney! We could do it, if we took Miss
+Paulette and hit the trail to-night."
+
+"And Macartney'd get us, if we tried it!" I had thrashed all that out in
+my head before, while I was tying up Macartney with Charliet's
+clothesline. "We'd be stopped by his picket at the Halfway, if ever we
+got to the Halfway, for the Caraquet road's likely drifted solid and
+you don't make time digging out smothering horses. No; we'll fight
+Macartney where we are! And the way to do it is with Charliet and guns."
+
+"If you'll tell me how we're to connect with either!" Collins was grim.
+"It's a mighty dangerous thing calling up Charliet on number one Wolf,
+with the whole of La Chance crawling with Macartney and his gang,
+hunting for Miss Paulette. But we can go up to the back door and try
+it!"
+
+"Oh, no," Paulette burst out wildly, "I'm afraid! I mean I know we must
+find out first if Charliet's all right, but you mayn't get him--and
+you'll give yourselves away!"
+
+It was almost the first time she had spoken, and it was more to Collins
+than to me, but I answered. "We'll get Charliet all right," I began--and
+Collins gripped me.
+
+"I dunno," he drawled. "Strikes me some one's going to get us--first!"
+
+He snapped out our candle, which was senseless, since Dunn's red-hot
+fire showed us up as plain as day, and all four of us stood paralyzed.
+Somebody--running, slipping, with a hideous clatter of stones--was
+coming down the long passage Collins called his back door.
+
+"Macartney," said I, "and Charliet's given us away!" And with the words
+in my mouth I had Paulette around the waist and shoved out of sight
+behind the boulder that separated Collins's cave from his tunnel and the
+pierced wall of Thompson's stope. Macartney might be a devil, but there
+was no doubt the man was brave to come like that for a girl, through the
+dark bowels of the earth where Charliet must have warned him Dunn and
+Collins would be lurking. Only he had not got Paulette yet, and he would
+find three men to face before he even saw her. I stooped over her in the
+dark of Collins's tunnel, where just a knife-edge of the cave firelight
+cut over the boulder's top. "Keep still, Paulette--and for any sake
+don't move and kick Collins's devilish explosive he's got stuck in here
+somewhere," I said, exactly as if I were steady. Which I was not,
+because it was my unlooked for, heaven-sent chance to get square with
+Macartney. I sprang around the boulder to do it and saw Collins strike
+up the barrel of Marcia's rifle in Dunn's stretched left arm.
+
+"Don't shoot," he yelled. "You fool, it's Charliet!"
+
+I stood dead still. It was Charliet, but a Charliet I had never seen.
+His French-Canadian face was tallow white, as he tore into the cave,
+grinning like a dog with rage and excitement. He brushed Dunn and
+Collins aside like flies and grabbed my arm. "Come out," he panted.
+"Sacre damn, bring Mademoiselle Paulette and _come out_! It is that
+Marcia! She sees you in the shack last night; sees you--alive and out of
+Thompson's stope where they buried you--carrying Mademoiselle away! She
+tells Macartney so this morning, when he and I get in after hunting for
+Mademoiselle all night--praying, me, that I might not make a mistake and
+find her, and that you might. Oh, I tell you I was crazy--dog crazy! I
+cannot get away from Macartney, I think she may be dead in the snow,
+looking for me who was not there, till first thing this morning we come
+in--and that she-devil tells Macartney Stretton takes Mademoiselle away!
+Not till now, till all are out of the house, do I have the chance to
+come and warn you what is coming! They--that Marcia, Macartney, all of
+the men--start now to dig you out of Thompson's stope they put you in.
+They think they left some hole you crawl out of in the snow and dark,
+that you come for Mademoiselle and take her back into. I could not get
+you even one small cartridge to hold this place, and--Macartney is
+clever! He will be in here, with all his guns, all his men. And then,
+_quoi faire_? Come now, all of you, while there is the one chance to
+come unseen, and get on horses and go away. Ah," the man's fierce voice
+broke, ran up imploringly, "I beg you, Mademoiselle, like I would beg
+the Blessed Virgin, to make them come! Before Macartney, or that Marcia,
+finds--you!"
+
+I jumped around and saw Paulette, in the cave. I had left her safe in
+Collins's tunnel; and there she stood, come out into plain view at the
+sound of Charliet's voice. But she was not looking at him, or me, or any
+of us. Her eyes stared, sword-blue, at the hole where Charliet had
+rushed in from Collins's secret passage: I think all I realized of her
+face was her eyes. I turned, galvanized, to what she stared at,--and
+saw. Marcia Wilbraham was standing in the entrance from the long
+passage, behind us all, except Paulette; meeting Paulette's eyes with
+her small, bright brown ones, her lips wide in her ugly, gum-showing
+smile. I knew, of course, that she had picked up Charliet's track in the
+snow from his kitchen door to Collins's juniper-covered back door, had
+followed fair on his heels down the dark passage, instead of going with
+Macartney to dig me out of Thompson's stope; that in one second she
+would turn and run back again, to show Macartney Collins's back door.
+
+My jump was late. It was Dunn who saved us. He sprang matter-of-factly,
+like a blood-hound, and pulled Marcia down. She was as strong as a man,
+pretty nearly; she fought fiercely, till she heard the boy laugh. That
+cowed her, in some queer way. I heard Dunn say: "You'd better stay here
+a while, Miss Wilbraham. It's safer--than with Macartney;" saw Charliet
+run to help him, and the two of them placidly tie and gag Marcia
+Wilbraham with anything they could take off themselves. It was with a
+vivid impression of Charliet's none too clean neck-handkerchief playing
+a large part in Marcia's toilette that Collins and I jumped, with one
+accord, to Paulette. I don't know what he said to her. I saw her nod.
+
+I said, "We're done for if Macartney gets in on us through Thompson's
+stope and finds this place. He'll just send half his men to scout for
+the other entrance; they'll find it from Charliet's and Marcia's tracks
+and get at us both ways. You stay here with Charliet, while Collins and
+I meet Macartney in Thompson's stope. When--if--you hear we can't best
+him, run--with Charliet! Dunn'll look after Marcia."
+
+She gave me a stunned sort of look, as if I were deserting her, as if I
+didn't--care! I would have snatched her in my arms and kissed her,
+Dudley or no Dudley lying dead in the bush, but I had no time. Collins
+had me by the elbow, his fierce drawl close to my half-comprehending
+ear. We'd no guns but Marcia's popgun and her rifle; two of us, even on
+the shelf in Thompson's stope, would do little good with those against
+all Macartney's men crowding into the stope and giving us a volley the
+second our fire from the shelf drew theirs. We might pick off half a
+dozen of them before our cartridges gave out. But there was no sense in
+that business. We would have to try----But here I came alive to what
+Collins was really talking about.
+
+"That high explosive," he was saying. "It's a filthy trick, but God
+knows they deserve it! If we blow them back far enough at the very
+entrance of the tunnel, they may never come on again to get in."
+
+I daresay I'd have recoiled in cold blood. But my blood ran hot that
+morning. I did think, though; hard. I said, "Can't do it! No fuse."
+
+"Heaps. Dunn's and mine!" I heard Collins grabbling for it, somewhere in
+the dark of the tunnel.
+
+Behind me somebody lit a candle; who, I never looked to see. In the
+light of it I saw Collins pick up his bundle of blasting powder and
+warned him sharply.
+
+"Look out with that stuff! We don't know it; it may work anyway. If it
+bursts up in the air the stope roof'll be down on us. It may fire back,
+too--and we'd be hit behind the point of burst!"
+
+"We won't be," said Collins, between his teeth. "I'll burst it _out_ the
+tunnel, and blow Macartney's gang to rags!"
+
+But that lighted candle at my back had shown me other than explosives:
+the silly, pointless snowshoes I had lugged from my own room in the
+shack. My conscious mind knew now what my subconscious mind had wanted
+them for, like a mill where some one had turned on the current. I swore
+out loud. "By gad, Collins, listen! If we don't smash Macartney, and he
+gets in on us, he'll get Paulette! I've got to stop that, somehow.
+Macartney doesn't _know_ she's here yet; Marcia only guessed it.
+Supposing he were to see only me, alone in Thompson's stope, he might
+never know she was here too!"
+
+"Dunno what you mean," Collins snapped. And I snapped back:
+
+"I mean that if we blow a clean hole at the tunnel entrance, and I burst
+out of it and run, I can get the whole gang after me--and make time for
+you and Charliet to get Paulette away somewhere, by the back door."
+
+"But"--Collins halted where he swarmed up into Thompson's
+stope--"where'll you go? You can't, Stretton. It's death!"
+
+"It's sense," said I. "As for where I'll go, Lac Tremblant'll do for
+me; and I bet it will finish any man of Macartney's who tries to come
+after me! Get through into that stope with your fuse, man; I'll hand you
+the blasting stuff. Got it? All right. Here you, gimme that candle!" I
+turned and took it--out of Paulette's hand!
+
+I gasped, taken aback all standing, before I lied, "It's all right,
+Paulette. I'll be back in a minute." And though I knew she must have
+heard what I was going to do, I had no better sense than to stoop before
+the girl's blank eyes and snatch up my two pairs of snowshoes, that had
+been lying beside the explosive I had just passed up to Collins, before
+I clambered up through the hole into Thompson's stope, on to the shelf
+from whence I had first dropped into Collins's cave.
+
+Collins was down in Thompson's tunnel already, laying his fuse with
+deadly skill. Already, too, we could hear Macartney's men outside,
+leveraging away the boulders that had plugged up the tunnel entrance
+where I was to starve and die. Collins placed the stuff I carried down
+to him. I said, "My God, you can't use all that; the whole stope'll be
+down on us!" And he answered, "No; I've done it right." That was every
+word we uttered till we were back on our high shelf, with a lit fuse
+left behind us in the stope. The fuse burned smooth as a dream, and
+Collins nudged me with fierce satisfaction. But I was suddenly sick with
+horror. Not at the thing we were doing--if it were devil's work we had
+been driven to be devils--but at the knowledge that Paulette was
+standing within reach of my feet, that were through the stope wall and
+were hanging down into Collins's tunnel,--that tunnel every bone in me
+knew was amateur, unsafe, a death trap. The shock of a big explosion in
+Thompson's stope might well bring its roof down on Paulette, standing
+alone in it, waiting,--trusting to me for safety. I turned my head and
+yelled at her as a man yells at a dog--or his dearest--when he is sick
+with fear for her: "Get back out of that into the cave! _Run!_"
+
+I heard her jump. Heard her----But thought stopped in me, with one
+unwritable, life-checking shock. The whole earth, the very globe, seemed
+to have blown to pieces around me. The flash and roar were like a
+thousand howitzers in my very face; the solid rock shelf I was on leapt
+under me; and behind me the whole of Collins's tunnel collapsed, with a
+grinding roar. I heard Collins gasp, "Good glory"; heard the rocks and
+gravel in the stope before me settling, with an indescribable,
+threatening noise, between thunder and breaking china--and all I thought
+of was that I'd warned my dream girl in time, that she'd answered me,
+that she was back in Collins's cave, and safe. Till, suddenly to eyes
+that had been too dazzled and seared to see it clearing, the smoke
+before me cleared, the choking fumes lessened, and I saw. Saw, straight
+in front of me, where a tunnel had been and was no longer, a clean hole
+like a barn door where Thompson's tunnel entrance had been but two-men
+wide; saw out, into furious, crimson color that turned slowly, as my
+sight grew normal, into the golden, dazzling glory of winter sun on
+snow.
+
+There was silence outside in the sun, all but some yells and moaning.
+How much damage we'd done I couldn't see; or where Macartney's men were,
+dead or alive. But now, while they were paralyzed with shock and
+surprise, now was my time to get through them. I lowered myself gingerly
+to the rubbish heap that had been the smooth floor of Thompson's stope;
+edged to the tunnel entrance; slipped my feet into the toe and heel
+straps of the snowshoes I had held tightly against me through all the
+unspeakable, hellish uproar of rending rock, and sprang,--sprang out
+into the sunlight, out on the clear snow, past wounded men, reeling men,
+dying men, and raced as I never put foot to ground before or since, for
+Lac Tremblant, glittering clear and free in front of me,--that Lac
+Tremblant I had thought of subconsciously when I carried snowshoes into
+Collins's cave.
+
+In the beginning of this story I said what Lac Tremblant was like. It
+was a lake that was no lake; that should have been our water-way out of
+the bush instead of miles of expensive road; and was no more practicable
+than a rope ladder to the stars. For the depth of Lac Tremblant, or its
+fairway, were two things no man might count on. It would fall in a night
+to shallows a child might wade through, among bristling rocks no one had
+ever guessed at; and rise in a morning to the tops of the spruce scrub
+on its banks,--a sweet spread of water, with never a rock to be seen.
+What hidden spring fed it was a mystery. But in the bitterest winter it
+was never frozen further than to form surging masses of frazil ice that
+would neither let a canoe push through them, nor yet support the weight
+of a man. It was on that frazil ice, that some people called lolly, that
+I meant to run for my life now, trusting to the resistance of the two
+feet of snow that lay on the lake in the mysterious way snow does lie on
+lolly, and to the snowshoes on my feet. And as I slithered on to the
+soft snow of the lake, from the crackling, breaking shell ice on the La
+Chance shore, I knew I had done well. Some--a good many--of Macartney's
+men were killed or half-killed by our deadly blast, but not all. He had
+been more cautious than I guessed. I saw the rest of his men bunched
+some hundred feet from the smashed-out tunnel; saw Macartney, too,
+standing with them. But all I cared for was that he should see me and
+come out after me on the crust of snow and lolly over Lac
+Tremblant,--that would never carry him without the snowshoes he did not
+have--and give Paulette her chance to get away. I yelled at him and
+skimmed out over the trembling ice like a bird.
+
+Neither Macartney nor his men had stirred in that one flying glance I
+had dared take at them. But sheer tumult came out of them now. Then
+shots--shots that missed me, and a sudden howled order from Macartney I
+dared not turn my head or break my stride to understand. The giving
+surface under me was bearing, but a quarter-second's pause would have
+let me through. There was no sense in zigzagging. Once I was clear, I
+ran as straight as I dared for the other shore, five miles away;
+but--suddenly I realized I was not clear! I was followed.
+
+Somebody else on snowshoes had shot out of Thompson's tunnel, over the
+crackling shore ice on to the snow and frazil; was up to me, close
+behind me.
+
+"Run, Nicky," shrieked Paulette's voice. "_Run!_"
+
+I slewed my head around and saw her, running behind me!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+LAC TREMBLANT
+
+    "Across the ice that never froze
+      The snow that never bore,
+    My love ran out to follow me--
+      To follow to the shore."
+
+    _The Day the World Went Mad._
+
+
+It may be true that I swore aloud; but what I meant by it was more like
+praying. Over me was the blue winter sky and the gold sun; under me the
+treacherous spread of the lake that was no lake, that one misstep might
+send me through, to God knew what hideous depth of unfrozen water, or
+bare, bone-shattering stone; behind me were Macartney and Macartney's
+men; and close up to me, nearer every second, my Paulette, my dream girl
+who had never been mine. There was nothing to do for both of us but to
+keep on crossing Lac Tremblant. Missteps might be death, but turning
+back was worse--for her, anyway.
+
+I yelled, "Keep wide! Get abreast of me--don't take any direction you
+don't see me take. But _keep wide_!" Because what held one of us would
+never hold two, and behind me, running in my tracks----Well, even a
+light girl would not run long!
+
+Paulette only screamed, "Yes. Keep on! They're coming!" She may have
+needed her breath, I don't know; but she didn't run like it. She ran
+like a deer, with my own flat, heel-dragging stride on the snowshoes I
+had not thought she knew how to use. One more shot came after us. I
+yelled again to her to keep wide and heard her sheer off a little to
+obey me; but she still ran behind me. God knows I didn't realize, till
+afterwards, that it was to keep Macartney from shooting me. I didn't
+even wonder why Collins and Dunn weren't firing into the brown of
+Macartney's men with Marcia's rifle and popgun. I was too busy watching
+the snow surfaces before me.
+
+There was a difference in them. I can't explain what, but a difference
+between where there was water to buoy the snow, and where it lay on
+shell ice. The open black holes where there was nothing at all any one
+could see, and I didn't worry over them. I only knew we must run over
+water, or the light stuff under us would let us through. I kept moving
+my hand in infinitesimal signals to Paulette, and God knows she was
+quick at understanding. My heart was in my mouth for her, but she never
+made a mistake, or a stumble where a stumble would have meant the end.
+She called to me suddenly; something that sounded like, "They're
+coming!"
+
+I turned my head and saw out of the tail of my eye, as a man sees when
+he's riding a race. They _were_ coming! Macartney's men, and--I
+thought--Macartney; but I knew better than to look long enough to make
+sure. His men, anyhow, had raced out on the lake as we had raced, and
+there was no need to watch what became of them. Their dying screams came
+to us, as they floundered and sank in their heavy boots through snow and
+frazil ice, to depths they would never get out of. I might have been
+sick anywhere else. I was fierce with joy out there in Lac Tremblant,
+running with a girl over the thin crust under which death lurked to
+snatch at us, as it had snatched at Macartney's men. Neither of us
+spoke. I was thinking too hard. I could have run indefinitely as we were
+running, but Paulette was just a girl. What of Paulette if she slackened
+with weariness, if I led her wrong by six inches, or missed a single
+threatening sign on the stuff we fled over?
+
+If I had been sure Macartney was drowned with his men, I might have
+taken her back to La Chance; but I was not sure. And, Macartney or no
+Macartney, the track I had led her out on the lake by was the only one I
+would have dared trust to return on,--and it was all lumps of snowy
+lolly and blue water, where Macartney's men had broken through. I looked
+ahead of me with my mind running like a mill. We had done about half the
+five-mile crossing; we might do the rest if we could stop and breathe
+for ten minutes, for five, even for two. Only, in all the width of the
+lake that lay like cake icing in front of us, there was not one place
+where we could dare to stand. The water under us was higher than I had
+ever known it. Not one single dagger-toothed rock showed as they had
+showed when I crossed it in a canoe the night before it froze to the
+thick slush that was all it ever froze to. There was not one single
+place to----But violently, out of the back of my memory, something came
+to me. There was one place in Lac Tremblant where, high water or low, a
+man might always stand--if I could hit it in the smothering, featureless
+snow.
+
+"The island!" I gasped out loud. Because there was one--a high, narrow
+island without even a bush on it--rising gradually, not precipitately
+like the rest of the rocks in Lac Tremblant, out of the uncertain water.
+But for half an hour I thought it might as well be non-existent. Stare
+as I might I could see no sign of it--and suddenly I all but fell with
+blessed shock. I was on it; on the highest end of it, with solid ground
+under my feet; solid ground and safety, breath and rest. I yelled to
+Paulette, "Jump to me!" and she jumped. That was all there was to it,
+except a man and a girl, panting, staggering, clinging together, till
+sense came to them, and they dropped flat in the snow.
+
+I said sense, but I don't know that I had any. I lay there staring at
+Paulette and her long bronze hair that had come down as she ran, till it
+was like a mantle over her and the snow round her. I had never thought
+women had hair like that. I cried out, "My God, Paulette, why did you
+come?"
+
+I may have sounded angry. I was, as a man always is angry when he has
+dragged a woman into his danger. Paulette panted without looking at me.
+"I--had to! The tunnel--caved in!"
+
+"I told you to get out of it!" I sat up where I had flung myself down
+and stared at her. She sat up, too, both of us crimson-faced and
+dishevelled. But neither of us thought of that. I stormed like a fool.
+"What possessed you to stay in the tunnel--or to follow me? I told you
+to jump for the cave!"
+
+"Well, I didn't!" Paulette stiffened as if she froze. "I hadn't time. I
+would have had to cross the tunnel. And I hadn't _time_ to do anything
+but jump to you and Collins before your stuff blew up. I'd just got on
+your shelf when it went off, and it stunned me till I had just sense
+enough left to lie still and hold on. But afterwards, when I saw what
+you were going to do, I put on the snowshoes you'd left by the tunnel
+entrance and came after you. I'm sorry I did, now!"
+
+"But Collins----" I looked blankly across the two miles of quivering
+death trap we still had to cross before we gained what safety there
+might be in the Halfway shore and the neighborhood of Macartney's
+picket, and my thoughts were not of Collins--"Why, in heaven's name,
+didn't Collins have sense enough to lug you back into his cave with him
+and Charliet, instead of letting you take a chance like this?"
+
+"Collins couldn't get back himself," Paulette retorted, as if I were
+unbearably stupid. "Nobody could get back! I told you the tunnel _caved
+in_, till it was solid between us and the others. Collins saw I had to
+follow you. In two more minutes Dick would have come to hunt Thompson's
+stope for me, and we had no guns to stave him off. You and Collins left
+them in the tunnel!" It was just what we had done, and I wasted good
+time in remembering it, guiltily. Paulette stood up and twisted back her
+streaming cloud of hair. "So, as I had to come with you," she resumed
+without looking at me, "don't you think we'd better get on? If you're
+waiting for me to rest, you needn't."
+
+I wasn't, altogether. I stared back over the perilous way we had come.
+There was no black speck of any one following us on its treacherous
+face; no sound of shots; no anything from the shore we had left. Yet,
+"Where do you suppose Macartney is?" I asked involuntarily.
+
+"Dead." Her voice was almost indifferent, but she shivered. "Or he'd
+have gone on shooting at us."
+
+I nodded, but I would have felt easier if I had thought so. Somehow I
+didn't, I don't know why. I know nothing would have induced me to take
+Paulette back to La Chance, even if the trodden lolly would have borne
+us again. I had a pang about Collins, left alone there; but Collins
+could take care of himself, and Paulette's shiver had reminded me we
+should freeze to death if we loitered where we were. I pointed to the
+snowy lake between us and the Halfway shore. "Can you do two more miles
+of running, over that?"
+
+"Yes," she glanced down at her slim, trained body, rather superbly.
+"Only--there's no one following us! Have we got to be quite so quick?"
+
+"Quicker! We don't know about Macartney. If he's alive he has a stable
+full of horses, and he knows where we're running to. He may try to cut
+us off." I half lied; he could not cut us off, since horses would be of
+no use to him in the heavy snow, and on foot it would take him two days
+to go round Lac Tremblant to the Halfway, where crossing the lolly could
+bring us in two hours. But I had no mind to air my real reason for
+haste.
+
+I should have known Paulette was too shrewd for me. "I'm a fool--Lac
+Tremblant never bears, of course," she said quite quietly. "Go on, Mr.
+Stretton. Only--don't stop, if anything goes wrong with me!"
+
+"Nothing will go wrong," said I, just as if I believed it. If she had
+called me Nicky, as she had done by mistake the night before, when she
+slept with her hand clasping mine, if she'd even looked at me, I must
+have burst out that I loved her, past life and death, and out to the
+world to come. But it was no time to force love-making on a girl who had
+seen the man she meant to marry lie dead before her eyes. If she turned
+shaky, or cried, I could never save her. For the bit of lake in front of
+us was ten times worse than what we'd crossed. I knew that when I
+tightened up the snowshoes silently and led my dream girl out on it. I
+would have given half my life for a rope, such as people have on
+glaciers. But I had no rope, and each of us would have to run, or sink,
+alone.
+
+I meant, of course----But that's no matter. I got Paulette off the
+island and, inch by inch, feeling my way, back to the channel where
+buoyant water, at least, lay under us. I twisted and turned like a
+corkscrew, but I dared not leave it. Once I cautioned Paulette never to
+try a short cut, just to keep abreast of me; and twice my heart was in
+my mouth at a hollow, instant-long clatter under our shoes. But we got
+on over the stuff somehow, leaving holes of blue water in our tracks,
+with great gobbets of snow floating in them. The shore lay close in
+front of us, with a hard distinct edge of shell ice showing where the
+water stopped. I was just going to call out that in ten feet more we'd
+be safe over the lolly, when--smash--both of us went through! I thought
+I fell a mile before I hit the water that was going to drown us; hit it
+knees first, just as I'd gone through, and--I sprawled in icy slush that
+rose no higher than my waist. I was in a sort of pocket between two
+rocks that were holding up the lolly. There was an avalanche of caving
+snow and ice all round me, but I was not drowned or likely to be,--only
+I barely thought of it. For I could not see Paulette. Suddenly, past
+belief, I heard her scream: "Nicky!"
+
+I fought blindly to the sound of her voice, wormed between my screening
+rocks, and shouted as I stood up. She was not even in slush! She had
+gone through shell ice to bare ground, a long strip of bare ground that
+led straight to the Halfway shore; roofed, high above my head, with
+shell ice and lolly that filtered a silver-green light. My dream girl
+lay there in her little blue sweater with the wind knocked out of
+her--and that was all. I kicked off my snowshoes that were not even
+broken and carried her under the ice roof to the Halfway shore. I may
+have thanked God aloud; I don't know. Only I carried her, with my face
+close to hers, and the slush and snow from her falling over me as I
+stumbled under the ice roof to the blessed shore. I had just sense
+enough to drop her in the blinding daylight, and drop myself beside her.
+I couldn't speak, from dead cold fear, now that I had saved her, of what
+it would have been if I had not. For two gasping minutes we just lay
+there.
+
+Then Paulette said pantingly, "I'm so dreadfully sorry--I've been such a
+trouble! But I couldn't do anything but come, and--I forgot you couldn't
+want me!"
+
+I sat up and saw her, sitting on a cold, bare, wind-swept rock that was
+all the refuge I had to offer her. Half a mile farther on were food and
+shelter in the Halfway shack--and it might as well have been in Heaven,
+for with Macartney's men cached in it I naturally could not take her
+there. Behind that, twenty-seven miles off, was Caraquet; but even a
+girl with a trained body like Paulette's could never make twenty-seven
+miles on top of all we'd done.
+
+"It's no question of wanting you," I exclaimed angrily. "It is that I
+don't know what to do. But want you--when do you suppose I haven't
+wanted you, ever since the night I first saw you by Dudley's fire? What
+do you suppose I'd ever have been in this game _for_, if I hadn't wanted
+just you in all this world? My heart of hearts, don't you know I love
+you?" I lost my head, or I never would have said it, for I saw her
+flinch. That brought me back to myself in the snow and desolation round
+us that stood for God's world as nothing else would have done. I burst
+out in shame, "Oh, forgive me! I never meant to let that out. I know you
+never cared a hang for me; that you were going to marry Dudley, if he
+hadn't been killed!"
+
+For one solid minute Paulette never opened her mouth. She sat like a
+colored statue, with rose-crimson cheeks and gold-bronze hair, under the
+white January sun. Her eyes were so dark in her face that they looked
+like blue-black ink. "I--I never was engaged to Dudley," she gasped at
+last, more as if it were jerked out of her than voluntarily. "I didn't
+think it was any business of yours, but I never was. We--Dudley and
+I--only said so, because it seemed the simplest way to manage Marcia,
+when Dudley brought me here to get me out of that emerald business. He
+was good to me, if ever a man was good to a girl he was only sorry for;
+I can't forget that brought him to his death. I'm sick with sorrow for
+him,--but I never was going to marry Dudley! He didn't even want me to.
+He----Oh, _Nicky_!"
+
+Because I couldn't stand it; I'd seen her eyes. I had both her hands in
+mine, I think I was telling her over and over how I had always loved
+her, how I had stood out of Dudley's way, that I didn't expect, of
+course, that she could care about an Indian-faced fool like me,
+when--suddenly--I knew! Like roses and silver trumpets and shelter out
+there in the homeless snow, _I knew_! All Paulette said was, "Oh,
+Nicky," again. But the two of us were in each other's arms.
+
+I don't know how long we clung or what we said. But at last I lifted my
+Indian-dark head from her gold one and spoke abruptly out of Paradise.
+"By gad, I have it!"
+
+"Have what?" Paulette gasped. "Oh, you certainly have most of my hair;
+it's all wound up in your coat buttons--if you mean that!"
+
+I didn't. "I meant I knew where we could go, and that's to Skunk's
+Misery," I harked back soberly, remembering the boy I had left there
+with a fire and shelter anyhow, if not food.
+
+"But you said it was a horrible place!"
+
+"So it is, when you have anywhere else to go. But we can't try the
+Halfway with Macartney's men in it, and neither of us could make
+Caraquet to-night. We've got to have shelter, darling."
+
+Paulette stopped plaiting her hair in a thick rope. "Say that again,"
+she ordered curiously.
+
+"What--Skunk's Misery?" But suddenly I understood, and used that word I
+had never said aloud before:
+
+"_Darling_ darling, Skunk's Misery is our only chance. Get up and come
+on!"
+
+But she answered without moving.
+
+"Want to tell you something first. The tunnel falling in wasn't all the
+reason I ran after you. I thought--thought Dick might not dare to shoot
+at you if I were between you and him, so----Oh, Nicky, _don't_ kiss my
+horrid, chapped hands!"
+
+But I was glad to hide my humbled face on them, remembering how I had
+stormed at her. I muttered, "Why didn't you tell me--out there on the
+lake?"
+
+"Well, you were pretty unpleasant, and"--as I kissed her, my dear love I
+had never thought to touch--"oh, Nicky, how could I tell you? I said
+everything to you last night but '_Nicholas Dane Stretton, I love
+you!_'--and all the notice you took was to kneel perfectly silent, with
+a face as long as your arm. You never even answered me, when I called
+you Nicky by mistake!"
+
+I hadn't dared. But it was no time to be talking of those things. Let
+alone that my wet breeches had frozen till I felt as if my legs didn't
+belong to me, we had landed exactly where old Thompson had been drowned.
+I wanted to get away from there, quickly; leaving no more trail than was
+necessary. I looked round me and saw how to do it.
+
+In front of us was the hole in the shore ice and all the smash and
+flurry where we had gone through. Where we had crawled on shore, from
+under the intact ice roof, was bare rock, wind-swept clean. It struck me
+that with a little management, and to a cursory inspector, it could look
+as though Paulette and I were drowned like Thompson. The snow had not
+piled on this side the lake as it had on ours. Detached rocks, few but
+practicable stepping-stones, lifted their bare bulk out of it, between
+us and the spruce bush we had to strike through to avoid the Halfway and
+Macartney's picket. Some kind of a trail we must leave to Skunk's
+Misery, but it need not begin here, in the first place Macartney would
+look, if he were alive to look anywhere. Paulette's eyes followed mine
+as I thought it, and she nodded. It was without a track of any sort,
+after the lake trail ended, that she and I stopped in the thick spruces
+and put on our snowshoes for the last lap of the way to Skunk's Misery.
+
+My dream girl's trained young body served her well. As she stepped out
+after me, I would never have guessed she had run a yard. It was easy
+enough to avoid the Halfway, and unlikely that Macartney's men would
+ever discover our devious track in the thick bush. Crossing the Caraquet
+road was the only place where we had to leave a track in the open. I did
+the best I could with it by picking up Paulette, and carrying her and
+her shoes into thick bush again; but I could not honestly feel much
+pleasure in the result. Any one with any sense would know my sunken shoe
+marks had carried double, but it was the best I could do. It was no
+pleasure to me either to hear Paulette exclaim sharply, as I set her
+down:
+
+"Nicky, I _forgot_! Dick can snowshoe after us, if he's alive. Charliet
+made a lot of snowshoes at odd times, to sell in Quebec if he ever went
+back there. They were piled up in the shed behind the kinty, and I
+believe Dick knew--though he didn't remember it in time to save his men.
+If he follows us I"--her lip curled in fear and hatred--"Oh, I hope he's
+dead!"
+
+So did I. Yet somehow I had never felt it. "Well, if he isn't," I said
+roughly, "he'll have to do twenty-two miles to catch up to our five, and
+then some to Skunk's Misery. He couldn't make good enough time round the
+lake to catch us to-night, supposing he knew where we were going; even
+on the chance of him, we've got to have one night's rest. And our only
+place to find it is Skunk's Misery!"
+
+Paulette nodded and stepped out after me once more. It was dead toil in
+the soft snow, and it was slow; for Macartney or no Macartney, there was
+no making time in the untrodden bush. I cut our way as short as I dared,
+but do the best I could it was dark when we came to that forlorn, evil
+hollow in the gap of desolate hills that Caraquet folk called Skunk's
+Misery. That had its points though, considering we needed to reach
+Macartney's old lean-to unseen, for the Skunk's Misery population was in
+bed, and as I said before, they had no dogs to bark at us. In dead
+silence, with Paulette holding to my coat and our snowshoes under our
+arms, we went Indian file through the maze of winding tracks Skunk's
+Misery used for roads, under rocks and around them; and on the
+hard-trodden paths our feet left no trace. At least, I thought so: and
+it was just where I slipped up! If I had looked behind me, when Paulette
+would not let me carry her snowshoes, I would have seen the tails of
+them dragging a telltale cut in the snow behind her, as they sagged from
+her tired arm. But my eyes were straight before me, on the door of
+Macartney's lean-to. It hung open, as it had always hung, but I only
+glanced in to make sure it was empty. It was elsewhere I was going,
+around the huge boulder that backed the place, and down a gully that
+apparently brought up against blind rock--only I knew better. I found
+the opening of the rocky passage I had wormed down once before with my
+back scraping the living rock between me and the sky, and on my hands
+and knees, with Paulette after me, I went down it again. It ended
+without warning, just as I had known it would end, in an open cave. A
+glow of fire was ahead of me; and, stooping over it--what I had never
+imagined I should see with joy and gratitude--the boy I had left there,
+toasting a raw rabbit on a stick. That was all I saw. And what possessed
+me I don't know, but as I stood up I turned on Paulette with a sudden
+wave of stale jealousy overwhelming me, and a question I had kept back
+all the afternoon:
+
+"Paulette, you're sure--_sure_--it's me, and not Dudley? That you didn't
+love the poor chap best?"
+
+Paulette scrambled to her feet beside me. "It's you," she said clearly.
+"I told you Dudley never loved me, or I him. I'll mourn for him always,
+for he met his death through me. But he never wanted to marry me, and if
+he were alive, he'd be the first person to tell you so!"
+
+There was a pause, definite, distinct, while you could count five. The
+boy at the fire started to frozen attention at sight of us, as sharply
+as his distorted body could start. But before he could speak, or I did,
+another voice answered Paulette's from the dark of the cave behind the
+fire,--an unexpected, mind-shattering voice, that took me toward it with
+one bound. "By gad," it said, "he would, would he? Two things have to go
+to that!"
+
+I stood paralyzed where I had jumped. Paulette's snowshoes dropped
+clattering on the cave floor. Dudley Wilbraham, whom the wolves had
+eaten--little, fat, with a face more like an egg than ever, but whole
+and _alive_--stood in the dimness of the cave behind the fire and my
+Skunk's Misery boy!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+SKUNK'S MISERY
+
+
+Paulette said, "Oh my heavens, Dudley!" and went straight to pieces.
+
+I don't know that I made much of a job of being calm myself. All I could
+get out was, "The wolves! We thought they'd eaten you--Paulette found
+your cap out by the Caraquet road."
+
+Dudley, for whom the whole of La Chance had beaten the bush all one
+livelong night, whom his own sister had sworn was killed and eaten,
+Dudley made the best show of the three. He had a flask, of course,--when
+had he not? He dosed Paulette and me with what was left in it, but even
+with the whisky limbering my parched throat I hadn't sense to ask a
+coherent question. Dudley looked from Paulette to me and spoke pretty
+collectedly to both of us.
+
+"I wasn't eaten, if that's what brought you two here--though judging
+from your conversation I imagine it wasn't. Thank the Lord you are here
+though, anyway. I've been pretty wild, tied up here with this snow.
+But"--sharply--"where the devil's Marcia?"
+
+"Hidden away from Macartney, with Charliet to look after her." It was
+all I could bring myself to say, except that she thought Dudley was
+dead.
+
+"Does Macartney think so too?" the corpse demanded.
+
+"He worked hard enough to feel safe in thinking it," I returned
+bitterly, and came out with the whole story. How Macartney said the
+wolves had howled around the shack till their noise drove Dudley
+distracted, and he had slipped out after them unnoticed, with a gun;
+that Macartney, the two girls and half the men had gone to look for him,
+when he never returned, till Paulette found his wolf-doped cap torn up
+by the Caraquet road, and Marcia found him, in the bush--unrecognizable
+but for what rags of his sable-lined coat were left on his body. And
+Dudley's hard-boiled egg face never changed with one word of it.
+
+"So that was how it was worked," he reflected quite composedly. "And
+Macartney thinks it was I Marcia found! Well, it wasn't--though I
+daresay it was my coat, all right, just as it was my cap Paulette picked
+up by the road. But it damn well would have been me, if it hadn't been
+for"--he paused casually, and pointed behind him--"Baker."
+
+"Baker! That good-for-nothing devil who was always trailing after you?
+Why, Macartney said----" but I remembered Macartney had only said Baker
+was missing, too. I wheeled on the dimness of the inside cave and saw
+what I had missed in my flurry over Dudley. A second man--white-faced,
+black-eyebrowed, slim looking--was standing just where the fire glow did
+not reach him, staring at Paulette and me. I said, "Land of love,
+_Baker_!" And I may be forgiven if I swore.
+
+Baker nodded as undramatically as Dudley. "Yes, it was me. I had sense
+enough all along to guess Macartney was going to finish Mr. Wilbraham
+with the wolf dope he'd tried out on you, if the rest of the gang
+hadn't. And I wouldn't stand for sculduddery like that, for one thing;
+and for another I thought I'd come out better in the end by sticking to
+the boss, like you seen me doing often enough! So I just told him he was
+being lain for and brought him out here. I knew this cave was safe, for
+I lived here two months before me and the rest of us dribbled into La
+Chance. And I knew the Halfway wasn't--for the two men who turned Billy
+Jones out of it, with a sham letter from the boss, were the two who
+drowned old Thompson! I've played honest in my way, Mr. Stretton, if
+you never thought so."
+
+"Shut up," Dudley interrupted him indignantly. "I'd be where Marcia
+thought she found me, if it hadn't been for you. Listen, Stretton! I got
+fussy after you left for Billy Jones's that afternoon; I'd been hitting
+it up the day before, and you know how that leaves me! I didn't see why
+in blazes I hadn't gone with you to Billy's instead of sitting around
+the house, and a couple of hours after you left I started out to get a
+horse and follow you. But it's a lie that I heard wolves, or thought of
+them: there wasn't one around the place. Macartney wasn't around,
+either. I guess he was out in the bush fixing up the wolf-baited ground
+that was to get me, for he'd fixed up my coat and cap with it before he
+started. I thought something smelt like the devil when I put them on,
+but I never guessed it was my own things. I went out to the stable just
+as I might on any other day, only nobody happened to see me go, and
+right there I ran on Baker. I told him to come for a ride with me, but
+he didn't seem to think much of the horse racket; said he knew a short
+cut to Billy's, and it would be better for my head if we just walked. It
+was Baker told me the devilish reek I smelled was coming from my own
+coat, and I chucked it down by the stable door. God knows which of
+Macartney's men picked it up and wore it after I left it, for Marcia to
+find," even Dudley looked sick, "but it wasn't me! I smelt my cap, too,
+after I'd walked some of the muzziness out of me, and I threw that
+away--where Paulette found it. We didn't leave a sign of a track, of
+course; it was long before there was any snow. If I'd known why Baker
+had me out there, walking away from La Chance, I'd have turned back and
+defied Macartney, or I'd never have started. But it wasn't till it was
+black dark, and I'd walked enough sense into myself to ask why we were
+not getting to Billy Jones's, that Baker took his life in his hands--for
+you may bet I was fighting mad at having seemed to run away--and told me
+that you and I and all of us were in a trap that was going to spring and
+get us, and give Macartney our mine. He let out about Thompson's murder,
+and you and the wolf dope; and that Macartney'd kicked Billy Jones out
+of the Halfway with a forged dismissal from me, and had his own men
+waiting there to get you while he limed the bush and my cap and coat,
+for the wolves to get _me_. And you know I'd have been dead sure to go
+out after them with a gun, just as he said I did, if I'd heard them come
+yowling around the shack while I was in it! I'd have gone back to face
+Macartney, even then, only----Well, you've had experience of
+Macartney's wolves, and you'd know I couldn't! We could hear the row
+they were making even where we stood, miles away. We set off on the dead
+run for Caraquet and help, but we had to break the journey somewhere. We
+couldn't face Macartney's men at Billy's, for neither of us had a
+gun--and that's another lie to Macartney--and it was no good leaving the
+devil to run into hell. So Baker brought me here."
+
+"But," I gasped, "I don't see how you missed me! I was here, too, that
+night!"
+
+"Well, we weren't--till the morning," Dudley snapped in his old way. "It
+was just beginning to snow when we crawled down the burrow you'd crawled
+out of and found this place--and your boy."
+
+"But I told him----D'ye mean he just _let_ you find him?"
+
+"He did not," grimly. "He was hidden away somewhere, and I don't suppose
+he'd ever have come out, if I hadn't happened to use what seems to have
+been your password! I said out loud that I'd give twenty dollars to any
+one who'd get me some food; and out comes your friend, and says you told
+him to trust any one who said that, and where was the twenty? So, after
+that, we settled down!"
+
+"But----" Dudley's selfishness had always been colossal, yet this time
+it beat even me. "What did you suppose was going to become of your
+sister and Paulette--left with Macartney when you'd disappeared, and the
+Halfway picket had got _me_?" I burst out.
+
+"My acquaintance with you made me hopeful they wouldn't get you," Dudley
+began drily, "and as for the girls----" but his sham indifference broke
+down. "Don't talk of it, will you?" he bellowed. "I did think you'd be
+all right, but I was in hell for those girls till I could get to
+Caraquet and take back help for them! Only this cursed snow stopped me.
+We had to wait till it was packed enough for Baker to sneak down to the
+Halfway and steal a couple of my own horses, for us to ride to Caraquet.
+But that's how I'm here--and how Marcia found a half-eaten man in my
+top-coat, that she thought was me!"
+
+I was speechless. It was all so simple, even to Dudley's twenty dollars
+and my boy. But before I could say so, Dudley turned on me with his old
+vicious pounce. "Why in blazes don't you tell me what you left Marcia
+for, after bullying me because I did? And why are you and Paulette here,
+if you thought I was killed?"
+
+"We left her because we had to, with a thousand tons of earth between us
+and the only way we could have got back to her alive," said I
+wrathfully. "And as for why we're here,"--I poured out the whole story
+of my return to La Chance, from Dudley's own funeral procession that met
+me and my bootless fight with Macartney, to the resurrection of Collins
+and Dunn, and Paulette's and my race across Lac Tremblant. I left out
+Marcia's share in my defeat, but Dudley gave a comprehending sniff.
+
+"Marcia always was a fool about Macartney! But it's no matter, since she
+isn't with him--whether he's alive or dead. Only you were a worse fool,
+Stretton, to cross that lake with a girl in tow. I don't know why you
+weren't both drowned, like Thompson----" but his voice broke. He was a
+good little man, under his bad habits, or he never would have done what
+he had for Paulette. He muttered something about all the decent men
+who'd met their death because he wouldn't listen to Paulette when she
+tried to tell him the truth about Macartney, damned him up and down, and
+turned to Paulette with a sweet sort of roughness:
+
+"You look done up, my girl! Here, get down by the fire and eat what our
+chef's got ready!" For the crippled boy had gone on with his cooking,
+regardless of the talk round him, and his rabbit was done.
+
+But Paulette never looked at the food Dudley held out to her. "You're
+not angry, Dudley?" she asked very low. "I mean--for what I said to
+Nicky as we came in?"
+
+"I was," but Dudley grinned in the half dark. "It was true enough, only
+nobody likes to hear their own obituary. But I knew about Stretton long
+ago, if you hadn't the sense to! You take him, my child, and my
+blessing. God knows I never asked you to marry an old soak like me!"
+
+He shoved Paulette's hand into mine and stared at the two of us for a
+second. Then--"By gad," he added, in a different voice, "I hope
+Macartney's got drowned, or he may walk in on the lot of us!"
+
+"How?" I demanded scornfully. "He couldn't do thirty-two miles in the
+time Paulette and I did fifteen, even if he knew where to do it to!"
+
+"He doesn't have to, my young son," Dudley stood musing on it. "Baker
+and I didn't do any twenty, coming here; and it was Macartney's own path
+we came by. That doesn't go round by any Halfway! If he takes a fancy to
+come here by it, and strikes your tracks as you two came into Skunk's
+Misery, the rest wouldn't take him long! I believe--hang on a minute,
+while I speak to Baker!" He wheeled suddenly and disappeared into the
+dark of the cave where Baker stood aloof.
+
+"You needn't worry about Macartney," I said to Paulette. "We didn't
+leave any tracks, once we got into broken snow!"
+
+I turned at a rustle behind me and looked straight into the muzzle of
+Macartney's revolver and into Macartney's eyes!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+THE END
+
+
+The boy at the fire let out a yelp and dropped flat. Dudley and Baker,
+invisible somewhere, neither spoke nor stirred. And I stood like a fool,
+as near the death of Nicholas Dane Stretton as ever I wish to get.
+
+But Macartney only stood there, looking so much as usual that I guessed
+he must have rested outside the mouth of our burrow before he wormed
+down to tackle me.
+
+"You wouldn't have left any tracks," he said, picking up what I'd just
+said in his everyday manner, if it had not been for the dog's grin he
+always wore when he was angry, "if I hadn't run on single snowshoe
+tracks carrying double, where you crossed the Caraquet road. And if one
+of you hadn't trailed your shoe tails through Skunk's Misery--that
+doesn't wear them!"
+
+"How did you get here?" said I slowly, because I was calculating my
+spring to Macartney's gun hand.
+
+"I walked," and I thought he had not noticed I was half a step nearer
+him. "If you meant me to drown myself following you over your lake, I
+didn't--thanks to the kind warning you made of my men. But I didn't
+imagine you'd drowned yourselves either--after I looked through a field
+glass! Charliet had plenty of snowshoes cached away; I was always
+quick on my feet; and after I struck your track the rest was
+simple--especially as you were fool enough to bring a girl here. I----"
+but his level voice was suddenly thick with passion. "_Get back!_ If you
+try to grab my gun I'll shoot you, and your boy too, like dogs! You'll
+stay still and listen--to what I've to say. I've an account to settle
+with you, Stretton; now that I've cleaned up Dudley's, and he's dead!"
+
+You could have heard a pin drop on the dead silence of that underground
+hole. Neither Dudley nor Baker stirred, and it hit me like a hammer that
+Macartney didn't know they were alive; _he didn't know!_
+
+I stood as though I had been struck dumb; so did Paulette. Neither of us
+even flickered an eyelash toward the shadows behind us, where Dudley
+must be crouching, anything but dead, with Baker beside him. Perhaps it
+struck both of us, simultaneously, that Dudley had heard Macartney
+coming before we did and disappeared on purpose, thinking Macartney
+might speak naked truth to Paulette and myself, where he would have
+varnished it up to a mysteriously resurrected employer whom he might yet
+bamboozle as he always had bamboozled him. Anyhow, neither of us saw fit
+to give Dudley away. Macartney sneered into our silent faces.
+
+"There's not much fight in you," he commented contemptuously. "Though it
+was never any good to try to fight me! If you like to have it in
+black and white, _I've_ been all the brains of the business
+here--single-handed! It was I got the secret of the wolf bait from the
+mother of your lame friend here," he pointed with his unoccupied hand to
+my grovelling boy, "when first I followed Paulette out from New York and
+laid up in Skunk's Misery to wait till I had a clear way to get to La
+Chance. That old ass Thompson gave me that, when I scooped him up on the
+road. After I'd used him, two of my men drowned him in Lac
+Tremblant--and you'd never have guessed a word about it, if it hadn't
+been for his cursed card they overlooked in the shack here, where you
+found it. It was I put that bottle in your wagon the day it broke there.
+I did it before I knew Paulette was going to drive with you; that was
+the only thing in the whole business that ever gave me a scare! It was I
+got rid of Collins and Dunn"--I saw that he believed it, just as he
+believed he was rid of Dudley--"and the most of your men who might have
+stuck by you if it came to a fight for the mine. I had to shoot the last
+four of them, as you _didn't_ find out that night in the assay office! I
+baited the bush that rid me of Dudley Wilbraham, with his yells about
+emeralds and hunting down Thompson's murderer; and I've got your and his
+mine, in spite of your blowing up and drowning all the men I meant to
+hold it with. But you found out most of that, even if it was a little
+late. What you didn't find out, or Dudley either, was that he was right
+about Van Ruyne's emeralds!"
+
+Paulette leapt up like a wildcat. "You mean you took them?"
+
+"I took them," he nodded sneeringly, and I saw her eyes blaze. "I took
+them--to get you into a hole you'd have to come to me to get out of!"
+
+"But I didn't have to come to you! I----" but she spoke with sudden
+cutting deliberation. "I don't believe you. You were never in the
+Houstons' house that night. I should have seen you."
+
+"Oh, seen me!" Macartney grinned. I think the two of them forgot me,
+forgot everything but that they were facing each other at last with the
+masks off. I know neither of them heard a slow, creeping, nearing sound
+in the long burrow behind Macartney, a sound that swung my blood up
+with the wild, furious hope that Collins and Dunn--anyhow Collins--was
+hot on Macartney's trail, as Macartney had been on Paulette's and mine,
+and was creeping down the burrow behind him now, ready to take him in
+the rear when I jumped at him from the front. I waited till whoever it
+was came close up; waited for the moment to grab Macartney, watching his
+triumphant, passionate eyes as he stared victoriously at Paulette.
+
+"Seen me?" he repeated, and I hoped the sound of his own voice would
+deafen him to that other sound, that was so loud to me. "You saw the
+Houstons' guests, and their servants! You never thought of seeing the
+expert who was down from New York about the heating of Mrs. Houston's
+new orchid houses! I left the real man dead drunk in New York, in a
+place he wouldn't leave in a hurry; and the week-end you spent at the
+Houstons' I, and my plans, had the run of Mrs. Houston's library, that
+neither she nor any one else ever goes into. And," he laughed outright,
+"it was next _your_ sitting room, opening on the same upstairs balcony!
+I had only to put my hand through an open window to scoop Van Ruyne's
+emeralds out of their case while you had your back turned, writing the
+note you sent _outside_ the case, instead of inside! Remember?" But this
+time he did not laugh. "I missed fire about getting you that night,
+thanks to that fool Wilbraham happening round with his car. But now I'll
+take all I did this whole business for--and that's you,--Paulette
+Valenka!"
+
+Paulette never took her eyes from him. "That's a lie," she said quite
+evenly. "Oh, not that you took the emeralds; I believe that. But it was
+not only to get me into trouble. It was for themselves! You had to steal
+something. You hadn't one penny."
+
+"Not then!" Even in the gloom I saw two scarlet spots flare out like
+sealing-wax on the always dead blondeness of Macartney's cheeks. I
+thought I could hear his heart beat where I stood. "But I have now! With
+the emeralds, your late friend Dudley's mine, and _you_,"--his voice was
+unspeakably, insultingly significant, but that unheard rustle behind
+him, growing nearer, more unmistakable, kept me motionless. "By heaven,
+a man might call himself rich! Did you suppose Stretton here could fight
+me? Why, I've been the secret wolf he never had the _nous_ to guess at!
+I----" he swung around on me like light, his revolver six inches from my
+ear. "Stand there," he shouted at me, "and die like Wilbraham, you----"
+
+His hand dropped, his jaw fell with the half-spoken words in it; his
+eyes, all pupils, stared over my shoulder. I turned and saw
+Dudley,--Dudley, silent, watching us both; saw him even before I grabbed
+the gun out of Macartney's hanging, lax hand. But Macartney never so
+much as felt me do it. He stared paralyzed at Dudley--little, fat, with
+a face like a hard-boiled egg--standing silent against the dark of the
+inner cave.
+
+Dudley had a nerve when you came through to it. "I've not died, yet," he
+snarled out suddenly.
+
+I had the only gun in the place and the drop on Macartney; but I never
+stirred. That long-heard rustle in the burrow was close on me: was--
+
+"My God, Marcia!" said I. I never even wondered about Collins and Dunn
+letting her get away. Marcia stood up in the entrance from the burrow,
+panting, purple-faced, exhausted. Marcia sprang to Macartney--not
+Dudley, I doubt if she even saw Dudley--with a cry out of her very soul.
+
+"Mack, you're not Hutton--you never took those emeralds--and for that
+girl! Say it's a lie, and it's _I_ you love! Mack, say you love me
+still!"
+
+Macartney flung back a mechanical hand and swept her away from him like
+a fly. She fell and lay there. None of us had said a word since Dudley
+came out and faced Macartney. None of us said a word now. I saw, almost
+indifferently, Collins burst out of the burrow behind Macartney, as
+Marcia had burst out, and grab me. "Stretton," he gasped, "thank
+God--found your tracks. But that she-devil Marcia got away from me,
+and----" But in his turn he jerked taut where he stood, at sight of
+Dudley, and stood speechless.
+
+But I never looked at him. I looked at nothing but Macartney's face.
+
+It was rigid, as if it were a mask that had frozen on him. The
+sealing-wax scarlet on his cheeks had gone out like a turned-out lamp.
+His eyes went from Dudley to Collins and back again, as if they were the
+only living part of his deathly face.
+
+"Ah," said Macartney, "A-ah!" He dropped on the floor all in one piece,
+like a cut-down tree.
+
+Collins made a plunge for him. I sent Collins reeling.
+
+"Let him alone, you young fool," I swore. "We've got him, and he's
+fainted. I've seen him like this before--the night he shot our own men
+in the assay office. It's only his old fainting fits."
+
+"It's his new death," said Dudley, quite quietly. He came forward and
+bent over Macartney, laid a hand on his breast. "Can't you see the man's
+gone, Stretton? It killed him: the run here--the shock of seeing me. He
+must have had a heart like rotten quartz!"
+
+Paulette, Collins, Baker, all of us, stood there blankly. We had not
+struck a blow, or raised a voice among the whole lot of us; Macartney's
+gun was still warm from his grasp whence I had snatched it; and
+Macartney--the secret wolf at La Chance, masquerader, thief,
+murderer--lay dead at our feet. I heard myself say out loud: "His heart
+was rotten: that was why he fainted in the assay office. But----Oh, the
+man was mad besides! He must have been." And over my words came another
+voice. It was Marcia's, and it made me sick.
+
+"Macartney," she was screaming, "Macartney!" She ran round and round
+like a hen in a road, before me, Dudley, all of us; then flung herself
+on her brother as if she had only just realized him. "You're
+alive--you're not dead! Can't you see he never stole any emeralds nor
+loved that girl, any more than he killed you? You made up lies about
+him, all of you! And you stand here doing nothing for him. He----Oh,
+Mack, speak to me! _Mack!_"
+
+She sprang to Macartney; dropped on her knees by the dead, handsome
+length of him; tore open his coat and shirt. But she knelt there, rigid,
+with her hand on his quiet heart.
+
+Macartney had never stolen Van Ruyne's emeralds: she had just said it.
+There, around Macartney's bared throat, lying on the white skin of his
+chest, green lights in the dull fire-glow of the cave, were Van Ruyne's
+emeralds, that Paulette Brown--whose real name was Tatiana Paulina
+Valenka--had never seen or touched since she put them back into Van
+Ruyne's velvet case!
+
+I will say Marcia Wilbraham knew when she was beaten. She cowered back
+to Dudley and began to cry; but it was with her arms round his neck. And
+the fat little man held her to his queer, kind heart. I turned my back
+sharply on the pair of them, and----My eyes met Paulette's!
+
+There would be all sorts of fuss and unpleasantness to go through with
+the sheriff from Caraquet, over what was left of Macartney; there was
+old Thompson's death to be accounted for; Van Ruyne's emeralds to be
+returned to him, so that Tatiana Paulina Valenka, and not Paulette
+Brown, could marry that lucky, Indian-dark fool who was Nicky Stretton.
+There was Dudley's mine, too, all safe again, and such an incredible
+mine that even I would be passably rich out of it,--but I barely, just
+barely, thought of all those things. My dream girl's blue eyes were like
+stars in mine, under the burnt gold of her silk-soft hair. The clear
+carnation rose in her cheeks as I looked at her, where she stood close
+to me, all mine, as I had always dreamed she would be,--till I met her
+and was sick with doubt of it. She was mine! As far as I was concerned,
+this story had ended at Skunk's Misery,--where it had begun, if I had
+only guessed it. I gave an honest start as Collins jogged my elbow.
+
+"We can't stay here, with _that_," he whispered, nodding at Macartney.
+"What do you think about getting out of this? We could leave--him--here,
+with Baker and the boy for a guard, till we can get the Caraquet people
+to come and see him. We've our snowshoes, and mine and the girls',
+besides Macartney's, that I guess he's done with. I think we could
+manage along as far as the Halfway in the morning, if we made a travois
+of boughs for Wilbraham!"
+
+"But," I stared at him, "Macartney's picket's there!"
+
+"Oh, Charliet and Dunn were going to clear them out with Miss
+Wilbraham's rifle, while I got after her, when she broke away on to
+Macartney's track here," Collins returned calmly. "I expect that's all
+right, and they've run. Anyhow, you've got Macartney's gun! You can go
+ahead and see."
+
+But I had no need to. An abandoned picket has a way of knowing when the
+game is up, and Macartney's men had cleared out on the double, even
+before Charliet's first rifle bullet missed them. We caught them
+afterwards, half dead in the bush,--but that doesn't come in here. I
+walked into the Halfway with my dream girl beside me, and both of us
+jumped as Dudley suddenly poked his pig-eyed face between us.
+
+"You needn't hop, you two," he commented irritably; "you can have your
+Old Nick, Paulette, for all me! What I'm thinking of's that boy--and
+Baker! I guess they saved my life all right between them, and I'm going
+to set them up for what's left of theirs. Got anything to say against
+that, hey?" with his old snarl.
+
+"Not much," I returned soberly. But Paulette clasped both Dudley's podgy
+hands in hers.
+
+"Oh, _dear_ Dudley," she said softly. But there were tears in her eyes.
+
+I know; for I kissed them away afterwards, when we were alone.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The La Chance Mine Mystery, by Susan Carleton Jones
+
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