"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.