The La Chance Mine Mystery

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?"