The La Chance Mine Mystery

"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, butGod 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!"