The La Chance Mine Mystery

"Yours truly,"William D. Thompson."

"That's funny," I let out involuntarily. And Dudley snapped at me that it wasn't; it was ghastly.

"I don't mean the letter," I said absently. "It's that about Lac Tremblant. Thompson was scared blue of that lake; he used to beg me not to go out on it. And by gad, Dudley, I don't see how he could have come that way! He couldn't paddle a canoe!"

"What?" Macartney started, staring at me. "You're right: he couldn't," he said slowly. "That does make it queer – except that we don't know he meant to paddle up the lake. He might have intended to walk here along its shore, and strayed or slipped in or something, in the dark. But what troubles me is – can't you see he'd gone crazy? This letter" – he put a finger on it, eloquently – "isn't sane, from a self-contained man like Thompson! He must have been off his head with worry before he wrote it, or started back to a place he'd left for – "

"Incompetency, if you want the brutal truth," Dudley broke in not unkindly. "He was too old-fashioned to make good elsewhere, I expect; and if he found it out, I don't wonder if he did go off his head."

I glanced over Dudley's shoulder at the letter he and Macartney were studying. It did not look crazy, with its Gaskell's Compendium copperplate and its careful signature. I don't know why I picked up the envelope from where it lay unnoticed on the table by Dudley and fiddled with it scrutinizingly, but I did. The outside of it looked all right, with its address in Thompson's neat copperplate. But it wasn't well glued or something, for as I shoved my fingers inside, the whole thing opened out flat, like a lily. I looked down mechanically as I felt it go, and – by gad, the inside of it didn't look right! There was nothing on the glued-down top flap, but the inside back of the envelope wasn't blank, as it should have been. It wasn't written on in Thompson's neat copperplate or in his neat phrases, either. A pencil scrawl stared at me, upside down, as I gripped the lower flap of the envelope unconsciously, under the ball of my big thumb. "Why, here's some more," I exclaimed like an ass, glaring at the envelope's inside back. "'Take care – something – ' What's this? What on earth did the old man mean?"

Macartney caught the splayed-out envelope from my hand, so sharply that the flap I didn't know I held tore away, and stayed in my fist as he gazed on the rest of the reversed envelope with his set-eyed stare. "'Take care, Macartney! Gold, life, everything – in danger!'" he read out blankly. "Why, it's some kind of a crazy warning to me! Only – nobody wants my life, and I've no gold – if that's what he means! I – " but he broke down completely. "Old Thompson must have gone stark mad," he muttered. "I – it makes me heartsick!"

"I don't know," Dudley snapped unexpectedly. "It fits about the gold, perhaps. Thompson might have suspected something before he left here!"

He looked at Macartney significantly, and I remembered the question he had rapped at me when I came in. Something inside me told me to hold my tongue concerning my adventures on the Caraquet road till I knew what Paulette had said about them, – which I was pretty certain was mighty little. But once again I had that cold fear that Macartney might have found out something about the seal she had put on all our gold, or her talking to Collins in the dark, for the question Dudley flung at me was just what I had been expecting:

"You didn't see anything of Dunn or Collins between here and Caraquet – or hear from Billy Jones that they'd gone by the Halfway?"

"No," I fenced with a bland, lying truth. "I saw two of our teamsters at the Halfway!"

Dudley shook his head. "Not them – I knew about them! But Dunn and Collins cleared out the day you left, and I thought – " he broke off irrelevantly. "What the dickens possessed you to take Paulette with you that night? She might have been killed – I heard you'd the dog's own trouble on the road!"

That something inside me stiffened up. Whatever he'd heard, I was pretty certain was not all; and I was hanged if I were coming out with the full story of that crazy drive till I knew whether Paulette came into it. I had no desire to talk before Macartney either, in spite of what he might have found out, or guessed; no matter what Paulette might have been mixed up in I was not going to have a stern-faced, set-eyed Macartney put her through a catechism about it. Or Dudley either, for that matter. I had no real voucher for the terms he and Paulette were on, except Marcia's word; and Dudley was no man to trust not to turn on a girl.

"We shot a few wolves, if that's what you mean," I said roughly. "I don't see why that should have worried you about Miss Paulette – or what it has to do with Dunn and Collins!" – which was a plain lie.

"Few wolves! I know all about them!" Dudley retorted viciously. "Billy Jones's wife came out with the plain truth – that you'd been chased by a pack! And as for what Dunn and Collins had to do with my worrying about the gold you carried, it's simple enough. They – " but he stopped, chewing two fingers with a disgusting trick he had. "By gad," he looked up suddenly, "I believe it was them the wolves were after to begin with, Stretton – before they got started on you! And it wasn't what they left La Chance for!"

"What d'ye mean?"

Dudley was chewing his fingers again, but Macartney answered with his usual set-eyed openness. "The gold," he supplied. "I got an idea those two deserters might have laid up beside the Caraquet road somewhere, to wait for you and get it. I had trouble with them over some drilling the morning you left; and when I went back to the stope after seeing you and Miss Paulette off, they'd cleared out. They must have gone a couple of hours before you did. They let out something about hold-ups while I was having the trouble with them, and Wilbraham and I got worried they might have managed to get over the road before you, and be lying up for you somewhere."

"They only left – two hours before I did," said I, with flat irrelevance. I must have stared at Macartney like a fool, but he had knocked the wind clean out of me as to Collins having been the man in the swamp. With only two hours' start neither he nor Dunn, nor any man, for matter of that, could have legged it over my road in time to lie up in the only place I knew some one had laid up, – on the corduroy road.

"Well, they didn't get me, and I never saw them," I began, – and suddenly remembered that ghastly noise, like the last flurry of a dog fight, that had halted the wolves on my track. My first thought of it, and of Dunn and Collins, had been right. "By gad, I believe I heard them though," I exclaimed, "and if they were on that road they're killed and eaten! But I didn't have any trouble about the gold."

It was true to the letter, for my side had attended to all the trouble, if my side was only a girl who would not have shot without need. But when I explained the noise that might have accounted for Dunn and Collins, Dudley shook his head.

"They didn't get eaten; not they! And your having no trouble with the gold isn't saying you won't have any. If no one saw Dunn and Collins going out to Caraquet I bet they're laid up somewhere on your road yet, waiting for your next trip! And as if that wasn't worry enough, poor old Thompson has to go out of his mind and come back here to be found dead – and I mean to find out how!" He was working himself up into one of his senseless rages, and he turned on Macartney furiously. "You knew him before I did! Write to his people and find out how he got here, anyhow. I'm not going to have any man come back, and just be found dead like a dog, if it is only old Thompson! I'm going to have him traced from the time he left Montreal."

"He had no people," said Macartney blankly. "As far as I know, he was just a bit of driftwood. And as for finding out anything about his journey here, I don't suppose we ever can! All we'll get at was that he came back – and was found dead." And something made me look past him and Dudley, sitting with their backs to the living-room door, and the blood jumped into my face.

Paulette Brown stood in the doorway, motionless, as if she had been there some time. I didn't know if she were merely knocked flat about the wolves and Collins, or scared Macartney might have found out something about her. But she was staring at Macartney's unconscious back as you look at a chair or anything, without seeing it, and if he were pale she was dead white, – except her mouth that was arched to a piteous crimson bow, and her eyes that looked dark as pools of blue ink. But she did not speak of Dunn or Collins.

"Do you mean Thompson's been found dead? – the quiet man who was here when I came?" she stammered, as if it choked her. And I had an ungodly fright she was going to say she must have shot him on the corduroy road!

"Billy Jones found him drowned in Lac Tremblant; it was an accident," I exclaimed sharply, before she could come out with more about shooting and wolf bait, and perhaps herself, than I chose any one to know, – till I knew it first. And I saw the blood flash into her face as it had flashed into mine at the sight of her.

"Oh, I thought Mr. Macartney meant he'd been – murdered," she returned faintly. "I'm glad – he wasn't. But if he had been, I suppose it would be sure to come out!"

"Crime doesn't always come out, Miss Paulette," said Macartney.

But Paulette only answered listlessly that she was not sure, one never could tell; and moved to her usual seat by the fire.

I was knocked endways about Collins; for who could have been on the corduroy road if he had not. I would have given most of the world for ten minutes alone with my dream girl and explanations. But Dudley began the whole story of Thompson over again, and Macartney stood there, and Marcia – whom I had not seen since she went to bed with a swollen face – came in, dressed in her hideous green tweed, and stood on tiptoe to chuck me under the chin, with a "Hullo, Nicky, you're back again!"

There was no earthly hope of speaking to my dream girl alone. I shoved the mystery of Collins into the back of my head and went off to my room before I remembered I was still unconsciously holding that torn-off flap of poor old Thompson's envelope in my shut fist. I dropped it on my floor, – and grabbed it up again, to stare at it for a full minute. Because there was writing on it, too.

"For God's sake, search my cards – my cards – my cards," Thompson had scrawled across the three-cornered envelope flap Macartney's grab had left in my hand: and, knowing Thompson, it was pitiful. He was the sort who must have been crazy indeed before he spoke of the Almighty and cards in the same breath.

I remembered taking his measly solitaire pack out of his pocket at the Halfway, and wished I had brought them along with me. But it was simple enough to go and get them from Billy Jones. Meantime I had no desire to speak to Macartney of them or the scrawled, torn-off flap from Thompson's envelope: he was sick enough already about old Thompson's aberration, without any more proofs of it. It hurt even me to remember I had always laughed at the poor devil and his forlorn cards. I had no heart to burn the scrap of his envelope either, while old Thompson lay unburied. I put it away in my letter case, and locked it up.

Which seemed a tame ending; I had not sense enough to know it was not tame at all!

CHAPTER IX

TATIANA PAULINA VALENKA!

Poor old Thompson seemed a closed incident. There was nothing to be found out about him, even regarding his departure from La Chance. Nobody remembered his going through Caraquet, or even the last time he had been there. He was not a man any one would remember, anyhow, or one who had made friends. We put a notice of his death and the circumstances in a Montreal paper, and I thought that was the end of it all, till Dudley, to my surprise, stuck obstinately to his idea of tracing Thompson from Montreal. He told Macartney and me that he had written to a detective about it, and I think we both thought it was silly. I know I did; and I saw Macartney close his lips as though he kept back the same thought. But we gave old Thompson the best funeral we could, over at the Halfway, with a good grave and a wooden cross. All of us went except Marcia. She said she had never cared about the poor old thing, and she wasn't going to pretend it.

It was a bitter day, with no snow come yet. Macartney looked sick and drawn about the mouth as he stood by the grave, while Dudley read the prayers out of Paulette's prayer book. I saw her notice Macartney when I did, and I think neither of us had guessed he had so much feeling. I stayed a minute or two behind the others, because I'd ridden over, instead of driving with them; and just before I started for La Chance I remembered that torn scrap of paper in my room there. I turned hastily to Billy Jones.

"Those solitaire cards of Thompson's," said I, from no reason on earth but that to find them had been the last request of the dead man, even if it did sound crazy. "I'd like them!"

Billy nodded and went into his shack. Presently he came out and said the cards were gone. He thought he'd put them away somewhere, but they weren't to be found. It was queer, too, because he remembered replacing them in their prayer-book sort of case after he'd spread them by the stove to dry with Thompson's clothes. But his wife said she would find them and send them over. Which she never did, and I forgot them. Goodness knows I had reason to.

I did an errand instead of going straight home from Thompson's funeral that took me into the bush not far from where the boulder had been placed on my road. It was there or near by I had heard wolves pull down a man or men; and after I'd tied my horse and done a little looking around, I found the spot. It was not the scattered bones of two men that sickened me, or even that the long thighs and shanks of one of them were the measure of Collins. It was the top of a skull, with the hair still on it. I did not need the face that was missing. Dunn, with his eternal chuckle, had had stubbly fair hair without a part in it, clipped close till it stood on end, – and the same fair hair was on the top of the skull that lay like a round stone in the frozen bush. Whether the two had set out to rob me I didn't know. I did know they had not done it, and that the man Paulette had shot at in the swamp was more of a mystery than ever.

The ground was too hard to do any burying. I made the bones into a decent heap and piled rocks into a cairn over them. If I said a kind of a prayer, too, it was no one's business but that of the God who heard me; the boys had been young, and they were dead while I lived, which was enough to make a man pray. I felt better when I had done it.

But when I got home to La Chance the bald story I told Dudley was wasted. He swore I was a fool, first, for burying two skulls with no faces and imagining they belonged to Dunn and Collins; and next that they were still alive and meaning to run a hold-up on us. From where, or how, he couldn't say. But he kept on at the thing; and the minute he had half a drink in him – which was usually the first thing in the morning – he began to worry me to go out and find where they were cached and hike them out of it; and he kept at it all day. That would not have worried me much since it was only Dudley, and Macartney and the others believed my story; but everything else at La Chance began to go crooked, and every one's nerves got edgy. Marcia was unpleasantly silent, except when Macartney was there, when she sat in his pocket and they talked low like lovers, – only that I was always idiotically nervous they might be talking about Paulette Brown. That was seldom enough though, for half the time Macartney never showed up, even for meals. He was working like ten men over the mine, and good, solid, capable work at that. Whatever had made poor Thompson send him to us he was worth his weight in the gold he was getting out of La Chance in – Well, in chunks! Which was one of the reasons he had to work so hard, and brings me to the naked trouble at La Chance.

We were deadly short of men. Not only were Dunn and Collins dead, but their grisly end seemed to have scared the others. Not a day went by that three or four of them did not come for their time, chiefly rockmen and teamsters, – for we had no ore chute at La Chance. Macartney thought it was Dudley's fault, for nagging around all the time, and was sore over it. Dudley said it was Macartney's, though when I pressed him he said, too, that he did not know why. The men I spoke to before they left just said they'd had enough of La Chance, but I could feel a sulky underhand rebellion in the bunk house. I ran the ore hauling as best I could, and Macartney doubled up the work in the mill. The ore-feeder acted as crusher-man, too, the engineer was his own fireman, which, with the battery man and the amalgamator, brought the mill staff down to four, – but they were the best of our men. The others Macartney turned to with the rockmen, and in the course of a fortnight he got a few more men from somewhere he wrote to outside. They were a rough lot; not troublesome, but the kind of rough that saves itself backache and elbow grease. Personally, I think they would not have worked at all, if Macartney had not put the fear of death in them. I caught him at it, and though I did not hear what he said in that competent low voice of his, there was no more lounging around and grinning from our new men. But the trouble among the old men kept on till we had none of them left except the four in the mill. It did not concern me particularly, except that I had to work on odd jobs that should not have concerned me either, and I did not think much about it. What I really did think about – and it put me out of gear more than anything else at La Chance – was Paulette Brown!

It had been all very well to call her my dream girl and to think I'd got to heaven because she'd taken the trouble to drive to the Halfway with me and fight wolves. But she had hardly spoken to me since. And – well, not only the bones and skull I'd buried had smashed up my theory that it was only Collins who'd meant to hold up my gold, but I'd smashed it up, for myself, for a reason that made me wild: Paulette Brown, whose real name Marcia swore was something else, was still meeting a man in the dark! Where, I couldn't tell, but I knew she did meet him; and naturally I knew the man was not Collins, or ever had been. I did my best to get a talk with her, but she ran from me like a rabbit. I was worried good and hard. For from what I'd picked up, I knew the man she met could be nobody at La Chance, – and any outsider who followed a girl there likely had a gang with him and meant business, not child's play like Collins.

The thing was serious, and I had no right to be trusting my dream girl and keeping silence to Dudley, but I went on doing it. There is no sense in keeping things back. I was mad with love for her, and if she had given me a chance I would have brushed Dudley out of my way like a straw. I had to grip all the decency I had not to do it, anyway. But if you think I just made an easy resignation of her and sat back meekly, you're wrong. I sat back because I was helpless and too stupid to formulate any way to deal with the situation. I don't know that I was any more silent than I always am, though Marcia said so. I did get into the way of pretending to write letters in the evenings, while Marcia and Macartney talked low, and Dudley went up and down the room in his eternal trudge of nervousness, throwing a word now and then to Paulette seated sewing by the fire, – that I kept my back to so that the others could not see my face.

But one night, nearly a month after Thompson was buried, I came in after supper, and Paulette was in my usual place. She was writing a letter or something, and Dudley was preaching to Macartney about the shortage of men in the bunk house. Marcia, cross as two sticks because she was only there to talk to Macartney herself, had Paulette's seat by the fire. I sat down by the table where Paulette was writing, more sideways than behind her.

If I had chosen to look I could have read every word she was writing. But naturally I was not choosing to, for one thing, and for another my eyes were glued to her face. Something in the look of her gave me a sick shock. She was deadly pale, and under the light of Charliet's half-trimmed lamp I saw the blue marks under her eyes, and the tight look round the nostrils that only come to a woman's face when she is fighting something that is pretty nearly past her, and is next door to despair. She looked hunted; that was the only word there was for it. It struck me that look must stop. If I had to march her out into the bush with me by force next morning, I meant to get a solitary talk with her; find out what her mysterious business was at La Chance with a man who had laid up for our gold; and, with any luck, transfer the hunted look to the face of the man who was hounding her, – for I felt certain he was still hanging around La Chance.

After that – but there could be no after that to matter to me, with a dream girl who scooted to Dudley every time I tried to speak to her! I took a half-glance at him, and it was plain enough he would be no good to her in the kind of trouble that was on now. If I couldn't have her – since she didn't want me – I was the only person who could help her. She was angel-sweet to Dudley, heaven knows, and he was charming to her when he was himself. When he was not, he had a patronizing, half-threatening way of speaking to her, as if he knew something ugly about her, as Marcia had insinuated, that made me boil. She never resented it either, and that made me boil too. If I had ever seen her even shrink from him, I don't know that the curb bit I had on myself would have held. I wished to heaven she would shrink and give me a chance to step in between her and a man who might love her, as Marcia said, but who loved drink and drugs better, or he would not have been talking between silliness and sobriety, as he was that night. And I was so busy wishing it that Marcia spoke to me three times before I heard her.

"Nicky, do make Dudley shut up," she repeated, "he won't let any one else speak! He's been preaching the whole evening that Collins and Dunn aren't dead, only laid up somewhere round and making the other men desert, and you ought to go and find them – and now he's worrying us about that old idiot Thompson, who got himself drowned! For heaven's sake tell him no one would have bothered to murder the old wretch!"

"Nobody ever thought he was murdered, and I buried Dunn and Collins right enough," said I absently, with my thoughts still on Paulette. But Dudley whisked around on me.

"Marcia's talking rot," he exclaimed, his little pig's eyes soberer than I expected. "I don't mean about those two boys, for I bet they're no more dead than I am, and it would be just like them to lie low and set up a smothered strike among the men as soon as you were ass enough to be taken in by some stray bones! But I do mean it about Thompson. There's no sense in saying there was nothing queer about the way he came back and was found dead – because there was! It was natural enough that the police couldn't trace him in Montreal, for I hadn't a sign of data to give them: but it's darned unnatural that I can't trace him in Caraquet. I've sieved the whole place upside down, and nobody ever saw Thompson after he left Billy Jones's that morning on his way to Caraquet!"

Macartney stared at him for a minute; then he put down the pipe he was smoking. "If I thought that, I'd sieve the whole place upside down, too," he said so quietly that I remembered Thompson had been his best friend, and that he had looked deadly sick beside his grave. "But I don't. What it comes to with me is that no one remembers seeing Thompson in Caraquet that particular time, but no one says he wasn't there!"

"Then where's the – " But Dudley checked himself quick as light. If I had been quite sure he was himself I should have been curious about what he had meant to say. But all he substituted was: "Well, nobody remembers seeing him that day, anyway, except Billy Jones!"

"Seems to me that narrows poor Thompson's potential murderers down to Billy Jones," said Macartney ironically, since Billy Jones would not have murdered the meanest yellow pup that ever walked, and Macartney knew it as well as I did. But Dudley made the two of us sit up.