The La Chance Mine Mystery

"Dead." Her voice was almost indifferent, but she shivered. "Or he'd have gone on shooting at us."

I nodded, but I would have felt easier if I had thought so. Somehow I didn't, I don't know why. I know nothing would have induced me to take Paulette back to La Chance, even if the trodden lolly would have borne us again. I had a pang about Collins, left alone there; but Collins could take care of himself, and Paulette's shiver had reminded me we should freeze to death if we loitered where we were. I pointed to the snowy lake between us and the Halfway shore. "Can you do two more miles of running, over that?"

"Yes," she glanced down at her slim, trained body, rather superbly. "Only – there's no one following us! Have we got to be quite so quick?"

"Quicker! We don't know about Macartney. If he's alive he has a stable full of horses, and he knows where we're running to. He may try to cut us off." I half lied; he could not cut us off, since horses would be of no use to him in the heavy snow, and on foot it would take him two days to go round Lac Tremblant to the Halfway, where crossing the lolly could bring us in two hours. But I had no mind to air my real reason for haste.

I should have known Paulette was too shrewd for me. "I'm a fool – Lac Tremblant never bears, of course," she said quite quietly. "Go on, Mr. Stretton. Only – don't stop, if anything goes wrong with me!"

"Nothing will go wrong," said I, just as if I believed it. If she had called me Nicky, as she had done by mistake the night before, when she slept with her hand clasping mine, if she'd even looked at me, I must have burst out that I loved her, past life and death, and out to the world to come. But it was no time to force love-making on a girl who had seen the man she meant to marry lie dead before her eyes. If she turned shaky, or cried, I could never save her. For the bit of lake in front of us was ten times worse than what we'd crossed. I knew that when I tightened up the snowshoes silently and led my dream girl out on it. I would have given half my life for a rope, such as people have on glaciers. But I had no rope, and each of us would have to run, or sink, alone.

I meant, of course – But that's no matter. I got Paulette off the island and, inch by inch, feeling my way, back to the channel where buoyant water, at least, lay under us. I twisted and turned like a corkscrew, but I dared not leave it. Once I cautioned Paulette never to try a short cut, just to keep abreast of me; and twice my heart was in my mouth at a hollow, instant-long clatter under our shoes. But we got on over the stuff somehow, leaving holes of blue water in our tracks, with great gobbets of snow floating in them. The shore lay close in front of us, with a hard distinct edge of shell ice showing where the water stopped. I was just going to call out that in ten feet more we'd be safe over the lolly, when – smash – both of us went through! I thought I fell a mile before I hit the water that was going to drown us; hit it knees first, just as I'd gone through, and – I sprawled in icy slush that rose no higher than my waist. I was in a sort of pocket between two rocks that were holding up the lolly. There was an avalanche of caving snow and ice all round me, but I was not drowned or likely to be, – only I barely thought of it. For I could not see Paulette. Suddenly, past belief, I heard her scream: "Nicky!"

I fought blindly to the sound of her voice, wormed between my screening rocks, and shouted as I stood up. She was not even in slush! She had gone through shell ice to bare ground, a long strip of bare ground that led straight to the Halfway shore; roofed, high above my head, with shell ice and lolly that filtered a silver-green light. My dream girl lay there in her little blue sweater with the wind knocked out of her – and that was all. I kicked off my snowshoes that were not even broken and carried her under the ice roof to the Halfway shore. I may have thanked God aloud; I don't know. Only I carried her, with my face close to hers, and the slush and snow from her falling over me as I stumbled under the ice roof to the blessed shore. I had just sense enough to drop her in the blinding daylight, and drop myself beside her. I couldn't speak, from dead cold fear, now that I had saved her, of what it would have been if I had not. For two gasping minutes we just lay there.

Then Paulette said pantingly, "I'm so dreadfully sorry – I've been such a trouble! But I couldn't do anything but come, and – I forgot you couldn't want me!"

I sat up and saw her, sitting on a cold, bare, wind-swept rock that was all the refuge I had to offer her. Half a mile farther on were food and shelter in the Halfway shack – and it might as well have been in Heaven, for with Macartney's men cached in it I naturally could not take her there. Behind that, twenty-seven miles off, was Caraquet; but even a girl with a trained body like Paulette's could never make twenty-seven miles on top of all we'd done.

"It's no question of wanting you," I exclaimed angrily. "It is that I don't know what to do. But want you – when do you suppose I haven't wanted you, ever since the night I first saw you by Dudley's fire? What do you suppose I'd ever have been in this game for, if I hadn't wanted just you in all this world? My heart of hearts, don't you know I love you?" I lost my head, or I never would have said it, for I saw her flinch. That brought me back to myself in the snow and desolation round us that stood for God's world as nothing else would have done. I burst out in shame, "Oh, forgive me! I never meant to let that out. I know you never cared a hang for me; that you were going to marry Dudley, if he hadn't been killed!"

For one solid minute Paulette never opened her mouth. She sat like a colored statue, with rose-crimson cheeks and gold-bronze hair, under the white January sun. Her eyes were so dark in her face that they looked like blue-black ink. "I – I never was engaged to Dudley," she gasped at last, more as if it were jerked out of her than voluntarily. "I didn't think it was any business of yours, but I never was. We – Dudley and I – only said so, because it seemed the simplest way to manage Marcia, when Dudley brought me here to get me out of that emerald business. He was good to me, if ever a man was good to a girl he was only sorry for; I can't forget that brought him to his death. I'm sick with sorrow for him, – but I never was going to marry Dudley! He didn't even want me to. He – Oh, Nicky!"

Because I couldn't stand it; I'd seen her eyes. I had both her hands in mine, I think I was telling her over and over how I had always loved her, how I had stood out of Dudley's way, that I didn't expect, of course, that she could care about an Indian-faced fool like me, when – suddenly – I knew! Like roses and silver trumpets and shelter out there in the homeless snow, I knew! All Paulette said was, "Oh, Nicky," again. But the two of us were in each other's arms.

I don't know how long we clung or what we said. But at last I lifted my Indian-dark head from her gold one and spoke abruptly out of Paradise. "By gad, I have it!"

"Have what?" Paulette gasped. "Oh, you certainly have most of my hair; it's all wound up in your coat buttons – if you mean that!"

I didn't. "I meant I knew where we could go, and that's to Skunk's Misery," I harked back soberly, remembering the boy I had left there with a fire and shelter anyhow, if not food.

"But you said it was a horrible place!"

"So it is, when you have anywhere else to go. But we can't try the Halfway with Macartney's men in it, and neither of us could make Caraquet to-night. We've got to have shelter, darling."

Paulette stopped plaiting her hair in a thick rope. "Say that again," she ordered curiously.

"What – Skunk's Misery?" But suddenly I understood, and used that word I had never said aloud before:

"Darling darling, Skunk's Misery is our only chance. Get up and come on!"

But she answered without moving.

"Want to tell you something first. The tunnel falling in wasn't all the reason I ran after you. I thought – thought Dick might not dare to shoot at you if I were between you and him, so – Oh, Nicky, don't kiss my horrid, chapped hands!"

But I was glad to hide my humbled face on them, remembering how I had stormed at her. I muttered, "Why didn't you tell me – out there on the lake?"

"Well, you were pretty unpleasant, and" – as I kissed her, my dear love I had never thought to touch – "oh, Nicky, how could I tell you? I said everything to you last night but 'Nicholas Dane Stretton, I love you!' – and all the notice you took was to kneel perfectly silent, with a face as long as your arm. You never even answered me, when I called you Nicky by mistake!"

I hadn't dared. But it was no time to be talking of those things. Let alone that my wet breeches had frozen till I felt as if my legs didn't belong to me, we had landed exactly where old Thompson had been drowned. I wanted to get away from there, quickly; leaving no more trail than was necessary. I looked round me and saw how to do it.

In front of us was the hole in the shore ice and all the smash and flurry where we had gone through. Where we had crawled on shore, from under the intact ice roof, was bare rock, wind-swept clean. It struck me that with a little management, and to a cursory inspector, it could look as though Paulette and I were drowned like Thompson. The snow had not piled on this side the lake as it had on ours. Detached rocks, few but practicable stepping-stones, lifted their bare bulk out of it, between us and the spruce bush we had to strike through to avoid the Halfway and Macartney's picket. Some kind of a trail we must leave to Skunk's Misery, but it need not begin here, in the first place Macartney would look, if he were alive to look anywhere. Paulette's eyes followed mine as I thought it, and she nodded. It was without a track of any sort, after the lake trail ended, that she and I stopped in the thick spruces and put on our snowshoes for the last lap of the way to Skunk's Misery.

My dream girl's trained young body served her well. As she stepped out after me, I would never have guessed she had run a yard. It was easy enough to avoid the Halfway, and unlikely that Macartney's men would ever discover our devious track in the thick bush. Crossing the Caraquet road was the only place where we had to leave a track in the open. I did the best I could with it by picking up Paulette, and carrying her and her shoes into thick bush again; but I could not honestly feel much pleasure in the result. Any one with any sense would know my sunken shoe marks had carried double, but it was the best I could do. It was no pleasure to me either to hear Paulette exclaim sharply, as I set her down:

"Nicky, I forgot! Dick can snowshoe after us, if he's alive. Charliet made a lot of snowshoes at odd times, to sell in Quebec if he ever went back there. They were piled up in the shed behind the kinty, and I believe Dick knew – though he didn't remember it in time to save his men. If he follows us I" – her lip curled in fear and hatred – "Oh, I hope he's dead!"

So did I. Yet somehow I had never felt it. "Well, if he isn't," I said roughly, "he'll have to do twenty-two miles to catch up to our five, and then some to Skunk's Misery. He couldn't make good enough time round the lake to catch us to-night, supposing he knew where we were going; even on the chance of him, we've got to have one night's rest. And our only place to find it is Skunk's Misery!"

Paulette nodded and stepped out after me once more. It was dead toil in the soft snow, and it was slow; for Macartney or no Macartney, there was no making time in the untrodden bush. I cut our way as short as I dared, but do the best I could it was dark when we came to that forlorn, evil hollow in the gap of desolate hills that Caraquet folk called Skunk's Misery. That had its points though, considering we needed to reach Macartney's old lean-to unseen, for the Skunk's Misery population was in bed, and as I said before, they had no dogs to bark at us. In dead silence, with Paulette holding to my coat and our snowshoes under our arms, we went Indian file through the maze of winding tracks Skunk's Misery used for roads, under rocks and around them; and on the hard-trodden paths our feet left no trace. At least, I thought so: and it was just where I slipped up! If I had looked behind me, when Paulette would not let me carry her snowshoes, I would have seen the tails of them dragging a telltale cut in the snow behind her, as they sagged from her tired arm. But my eyes were straight before me, on the door of Macartney's lean-to. It hung open, as it had always hung, but I only glanced in to make sure it was empty. It was elsewhere I was going, around the huge boulder that backed the place, and down a gully that apparently brought up against blind rock – only I knew better. I found the opening of the rocky passage I had wormed down once before with my back scraping the living rock between me and the sky, and on my hands and knees, with Paulette after me, I went down it again. It ended without warning, just as I had known it would end, in an open cave. A glow of fire was ahead of me; and, stooping over it – what I had never imagined I should see with joy and gratitude – the boy I had left there, toasting a raw rabbit on a stick. That was all I saw. And what possessed me I don't know, but as I stood up I turned on Paulette with a sudden wave of stale jealousy overwhelming me, and a question I had kept back all the afternoon:

"Paulette, you're sure —sure– it's me, and not Dudley? That you didn't love the poor chap best?"

Paulette scrambled to her feet beside me. "It's you," she said clearly. "I told you Dudley never loved me, or I him. I'll mourn for him always, for he met his death through me. But he never wanted to marry me, and if he were alive, he'd be the first person to tell you so!"

There was a pause, definite, distinct, while you could count five. The boy at the fire started to frozen attention at sight of us, as sharply as his distorted body could start. But before he could speak, or I did, another voice answered Paulette's from the dark of the cave behind the fire, – an unexpected, mind-shattering voice, that took me toward it with one bound. "By gad," it said, "he would, would he? Two things have to go to that!"

I stood paralyzed where I had jumped. Paulette's snowshoes dropped clattering on the cave floor. Dudley Wilbraham, whom the wolves had eaten – little, fat, with a face more like an egg than ever, but whole and alive– stood in the dimness of the cave behind the fire and my Skunk's Misery boy!