The La Chance Mine Mystery

CHAPTER VII

I FIND LITTLE ENOUGH ON THE CORDUROY ROAD, AND LESS AT SKUNK'S MISERY

I told Billy Jones as much as I thought fit of the evening's work, – which included no mention of wolf dope, or shooting on the corduroy road.

If he listened incredulously to my tale of a wolf pack one look at Bob and Danny told him it was true. They had had all they wanted, and we spent an hour working over them. The wagon was a wreck; why the spliced pole had hung together to the Halfway I don't know, but it had; and I let the smell on it go as a skunk. I lifted the gold into the locked cupboard where Billy kept his stores. It had to be put in another wagon for Caraquet, anyhow; and besides, I was not going on to Caraquet in the morning. The gold was safe with Billy, and there were other places that needed visiting first. There was no hope of getting at the ugly business that had brewed up at La Chance through Paulette Brown, or Collins either; since one would never tell how much or how little she knew, and the other would lie, if he ever reappeared. But the wolf bait end I could get at, and I meant to. Which was the reason I sat on one of the horses I had sent over to the Halfway – after my one experience when it held none – when my dream girl and Mrs. Jones came out of Billy's shack in the cold of a November dawn.

"I'm riding some of the way back with you," I observed casually.

Paulette stopped short. She was lovelier than I had ever seen her, with her gold-bronze hair shining over the sable collar of Dudley's coat. I fancied her eyes shone, too, for one second, at seeing me. But there I was wrong.

"I thought you'd started for Caraquet," she exclaimed hastily. "You needn't come with us. There won't be any wolves in the daytime, and – you know there's no need for you to come!"

There was not. Even if her voice had not so significantly conveyed the fact that there was no bottle in her wagon this time, Mrs. Billy Jones – to put a hard fact politely – was about the most capable lady I had ever met. She was big-boned, hard-faced and profane; and usually left Billy to look after the house while she attended to a line of traps, or hunted bears for their skins. No wolves would worry the intrepid and thoroughly armed Mrs. Jones. But all the same I was riding some of the way back to La Chance.

There was not a thing to be seen on the corduroy road through the swamp, or on the hill we had come down at the dead run; and I had not expected there would be. But on the top of the hill I bade good-by to my dream girl, – who was not mine, and was going back to Dudley. It was all I could manage to do it, too. I did not know I was biting my lip until it hurt; then I stopped watching her out of sight and turned back on the business that had brought me.

You could ride a horse down the hill into the swamp if you knew how; and I did. I tied him to a tree and went over each side of the corduroy road on my feet. It was silent as death there in the cold gray morning, with the frost-fog clinging in the somber hemlocks, and the swamp frozen so solid that my moccasins never left a mark. No one else's feet had left a mark there, either, and I would have given up the idea that a man had been cached by the road the night before, if it had not been for two things.

One was a dead wolf, with a gash in his throat in which the knife had been left till he was cold; you could tell by the blood clots round the wound: the other I did not find at once. But wolves do not stab themselves, and I remembered that the lone wolf cry ahead of us on that road had been a dying cry, not a hunting one. If Collins had killed the beast he had waited there long enough to let an hour pass before he took his knife out of its throat: so he had been there when we raced by, – which was all I wanted to know, except where he had gone since. As for the other thing I found, it was behind the hemlocks when I quartered the sides of the road in the silence and the frost-fog: and it was nothing but a patch of shell ice. But the flimsy, crackling stuff was crushed into two cup-like marks, as plainly telltale as if I had seen a man fall on his knees in them. And by them, frozen there, were a dozen drops of blood.

I knew angrily that if it were Collins's blood he had not missed it particularly, for he had moved away without leaving a sign of a trail. Where to I had no means of knowing, till five minutes later I found another spatter of blood on my corduroy road, – and as I looked at it my own blood boiled. There was not only no one but that young devil Collins who could have lain in wait for me; but he had had the nerve to walk away on my own road! Where to, beat me; but considering what I knew of his easy deviltry it was probably back to La Chance and a girl who was daring to fight him.

If I were worried for that girl I could not go back to her. I had to get my gold to Caraquet. Besides, I had a feeling it might be useful to do a little still hunting round Skunk's Misery. If Collins had had that bottle of devil's brew at La Chance he had got it from Skunk's Misery: probably out of the very hut where I had once nursed a filthy boy. And I had a feeling that the first thing I needed to do was to prove it.

As I rode back to Billy Jones's I would have given a deal for any kind of a motor car that would have reduced the twenty-seven miles to Caraquet into nothing, instead of an all-day job, – which it proved to be.

Not that I met a soul on the road. I didn't. But it took my wagon four hours to reach Caraquet over the frozen ruts of that same road; and another hour to hand over Dudley's gold to Randall, a man of my own who was to carry it on the mail coach to the distant railway.

I had no worry about the gold, once Randall had charge of it: no one was likely to trouble him or the coach on the open post road, even if they had guessed what he convoyed. I was turning away, whistling at being rid of the stuff, when he called me back to hand over a bundle of letters for La Chance. There were three for Marcia, and one – in old Thompson's back-number copperplate – for Dudley. There were no letters for Paulette Brown or myself, but perhaps neither of us had expected any. I know I hadn't. I gave the Wilbraham family's correspondence the careless glance you always bestow on other people's letters and shoved it into my inside pocket. After which I left my horses and wagon safe in Randall's stable and started to walk back to Skunk's Misery and the Halfway stables.

It seemed a fool thing to do, and I had no particular use for walking all that way; but there was no other means of accomplishing the twenty miles through the bush from Caraquet to Skunk's Misery. Aside from the fact that I had no desire to advertise my arrival, there was no wagon road to Skunk's Misery. Its inhabitants did not possess wagons, – or horses to put in them.

It was black dark when I reached the place, and for a moment I stood and considered it. I had never really visualized it before, any more than you do any place that you take for granted as outside your scheme of existence. I was not so sure that it was, now. Anyhow, I stood in the gap of a desolate hill and looked into the hollow before me that – added to the dirt no skunk could stand – had earned the place its name. It was all stones: gravel stones, little stones, stones as big as cabs and as big as houses; and, hunched up among them like lean-tos, hidden away among the rocks and the pine trees growing up from among the rocks wherever they could find root-hold, were the houses of the Skunk's Misery people. There was no pretense of a street or a village: there were just houses, – if they deserved even that name. How many there were I could not tell. I had never had the curiosity to explore the place. But if it sounds as though a narrow, stone-choked valley were no citadel for a man or men to have hidden themselves, or for any one to conduct an industry like making a secret scent to attract wolves, the person who said so would be mistaken. There was never in the world a better place for secret dwelling and villainy and all the rest than Skunk's Misery.

In the first place, you could not see the houses among the rocks. The valley was just like a porcupine warren. No rock stood out alone: they were all jumbled up together, big and little, with pine trees growing on the tops of them and in between them, up from the earth that was twelve, twenty, or sometimes forty feet below. The whole hollow was a maze of narrow, winding tracks, between rocks and under them, sometimes a foot wide and sometimes six, that Skunk's Misery used for roads. What its citizens lived on, I had never been able to guess. Caraquet said it was on wolf bounties, – which was another thing that had set me thinking about the bottle I had spilt on my clothes. If Collins or Dunn had got a similar bottle there I meant to find out about it: and I had the more heart for doing it since Paulette Brown knew nothing of Skunk's Misery. You can tell when a girl has never heard of a place, and I knew she had never heard of that one. I settled down the revolver I had filled up at Billy Jones's, and trod softly down the nearest of the winding alleys, over the worn pine needles, in the dark.

There were just twenty houses, when I had counted all I could find. There might have been twenty more, under rocks and behind rocks I could not make my way around; but I was no porcupine, and in the dark I could not stumble on them. There was not a sign of a stranger in the place, or a soul about. And judging from the darkness and the quiet, all the fat-faced, indifferent women were in bed and asleep, and the shiftless rats of men were still away. There were no dogs to bark at me: I had learned that in my previous sojourn there. Dogs required food, and Skunk's Misery had none to spare. I went back through the one winding alley that was familiar to me, found the hut where I had nursed the boy, and walked in.

There was not any Collins there, anyhow. The boy and his mother were in bed, or what went for being in bed. But at the sound of my voice the woman fairly flung herself at me, saying that her son was recovered again, and it was I who had saved him for her. She piled wood on the fire that was built up against the face of the rock that formed two sides of her house, and jabbered gratitude as I had never thought any Skunk's Misery woman could jabber. And she did not look like one, either; she was handsome, in a haggard, vicious way, and she was not old. I did not think myself that her son looked particularly recovered. He lay like a log on his spruce-bough bed, awake and conscious but wholly speechless, though his mother seemed satisfied. But I had not come to talk about any sick boys. I asked casually where I could find the stranger who had been in Skunk's Misery lately. But the woman only stared at me, as if the idea would not filter into her head. Presently she said dully that there had been no stranger there; I was the only one she had ever seen.

It was likely enough; a Skunk's Misery messenger had more probably taken the wolf dope to Collins. I asked casually if she had any more of the stuff I had spilt on my clothes, and where she had got it, – and once more I ran bang up against a stone wall. The woman explained matter-of-factly that she had not got it from any one. She had found it standing in the sun beside one of the rocks, and stolen it, supposing it was gin. When she found it was not she took it for some sort of liniment; and put it where I had knocked it over on myself. She had never seen nor heard of any more of it. But of course it might have belonged to any one in the place, only I could understand she could not ask about it: which I did, knowing how precious a whole bottle of anything was in those surroundings. As to where she had found it, she could not be sure. She thought it was by the new house the Frenchwoman's son had built that autumn and never lived in!

I pricked up my ears. The Frenchwoman's son was one of the men arrested in Quebec province for using wolf dope: a handsome, elusive devil who sometimes haunted the lumber woods at the lower end of Lac Tremblant, trapping or robbing traps as seemed good to him, and paying back interruptions with such interest that no one was keen to interfere with him. If the Frenchwoman's son were in with Collins in trying to hold up the La Chance gold, and was at Skunk's Misery now, I saw daylight, – anyhow about the wolf dope.

But the woman by the fire knocked that idea out of me, half-made. The Frenchwoman's son had not been there for two months past and had only come there at all to build a house. It was empty now, but no one had dared to go into it. She could show it to me, but she was sure he had had nothing to do with that liniment, if I wanted any more. After which she relapsed into indifference, or I thought so, till I showed her what little money I had in my pocket. She rose then, abruptly, and led the way out of her hut to the deserted house the Frenchwoman's son had built for caprice and never lived in.

It was deserted enough, in all conscience. The door was open, and the November wind free to play through the place as it liked. I stood on the threshold, thinking. I had found out nothing about any wolf-bait, excepting the one bottle the Frenchwoman's son might or might not have left there; certainly nothing about Collins ever having got hold of any; and if I had meant to spend the rest of the night in Skunk's Misery I saw no particular sense in doing it. I had a solid conviction that the boy's mother would not mention I had ever been there, for fear she might have to share what little I had given her – which, as it fell out, was true – and turned to go.

But when the woman had left me to creep home in the dark, while I made my own way out of the village, I altered my mind about going. I cut down enough pine boughs to make a bed under me, shut the door of the deserted house – that I knew enough of the Frenchwoman's son to know would have no visitors – had a drink from my flask, and slept the sleep of the hunting dog till it should be daylight.

And, like the hunting dog, I went on with my business in my dreams; till my legs jerked and woke me, to see a waning moon peering in from the west, through the hole that served the hut for a chimney, and I rose to go back to Billy Jones. For I dreamed there was a gang of men in a cellar under the very hut I slept in, with a business-like row of wolf-bait bottles at their feet, where they sat squabbling over a poker game. But as I said, it was the waning morning moon that woke me, and the hut was silent as the grave. I picked up the pine-bough bed I had slept on and carried it into the bush with me far enough to throw it down where it would tell no tales – I did not know why I did it, but I was to be glad – tightened up my belt, and took a short cut through the thick bush to Billy Jones's stables, with nothing to show for my day's and night's work but a dead wolf, a stained bit of shell ice, and a few drops of blood on the logs of my corduroy road. I was starving, and it was noonday, when I came out of the bush and tramped into the Halfway, much as I had done that first time I came from Skunk's Misery and went home to La Chance. Only to-day Billy Jones was not sitting by his stove reading his ancient newspaper. He was standing in the kitchen with two teamsters from La Chance, looking down at a dead man.

As I opened the door and stood staring, the teamsters jumped as if they had been shot. But Billy only turned a stolid white face on me.

"My God, Mr. Stretton," he said, stolidly too, "what do you make of this?"

All I could see from where I stood was a rigid hand, that had said death to me the second I opened the door. I gave a sort of spring forward. What I thought was that here was the man who had left the blood in the swamp when Paulette's bullet hit him, and that I had got Collins. I had nearly burst out that he had what he deserved. But instead I stopped, paralyzed, where my spring had left me.

"My God," I said in my turn, "I don't know!"

For the man who lay in front of me, stone dead in water-soaked clothes that were frozen to his stark body, was Thompson, our old superintendent, who only six weeks ago had left the La Chance mine; whose letter to Dudley, with its careful, back-number copperplate address, lay in my pocket now.

"It's Thompson!" was the only thing I could say.

CHAPTER VIII

THOMPSON!

Thompson it was, if it seemed incredible. And Billy Jones exclaimed, as he pointed to him, "He can't have been dead longer than since last night! And I can't understand this thing, Mr. Stretton! It's but six weeks since Thompson left here; and from what he said he didn't mean to come back. He told me he was in a hurry to get away, because he was taking a position in a copper mine in the West. I remember I warned him you hadn't got all your swamps corduroyed, and likely he couldn't drive clear into Caraquet; so he left his wagon here and borrowed a saddle from me to ride over. And a boy brought his horse back next day, or day after, – I forget which. I remember Thompson forgot to send me a tin of tobacco he promised to get me off Randall, at Caraquet!"

"D'ye mean you think he never went to Caraquet?" It was a stupid question, for, of course, I knew he had gone there, and farther, or he could not have sent Macartney to La Chance, or a letter to Dudley now. But what I was really thinking of was that I had been right about the date old Thompson left the mine, and that he had gone over my road on one of the two days I was away with all my road men, getting logs out of the bush.

Billy Jones scattered my thoughts impatiently: "Oh, he went there all right. It's his – coming back – that beats me!"

It beat me too, for reasons Billy knew nothing about. Why Thompson had come back was his own business; but it was plain he had been dead a scant twenty-four hours, and the only place I could think of where he was likely to have been killed was on my corduroy road the night before. Only I did not see how Thompson's clothes could have got water-soaked in a frozen swamp; and I did not see, either, what a decent man like Thompson could have been doing out there like a wolf, with wolves. I had more sense than to think he could have had any truck with Collins about our gold. I nodded back at the teamsters: "Where did they find him?"

"They didn't find him," returned Billy simply, "it was my hound dog. He was yelling down at the lake shore this morning, like he'd treed a wildcat, and when I went down it was Thompson he'd found, – lying right on shore in the daylight! You know how that fool Lac Tremblant behaves; the water in it had gone down to nothing this morning, and on the bare stones it had left was Thompson. Only I don't see how he ever got there unless he was coming back, from wherever he'd been outside, by Lac Tremblant instead of your road!"

"Where was his canoe?"

"He didn't have any! But you know that lake – it might have smashed his canoe on him like an egg, and then – just by chance – put him ashore!" I did know: I had had all I wanted to keep from being smashed myself the night I crossed to La Chance. I nodded, and Billy choked. "It – it kind of sickened me this morning; I liked Thompson, Mr. Stretton!"

So had I, if I had laughed at his eternal solitaire. Billy and I laid him on the bed, decently, after we had done what we could for him. And I was ashamed to have even wondered if he had been the man Paulette had shot at on the La Chance road; for there was not a mark on him, and a fool could have told he had just been drowned in Lac Tremblant. There was nothing in his pockets to tell how he had got there: only a single two-dollar bill and a damp pack of cards in a wet leather case. Thompson's solitaire cards! Somehow the things gave me a lump in my throat; I wished I had talked more to Thompson in the long evenings. The letter in my pocket from him was Dudley's, and I did not mention it to Billy. I said I would try to find out where the dead man had come from, and anything else I could, before he buried him. And with that I left old Thompson lying on Billy's bed with his face covered, and rode home to La Chance.

When I got in, Dudley and Macartney were in the living room, talking. Any other time I might have wondered why Dudley looked so jumpy and bad-tempered, but all I was thinking of then was my ugly news. But before I could tell it, Dudley flew at me. "Where the devil have you been all day? And what's happened to my gold?"

I don't know why, but I had a furious, cold qualm that either Dudley or Macartney had found out, – I don't mean about Collins so much as about Paulette having been mixed up with him. Till I knew I was damned if I'd mention him.

"I don't understand," I said shortly. "The gold's in Caraquet. But the reason I didn't get home this morning is that Thompson's back!"

"What?" Macartney never spoke loud, yet it cracked out.

I nodded. "I mean he's dead, poor chap! They found his body in Lac Tremblant this morning." And suddenly I knew I was staring at Macartney. His capable face was always pale, but in one second it had gone ghastly. It came over me that he had known old Thompson all his life, and I blurted involuntarily, "I'm sorry, Macartney!"

But he took no notice.

"They found Thompson's body," he said heavily, as a man does when he is sick with shock. "Who found it? Why, – he wasn't here! What in hell do you mean?"

I told him. Dudley sat and goggled at the two of us, but Macartney stared at the floor, his face still ghastly. "I beg your pardon, Stretton," he muttered as if he were dizzy. "Only Thompson was about the oldest friend I had. I thought – " But he checked himself and exclaimed with a sudden sharp doubt, "It can't be old Thompson, Stretton; you must be mistaken! He couldn't be here – he was going out West. I was expecting a letter from him any day, to say he'd started."

"It's here. At least, I mean there's a letter from him, that I got in Caraquet, only it's for Mr. Wilbraham. And I wasn't mistaken, Macartney. I wish I were!"

Macartney could not speak. I was surprised; I had not suspected him of much of a heart. I pulled out the letter, and Dudley opened it.

"Down and out – the poor old devil," said he slowly, staring at it, "and came back. Well, poor Thompson!" He read the thing again and handed it to Macartney. But Macartney only gave one silent, comprehensive stare at it, in the set-eyed way that was the only thing I had never liked about him, and pushed the letter across the table to me.

It was dated and postmarked Montreal. There was no street address, which was not like Thompson. But its precise phrases, which were like him, sounded down and out all right.

"Dear Mr. Wilbraham: I write to inquire if you will take me back at La Chance. There is no work here, or anywhere, and the British Columbia copper mine, where I intended to go, has shut down. I have nothing else in view, and I am stranded. If by to-morrow I cannot obtain work here I see nothing between me and starvation but to return to La Chance. I trust you can see your way to taking me back, in no matter how subordinate a position, at least till I can hear of something else. If I am obliged to chance coming to you I will take the shortest route, avoiding Caraquet, and coming by Lac Tremblant.