The La Chance Mine Mystery

I nodded. I knew it was hand to mouth with Dudley: he had no cash to call on but the mine output, and immediate payments had to be made on the machinery we were using. But I was not excited about being held up on the Caraquet road, – after I'd once been to Skunk's Misery. I was not red-hot about hurrying there, either; I wanted to give Hutton time to get back to his lair and feel easy about pursuit after his abortive raid. "I expect we'll worry along," I said idly. "Gimme that clean rag for your arm!"

But Macartney cast down the handkerchief in his hand. "This fool thing's too short! Open that box, will you? There's a roll of bandage just inside."

There was. But there was something else just inside, too. I stared at a worn leather case, that pretended to be a prayer-book with a brass clasp and tarnished gilt edges, a case I had seen too often to make any mistake about. "By gad," I cried blankly. "Why, you've got old Thompson's cards!"

Macartney was poking at his wounded arm, and he winced. "Hurry up, will you? I can't stop this silly blood. Of course I have Thompson's cards; I can't help it if you think I'm an ass. I liked the old man, and I didn't fancy the Billy Joneses playing cribbage with the only thing in the world he cared for. I took the cards the day we buried him – saw them lying in the kitchen."

"I expect you needn't have worried about Billy," I commented absently. "He was going to give those cards to me, only he and I couldn't find them."

"Do come on," snapped Macartney. He was set-eyed as usual, but I guessed he was ashamed to have had me find him out in a sentimental weakness. "I'd have told you I had them if I'd known you cared. You can take the things now, if you want them."

It was not till that minute that I remembered Macartney could not know why I wanted them, nor anything about the sort of codicil I'd torn off the envelope of Thompson's letter to Dudley: for there had been nothing about cards in what he'd read in it, or in the letter itself. But as the remembrance of both things shot up in me, I didn't confide them to Macartney, any more than I had to Dudley himself. I had a queer sort of idea that if Thompson's pencilled scrawl had meant anything more than the wanderings of a distressed mind, I'd better get hold of it myself first. I said: "All right," and pocketed Thompson's cards. Then I did up Macartney's arm, and the two of us went up the road to Dudley. He and his dry nurse, Baker, who'd promptly arrived from the bunk house, stumped straight back to the assay office with Macartney to fuss over the men who'd been killed. I was making for my own room, to see if Thompson's resurrected cards would shed any light on his crazy scrawls, when I heard a poker drop in the living room. Somebody was in there, raking up the fire.

Charliet had gone after Macartney, with Dudley and Baker. I guessed Paulette had got up and was trying to start the fire, – for she was always working to keep things comfortable – if I haven't mentioned it – even for me. I once caught her darning my rags of socks and crying over them – the Lord knew why! I went in to stop her now – and it was I who stopped dead in the doorway. It was not Paulette inside: it was Marcia! Marcia in a velvet dressing gown, poking the ashes all over the hearth. I could have sworn I had seen Paulette burn the letter she had signed with Tatiana Paulina Valenka's name, but all the same the look of Marcia's back turned me sick. And her face turned me sicker as she flung around on me, with her fingers all ashes, – and Paulette's letter in her hand!

I kept back a curse at the raw fool that was me. I might have seen it was not a tightly folded wad of stiff paper I had watched burn up, but just the light torn scraps Paulette had thrown in with it. What was more, I had been alone with the thing under my very nose in the light ashes into which it must have sunk and never had the sense to burrow for it. It was too late even to snatch for it: Marcia had read it! She held it up to me now, – and Tatiana Paulina Valenka, black on the yellow of the scorched paper, hit me on the eyes.

"Who was right, Nicky Stretton?" she demanded triumphantly. "I told you I'd seen Paulette Brown before! Only I never thought of the Houston business. I could kill Dudley; how dare he bring me out here with a thief! I won't have her here another day."

"What thief?" I snapped. "I don't know what you mean! Why on earth are you poking in the ashes? What are you up for?"

"Only a Paulette Brown could stay asleep, with Dudley yelling at you and Macartney," scornfully. "But if you want to know what I was poking in the ashes for, I had no matches, and my fire was out, so I came in here for a log to light it up. And I found this!"

"Well, burn it," said I furiously. But she had begun to read it out, and I would have been a fool to stop her, for what Marcia knew I had to know. But it knocked me silly. The something Paulette had "wanted to make clear" was just a letter to Hutton! And the Lord knows it made me more set than ever on getting to Skunk's Misery before Hutton could know that Tatiana Paulina Valenka had given in! Because she had. She was not only going to meet him; she was going away with him, Marcia's hard voice read out baldly, if only he would give up the plan in his head. But it was the last sentence that bit into me:

"Oh, Dick, have some mercy! I know you hate me now, but have some mercy; don't do what I'm afraid of. I'll give you all you want – myself – everything – if only you'll let that be. Go away, as I begged you, and I'll leave Dudley for you, and go too." And it was signed, as I knew Paulette Brown had not meant to sign anything, "Tatiana Paulina Valenka."

I never even wondered how she had meant to get it to Hutton, if she had not supposed she burned it. Every drop of my blood boiled in me with the determination that she should never pay Hutton's price with her lips against his that she hated, and his cheek on her soft hair I had never touched; all the gold Dudley Wilbraham could ever mine was not worth that. But I kept a cold eye on Marcia. "A half-burnt letter – that wasn't going to be sent – isn't anything but girl's nonsense," I swore contemptuously.

"Isn't it? We'll see – when Dudley reads it!" Marcia looked like a devil hunched up in her dressing gown, with her gums showing as she grinned. "I told you she never meant to marry him. Now we'll see if he marries her – when she writes letters like this!"

"I won't let you show it to Dudley!"

"You are like – everybody: cracked about a Paulette Brown!" Marcia retorted; and if I had only known what the "everybody" was going to mean I think I could have managed her, even then, by coming out with it. But I didn't know, and I did the best I could.

"Marcia Wilbraham, if you dare to show that thing to Dudley, or so much as speak of it, I'll pay you out, – so help me," I said; and if it was in a voice no decent woman knows a man can use, I meant it to be. It scared Marcia, anyhow, though heaven knew I didn't see how I could ever pay her out, no matter what she did. She let go of the letter, which she had to, for I had her by the wrist. I would have burnt it up, only I had no match. Marcia leaned forward suddenly, electrically, and tapped the "Oh, Dick" in the last sentence, that was the only name in the letter.

"Well, I'm damned," said she coolly. "Why, the thing's to you! Do you mean you're going to run away with that – that girl?"

"No," I said furiously and then saw I was an ass, "I mean, not now!"

"Since I know about you," Marcia cut me off sweetly. But she stared at me calculatingly. "H – m," said she, "I beg your pardon for mistaking your N for a big, big D, Nicky darling, but you see I never heard any one call you plain, short Nick! I don't exactly see why she had to write with you in the house, either, but you needn't be nervous. I'm not going to use my cinch on you – not now, anyway! I've changed my mind about telling Dudley. It won't do me any harm to keep something up my sleeve against you, if ever I want to do anything you don't admire. It wasn't the least bit of use for you to snatch that letter; I learned it off by heart before you came in on me. And I can always threaten Dudley now that I'll tell who Paulette Brown really is, if he tries to bully me about any one I have a fancy for!"

Of course I knew she was thinking of Macartney. I didn't believe Dudley would have cared if she had married him ten times over. But he might have been making some unreasonable objection to Macartney, at that, for all I knew.

"I don't care one straw about your knowing I was going to take Paulette Brown out of this. But if you don't hold your tongue on it, I'll know it, so you mind that," I observed with some heat. Yet I was easier. She could not talk that night, anyhow, and she was welcome to come out with her crazy lie about Paulette and myself, once Hutton was dead, – because he and a snake would be all one to me, once I got my hands on him. After that I had no qualms about being able to make Dudley see the truth concerning that letter, and that it had been written to save his gold, – and his life, likely enough! I let Marcia believe the name in the letter was mine, and that Paulette had been going off with me. All I wished was that she had been. I went off to my room and left Marcia sitting over the dead fire, – not so triumphant as she'd meant to be, for all the good face she put on it.

Paulette's letter had pretty well knocked out all the interest I had in old Thompson's cards, but I got out the torn scrap of paper I'd put away. There was nothing on it but what I'd read before: "For God's sake search my cards —my cards!" – and it looked crazier than ever with the things in my hand. The cards had been water-soaked and were bumpy and blistery where Billy Jones had dried them, even though they were flattened out again by the pressure of their tight case; but there was nothing to them, except that they were old Thompson's beyond a doubt. If I had thought there might be writing on them there was not so much as the scratch of a pencil. There seemed to be a card missing. I thought it was the deuce of hearts; but I was too sick over Marcia's discovery about Paulette to really examine the things and make sure. I shoved them into my coat pocket beside what was there already, just as Dudley came into my room.

He had enough to worry him without hearing that Marcia had found out about Paulette. He sat on my bed, biting his nails; and said – what Macartney had said – that we had too much gold at La Chance to run the risk of losing it by a better organized raid on it: and – what I had known for myself – that the mine output represented his only ready money for notes that were past renewing, and that it had to go out to Caraquet. When I said why not, he bit his nails some more, and said he was afraid of a hold-up: what he wanted me to do was to ride over to the Halfway and scout around from there to clear the Caraquet road, before I started out from La Chance with an ounce of gold.

The idea suited me well enough. It would cover my expedition to Skunk's Misery. But I did not mention that, or Hutton, to Dudley; and never guessed I was a criminal fool! I did not mean to waste any time in scouting around the road, either, when I knew just where my man would be sitting, with the half dozen wastrels he had probably scraped up. But first I wanted five minutes, even two minutes, with Paulette, to warn her of what Marcia knew. So I said the afternoon would be time enough to start.

But Dudley would not hear of it and blazed out till I had to give up all idea of warning Paulette, and get out. And as I rode away from La Chance the last person I saw was Macartney, though I might not have remembered it, if I had not turned my head after I passed and caught the same grin on his face he had worn there the night his own man shot him. I rode back and asked him what the mischief he was grinning at.

"Grinning – because I'm angry," Macartney returned with his usual set stare. "I'd sooner go with you than stay here, burying men and talking to Wilbraham. I'm sick of La Chance, if you'd like to know. I came here to mine, not to play in moving pictures. But I guess I've got to stick, unless I can hurry up my job here. So long – but I don't expect you'll see anything of last night's man on the Caraquet road!"

Neither did I, nor of any one else. But I was not prepared to find the Halfway stable empty, when I rode in there just at dark. The house was as deserted as the stable, though the fire was alive in the stove, and taking both things together, I decided Billy and his wife had taken a four-horse team into Caraquet for a load. I had meant to borrow one of his horses to go on to Skunk's Misery, – for this time I intended to ride there. But with no horse to borrow, there was nothing to do but to ride my own, and it was toward ten that night when I left him to wait for me in a spruce thicket, within half a mile of the porcupine burrows that Skunk's Misery called houses.

As I turned away, the cold bit a hundred times worse for the lack of snow in the woods, and the bare ground made the pat of my moccasins sound louder than I liked; but on the other hand I should leave no track back to my waiting horse, if I had to clear out without getting Hutton. The thought made me grin, for I had no fear of it.

Hutton would be asleep, judging from the look of things; for as I got fairly into Skunk's Misery, it lay still as the dead. The winding tracks through it were deserted; silent between and under the great rocks and boulders; slippery in the open with droppings from the pine trees that grew in and on the masses of huddled rocks. The wind rose a little, too, and soughed in the pine branches, to die wailing among the stones. It did not strike me as a cheerful wind for a man in Hutton's shoes, for it covered the light sound of my feet as I went past the hut of the boy I had nursed and through the maze of tracks his mother had shown me, to the new log lean-to the Frenchwoman's son had built and never used. But, as I reached it, I was suddenly not so sure Hutton was there!

The lean-to looked all right. The door was open, just as I had left it. But, as I crossed the threshold, I knew I was too late, and there was nobody inside, or in the cave underneath it where men had been when I slept there. The place had that empty feeling of desertion, or late occupancy and a cold lair, that even a worse fool than I could not mistake now. I shut the door on myself without sound, all the same; snapped my pocket lantern; and stared, – at just what I had known I was going to find.

There was nothing in the place now but the bare lean-to walls and the rock they backed on; but twenty men had been living there since I left it. The black mark of their fire was plain against the rock face; the log floor was splintered by heavy boots with nails in them – which did not speak of the moccasined return of the Frenchwoman's son – and in the place where I had once made a bed of pine boughs and carried it away with me there lay a flurry of litter that spoke volumes: for among it was a corned-beef can that was no product of Skunk's Misery, where meat meant squirrels and rabbits, and – a corked bottle of wolf dope! That I laid gingerly aside till I had poked around in the rest of the mess, but there was not much else there besides kindling. I got up to leg it for the underground cave, blazing that I had missed Hutton and half hoping he might be there, – but I dropped flump on my knees again, dumbfounded.

Underneath the displaced litter, stuck sideways in a crack of the log floor, was a shiny, dirty white playing card. I pulled it out. And in the narrow white beam of my electric lantern I saw the missing two of hearts out of Thompson's pack!

I saw more, too, before I even wondered how one of Thompson's cards had ever got to Skunk's Misery. The deuce of hearts was written on – closely, finely and legibly – with indelible pencil. And as I read the short sentences, word by word, I knew Thompson had never got to Caraquet, never got anywhere but to the cave under the very lean-to I knelt in – till he had been brought up from it, here – to be taken away and drowned in Lac Tremblant, as a decent man would not drown a dog! And I knew – at last – where Hutton and his gang were, and who Hutton was!

But I made no move to go underground to the cave to look for them. And the only word that came to my tongue was: "Macartney!"