A DEAD MAN'S MESSENGER
For the written message on Thompson's lost card was plain. Macartney
was--Hutton! And Hutton's gang were just the new, rough men Macartney
had dribbled in to the La Chance mine!
It was Macartney--our capable, hard-working superintendent--for whom
Paulette had mistaken me in the dark, that first night I came home to La
Chance and the dream girl, who was no nearer me now than she was then;
Macartney from whom she had sealed the boxes of gold, to prevent him
substituting others and sending me off to Caraquet with worthless
dummies; Macartney I had heard her tell herself she could not trust;
Macartney who had put that wolf dope--that there was no longer any doubt
he had brought from Skunk's Misery--in my wagon; Macartney who had had
that boulder stuck in the road to smash my pole, by the same men who
were posted by the corduroy road through the swamp to cut me off there
if the wolves and the broken wagon failed; and Macartney who had been
balked by a girl I had left at La Chance to fight him alone now!
The thing seemed to jump at me from six places at once, now that I knew
enough to see it was there at all. But what sickened me at my own utter
blindness was not the nerve of the man, but just the risk he had let
Paulette run on the Caraquet road, and--old Thompson! For Thompson had
never sent Macartney to La Chance, and Macartney had had him murdered in
cold blood!
If my eyes fogged as I stared at the dead man's two of hearts, it was
only half with fury. Old Thompson had been decent, harmless, happy with
his unintelligent work and his sad solitaire,--and he had been through
seven hells before he wrote what I read now:
"Wilbraham--Stretton--pray God one of you saw all I could
put inside envelope of last letter Macartney forced me to
write. I never sent him to La Chance. I never saw the man
till he waylaid me between Halfway and Caraquet, and brought
me here. Do not know where it is, am prisoner underground.
Wrote you two letters to save my miserable life; know now I
have not saved it. Your lives--gold--everything--in danger
too. For any sake get Macartney before he gets you. No use
to look for me. Tried to warn you inside envelope, but
suppose was no use. Good-by. _Take care, take care!_ There
was a boy Macartney sent off with my horse; was kind; said
he would come back. When he does, takes this to you----He
has not come. Been brought up into lean-to, am gagged, feel
death near. Forgive treachery--life was dear--get Macar----"
But the scrawl broke off in a long pencil line, where death had jerked
Thompson's elbow, and his card had fallen from his hand.
I sat on the floor and saw the thing. Macartney, hidden in Skunk's
Misery, making plans to get openly and with decent excuse to La Chance,
had fallen on Thompson and used him. And for Thompson, writing lying
letters in Skunk's Misery in fear of the death that had come to him in
the end, there had been no rescue. His scribbled envelope, even if
Dudley or I had understood it, had come too late. The boy who took his
horse to Billy--whoever he was--had never come back. Thompson had not
even had time, in the end, to slip his written-over card into the cased
pack I had found in his almost empty pockets, before Macartney's
men--for of course Macartney himself had never been near the place since
he got his wolf dope there and left it for good--had taken him off and
made away with him. Once his last letter was written and posted under
cover from Caraquet to be reposted to Dudley from Montreal by some
unknown hand, Macartney had no more use for Thompson, and a screen
against betrayal on two sides: either by his own men, or that chance
finding of Thompson's body that had actually happened; for Thompson's
own letter would clear his murderer.
As for Thompson's envelope! It's an easy enough thing to do if you just
slip your pencil inside an envelope and write blindly, but it made me
sick to think of poor old Thompson scrawling in the inside of his
envelope, furiously, furtively, while the ink of his neat copperplate
dried on the outside, and Macartney likely stood by poring over the
actual letter, wondering if there was any flaw in it that could show out
and damn him. And the desperate scrawl in the envelope had been _no
good_, thanks to the fool brain and tongue of myself, Nicky Stretton! It
had done more to warn Macartney than either Dudley or me, since if
Thompson had written in the reverse of the envelope he was also likely
to have written on anything that would take a pencil.
It was no wonder Macartney had stood stunned over that envelope, till
Dudley and I believed him heartsick for his friend, for it must have
been then that he remembered Thompson's cards,--that I guessed the old
man had just sat and played with, day in and day out, while he was a
prisoner and about to die. Thompson could have written on them; and
Macartney must have feared it, or he never would have stolen them from
Billy Jones. I hoped grimly that he had been good and worried before he
got his chance to do it and set his mind at ease. And at ease it must
have been, for he had actually known nothing about the cards; he could
only have taken them on chance, from sheer terror, and found them
harmless. He had probably never even noticed one was missing--and
whatever Thompson had not been wise about he had been wise when he took
out a deuce, and not one of the four aces the most casual eye must
miss--or he would never have let me have them, contemptuously, as one
lets a child play with a knife without a blade.
Only I was not so sure this particular knife had no blade,--for
Macartney!
He knew nothing of the desperate scrawl on the bottom flap of that
envelope that his own hasty grab had jerked off and left in my fist;
nothing of the deuce of hearts that made its crazy inscription pitifully
sane to me now; and nothing in particular about me, Nicky Stretton. But
when I came to think of all I knew about Macartney, that was no
remarkable consolation; for--except his never noticing that the bottom
flap of Thompson's envelope was missing, and taking it for granted it
had been blank like the top one--he had made a fool of me all along the
line!
I had stopped Paulette from going away with him the night before, after
she thought she had burned the note she had meant to slip into his hand;
but he must have told her, outside in the passage, when I thought he was
sending a message to Marcia, that if she did not go with him then--in
the next hour--he would begin trouble that very night for Dudley and La
Chance.
And he had! It was Paulette he was waiting for, when he lied to me about
a strange man. And he had gone straight down to the assay office, done
his own alarm of a robber, and killed four men to give it artistic
truth. It was no wonder he had said he was sick of playing in moving
pictures and grinned at me when I left La Chance to search the Caraquet
road for nobody else but himself.
As for his gang, the very bunk-house men he had told me to order out of
the assay office, were just Macartney's own gang from Skunk's Misery,
come over when they had silenced Thompson forever; at Macartney's elbow
whenever he chose to murder the lot of us and commandeer the La Chance
mine. I wished, irrelevantly, that Dunn and Collins _had_ got to
Macartney, instead of being killed on the way; they might have been
chancy young devils about stealing gold, but they would never have stood
for murdering old Thompson! It was no good thinking of that, though.
I stowed away Thompson's deuce of hearts, that no boy had ever come for,
in the case with those other pitiful cards he had told me to search, and
got on my feet with only one thought in my head,--to get back to La
Chance and my dream girl that Macartney was alone with, except for
Dudley,--Dudley whom he hated, who had threatened him for Paulette
Valenka, for Thompson, till it was no wonder I had found him with the
face of a devil where he lurked eavesdropping in the shack hall. And
there something else hit me whack. Baker, Dudley's jackal, was one of
Macartney's gang: told off, for all I knew, to put him out of the way! I
wheeled to get out of that damn lean-to quicker than I had got in; and
instead I stood rooted to the floor. _Below me, somewhere underground,
somebody was moving!_
Naturally, I knew it could not be Macartney, because he could not have
got there, even if he had not had other fish to fry at home. But one of
his gang might have been left at Skunk's Misery and could have the life
choked out of him. There was no way leading underground directly from
the lean-to, or I would have been caught the night I slept there and
believed real voices were a dream. I slid out of the door, around the
boulder that backed the place, and was afraid of my lantern. I went down
on my hands and knees to feel for a track and found one, down a gully
that ran in under a blind rock. I crawled down it, all but flat, as I
burrowed like a rabbit, with my back scraping against the living rock
between me and the sky, and my head turned to the place where I knew the
lean-to stood. I was under it with no warning whatever; in a natural,
man-high cellar I could stand up in, with half a dozen bolt holes
running off it: and I had no need to flash up my lantern to see them.
There was a light in the place already from a candle-end Macartney's men
must have left behind; and beside it, not looking at me, not even
hearing my step, because he was sobbing his heart out, lay the boy I had
carried home from the Caraquet road!
"Thompson's boy, who took his horse to Billy--who never came back!" I
said to myself. God knows I touched him gently, but he screamed like a
shot rabbit till he saw my face.
"You?" said I. "What's the matter with you? Brace up; it's only me!"
Brace up was just what he did not do. He sank back with every muscle of
him relaxed. "Bon Dieu, I thought you was him come back," he gasped in
his bastard French Indian, "that man that half killed me on the Caraquet
road! But it wasn't him I was crying about. It was the other man--that
promised me two dollars for something."
"To come back and take a letter--where you had taken his horse?"
The boy--I did not even know his name--nodded, with a torrent of sullen
patois. He had never come for his two dollars, and now the man was gone
and he would never get it. But it was not his fault. The first man--the
one who had sent him to the Halfway with the horse--had caught him
crawling back for the letter, had told him the man who was going to pay
him had gone away long ago, and had taken him out to chop firewood and
let a tree fall on him. How the lad had ever crawled out to the Caraquet
road I did not ask. I think the thing that stabbed me was that I had
been within five hundred yards of Thompson all the time I was nursing
this very boy, that the knowledge of it had lain behind unconscious lips
within a hand's breadth of me, that I had gone away ignorant, leaving
Thompson robbed of the only help he could ever have had.
"Why didn't you tell me all that--the night I came over to your
mother's?" I groaned.
The boy said shortly that his mother would have gone straight off and
told I'd been there, if he had come out with the truth. It was all lies
she had told me about the Frenchwoman's son; he had never been near the
place. It was the man who had half killed him who had built the lean-to,
and his mother had said she would finish the business if ever he opened
his mouth about it, or let out the truth about the same man sending him
to the Halfway with a horse, or the smelling stuff she had helped him
make.
"You're sure she didn't go and tell that man about me, anyway?" I
remembered Macartney's grin.
But the boy shook his head. "She didn't worry; she said you were too big
a fool to matter!" After which wholesome truth he announced listlessly
that he was done with his mother. She had turned him out of her house
now, anyway. She said he was no good to her, now that he could only
crawl, and could not even trap enough rabbits to live on, and she had
another man living in her house who would do it for her. So he had come
here to find the man who had promised him two dollars--that solitary
bill that had been all the money in Thompson's pockets--and when he
found him gone and the place empty he had stayed there to hide, and
because he had nowhere else to go.
I thought of his mother's haggard, handsome face and hard mouth.
Macartney had certainly found a good ally while he was laid up in
Skunk's Misery waiting for his chance to fall on Paulette. But all that
did not matter now. What did matter was that I had found the missing
link between Thompson's cards and Macartney in the boy who had taken
Thompson's horse back to the Halfway. I had no mind to produce him now
though; for there were other things to be looked to than showing up old
Thompson's murder. And the boy was safe where he was, for one glance at
him had told me he could not walk half a mile.
"Are you safe from your mother here--and can you get food for yourself?"
I demanded abruptly, and the boy nodded the head I knew would never be
other than a cripple's. "Well, you stay here," I told him, because if
ever I needed the poor little devil for a witness against Macartney he
would be no good lying dead somewhere in the bush, "and I'll come back
and pay you ten times two dollars for just waiting here till I come. But
you'll have to hide if that man comes back who sent you out with the
horse!" I knew Macartney would kill him in good earnest, if he came back
and found him with a living tongue in his head. "Don't you trust any one
but me--or some one who comes and gives you twenty dollars," I added
emphatically, just because that was the only absolutely unlikely event I
could think of. "And even then, you stay here till you see me!
Understand?"
He said he did; it was easy enough to creep out after dark and rob
rabbit traps; he was doing it now. And from the greed a fortune of
twenty dollars had lit in his wretched eyes, I knew he would go on doing
it till I came back. Of what wildly unexpected use he was to be to me in
his waiting, heaven knows I had no thought. I crept out of his burrow as
I had crept in, got back to my half-frozen horse, and rode hell for
leather back to the Halfway. And just there was where I slumped.
My horse had to be fed and rested; he was dead beat when I led him into
the unlocked stable, and when I had seen to him I meant to rouse up
Billy Jones and tell him all the ugly stuff I had unearthed--and seen
too--for the killing of four innocent men was hot in my mind. But I did
not, for the excellent reason that Billy was not back. His house was
dark, and his four horses still away from their vacant stalls. I sat
down on a heap of clean straw to wait for him, and I said I slumped. I
went sound, dead asleep. If I was hunting for excuses I might say it was
two in the morning, and I had been up most of the night before. But
anyhow, I did it. And I sat up, dazed, to see a lantern held in front
of my eyes and one of Macartney's men from La Chance staring at me.
It struck me even then that it was not he who was surprised; and the
sleep jerked out of me like wine out of a glass. "What are you doing
here? And where the devil's Billy?" I snapped, without thinking.
I saw the man grin. "Billy's fired," he returned coolly. "Him and his
wife got it in a note from Wilbraham, day before yesterday, when your
teamsters stopped here on their way to Caraquet. They doubled up their
teams with Billy's and took him and his wife along, and all their stuff.
And I guess they'd been fired too, for they ain't come back. Mr.
Macartney sent me over to see. Anything I can do for you?"
"Take that lantern out of my eyes, and hustle me up some breakfast.
I--I'm sorry about Billy!" I was not; I was startled,--and worse. It had
not been Dudley who had dismissed him, asinine as he had been about
Billy and old Thompson, or he would have told me. It had been Macartney,
getting rid of him and my teamsters under my very nose; and--as
Macartney's parting grin recurred to me--if his man had any one with him
in Billy's vacant shack they had been put there to get rid of _me_.
"Get me a bucket of water and make coffee, if you haven't done it," I
said, yawning. "I'll come in--as soon as I've fed my horse."
But I did neither. I stopped yawning, too. Through the frosty window, as
the man disappeared for the shack, I saw a light in its doorway and two
more of Macartney's men standing in it, black between the lamp and the
gray morning glimmer. I stirred some meal into the water Macartney's man
had brought, drank a mouthful before I let my horse have just enough to
rinse his throat with, and threw on his saddle. It was flat on his neck
that I came out the stable door, and what Macartney's men meant to have
done I don't know, for I was down the road toward La Chance like a
rocket. And before I had made a mile I knew I had got off none too soon,
for we were going to have snow at last, and have it hard.
Before I cleared the corduroy road it cut my face in fine stinging
flakes, and by the time I was halfway to La Chance it was blinding me.
It came on a wind, too, and I cursed it as I faced it, with my horse
toiling through the heavy, sandy stuff that was too cold and dry to
pack. The twenty-two miles home took me most of the day. It was close on
dusk when I fumbled through drifting, hissing snow and choking wind, to
the door of the La Chance stable. And the second I got inside I knew
Macartney's man had told the truth, and Macartney had fired my
teamsters with Billy Jones. There was not a soul about the place, and
ten hungry horses yelled at me at once as I stamped my half-frozen feet
on the floor. I would have shouted for Charliet if it had not seemed
quicker to feed them myself. I yanked down a forkful of hay for each of
them, after I saw to my own horse. And if you think I was a fool to
worry over dumb beasts, just that small delay made a difference in my
immediate future that likely saved my life. If I had raced off for the
house at once I might have met with----Well, an accident! But that comes
in later.
As it was I was a good twenty minutes in that stable. When I waded out
into the swirling white dusk of snow and wind between me and the shack I
was just cautious enough, after the Halfway business, to stare hard
through the blinding storm at the house I was making for, though I did
not think Macartney was ripe to dare anything open against me at La
Chance. But with that stare I knew abruptly that he was! Massed just
inside the open door of Dudley's shack, that was black dark but for one
light in the living-room window, were a crowd of men that looked like
nothing in the world but our own miners, that I knew now for
Hutton's--or Macartney's--gang! How he dared have them there, instead of
in the bunk house, beat me,--but it was them, all right. The wind was
clear of snow for one second, and I saw them plainly. And they saw me.
Without one sound the whole gang jumped for me. I had my gun out, and I
could have stopped the leaders before I had to get back against the
stable door; but there was no need.
There was a shout behind me. The men checked, sprawling over each other
in the snow--ludicrously, if I had been seeing much humor in things--and
it was then it struck me that I should have had an accident if I had
bolted straight into a dark house, instead of delaying in the stable
till Macartney's gang got tired of waiting for me and bundled out
themselves to see where I was. But I only wheeled, with my gun in my
fist, to Macartney's voice.
What I had expected to see I don't know. What I did see, stumbling
through the drifts to me, was an indistinguishable figure that turned
out to be two. For it was Macartney, carrying Marcia Wilbraham. And
behind him, short-skirted to her knees, and with no coat but her
miserable little blue sweater, came my dream girl.
I forgot Macartney could not know I knew he was Hutton, or all the rest
that I did know. I said, "What hell's trick are you up to now?"
But Macartney only turned a played-out face to me. "Take her from me,
will you?" he snapped. "I'm done." He let Marcia slip down into the
snow. "Wilbraham's killed!"