WOLVES--AND DUDLEY
It was cleverly done. So was the desperate gesture of Macartney's hand
across his blood-shot, congested eyes. If I had not had Thompson's deuce
of hearts in my pocket I might have doubted if Macartney really were
Hutton, or had had any hand in the long tale of tragedy at La Chance.
But as it was I knew, in my inside soul, bleakly, that if Dudley were
dead Macartney had killed him,--as only luck had kept him from killing
me.
I saw him give a quick, flicking sign to his men with the fingers of the
hand that still covered his eyes, and I knew I was right in the last
thing, anyhow, for the men straggled back from us, as to an order. They
were to do nothing now, before Paulette and Marcia, if their first
instructions had been to ambush inside the shack to dispose of me when I
got back from the Halfway,--which I had not been meant to do. I did not
drop my gun hand, or fling the truth at Macartney. But I made no move
to pick up Marcia. I said, "How d'ye mean Dudley's killed? Who killed
him?"
"Wolves!" If Macartney meant me to think he was too sick to answer
properly he was not, for he spoke suddenly to the bunk-house men. "There
is no good in your waiting round, or looking any more. They've got Mr.
Wilbraham, and"--he turned his head to me again--"they damn nearly got
me!"
Later, I wished sincerely that they had, for it would have saved me some
trouble. At that minute all I wanted was to get even with Macartney
myself. I said, "Pick up Marcia and get into the house. You can talk
there!"
Macartney glanced at me. Secretly, perhaps, neither of us wanted to give
the other a chance by stooping for a heavy girl; I knew I was not going
to do it. But Paulette must have feared I was. She sprang past me and
lifted Marcia with smooth, effortless strength, as if she were nothing.
Macartney started, as though he realized he had been a fool not to have
done it himself, and wheeled to walk into the house before us, where he
could have slipped cartridges into his gun; I knew afterwards that it
was empty. But Paulette had moved off with Marcia and a peremptory
gesture of her back-flung head that kept Macartney behind her. I came
behind him. And because he had no idea of all I knew about him, he took
things as they looked on the surface. With Paulette leading, and me on
Macartney's heels, we filed into the living room. There was a light
there, but the fire was out. I guessed Charliet was hiding under his
bed,--in which I wronged him. But I was not worrying about Charliet or
cold rooms then. Paulette laid Marcia down on the floor, and I stood in
the doorway. I did not believe the bunk-house men would come back till
an open row suited Macartney's book, but there was no harm in commanding
the outside doors of the shack, all the same. And the sudden thought
that we were all in the living room but Dudley, and that he would never
come back to it, gripped my soul between fury and anguish. "Get it
out--about Dudley," I said; and I did not care if my voice were thick.
Macartney looked over at me just as an honest, capable superintendent
ought to have looked. "I can't; because I don't know it. All I do know's
this. After you went off yesterday Wilbraham got to drinking; the wolves
began to howl round the place after dark, and he said they drove him
mad. He got a gun and went out after them--and he never came back. I
didn't even know he was gone till midnight. I thought he'd shut himself
in his office as he often does, till I heard shots outside, and found
he wasn't in the house. I turned out the bunk-house men to look for him
that instant, and when the lot you saw waiting in the shack for me came
home toward morning, and said they couldn't find a sign of Wilbraham,
and the bush was so full of wolves they were scared to go on looking, I
went myself----"
"And took _girls_"--I remembered the reek of my wolf-doped clothes till
I fancied I could smell the stuff there in the room, thought of a half
drunk man walking out on a like baited track, and two girls taken over
it to look for him--"into bush like that!"
"They followed me," curtly. "I didn't know it till it was too late to
turn them back! I couldn't have sent Miss Wilbraham back, anyhow; she
was nearly crazy. And if you're thinking of wolves, it was getting
daylight, and----" he hesitated, and I could have filled in the pause
for myself, remembering how that wolf dope acted: two lambs could have
moved in the bush with safety, so long as they kept away from where it
was smeared on the ground. But Macartney filled it in differently. "And,
anyhow, it was well they did come. It was Marcia--found Wilbraham!"
I don't think I had really believed Dudley was dead till then. I stared
at Marcia, lying on the floor as purple in the face from over-exertion
and fright as if she had had an apoplectic fit, and at Paulette stooping
over her, silent, and white around the mouth. She looked up at me, and
her eyes gave me fierce warning, if I had needed it.
"Marcia got afraid and bolted for home--the wrong way," she spoke up
sharply. "When I ran after her she was standing in some spruces,
screaming and pointing in front of her. I saw the blood on the ground,
and----Here's Dudley's cap! I found it, all chewed, close by." She
pulled out a rag of fur from under her snow-caked sweater; and as the
stale reek of the Skunk's Misery wolf dope rose from the thing, I knew
the smell in the room had been no fancy, and how Dudley Wilbraham had
died. I wheeled and saw Macartney's face,--the face of a man who took me
for a fool whose nose would tell him nothing.
"D'ye mean _that_ was all you found?" I got out.
"No! The rest was there. But it was--unrecognizable! Even I couldn't
look at it. It was--pretty tough, for girls. I shot one wolf we scared
off it, but I couldn't do anything more. I couldn't lift--it;
but--Dudley's coat was on it." He had turned so white that I remembered
his faint in the assay office, like you do remember things that don't
matter. I would have thought him chicken-hearted for a wholesale
murderer, if it had not been for the cold hate in his eyes.
"D'ye mean you left Dudley--out there in the bush? Where the devil was
Baker, that black and white weasel you set to look after him? I'll bet
he saved _his_ skin! Where is he?"
"Baker's missing, too," simply; and I did not believe it. "And I don't
see what else I could have done but leave Dudley. None of the men were
with me to carry him in; it had begun to snow; and in another hour I
couldn't have kept the track back to La Chance. As it was, Miss Marcia
played out; I had to carry her most of the way. And that's all there is
to it," with sudden impatience, "except that Wilbraham's dead and
Baker's missing. If he wasn't, he would have brought Dudley in."
"Yes," I said. I saw Charliet's head poke around the corner of the
kitchen door and called to him to carry Marcia to her room, and to get
fires going and something to eat; for the queer part of it was that
there seemed to be two of me, and one of them was thinking it was
starving. It saw Charliet and my dream girl take Marcia out, and the
other me turned on Macartney.
"By gad, there's one thing more," I said slowly. "You don't have to go
on playing moving pictures, Dick Hutton, or using an alias either!
You've killed Dudley and Thompson, and for a good guess Dunn and
Collins, if I can't be sure--and you'd have had me first of all, if your
boulder and your wolf dope hadn't failed you on the Caraquet road!"
Macartney's furious, surprised oath was real. "I don't know what you
mean! Who on earth"--but he stammered on it--"Who d'ye mean by Hutton?"
"You," said I. "And if you're not he, I don't know why! There's no one
else who would have followed Paulette Valenka out here. I don't believe
what you've done's been all revenge on the girl you tried to get into
trouble about Van Ruyne's emeralds, or scare that Dudley would worm out
the truth about that, either: but if it was to jump the La Chance mine
too, you're busted! Your accident serial story won't go down. I knew
about your wolf dope business long ago, and do you suppose _this_," I
shoved Dudley's cap under his nose, "doesn't tell me how you limed the
trap you set for Dudley last night, or what you smeared on his clothes
when he was too drunk to smell it? I know what brought the wolves to
howl around this house, if I don't know how you shoved Dudley out to
them. I know it was a home-made raid you had down at the assay office,
and--I've been to Skunk's Misery!"
"Well?" said Macartney thickly.
"Well enough! I have Thompson's deuce of hearts you didn't see was
missing, when you gave me back his pack! With any luck I'll pay you out
for that, and our four mill men, _and_ Dudley; not here, where you can
fight and die quick, but outside--where they've things like gallows! Oh,
you would, would you?"
For his empty gun just missed me as he made a lightning jump to bring it
down on my head, and my left hand stopped him up just under the ear. I
ought to have shot him. I don't know why I held back. I was so mad with
rage when he dropped that I could have jumped on him like a lumberman
and tramped the heart out of him. But I only lit for the kitchen, and
Charliet's clothesline. As I got back and knelt down by the man who had
called himself Macartney, Thompson rose up before me, as he had sat in
that very room, playing his lonely solitaire; and the four dead men in
the assay office; and Dudley--only I had no grief for Dudley, because it
was drowned in rage. I bound Macartney round and round with the
clothesline, whether he was really Hutton or not,--and I meant to have
the truth out of him about that and everything else before I was done.
But when I had him gagged with kitchen towels while he was still knocked
out, I sat back on my heels to think; and I damned myself up and down
because I had not shot Macartney out of hand.
I had Macartney all right; but I had next door to nothing else, unless I
could find a safe place to jail him while I disposed of his men. Now, if
they chose to rush me, I could not hold the eight shack windows against
them, if Paulette and I might each hold a door. If I took to the bush
with Paulette and Marcia, _and_ Macartney, I had nowhere on earth to go.
There could be no piling that ill-assorted company on horses and putting
out for Caraquet, with the road choked with snow, even if I could have
got by Macartney's garrison at the Halfway. Crossing Lac Tremblant, that
by to-morrow would be lying sweetly level under a treacherous scum of
lolly and drifted snow, ready to drown us all like Thompson,--I cursed
and put that out of the question. That lake that was no lake offered
about as good a thoroughfare as rats get in a rain-barrel. Whereas, to
hold Macartney at La Chance till I downed his gang----
"By gad," I flashed out, "I can do it--in Thompson's abandoned stope!"
It was not so crazy as it sounds. Thompson's measly entrance tunnel
would only admit one man at a time, and I could hold it alone till
doomsday. Macartney could be safely jailed inside the stope till I had
wiped out his men; Paulette would be safe; and there remained no
doubtful quantities but Marcia and Charliet the cook. I guessed I could
scare Marcia and that Charliet would probably be on my side, anyway. If
he were and sneaked down now to provision the stope, the thing would be
dead easy, even to firewood, for Thompson had yanked in a couple of
loads of mine props and left them there. I lit out into the passage to
hunt Charliet and find out where the bunk-house men had gone to. But
there was no sign of either in the wind and snow outside the shack. I
bolted the door on the storm, turned for the kitchen, and saw my dream
girl standing outside Marcia's room.
She was dead white in the dim candlelight that shone through Marcia's
half-open door. I thought of that as I jumped to her, and I would have
done better to have thought of Marcia. I could see her from the passage,
lying on her bed, purple-faced still, and with her eyes shut. But one
glance was all I gave to Marcia. I said:
"For heaven's sake, Paulette, don't look like that! I'm top-sides with
Macartney now. Got him tied up. Come into the kitchen till I speak to
you. I want Charliet----" But as I pushed Paulette before me, into the
kitchen just across the passage from Marcia's room, I stopped speaking.
She was holding out Thompson's case of cards,--open, with that scrawled
two of hearts on the top!
"Charliet's gone--run away somewhere." Her chest labored as if she were
making herself go on breathing, "and you dropped--this! I ran out from
Marcia to see what you were doing with Macartney," she hesitated on the
name, "and you'd dropped this. I----You know Macartney killed Dudley,
really. Does this mean he killed _Thompson_, too?"
"You can say Macartney's real name," I snapped bitterly. "I've known he
was Dick Hutton ever since last night."
But Paulette only gasped, as if she did not care whether I knew it or
not, "Where--how--did you get these cards?"
I told her, and she gave a queer low moan. "Dudley's dead, and I'm past
crying." Her voice never rose when she was moved; it went down, to D
below the line on a violin. "I'm past everything, but wishing I was
dead, too, for I'm the reason that brought Dick Hutton here as
Macartney. Oh, you should have let me meet him that night! I wasn't only
going to meet him; I meant to go away with him before morning. It would
have been too late for poor, innocent old Thompson, but it would have
saved the four mill men--and Dudley!" She had said she was past crying,
but her voice thrilled through me worse than tears; and it might have
thrilled Marcia in her room across the passage, if I'd remembered
Marcia. "God knows Dudley was good to me--but it's no use talking of
that now. What have you done with Macart--with Dick Hutton--that you
said you had him safe for now?"
"Knocked him out; and tied him up with the clothesline, in the living
room--till I can take him out to Caraquet to be hanged!"
"You ought to have killed him," Paulette answered very slowly. "I would
have, when we found Dudley, only he'd taken my gun. At least, I believe
he had: he said I'd lost it. And I'm afraid, without it--while Dick
Hutton's alive!"
I looked at her ghastly face and behaved like a fool for the hundredth
time in this history; for I shoved my own gun into her hand and told her
to keep it, that I'd get another. I would have caught her in my arms if
it had not been for remembering Dudley, who was dead because the two of
us had held our tongues to him. "Look here," I said irrelevantly. "D'ye
know Marcia thinks Macartney wants to marry her?"
"He doesn't want to marry any one--except me," Paulette retorted
scornfully; and once more I should have remembered Marcia across the
passage, only I didn't. "He's made love to Marcia, of course, for a
blind, like he did everything else. If we could make her realize that
and that he killed Dudley as surely as if he'd lifted his own hand to
him----"
But I cut her off. "By gad, Paulette, what sticks me is what Macartney
did all this _for_!"
"Me," said Paulette very bitterly. "At least, at first; I'm not so sure
about it now. When I first met Dick we were in Russia. He'd got into
trouble over a copper mine--you've heard Macartney talk of the
Urals?"--if we both spoke of him as though he were two different men
neither of us noticed. "He came to me in Petrograd, penniless, and I
helped him. But when I came to America, alone, I turned him out of my
flat. He may have loved me, I don't know; but when I wouldn't marry him,
he said he'd make me; that he'd hound me wherever I went and disgrace
me, till I had to give in and come to him. And he _must_ have done it at
the Houstons', if I don't know how; for the police would take me now for
those emeralds I never stole, if they knew where I was. I can't see
where Dick could have been or how he managed the thing, but all the rest
Dudley told you and him about that night at the Houstons' was true. I
did give Van Ruyne sleeping stuff to keep him quiet while I got away,
but it was because it came over me--the second I knew those emeralds
were gone--that Dick must be in that house!--that if I didn't run away,
he'd come in and threaten me till I had to go with him. And I'd have
died first. I slipped out of the house unseen; and it was just the
Blessed Virgin," simply, "who made me find Dudley's car stalled outside
the Houstons' gate!"
"D'ye mean you'd known Dudley before?"
She nodded. "I'd met him: and I liked him, because he never made love to
me. He hadn't been at the Houstons' that night; he was only coming back
from Southampton alone, without any chauffeur. I knew no one would ever
think he'd helped me, so I just got into his car. But I never should
have let him bring me here," bitterly; "I should have known Dick would
find me, and play gold robberies here to pay Dudley out. He told me he
would, unless I'd go away with him--that first night you heard me
talking to him--but I didn't see how he could work it. I thought I could
tire him out by always balking him--till that night I didn't meet him,
and he killed those four men. Then I knew I couldn't fight him; and the
reason was that Dick's a finished mining engineer who never ran straight
in his life!"
"What?" I knew both things, only I saw no connection with Paulette.
But she nodded. "He could get good work anywhere, but he won't work
honestly. All he cares for is the excitement of big things he can get
at crookedly. That was why he tried a _coup_ with that copper mine in
the Urals and had to clear out of Russia. And the La Chance mine that he
came to contemptuously, and just to get hold of me, is a big thing too.
No--listen! You don't know how big, for you've been kept in the dark.
But Dick knows; and that's how I first knew I couldn't manage him any
more, and why I don't think it is I he has done all he has for, nor that
it was even to pay out Dudley. I believe it was to _get the mine_!"
"Then why, in heaven's name, didn't you tell Dudley who he was?"
"I couldn't make Dudley listen, at first. Then," very low, "I didn't
dare; I knew it would mean that Dudley would get killed. I never thought
that--would happen, anyway."
"There was me." I was stung unbearably. "You must have known ever since
the night I first came here that there was always me!"
"Y-you," she stumbled oddly on it. "I couldn't tell _you_! Can't you see
I was afraid, Nicky, that you might--get killed for me, too?"
For the first time that night she looked at me as if she saw me--me,
Nicky Stretton, dark, fierce and dirty--and not Dudley Wilbraham and the
dead. My name in that voice of hers would have caught me at my heart,
if I had dared to be thinking of her. But I was not. It had flashed
through me that Marcia's door had been half open when we went into the
kitchen,--and that now it was shut!
It was a trifling thing to make my heart turn over; but it did. I
covered the passage in two jumps to the living-room door. But as I flung
it open, all I had time to see was that the window was open too; with
Marcia standing by it in her horrible green shooting clothes, just as
she had lain on her bed, and a crowd of bunk-house men swarming through
the open sash behind her and Macartney,--Macartney, standing on his feet
without any clothesline, with his gun in his hand!
I saw, like you do see things, how it had all happened. I had misjudged
Macartney's intellect about the bunk-house men; he had had them within
call. But it was no one but Marcia who had let them in, and she had
freed Macartney. She had overheard Paulette and me in the kitchen, had
shut her door, slipped out of her own window and into the living room,
and cut Macartney's rope. She had no earthly reason to connect him with
Dudley's death, except the scraps of conversation she had overheard from
Paulette and me; she knew nothing of the bottle of wolf dope that had
been meant to smash in my wagon, or that Dudley--so full up with drink
and drugs that he could not have smelled even that mixture of skunks and
sulphide--could easily have been sent out reeking with it, into bush
that reeked of it too. And that second she screamed at me: "You lie,
Nicky Stretton; you, and that girl! He's not Hutton--he's Macartney!"
But Macartney fired full in my face.
It was Marcia's flying jump that made him miss me. Even though his very
cartridge was one of hers that she always carried in her pockets, and
must have been given to him the first thing, I don't think she had been
prepared to see me killed. I didn't wait to see. I was down the passage
to Paulette before Macartney could get in a second shot. As he, and some
of the bunk-house men tore out of the living room after me, I fired into
the brown mass of them with my own gun, that I snatched from Paulette. I
thought it checked them, and lit out of the kitchen door, into the wind
and the dark and the raving, swirling snow, with my dream girl's hand
gripped in mine. We plunged knee-deep, waist-deep through the drifts,
for our lives,--for mine, anyhow.
"Thompson's stope," I gasped; and she said yes. I couldn't see an inch
before me, but I think we would have made it, since Macartney could not
see, either. I knew we were far ahead of him, but that was all I did
know, till I heard myself shout to Paulette, "_Run!_"--and felt my legs
double under me. If something hit me on the head like a ton of brick I
had no sense of what had happened, as people have in books. I only
realized I had been knocked out when I felt myself coming to. Somehow it
felt quite natural to be deadly faint and sick, and lying flat, like a
log,--till I put out my hand and touched hard rock.
"I don't see how it's rock," I thought dully; "it ought to be snow!
Something hit me--out in the snow with Paulette!" And with that sense
came back to me, like a red-hot iron in my brain. I _had_ been out in
the snow with Paulette; one of Macartney's men must have hit me a swipe
on the head and got her from me. But--where in heaven's name was
Paulette now? The awful, sickening thought made me so wild that I
scrambled to my knees to find out in what ungodly hole I had been put
myself. I had been carried somewhere, and the rock under me felt like
the mine. But somehow the darkness round me did not smell like a mine,
where men worked every day. It smelt cold, desolate, abandoned, like----
And suddenly I knew where Macartney's men had carried me when I was
knocked out! It was no comfort to me that it was to the very place where
I had meant to jail Macartney and hide Paulette, where Charliet and I
were to have stood off Macartney's men.
"Thompson's stope," I gasped. "It's there Macartney's put me!" I
crawled, sick and dizzy, to what ought to have been the tunnel and the
tunnel entrance, opening on the storm out of doors. The tunnel was
there, all right. But as I fumbled to what ought to have been the open
entrance, stillness met me, instead of a rush of wind; piled rock met my
groping hands, instead of piled snow. I was in Thompson's abandoned
stope all right,--only Macartney had sealed up the only way I could ever
get out! I shoved, and dug, and battered, as uselessly as a rat in a
trap, and suddenly knew that was just what I was! Macartney had not even
taken the trouble to kill me,--not to avoid visible murder at this stage
of the game, when only the enemy was left, if you did not count a duped
woman and a captured one; but for the sheer pleasure of realizing the
long, slow death that must get me in the end.
"Die here--I've got to die here," I heard my own voice in my ears.
"While----My God, Paulette! Macartney's got Paulette!"
And in the darkness behind me somebody slipped on a stone.
I had not thought I could ever feel light and fierce again. I was both,
as I swung round.