The La Chance Mine Mystery

CHAPTER IX

TATIANA PAULINA VALENKA!

Poor old Thompson seemed a closed incident. There was nothing to be found out about him, even regarding his departure from La Chance. Nobody remembered his going through Caraquet, or even the last time he had been there. He was not a man any one would remember, anyhow, or one who had made friends. We put a notice of his death and the circumstances in a Montreal paper, and I thought that was the end of it all, till Dudley, to my surprise, stuck obstinately to his idea of tracing Thompson from Montreal. He told Macartney and me that he had written to a detective about it, and I think we both thought it was silly. I know I did; and I saw Macartney close his lips as though he kept back the same thought. But we gave old Thompson the best funeral we could, over at the Halfway, with a good grave and a wooden cross. All of us went except Marcia. She said she had never cared about the poor old thing, and she wasn't going to pretend it.

It was a bitter day, with no snow come yet. Macartney looked sick and drawn about the mouth as he stood by the grave, while Dudley read the prayers out of Paulette's prayer book. I saw her notice Macartney when I did, and I think neither of us had guessed he had so much feeling. I stayed a minute or two behind the others, because I'd ridden over, instead of driving with them; and just before I started for La Chance I remembered that torn scrap of paper in my room there. I turned hastily to Billy Jones.

"Those solitaire cards of Thompson's," said I, from no reason on earth but that to find them had been the last request of the dead man, even if it did sound crazy. "I'd like them!"

Billy nodded and went into his shack. Presently he came out and said the cards were gone. He thought he'd put them away somewhere, but they weren't to be found. It was queer, too, because he remembered replacing them in their prayer-book sort of case after he'd spread them by the stove to dry with Thompson's clothes. But his wife said she would find them and send them over. Which she never did, and I forgot them. Goodness knows I had reason to.

I did an errand instead of going straight home from Thompson's funeral that took me into the bush not far from where the boulder had been placed on my road. It was there or near by I had heard wolves pull down a man or men; and after I'd tied my horse and done a little looking around, I found the spot. It was not the scattered bones of two men that sickened me, or even that the long thighs and shanks of one of them were the measure of Collins. It was the top of a skull, with the hair still on it. I did not need the face that was missing. Dunn, with his eternal chuckle, had had stubbly fair hair without a part in it, clipped close till it stood on end, – and the same fair hair was on the top of the skull that lay like a round stone in the frozen bush. Whether the two had set out to rob me I didn't know. I did know they had not done it, and that the man Paulette had shot at in the swamp was more of a mystery than ever.

The ground was too hard to do any burying. I made the bones into a decent heap and piled rocks into a cairn over them. If I said a kind of a prayer, too, it was no one's business but that of the God who heard me; the boys had been young, and they were dead while I lived, which was enough to make a man pray. I felt better when I had done it.

But when I got home to La Chance the bald story I told Dudley was wasted. He swore I was a fool, first, for burying two skulls with no faces and imagining they belonged to Dunn and Collins; and next that they were still alive and meaning to run a hold-up on us. From where, or how, he couldn't say. But he kept on at the thing; and the minute he had half a drink in him – which was usually the first thing in the morning – he began to worry me to go out and find where they were cached and hike them out of it; and he kept at it all day. That would not have worried me much since it was only Dudley, and Macartney and the others believed my story; but everything else at La Chance began to go crooked, and every one's nerves got edgy. Marcia was unpleasantly silent, except when Macartney was there, when she sat in his pocket and they talked low like lovers, – only that I was always idiotically nervous they might be talking about Paulette Brown. That was seldom enough though, for half the time Macartney never showed up, even for meals. He was working like ten men over the mine, and good, solid, capable work at that. Whatever had made poor Thompson send him to us he was worth his weight in the gold he was getting out of La Chance in – Well, in chunks! Which was one of the reasons he had to work so hard, and brings me to the naked trouble at La Chance.

We were deadly short of men. Not only were Dunn and Collins dead, but their grisly end seemed to have scared the others. Not a day went by that three or four of them did not come for their time, chiefly rockmen and teamsters, – for we had no ore chute at La Chance. Macartney thought it was Dudley's fault, for nagging around all the time, and was sore over it. Dudley said it was Macartney's, though when I pressed him he said, too, that he did not know why. The men I spoke to before they left just said they'd had enough of La Chance, but I could feel a sulky underhand rebellion in the bunk house. I ran the ore hauling as best I could, and Macartney doubled up the work in the mill. The ore-feeder acted as crusher-man, too, the engineer was his own fireman, which, with the battery man and the amalgamator, brought the mill staff down to four, – but they were the best of our men. The others Macartney turned to with the rockmen, and in the course of a fortnight he got a few more men from somewhere he wrote to outside. They were a rough lot; not troublesome, but the kind of rough that saves itself backache and elbow grease. Personally, I think they would not have worked at all, if Macartney had not put the fear of death in them. I caught him at it, and though I did not hear what he said in that competent low voice of his, there was no more lounging around and grinning from our new men. But the trouble among the old men kept on till we had none of them left except the four in the mill. It did not concern me particularly, except that I had to work on odd jobs that should not have concerned me either, and I did not think much about it. What I really did think about – and it put me out of gear more than anything else at La Chance – was Paulette Brown!

It had been all very well to call her my dream girl and to think I'd got to heaven because she'd taken the trouble to drive to the Halfway with me and fight wolves. But she had hardly spoken to me since. And – well, not only the bones and skull I'd buried had smashed up my theory that it was only Collins who'd meant to hold up my gold, but I'd smashed it up, for myself, for a reason that made me wild: Paulette Brown, whose real name Marcia swore was something else, was still meeting a man in the dark! Where, I couldn't tell, but I knew she did meet him; and naturally I knew the man was not Collins, or ever had been. I did my best to get a talk with her, but she ran from me like a rabbit. I was worried good and hard. For from what I'd picked up, I knew the man she met could be nobody at La Chance, – and any outsider who followed a girl there likely had a gang with him and meant business, not child's play like Collins.

The thing was serious, and I had no right to be trusting my dream girl and keeping silence to Dudley, but I went on doing it. There is no sense in keeping things back. I was mad with love for her, and if she had given me a chance I would have brushed Dudley out of my way like a straw. I had to grip all the decency I had not to do it, anyway. But if you think I just made an easy resignation of her and sat back meekly, you're wrong. I sat back because I was helpless and too stupid to formulate any way to deal with the situation. I don't know that I was any more silent than I always am, though Marcia said so. I did get into the way of pretending to write letters in the evenings, while Marcia and Macartney talked low, and Dudley went up and down the room in his eternal trudge of nervousness, throwing a word now and then to Paulette seated sewing by the fire, – that I kept my back to so that the others could not see my face.

But one night, nearly a month after Thompson was buried, I came in after supper, and Paulette was in my usual place. She was writing a letter or something, and Dudley was preaching to Macartney about the shortage of men in the bunk house. Marcia, cross as two sticks because she was only there to talk to Macartney herself, had Paulette's seat by the fire. I sat down by the table where Paulette was writing, more sideways than behind her.

If I had chosen to look I could have read every word she was writing. But naturally I was not choosing to, for one thing, and for another my eyes were glued to her face. Something in the look of her gave me a sick shock. She was deadly pale, and under the light of Charliet's half-trimmed lamp I saw the blue marks under her eyes, and the tight look round the nostrils that only come to a woman's face when she is fighting something that is pretty nearly past her, and is next door to despair. She looked hunted; that was the only word there was for it. It struck me that look must stop. If I had to march her out into the bush with me by force next morning, I meant to get a solitary talk with her; find out what her mysterious business was at La Chance with a man who had laid up for our gold; and, with any luck, transfer the hunted look to the face of the man who was hounding her, – for I felt certain he was still hanging around La Chance.

After that – but there could be no after that to matter to me, with a dream girl who scooted to Dudley every time I tried to speak to her! I took a half-glance at him, and it was plain enough he would be no good to her in the kind of trouble that was on now. If I couldn't have her – since she didn't want me – I was the only person who could help her. She was angel-sweet to Dudley, heaven knows, and he was charming to her when he was himself. When he was not, he had a patronizing, half-threatening way of speaking to her, as if he knew something ugly about her, as Marcia had insinuated, that made me boil. She never resented it either, and that made me boil too. If I had ever seen her even shrink from him, I don't know that the curb bit I had on myself would have held. I wished to heaven she would shrink and give me a chance to step in between her and a man who might love her, as Marcia said, but who loved drink and drugs better, or he would not have been talking between silliness and sobriety, as he was that night. And I was so busy wishing it that Marcia spoke to me three times before I heard her.

"Nicky, do make Dudley shut up," she repeated, "he won't let any one else speak! He's been preaching the whole evening that Collins and Dunn aren't dead, only laid up somewhere round and making the other men desert, and you ought to go and find them – and now he's worrying us about that old idiot Thompson, who got himself drowned! For heaven's sake tell him no one would have bothered to murder the old wretch!"

"Nobody ever thought he was murdered, and I buried Dunn and Collins right enough," said I absently, with my thoughts still on Paulette. But Dudley whisked around on me.

"Marcia's talking rot," he exclaimed, his little pig's eyes soberer than I expected. "I don't mean about those two boys, for I bet they're no more dead than I am, and it would be just like them to lie low and set up a smothered strike among the men as soon as you were ass enough to be taken in by some stray bones! But I do mean it about Thompson. There's no sense in saying there was nothing queer about the way he came back and was found dead – because there was! It was natural enough that the police couldn't trace him in Montreal, for I hadn't a sign of data to give them: but it's darned unnatural that I can't trace him in Caraquet. I've sieved the whole place upside down, and nobody ever saw Thompson after he left Billy Jones's that morning on his way to Caraquet!"

Macartney stared at him for a minute; then he put down the pipe he was smoking. "If I thought that, I'd sieve the whole place upside down, too," he said so quietly that I remembered Thompson had been his best friend, and that he had looked deadly sick beside his grave. "But I don't. What it comes to with me is that no one remembers seeing Thompson in Caraquet that particular time, but no one says he wasn't there!"

"Then where's the – " But Dudley checked himself quick as light. If I had been quite sure he was himself I should have been curious about what he had meant to say. But all he substituted was: "Well, nobody remembers seeing him that day, anyway, except Billy Jones!"

"Seems to me that narrows poor Thompson's potential murderers down to Billy Jones," said Macartney ironically, since Billy Jones would not have murdered the meanest yellow pup that ever walked, and Macartney knew it as well as I did. But Dudley made the two of us sit up.