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"Don't talk of it, will you?" he bellowed. "I did think you'd be all right, but I was in hell for those girls till I could get to Caraquet and take back help for them! Only this cursed snow stopped me. We had to wait till it was packed enough for Baker to sneak down to the Halfway and steal a couple of my own horses, for us to ride to Caraquet.
All he had to do with would-be prospectors was to chuck them out. He had got in ten stamps for his mill over the road I had built from Caraquet, and since Macartney arrived was milling stuff whose net result made me stare, after the miserable, two-dollar ore old Thompson had broken my heart with. "So you see, we're made," Dudley finished simply.
Take your hand off me!" I tightened it. "You'll stay here! Please! And you can't go on preventing me from meeting Hutton, either. What about the first time I take any gold out over the Caraquet road and he and his gang try a hold-up on me?" I said gang without thinking, for I was naturally dead sure he had one. But I was not prepared to have the cork come straight out of the bottle.
"What happened about him?" I had had no chance to ask before. "Oh, I never could stand him," and I knew it was true. "Sitting all the evening playing cards like a performing dog! And he wasn't fit for his work, either. I told him so, and he said he'd go. He went out to Caraquet nearly a month ago I thought you knew. D'ye mean you didn't see him going through?" I shook my head.
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.
"You own she doesn't know anything about Macartney's wolf dope; you haven't any witnesses to prove he tried it on your wagon, or to set the wolves on Dudley. Miss Marcia would just up and swear your whole story was a lie and all Caraquet would believe her! Nobody alive ever heard of such a thing as wolf dope!" "That's just where you're wrong!"
There were not any work horses at the Halfway, because he had doubled up the teams for some heavy hauling from Caraquet, according to my orders sent over from Caraquet the week before, and no horses had been sent back from La Chance since.
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.
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!"
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!
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