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Updated: July 18, 2025
"Oh, you're frozen stiff," she said with a kind of dismayed sympathy. "And I heard Mr. Wilbraham say some one had forgotten to send out your horse for you, and that you'd probably walk the whole way from Caraquet! You must be tired to death. Please come to the fire and get warm now you've come home!"
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!
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.
As I rode back to Billy Jones's I would have given a deal for any kind of a motor car that would have reduced the twenty-seven miles to Caraquet into nothing, instead of an all-day job, which it proved to be. Not that I met a soul on the road. I didn't.
Even as it was, I determined to do no forwarding from Caraquet till I knew what something on them meant. For on each box, just as I had expected even before I heard Paulette Brown say she had marked them, was a tiny seal in blue wax! The reason for any seal knocked me utterly, but I couldn't wait to worry over it.
"You wouldn't have left any tracks," he said, picking up what I'd just said in his everyday manner, if it had not been for the dog's grin he always wore when he was angry, "if I hadn't run on single snowshoe tracks carrying double, where you crossed the Caraquet road. And if one of you hadn't trailed your shoe tails through Skunk's Misery that doesn't wear them!"
How Macartney said the wolves had howled around the shack till their noise drove Dudley distracted, and he had slipped out after them unnoticed, with a gun; that Macartney, the two girls and half the men had gone to look for him, when he never returned, till Paulette found his wolf-doped cap torn up by the Caraquet road, and Marcia found him, in the bush unrecognizable but for what rags of his sable-lined coat were left on his body.
Paulette clutched me till I bit my lip to keep steady. "His gang's what I'm afraid of for Dudley," she gasped, which certainly steadied me like a bucket of ice. "Look here, when first I met Dick, he told me things, to frighten me that he'd eighteen or twenty men laid up between here and Caraquet enough to raid us here, even, if he chose.
He looked at Macartney significantly, and I remembered the question he had rapped at me when I came in. Something inside me told me to hold my tongue concerning my adventures on the Caraquet road till I knew what Paulette had said about them, which I was pretty certain was mighty little.
"D'ye mean you think he never went to Caraquet?" It was a stupid question, for, of course, I knew he had gone there, and farther, or he could not have sent Macartney to La Chance, or a letter to Dudley now.
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