Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: July 4, 2025
Somebody running, slipping, with a hideous clatter of stones was coming down the long passage Collins called his back door. "Macartney," said I, "and Charliet's given us away!" And with the words in my mouth I had Paulette around the waist and shoved out of sight behind the boulder that separated Collins's cave from his tunnel and the pierced wall of Thompson's stope.
Collins's long passage had wormed behind Thompson's stope, behind the La Chance stables; and it was no wonder he had found it easy enough to get supplies from Charliet. All he had to do was to cross the clearing from the jutting rock that shielded his private entrance and walk into Charliet's kitchen door. I moved toward it, and Collins grabbed at me through the smothering snow.
Some one had flung open the kitchen door and fired a charge of buckshot out into the night. I heard it scatter over my head, and a burst of uproar on its heels told me Charliet's kitchen was crowded with Macartney's men. Somebody not Charliet shouted over the noise, "What the devil's that for?" And another voice yelled something about wolves and firing to scare them.
He stuck his fat little arm through mine, and we went back to the house by the back door and Charliet's untidy kitchen. It was the shortest way, and it was not till afterwards that I remembered it was not commanded by the window in his office, like the front way.
Anyhow, you've got Macartney's gun! You can go ahead and see." But I had no need to. An abandoned picket has a way of knowing when the game is up, and Macartney's men had cleared out on the double, even before Charliet's first rifle bullet missed them. We caught them afterwards, half dead in the bush, but that doesn't come in here.
I stumbled to my window to open it Charliet's lamp had burned out while I was at supper and the room was stifling and a sudden queer sense that some one or something was under my window made me stand there without raising it. And there was some thing, anyway. The windows in the shack were about a yard above the ground.
I had one arm round her by that time, feeding her with my other hand like a child, with bits of bread soaked in black coffee. If I had any thoughts they were only fear that she might move from me as soon as she really came to herself. But Charliet's name brought me back from what was next door to heaven. "Charliet," said I blankly; "where in the world is he?
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.
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.
"It's a mighty dangerous thing calling up Charliet on number one Wolf, with the whole of La Chance crawling with Macartney and his gang, hunting for Miss Paulette. But we can go up to the back door and try it!" "Oh, no," Paulette burst out wildly, "I'm afraid! I mean I know we must find out first if Charliet's all right, but you mayn't get him and you'll give yourselves away!"
Word Of The Day
Others Looking