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Updated: May 28, 2025
But all I cared for was that he should see me and come out after me on the crust of snow and lolly over Lac Tremblant, that would never carry him without the snowshoes he did not have and give Paulette her chance to get away. I yelled at him and skimmed out over the trembling ice like a bird. Neither Macartney nor his men had stirred in that one flying glance I had dared take at them.
"I don't mean the letter," I said absently. "It's that about Lac Tremblant. Thompson was scared blue of that lake; he used to beg me not to go out on it. And by gad, Dudley, I don't see how he could have come that way! He couldn't paddle a canoe!" "What?" Macartney started, staring at me. "You're right: he couldn't," he said slowly.
Also the canoe was leaking till she was dead logy, and the gusts were so fierce I could not stop paddling to bail her. The short, vicious seas that snapped at me five ways at once were the color of lead and felt as heavy as cold molasses. But, for all that, crossing Lac Tremblant was saving me twenty-two miles on my feet, and I was not wasting any dissatisfaction on the traverse.
I might have been sick anywhere else. I was fierce with joy out there in Lac Tremblant, running with a girl over the thin crust under which death lurked to snatch at us, as it had snatched at Macartney's men. Neither of us spoke. I was thinking too hard. I could have run indefinitely as we were running, but Paulette was just a girl.
The five-mile crossing I was making was just a fair sample of the forty miles of length Lac Tremblant stretched mockingly past the La Chance mine toward the main road from Caraquet our nearest settlement to railhead: and that was forty miles of queer water, sown with rocks that were sometimes visible as tombstones in a cemetery and sometimes hidden like rattlesnakes in a blanket.
Dudley had no use for expert assistance or for advice. And it was a simple looking place. The shore of Lac Tremblant there ran back flat to a hill, a quarter of a mile from the water, with a solid rock face like a cliff. Along that cliff face came first Dudley's shack, then Thompson's tunnel, then a good way farther down the bunk house, the mill, and a shanty Dudley called the assay office.
I trust you can see your way to taking me back, in no matter how subordinate a position, at least till I can hear of something else. If I am obliged to chance coming to you I will take the shortest route, avoiding Caraquet, and coming by Lac Tremblant. "Yours truly, "That's funny," I let out involuntarily. And Dudley snapped at me that it wasn't; it was ghastly.
To a stranger there might have seemed to be nothing particular to stare at, out on a lake where the world was all wind and lumpy seas and growing November twilight; but any one who had lived at La Chance knew better. By the map Lac Tremblant should have been our nearest gold route to civilization, but it was a lake that was no lake, as far as transport was concerned, and we never used it.
"Wilbraham expected me a week ago. But I don't walk any twenty-two miles! I'll take your old canoe and a short cut across the lake." I was the only man who ever used Lac Tremblant, and the foreman of the Halfway stables cast a glance on me. "If it was me, I'd walk," he remarked drily. "But take your choice.
There was one place in Lac Tremblant where, high water or low, a man might always stand if I could hit it in the smothering, featureless snow. "The island!" I gasped out loud. Because there was one a high, narrow island without even a bush on it rising gradually, not precipitately like the rest of the rocks in Lac Tremblant, out of the uncertain water.
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