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And as for a witness, I've a boy cached at Skunk's Misery who can prove Macartney made the same stuff there. The only thing we might get stuck on in Caraquet is the reason for all the murders he's done with, and without it!"
"My soul," I thought, galvanized, "she can't be she must be coming with me to Caraquet!" Why comest thou to ride with me? "The road, this night, is dark." Dost thou and thine then side with me? "Ride on, ride on and hark!" The Night Ride. There she sat, anyhow, alone except for Macartney, who stood at the horses' heads.
I say again, let's get a sheriff and posse at Caraquet, and come back here and get Macartney! We could do it, if we took Miss Paulette and hit the trail to-night." "And Macartney'd get us, if we tried it!" I had thrashed all that out in my head before, while I was tying up Macartney with Charliet's clothesline.
He guessed affably that some one might be driving over from the mine in the morning, and that after tramping from Caraquet I had better stay where I was for the night. I hesitated. I was dog-tired for once in my life, but I had not done any tramp from Caraquet that day, if I had told the bald truth.
And Macartney gave me the despairing glance of a sensible man who had tried his best to head off a girl's silly whim, and failed. "It's as you like," he said to her, not to me. "But you understand you can't get back to-night, if you go to Caraquet. And Good heavens you ought not to go, if you want the truth of it!
"That's one thing we don't keep loose on the doorsteps," Macartney returned drily, and I rather liked him for it, since he knew nothing of my share in the mine. But Dudley snapped at him: "Why can't you say it's in the house in my office? Stretton's going to take it into Caraquet; there's no sense in making a mystery to him. Come on, Stretton, and have a look at it now!"
It was Paulette he was waiting for, when he lied to me about a strange man. And he had gone straight down to the assay office, done his own alarm of a robber, and killed four men to give it artistic truth. It was no wonder he had said he was sick of playing in moving pictures and grinned at me when I left La Chance to search the Caraquet road for nobody else but himself.
"With what's there, and what you and Wilbraham have in his office, we've too much around to be healthy," he observed succinctly, "and I guess some one's got wind of it. I don't know that it'll be any healthier for you to try running it out to Caraquet and get held up on the road! But I suppose it's got to go." I nodded.
It lay in the bush, in a slanting line between Caraquet and Lac Tremblant: a nest of thriftless evil stuck in a hollow you might pass within twenty yards of, and never guess held a house.
But I was not prepared to find the Halfway stable empty, when I rode in there just at dark. The house was as deserted as the stable, though the fire was alive in the stove, and taking both things together, I decided Billy and his wife had taken a four-horse team into Caraquet for a load. I had meant to borrow one of his horses to go on to Skunk's Misery, for this time I intended to ride there.
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