There was a silence. "I see yeh!" He took unsteady aim at a shadow and fired. "Never mind, I'll get yeh!" After a little while he stumbled onward between the boulders, shouting a challenge to his invisible opponent. He had gone perhaps fifty feet when the darkness was stabbed by the blaze of Slevin's gun. Three times the weapon spoke, at little more than arm's-length, and Black Jack spun on his heels, then rocked forward limply. It was a long time before the sound of his loud, slow breathing ceased. Not until then did Denny Slevin move. With a rattle in his throat the foreman crept out from hiding and went down the mountain-side upon his hands and knees.
It occasioned considerable speculation at the Aurora Borealis when neither the superintendent nor the foreman appeared for breakfast. Later, a telephone message to Doctor Slayforth having elicited the startling intelligence that neither man had been seen in town during the night, there came a flicker of excitement. This excitement blazed to white heat when Slayforth rode up on a muddy horse, accompanied by the town marshal and the chief of police. Followed more telephoning and some cross-examination. But the men were gone. They had disappeared.
It was a mystery baffling any attempt at explanation, for there were no ships in the roadstead, and hence it was impossible for the pair to have taken French leave. While a search party was being organized there came word that the missing saddle-horses had been found on the slope of Anvil Mountain, and by the time Slayforth's party had reached the ground more news awaited them. Up near the head of the draw some one had discovered the body of Denny Slevin. There was a rush thither, and thence on up the trail Slevin had left, to the scene of the twilight duel, to Black Jack Berg and the cache in the slide.
The story told itself down to the last detail; it was the story of a thieves' quarrel and a double killing. Doctor Slayforth fell upon his bag of gold as a mother falls upon her babe; he voiced loud, hysterical condemnation of the deed; he wept tears of mingled indignation and thanksgiving; he gabbled scriptural quotations about the wages of sin. Then, remembering that the wages of his men were going on, he sent them back to their work, and determined to dock half their morning's pay.
The story of the tragedy was still the sensation of Nome when, a fortnight later, Laughing Bill Hyde showed up in town with the cheerful announcement that he had been fired. Ponatah was at the cabin when he arrived, and she did not try to conceal her joy at seeing him again.
"I've been so unhappy," she told him. "You've never been out of my thoughts, Billy."
"Ain't you got nothing better to think about than me?" he asked, with a smile. "Well, the psalm-shouter let me out—jerked the piller-slip from under me, you might say—and turned me adrift. He's got a high-chested, low-browed Swede in my place. It takes a guy with hair down to his eyebrows to be a buck chamber-maid."
"The old rascal!" Ponatah's face darkened with anger. "No wonder those men robbed him. I wish they had taken all his gold, and escaped."
"You're pretty sore on his heavenly nibs, ain't you?" Ponatah clenched her hands and her eyes blazed. "Well, you got this consolation, the Aurora ain't as rich as it was."
"It would have been rich enough for us."