The La Chance Mine Mystery

by Susan Morrow Jones

Thompson it was, if it seemed incredible. And Billy Jones exclaimed, as he pointed to him, "He can't have been dead longer than since last night! And I can't understand this thing, Mr. Stretton! It's but six weeks since Thompson left here; and from what he said he didn't mean to come back. He told me he was in a hurry to get away, because he was taking a position in a copper mine in the West. I remember I warned him you hadn't got all your swamps corduroyed, and likely he couldn't drive clear into Caraquet; so he left his wagon here and borrowed a saddle from me to ride over. And a boy brought his horse back next day, or day after,—I forget which. I remember Thompson forgot to send me a tin of tobacco he promised to get me off Randall, at Caraquet!"

"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. But what I was really thinking of was that I had been right about the date old Thompson left the mine, and that he had gone over my road on one of the two days I was away with all my road men, getting logs out of the bush.

Billy Jones scattered my thoughts impatiently: "Oh, he went there all right. It's his—coming back—that beats me!"

It beat me too, for reasons Billy knew nothing about. Why Thompson had come back was his own business; but it was plain he had been dead a scant twenty-four hours, and the only place I could think of where he was likely to have been killed was on my corduroy road the night before. Only I did not see how Thompson's clothes could have got water-soaked in a frozen swamp; and I did not see, either, what a decent man like Thompson could have been doing out there like a wolf, with wolves. I had more sense than to think he could have had any truck with Collins about our gold. I nodded back at the teamsters: "Where did they find him?"

"They didn't find him," returned Billy simply, "it was my hound dog. He was yelling down at the lake shore this morning, like he'd treed a wildcat, and when I went down it was Thompson he'd found,—lying right on shore in the daylight! You know how that fool Lac Tremblant behaves; the water in it had gone down to nothing this morning, and on the bare stones it had left was Thompson. Only I don't see how he ever got there unless he was coming back, from wherever he'd been outside, by Lac Tremblant instead of your road!"

"Where was his canoe?"

"He didn't have any! But you know that lake—it might have smashed his canoe on him like an egg, and then—just by chance—put him ashore!" I did know: I had had all I wanted to keep from being smashed myself the night I crossed to La Chance. I nodded, and Billy choked. "It—it kind of sickened me this morning; I liked Thompson, Mr. Stretton!"

So had I, if I had laughed at his eternal solitaire. Billy and I laid him on the bed, decently, after we had done what we could for him. And I was ashamed to have even wondered if he had been the man Paulette had shot at on the La Chance road; for there was not a mark on him, and a fool could have told he had just been drowned in Lac Tremblant. There was nothing in his pockets to tell how he had got there: only a single two-dollar bill and a damp pack of cards in a wet leather case. Thompson's solitaire cards! Somehow the things gave me a lump in my throat; I wished I had talked more to Thompson in the long evenings. The letter in my pocket from him was Dudley's, and I did not mention it to Billy. I said I would try to find out where the dead man had come from, and anything else I could, before he buried him. And with that I left old Thompson lying on Billy's bed with his face covered, and rode home to La Chance.

When I got in, Dudley and Macartney were in the living room, talking. Any other time I might have wondered why Dudley looked so jumpy and bad-tempered, but all I was thinking of then was my ugly news. But before I could tell it, Dudley flew at me. "Where the devil have you been all day? And what's happened to my gold?"

I don't know why, but I had a furious, cold qualm that either Dudley or Macartney had found out,—I don't mean about Collins so much as about Paulette having been mixed up with him. Till I knew I was damned if I'd mention him.