"You didn't see anything of Dunn or Collins between here and Caraquet—or hear from Billy Jones that they'd gone by the Halfway?"
"No," I fenced with a bland, lying truth. "I saw two of our teamsters at the Halfway!"
Dudley shook his head. "Not them—I knew about them! But Dunn and Collins cleared out the day you left, and I thought——" he broke off irrelevantly. "What the dickens possessed you to take Paulette with you that night? She might have been killed—I heard you'd the dog's own trouble on the road!"
That something inside me stiffened up. Whatever he'd heard, I was pretty certain was not all; and I was hanged if I were coming out with the full story of that crazy drive till I knew whether Paulette came into it. I had no desire to talk before Macartney either, in spite of what he might have found out, or guessed; no matter what Paulette might have been mixed up in I was not going to have a stern-faced, set-eyed Macartney put her through a catechism about it. Or Dudley either, for that matter. I had no real voucher for the terms he and Paulette were on, except Marcia's word; and Dudley was no man to trust not to turn on a girl.
"We shot a few wolves, if that's what you mean," I said roughly. "I don't see why that should have worried you about Miss Paulette—or what it has to do with Dunn and Collins!"—which was a plain lie.
"Few wolves! I know all about them!" Dudley retorted viciously. "Billy Jones's wife came out with the plain truth—that you'd been chased by a pack! And as for what Dunn and Collins had to do with my worrying about the gold you carried, it's simple enough. They——" but he stopped, chewing two fingers with a disgusting trick he had. "By gad," he looked up suddenly, "I believe it was them the wolves were after to begin with, Stretton—before they got started on you! And it wasn't what they left La Chance for!"
"What d'ye mean?"
Dudley was chewing his fingers again, but Macartney answered with his usual set-eyed openness. "The gold," he supplied. "I got an idea those two deserters might have laid up beside the Caraquet road somewhere, to wait for you and get it. I had trouble with them over some drilling the morning you left; and when I went back to the stope after seeing you and Miss Paulette off, they'd cleared out. They must have gone a couple of hours before you did. They let out something about hold-ups while I was having the trouble with them, and Wilbraham and I got worried they might have managed to get over the road before you, and be lying up for you somewhere."
"They only left—two hours before I did," said I, with flat irrelevance. I must have stared at Macartney like a fool, but he had knocked the wind clean out of me as to Collins having been the man in the swamp. With only two hours' start neither he nor Dunn, nor any man, for matter of that, could have legged it over my road in time to lie up in the only place I knew some one had laid up,—on the corduroy road.
"Well, they didn't get me, and I never saw them," I began,—and suddenly remembered that ghastly noise, like the last flurry of a dog fight, that had halted the wolves on my track. My first thought of it, and of Dunn and Collins, had been right. "By gad, I believe I heard them though," I exclaimed, "and if they were on that road they're killed and eaten! But I didn't have any trouble about the gold."