The La Chance Mine Mystery

by Susan Morrow Jones

I had stopped Paulette from going away with him the night before, after she thought she had burned the note she had meant to slip into his hand; but he must have told her, outside in the passage, when I thought he was sending a message to Marcia, that if she did not go with him then—in the next hour—he would begin trouble that very night for Dudley and La Chance.

And he had! 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.

As for his gang, the very bunk-house men he had told me to order out of the assay office, were just Macartney's own gang from Skunk's Misery, come over when they had silenced Thompson forever; at Macartney's elbow whenever he chose to murder the lot of us and commandeer the La Chance mine. I wished, irrelevantly, that Dunn and Collins had got to Macartney, instead of being killed on the way; they might have been chancy young devils about stealing gold, but they would never have stood for murdering old Thompson! It was no good thinking of that, though.

I stowed away Thompson's deuce of hearts, that no boy had ever come for, in the case with those other pitiful cards he had told me to search, and got on my feet with only one thought in my head,—to get back to La Chance and my dream girl that Macartney was alone with, except for Dudley,—Dudley whom he hated, who had threatened him for Paulette Valenka, for Thompson, till it was no wonder I had found him with the face of a devil where he lurked eavesdropping in the shack hall. And there something else hit me whack. Baker, Dudley's jackal, was one of Macartney's gang: told off, for all I knew, to put him out of the way! I wheeled to get out of that damn lean-to quicker than I had got in; and instead I stood rooted to the floor. Below me, somewhere underground, somebody was moving!

Naturally, I knew it could not be Macartney, because he could not have got there, even if he had not had other fish to fry at home. But one of his gang might have been left at Skunk's Misery and could have the life choked out of him. There was no way leading underground directly from the lean-to, or I would have been caught the night I slept there and believed real voices were a dream. I slid out of the door, around the boulder that backed the place, and was afraid of my lantern. I went down on my hands and knees to feel for a track and found one, down a gully that ran in under a blind rock. I crawled down it, all but flat, as I burrowed like a rabbit, with my back scraping against the living rock between me and the sky, and my head turned to the place where I knew the lean-to stood. I was under it with no warning whatever; in a natural, man-high cellar I could stand up in, with half a dozen bolt holes running off it: and I had no need to flash up my lantern to see them. There was a light in the place already from a candle-end Macartney's men must have left behind; and beside it, not looking at me, not even hearing my step, because he was sobbing his heart out, lay the boy I had carried home from the Caraquet road!

"Thompson's boy, who took his horse to Billy—who never came back!" I said to myself. God knows I touched him gently, but he screamed like a shot rabbit till he saw my face.

"You?" said I. "What's the matter with you? Brace up; it's only me!"

Brace up was just what he did not do. He sank back with every muscle of him relaxed. "Bon Dieu, I thought you was him come back," he gasped in his bastard French Indian, "that man that half killed me on the Caraquet road! But it wasn't him I was crying about. It was the other man—that promised me two dollars for something."

"To come back and take a letter—where you had taken his horse?"

The boy—I did not even know his name—nodded, with a torrent of sullen patois. He had never come for his two dollars, and now the man was gone and he would never get it. But it was not his fault. The first man—the one who had sent him to the Halfway with the horse—had caught him crawling back for the letter, had told him the man who was going to pay him had gone away long ago, and had taken him out to chop firewood and let a tree fall on him. How the lad had ever crawled out to the Caraquet road I did not ask. I think the thing that stabbed me was that I had been within five hundred yards of Thompson all the time I was nursing this very boy, that the knowledge of it had lain behind unconscious lips within a hand's breadth of me, that I had gone away ignorant, leaving Thompson robbed of the only help he could ever have had.