The La Chance Mine Mystery

by Susan Morrow Jones

"Why didn't you tell me all that—the night I came over to your mother's?" I groaned.

The boy said shortly that his mother would have gone straight off and told I'd been there, if he had come out with the truth. It was all lies she had told me about the Frenchwoman's son; he had never been near the place. It was the man who had half killed him who had built the lean-to, and his mother had said she would finish the business if ever he opened his mouth about it, or let out the truth about the same man sending him to the Halfway with a horse, or the smelling stuff she had helped him make.

"You're sure she didn't go and tell that man about me, anyway?" I remembered Macartney's grin.

But the boy shook his head. "She didn't worry; she said you were too big a fool to matter!" After which wholesome truth he announced listlessly that he was done with his mother. She had turned him out of her house now, anyway. She said he was no good to her, now that he could only crawl, and could not even trap enough rabbits to live on, and she had another man living in her house who would do it for her. So he had come here to find the man who had promised him two dollars—that solitary bill that had been all the money in Thompson's pockets—and when he found him gone and the place empty he had stayed there to hide, and because he had nowhere else to go.

I thought of his mother's haggard, handsome face and hard mouth. Macartney had certainly found a good ally while he was laid up in Skunk's Misery waiting for his chance to fall on Paulette. But all that did not matter now. What did matter was that I had found the missing link between Thompson's cards and Macartney in the boy who had taken Thompson's horse back to the Halfway. I had no mind to produce him now though; for there were other things to be looked to than showing up old Thompson's murder. And the boy was safe where he was, for one glance at him had told me he could not walk half a mile.

"Are you safe from your mother here—and can you get food for yourself?" I demanded abruptly, and the boy nodded the head I knew would never be other than a cripple's. "Well, you stay here," I told him, because if ever I needed the poor little devil for a witness against Macartney he would be no good lying dead somewhere in the bush, "and I'll come back and pay you ten times two dollars for just waiting here till I come. But you'll have to hide if that man comes back who sent you out with the horse!" I knew Macartney would kill him in good earnest, if he came back and found him with a living tongue in his head. "Don't you trust any one but me—or some one who comes and gives you twenty dollars," I added emphatically, just because that was the only absolutely unlikely event I could think of. "And even then, you stay here till you see me! Understand?"

He said he did; it was easy enough to creep out after dark and rob rabbit traps; he was doing it now. And from the greed a fortune of twenty dollars had lit in his wretched eyes, I knew he would go on doing it till I came back. Of what wildly unexpected use he was to be to me in his waiting, heaven knows I had no thought. I crept out of his burrow as I had crept in, got back to my half-frozen horse, and rode hell for leather back to the Halfway. And just there was where I slumped.

My horse had to be fed and rested; he was dead beat when I led him into the unlocked stable, and when I had seen to him I meant to rouse up Billy Jones and tell him all the ugly stuff I had unearthed—and seen too—for the killing of four innocent men was hot in my mind. But I did not, for the excellent reason that Billy was not back. His house was dark, and his four horses still away from their vacant stalls. I sat down on a heap of clean straw to wait for him, and I said I slumped. I went sound, dead asleep. If I was hunting for excuses I might say it was two in the morning, and I had been up most of the night before. But anyhow, I did it. And I sat up, dazed, to see a lantern held in front of my eyes and one of Macartney's men from La Chance staring at me.

It struck me even then that it was not he who was surprised; and the sleep jerked out of me like wine out of a glass. "What are you doing here? And where the devil's Billy?" I snapped, without thinking.

I saw the man grin. "Billy's fired," he returned coolly. "Him and his wife got it in a note from Wilbraham, day before yesterday, when your teamsters stopped here on their way to Caraquet. They doubled up their teams with Billy's and took him and his wife along, and all their stuff. And I guess they'd been fired too, for they ain't come back. Mr. Macartney sent me over to see. Anything I can do for you?"