"And took girls"—I remembered the reek of my wolf-doped clothes till I fancied I could smell the stuff there in the room, thought of a half drunk man walking out on a like baited track, and two girls taken over it to look for him—"into bush like that!"
"They followed me," curtly. "I didn't know it till it was too late to turn them back! I couldn't have sent Miss Wilbraham back, anyhow; she was nearly crazy. And if you're thinking of wolves, it was getting daylight, and——" he hesitated, and I could have filled in the pause for myself, remembering how that wolf dope acted: two lambs could have moved in the bush with safety, so long as they kept away from where it was smeared on the ground. But Macartney filled it in differently. "And, anyhow, it was well they did come. It was Marcia—found Wilbraham!"
I don't think I had really believed Dudley was dead till then. I stared at Marcia, lying on the floor as purple in the face from over-exertion and fright as if she had had an apoplectic fit, and at Paulette stooping over her, silent, and white around the mouth. She looked up at me, and her eyes gave me fierce warning, if I had needed it.
"Marcia got afraid and bolted for home—the wrong way," she spoke up sharply. "When I ran after her she was standing in some spruces, screaming and pointing in front of her. I saw the blood on the ground, and——Here's Dudley's cap! I found it, all chewed, close by." She pulled out a rag of fur from under her snow-caked sweater; and as the stale reek of the Skunk's Misery wolf dope rose from the thing, I knew the smell in the room had been no fancy, and how Dudley Wilbraham had died. I wheeled and saw Macartney's face,—the face of a man who took me for a fool whose nose would tell him nothing.
"D'ye mean that was all you found?" I got out.
"No! The rest was there. But it was—unrecognizable! Even I couldn't look at it. It was—pretty tough, for girls. I shot one wolf we scared off it, but I couldn't do anything more. I couldn't lift—it; but—Dudley's coat was on it." He had turned so white that I remembered his faint in the assay office, like you do remember things that don't matter. I would have thought him chicken-hearted for a wholesale murderer, if it had not been for the cold hate in his eyes.
"D'ye mean you left Dudley—out there in the bush? Where the devil was Baker, that black and white weasel you set to look after him? I'll bet he saved his skin! Where is he?"
"Baker's missing, too," simply; and I did not believe it. "And I don't see what else I could have done but leave Dudley. None of the men were with me to carry him in; it had begun to snow; and in another hour I couldn't have kept the track back to La Chance. As it was, Miss Marcia played out; I had to carry her most of the way. And that's all there is to it," with sudden impatience, "except that Wilbraham's dead and Baker's missing. If he wasn't, he would have brought Dudley in."
"Yes," I said. I saw Charliet's head poke around the corner of the kitchen door and called to him to carry Marcia to her room, and to get fires going and something to eat; for the queer part of it was that there seemed to be two of me, and one of them was thinking it was starving. It saw Charliet and my dream girl take Marcia out, and the other me turned on Macartney.
"By gad, there's one thing more," I said slowly. "You don't have to go on playing moving pictures, Dick Hutton, or using an alias either! You've killed Dudley and Thompson, and for a good guess Dunn and Collins, if I can't be sure—and you'd have had me first of all, if your boulder and your wolf dope hadn't failed you on the Caraquet road!"