For two breaths I did not know where I was. It was still snowing, and the night was wild, such a night as we might not have again for weeks. Any one could move in it as securely as behind a curtain, for I could not see a yard before my face, and not a track could lie five minutes. But suddenly the familiarity of the place hit me, till I could have laughed out, if I had been there on any other business. Collins's long passage had wormed behind Thompson's stope, behind the La Chance stables; and it was no wonder he had found it easy enough to get supplies from Charliet. All he had to do was to cross the clearing from the jutting rock that shielded his private entrance and walk into Charliet's kitchen door. I moved toward it, and Collins grabbed at me through the smothering snow.
"Hang on—you don't know who's there! Wait till I ring up Charliet, number one Wolf!" He stood back from me, and far, far off, with a perfect illusion of distance broken by the wind, I heard a wolf howl, once, and then twice again. If he had not stood beside me, I could not have believed the cry came from Collins's throat. But, remembering Dudley, it had an ill-omened sound to me.
"Shut up!" I breathed sharply.
Collins might have remembered Dudley too. "I wasn't going to do it again," he muttered, "but I've had to use it for a signal. It's been a fashionable kind of a sound around here, if I hadn't sense enough to know Macartney brought the beasts that made it. But Charliet knows my howl. He'll come out, if he's——Drop, quick!"
But both of us had dropped already. Some one had flung open the kitchen door and fired a charge of buckshot out into the night. I heard it scatter over my head, and a burst of uproar on its heels told me Charliet's kitchen was crowded with Macartney's men. Somebody—not Charliet—shouted over the noise, "What the devil's that for?" And another voice yelled something about wolves and firing to scare them.
"The boss'll scare you—if you get to firing guns this night," the first voice swore; and a man laughed, insolently. Then the kitchen door banged, and Collins sprang up electrically.
"I don't like this one bit," he muttered. "Macartney's not in the house, or his men wouldn't dare be yelling like that; and Charliet's not there, either, or he'd have been out. That devil must have got him somewhere—him and Miss Paulette! Can't you see there's not a light in the shack, bar the kitchen one? Come on!"
But I was gone already, around the corner of the shack to Paulette's side of it, and I knew better. There was a light—in Paulette's room—shining through a hole in the heavy wooden shutters she had had made for her window, long before I guessed why she wanted them and their bars. It ran through me like fire that Macartney was in that room, deaf to any kind of yells from the kitchen, to everything but Paulette's voice; and nobody but a man who has had to think it can guess what that thought was like to me, out there in the snow. I made for my own window, but it was locked; and God knew who might be watching me out of it, as I had watched Macartney one night, before I knew he was Hutton. I thought: "By gad, Nick Stretton, you'll go in the front door!" For that—with me shut up to die in Thompson's stope, and not one other soul alive to interfere with him—was the last thing Macartney would think to lock! Nor had he. The latch lifted just as usual, and I walked in.
The long passage through the shack was dark; and, after the storm outside, dead silent. It was empty, too, as the living room was empty; but what I thought of was my dream girl's door. That was open a foot-wide space, and somebody inside it sobbed sickeningly. But if Macartney were there he was not speaking. I daresay I forgot I had no gun to kill him with. I crept forward in the soundless moccasins I had reason to thank heaven were my only wear and suddenly felt Collins beside me, in his stocking feet.
"Hang on," he breathed; "I tell you he isn't there! If he were, you couldn't get him. One shout, and he'd have the whole gang out on us!"