The La Chance Mine Mystery

by Susan Morrow Jones

I turned my head and saw out of the tail of my eye, as a man sees when he's riding a race. They were coming! Macartney's men, and—I thought—Macartney; but I knew better than to look long enough to make sure. His men, anyhow, had raced out on the lake as we had raced, and there was no need to watch what became of them. Their dying screams came to us, as they floundered and sank in their heavy boots through snow and frazil ice, to depths they would never get out of. I might have been sick anywhere else. I was fierce with joy out there in Lac Tremblant, running with a girl over the thin crust under which death lurked to snatch at us, as it had snatched at Macartney's men. Neither of us spoke. I was thinking too hard. I could have run indefinitely as we were running, but Paulette was just a girl. What of Paulette if she slackened with weariness, if I led her wrong by six inches, or missed a single threatening sign on the stuff we fled over?

If I had been sure Macartney was drowned with his men, I might have taken her back to La Chance; but I was not sure. And, Macartney or no Macartney, the track I had led her out on the lake by was the only one I would have dared trust to return on,—and it was all lumps of snowy lolly and blue water, where Macartney's men had broken through. I looked ahead of me with my mind running like a mill. We had done about half the five-mile crossing; we might do the rest if we could stop and breathe for ten minutes, for five, even for two. Only, in all the width of the lake that lay like cake icing in front of us, there was not one place where we could dare to stand. The water under us was higher than I had ever known it. Not one single dagger-toothed rock showed as they had showed when I crossed it in a canoe the night before it froze to the thick slush that was all it ever froze to. There was not one single place to——But violently, out of the back of my memory, something came to me. There was one place in Lac Tremblant where, high water or low, a man might always stand—if I could hit it in the smothering, featureless snow.

"The island!" I gasped out loud. Because there was one—a high, narrow island without even a bush on it—rising gradually, not precipitately like the rest of the rocks in Lac Tremblant, out of the uncertain water. But for half an hour I thought it might as well be non-existent. Stare as I might I could see no sign of it—and suddenly I all but fell with blessed shock. I was on it; on the highest end of it, with solid ground under my feet; solid ground and safety, breath and rest. I yelled to Paulette, "Jump to me!" and she jumped. That was all there was to it, except a man and a girl, panting, staggering, clinging together, till sense came to them, and they dropped flat in the snow.

I said sense, but I don't know that I had any. I lay there staring at Paulette and her long bronze hair that had come down as she ran, till it was like a mantle over her and the snow round her. I had never thought women had hair like that. I cried out, "My God, Paulette, why did you come?"

I may have sounded angry. I was, as a man always is angry when he has dragged a woman into his danger. Paulette panted without looking at me. "I—had to! The tunnel—caved in!"

"I told you to get out of it!" I sat up where I had flung myself down and stared at her. She sat up, too, both of us crimson-faced and dishevelled. But neither of us thought of that. I stormed like a fool. "What possessed you to stay in the tunnel—or to follow me? I told you to jump for the cave!"

"Well, I didn't!" Paulette stiffened as if she froze. "I hadn't time. I would have had to cross the tunnel. And I hadn't time to do anything but jump to you and Collins before your stuff blew up. I'd just got on your shelf when it went off, and it stunned me till I had just sense enough left to lie still and hold on. But afterwards, when I saw what you were going to do, I put on the snowshoes you'd left by the tunnel entrance and came after you. I'm sorry I did, now!"

"But Collins——" I looked blankly across the two miles of quivering death trap we still had to cross before we gained what safety there might be in the Halfway shore and the neighborhood of Macartney's picket, and my thoughts were not of Collins—"Why, in heaven's name, didn't Collins have sense enough to lug you back into his cave with him and Charliet, instead of letting you take a chance like this?"

"Collins couldn't get back himself," Paulette retorted, as if I were unbearably stupid. "Nobody could get back! I told you the tunnel caved in, till it was solid between us and the others. Collins saw I had to follow you. In two more minutes Dick would have come to hunt Thompson's stope for me, and we had no guns to stave him off. You and Collins left them in the tunnel!" It was just what we had done, and I wasted good time in remembering it, guiltily. Paulette stood up and twisted back her streaming cloud of hair. "So, as I had to come with you," she resumed without looking at me, "don't you think we'd better get on? If you're waiting for me to rest, you needn't."

I wasn't, altogether. I stared back over the perilous way we had come. There was no black speck of any one following us on its treacherous face; no sound of shots; no anything from the shore we had left. Yet, "Where do you suppose Macartney is?" I asked involuntarily.