ly he couldn't drive
clear into Caraquet; so he left his wagon here and borrowed a saddle
from me to ride over. And a boy brought his horse back next day, or day
after,--I forget which. I remember Thompson forgot to send me a tin of
tobacco he promised to get me off Randall, at Caraquet!"

"D'ye mean you think he never went to Caraquet?" It was a stupid
question, for, of course, I knew he had gone there, and farther, or he
could not have sent Macartney to La Chance, or a letter to Dudley now.
But what I was really thinking of was that I had been right about the
date old Thompson left the mine, and that he had gone over my road on
one of the two days I was away with all my road men, getting logs out of
the bush.

Billy Jones scattered my thoughts impatiently: "Oh, he went there all
right. It's his--coming back--that beats me!"

It beat me too, for reasons Billy knew nothing about. Why Thompson had
come back was his own business; but it was plain he had been dead a
scant twenty-four hours, and the only place I could think of where he
was likely to have been killed was on my corduroy road the night before.
Only I did not see how Thompson's clothes could have got water-soaked in
a frozen swamp; and I did not see, either, what a decent man like
Thompson could have been doing out there like a wolf, with wolves. I had
more sense than to think he could have had any truck with Collins about
our gold. I nodded back at the teamsters: "Where did they find him?"

"They didn't find him," returned Billy simply, "it was my hound dog. He
was yelling down at the lake shore this morning, like he'd treed a
wildcat, and when I went down it was Thompson he'd found,--lying right
on shore in the daylight! You know how that fool Lac Tremblant behaves;
the water in it had gone down to nothing this morning, and on the bare
stones it had left was Thompson. Only I don't see how he ever _got_
there unless he was coming back, from wherever he'd been outside, by Lac
Tremblant instead of your road!"

"Where was his canoe?"

"He didn't have any! But you know that lake--it might have smashed his
canoe on him like an egg, and then--just by chance--put him ashore!" I
did know: I had had all I wanted to keep from being smashed myself the
night I crossed to La Chance. I nodded, and Billy choked. "It--it kind
of sickened me this morning; I _liked_ Thompson, Mr. Stretton!"

So had I, if I had laughed at his eternal solitaire. Billy and I laid
him on th