off his head with worry before he wrote it,
or started back to a place he'd left for----"

"Incompetency, if you want the brutal truth," Dudley broke in not
unkindly. "He was too old-fashioned to make good elsewhere, I expect;
and if he found it out, I don't wonder if he did go off his head."

I glanced over Dudley's shoulder at the letter he and Macartney were
studying. It did not look crazy, with its Gaskell's Compendium
copperplate and its careful signature. I don't know why I picked up the
envelope from where it lay unnoticed on the table by Dudley and fiddled
with it scrutinizingly, but I did. The outside of it looked all right,
with its address in Thompson's neat copperplate. But it wasn't well
glued or something, for as I shoved my fingers inside, the whole thing
opened out flat, like a lily. I looked down mechanically as I felt it
go, and--by gad, the inside of it _didn't_ look right! There was nothing
on the glued-down top flap, but the inside back of the envelope wasn't
blank, as it should have been. It wasn't written on in Thompson's neat
copperplate or in his neat phrases, either. A pencil scrawl stared at
me, upside down, as I gripped the lower flap of the envelope
unconsciously, under the ball of my big thumb. "Why, here's some more,"
I exclaimed like an ass, glaring at the envelope's inside back. "'Take
care--something----' What's this? What on earth did the old man mean?"

Macartney caught the splayed-out envelope from my hand, so sharply that
the flap I didn't know I held tore away, and stayed in my fist as he
gazed on the rest of the reversed envelope with his set-eyed stare.
"'Take care, Macartney! Gold, life, everything--in danger!'" he read out
blankly. "Why, it's some kind of a crazy warning to _me_! Only--nobody
wants my life, and I've no gold--if that's what he means! I----" but he
broke down completely. "Old Thompson must have gone stark mad," he
muttered. "I--it makes me heartsick!"

"I don't know," Dudley snapped unexpectedly. "It fits about the gold,
perhaps. Thompson might have suspected something before he left here!"

He looked at Macartney significantly, and I remembered the question he
had rapped at me when I came in. Something inside me told me to hold my
tongue concerning my adventures on the Caraquet road till I knew what
Paulette had said about them,--which I was pretty certain was mighty
little. But once again I had that cold fear that Macartney might have
found out something ab