have gone a couple of
hours before you did. They let out something about hold-ups while I was
having the trouble with them, and Wilbraham and I got worried they might
have managed to get over the road before you, and be lying up for you
somewhere."

"They only left--two hours before I did," said I, with flat irrelevance.
I must have stared at Macartney like a fool, but he had knocked the wind
clean out of me as to Collins having been the man in the swamp. With
only two hours' start neither he nor Dunn, nor any man, for matter of
that, could have legged it over my road in time to lie up in the only
place I knew some one had laid up,--on the corduroy road.

"Well, they didn't get me, and I never saw them," I began,--and suddenly
remembered that ghastly noise, like the last flurry of a dog fight, that
had halted the wolves on my track. My first thought of it, and of Dunn
and Collins, had been right. "By gad, I believe I heard them though," I
exclaimed, "and if they were on that road they're killed and eaten! But
I didn't have any trouble about the gold."

It was true to the letter, for my side had attended to all the trouble,
if my side was only a girl who would not have shot without need. But
when I explained the noise that might have accounted for Dunn and
Collins, Dudley shook his head.

"They didn't get eaten; not they! And your having no trouble with the
gold isn't saying you won't have any. If no one saw Dunn and Collins
going out to Caraquet I bet they're laid up somewhere on your road yet,
waiting for your next trip! And as if that wasn't worry enough, poor old
Thompson has to go out of his mind and come back here to be found
dead--and I mean to find out how!" He was working himself up into one of
his senseless rages, and he turned on Macartney furiously. "You knew
him before I did! Write to his people and find out how he got here,
anyhow. I'm not going to have any man come back, and just be found dead
like a dog, if it is only old Thompson! I'm going to have him traced
from the time he left Montreal."

"He had no people," said Macartney blankly. "As far as I know, he was
just a bit of driftwood. And as for finding out anything about his
journey here, I don't suppose we ever can! All we'll get at was that he
came back--and was found dead." And something made me look past him and
Dudley, sitting with their backs to the living-room door, and the blood
jumped into my face.

Paulette Brown stood in the doorway,