pitifully
sane to me now; and nothing in particular about me, Nicky Stretton. But
when I came to think of all I knew about Macartney, that was no
remarkable consolation; for--except his never noticing that the bottom
flap of Thompson's envelope was missing, and taking it for granted it
had been blank like the top one--he had made a fool of me all along the
line!

I had stopped Paulette from going away with him the night before, after
she thought she had burned the note she had meant to slip into his hand;
but he must have told her, outside in the passage, when I thought he was
sending a message to Marcia, that if she did not go with him then--in
the next hour--he would begin trouble that very night for Dudley and La
Chance.

And he had! It was Paulette he was waiting for, when he lied to me about
a strange man. And he had gone straight down to the assay office, done
his own alarm of a robber, and killed four men to give it artistic
truth. It was no wonder he had said he was sick of playing in moving
pictures and grinned at me when I left La Chance to search the Caraquet
road for nobody else but himself.

As for his gang, the very bunk-house men he had told me to order out of
the assay office, were just Macartney's own gang from Skunk's Misery,
come over when they had silenced Thompson forever; at Macartney's elbow
whenever he chose to murder the lot of us and commandeer the La Chance
mine. I wished, irrelevantly, that Dunn and Collins _had_ got to
Macartney, instead of being killed on the way; they might have been
chancy young devils about stealing gold, but they would never have stood
for murdering old Thompson! It was no good thinking of that, though.

I stowed away Thompson's deuce of hearts, that no boy had ever come for,
in the case with those other pitiful cards he had told me to search, and
got on my feet with only one thought in my head,--to get back to La
Chance and my dream girl that Macartney was alone with, except for
Dudley,--Dudley whom he hated, who had threatened him for Paulette
Valenka, for Thompson, till it was no wonder I had found him with the
face of a devil where he lurked eavesdropping in the shack hall. And
there something else hit me whack. Baker, Dudley's jackal, was one of
Macartney's gang: told off, for all I knew, to put him out of the way! I
wheeled to get out of that damn lean-to quicker than I had got in; and
instead I stood rooted to the floor. _Below me, somewhere underground,
so