I had
been within five hundred yards of Thompson all the time I was nursing
this very boy, that the knowledge of it had lain behind unconscious lips
within a hand's breadth of me, that I had gone away ignorant, leaving
Thompson robbed of the only help he could ever have had.

"Why didn't you tell me all that--the night I came over to your
mother's?" I groaned.

The boy said shortly that his mother would have gone straight off and
told I'd been there, if he had come out with the truth. It was all lies
she had told me about the Frenchwoman's son; he had never been near the
place. It was the man who had half killed him who had built the lean-to,
and his mother had said she would finish the business if ever he opened
his mouth about it, or let out the truth about the same man sending him
to the Halfway with a horse, or the smelling stuff she had helped him
make.

"You're sure she didn't go and tell that man about me, anyway?" I
remembered Macartney's grin.

But the boy shook his head. "She didn't worry; she said you were too big
a fool to matter!" After which wholesome truth he announced listlessly
that he was done with his mother. She had turned him out of her house
now, anyway. She said he was no good to her, now that he could only
crawl, and could not even trap enough rabbits to live on, and she had
another man living in her house who would do it for her. So he had come
here to find the man who had promised him two dollars--that solitary
bill that had been all the money in Thompson's pockets--and when he
found him gone and the place empty he had stayed there to hide, and
because he had nowhere else to go.

I thought of his mother's haggard, handsome face and hard mouth.
Macartney had certainly found a good ally while he was laid up in
Skunk's Misery waiting for his chance to fall on Paulette. But all that
did not matter now. What did matter was that I had found the missing
link between Thompson's cards and Macartney in the boy who had taken
Thompson's horse back to the Halfway. I had no mind to produce him now
though; for there were other things to be looked to than showing up old
Thompson's murder. And the boy was safe where he was, for one glance at
him had told me he could not walk half a mile.

"Are you safe from your mother here--and can you get food for yourself?"
I demanded abruptly, and the boy nodded the head I knew would never be
other than a cripple's. "Well, you stay here," I told him, because if
ever