ck would have come to hunt Thompson's
stope for me, and we had no guns to stave him off. You and Collins left
them in the tunnel!" It was just what we had done, and I wasted good
time in remembering it, guiltily. Paulette stood up and twisted back her
streaming cloud of hair. "So, as I had to come with you," she resumed
without looking at me, "don't you think we'd better get on? If you're
waiting for me to rest, you needn't."

I wasn't, altogether. I stared back over the perilous way we had come.
There was no black speck of any one following us on its treacherous
face; no sound of shots; no anything from the shore we had left. Yet,
"Where do you suppose Macartney is?" I asked involuntarily.

"Dead." Her voice was almost indifferent, but she shivered. "Or he'd
have gone on shooting at us."

I nodded, but I would have felt easier if I had thought so. Somehow I
didn't, I don't know why. I know nothing would have induced me to take
Paulette back to La Chance, even if the trodden lolly would have borne
us again. I had a pang about Collins, left alone there; but Collins
could take care of himself, and Paulette's shiver had reminded me we
should freeze to death if we loitered where we were. I pointed to the
snowy lake between us and the Halfway shore. "Can you do two more miles
of running, over that?"

"Yes," she glanced down at her slim, trained body, rather superbly.
"Only--there's no one following us! Have we got to be quite so quick?"

"Quicker! We don't know about Macartney. If he's alive he has a stable
full of horses, and he knows where we're running to. He may try to cut
us off." I half lied; he could not cut us off, since horses would be of
no use to him in the heavy snow, and on foot it would take him two days
to go round Lac Tremblant to the Halfway, where crossing the lolly could
bring us in two hours. But I had no mind to air my real reason for
haste.

I should have known Paulette was too shrewd for me. "I'm a fool--Lac
Tremblant never bears, of course," she said quite quietly. "Go on, Mr.
Stretton. Only--don't stop, if anything goes wrong with me!"

"Nothing will go wrong," said I, just as if I believed it. If she had
called me Nicky, as she had done by mistake the night before, when she
slept with her hand clasping mine, if she'd even looked at me, I must
have burst out that I loved her, past life and death, and out to the
world to come. But it was no time to force love-making on a girl who had
seen the