she had known some one
meant to get at me, with wolves or anything else. It had been just
Collins--and the sheer gall of it jammed my teeth--Collins and Dunn,
two ne'er-do-well brats in our own mine. I had realized already that
they had been missing from La Chance quite early enough for me to thank
them for the boulder on my good road, and Collins----But I hastily
revised my conviction that it was Collins I had heard the wolves chop in
the bush as hounds chop a fox: Collins had too much sense. It had more
likely been Dunn; he was the kind to get eaten! Collins must have legged
it early for my corduroy road, where Paulette had expected him enough to
shoot at him; while Dunn stayed round La Chance to put the wolf bait in
my wagon and got caught by it himself on his way to join Collins.

As for the genesis of the wolf dope, its history came to me coherently
as letters spelling a word, beginning with the bottle of mixed filth I
had spilt on myself at Skunk's Misery. The second I and my smelly
clothes reached shore the night I returned to La Chance, a wolf had
scented me and howled; had followed me to the shack and howled again
while I was talking to Marcia about Paulette Brown; and another had
carried off those very clothes under my own eyes where I stood by my
window, as if the smell on them had been some kind of bait it could not
resist. Wherever Dunn and Collins had got it, the smell from the broken
bottle had been exactly the same, only twenty times stronger: and it
had been meant to smash at the boulder on my road and turn me into a
living bait for wolves!

The theory may sound crazy, but it happens to be sane. There is a wolf
dope, made of heaven knows what, except that it contains certain
ingredients that have to be put in bottles and ripened in the sun for a
month. Two Frenchmen were jailed this last June in Quebec province for
using it around a fish and game club, and endangering people's lives.
That same wolf bait had been put in my wagon by somebody,--and the human
cry out of the swamp at Paulette's shot suddenly repeated itself in my
ears. I was biting my lip, or I would have grinned. Paulette had hit the
man who was to have put me out of business, if the wolves failed when
that bottle smashed and the boulder crippled my wagon. Collins, who,
laid up in the swamp, was to have reaped my gold and me if I got
through! The cheek of him made me blaze again, and I turned on Paulette
abruptly.

"Look here, do you kno