t, where they sat squabbling over a poker
game. But as I said, it was the waning morning moon that woke me, and
the hut was silent as the grave. I picked up the pine-bough bed I had
slept on and carried it into the bush with me far enough to throw it
down where it would tell no tales--I did not know why I did it, but I
was to be glad--tightened up my belt, and took a short cut through the
thick bush to Billy Jones's stables, with nothing to show for my day's
and night's work but a dead wolf, a stained bit of shell ice, and a few
drops of blood on the logs of my corduroy road. I was starving, and it
was noonday, when I came out of the bush and tramped into the Halfway,
much as I had done that first time I came from Skunk's Misery and went
home to La Chance. Only to-day Billy Jones was not sitting by his stove
reading his ancient newspaper. He was standing in the kitchen with two
teamsters from La Chance, looking down at a dead man.

As I opened the door and stood staring, the teamsters jumped as if they
had been shot. But Billy only turned a stolid white face on me.

"My God, Mr. Stretton," he said, stolidly too, "what do you make of
this?"

All I could see from where I stood was a rigid hand, that had said death
to me the second I opened the door. I gave a sort of spring forward.
What I thought was that here was the man who had left the blood in the
swamp when Paulette's bullet hit him, and that I had got Collins. I had
nearly burst out that he had what he deserved. But instead I stopped,
paralyzed, where my spring had left me.

"My God," I said in my turn, "I don't know!"

For the man who lay in front of me, stone dead in water-soaked clothes
that were frozen to his stark body, was Thompson, our old
superintendent, who only six weeks ago had left the La Chance mine;
whose letter to Dudley, with its careful, back-number copperplate
address, lay in my pocket now.

"It's Thompson!" was the only thing I could say.

CHAPTER VIII

THOMPSON!

Thompson it was, if it seemed incredible. And Billy Jones exclaimed, as
he pointed to him, "He can't have been dead longer than since last
night! And I can't understand this thing, Mr. Stretton! It's but six
weeks since Thompson _left_ here; and from what he said he didn't mean
to come back. He told me he was in a hurry to get away, because he was
taking a position in a copper mine in the West. I remember I warned him
you hadn't got all your swamps corduroyed, and like