it did sound crazy. "I'd like them!"

Billy nodded and went into his shack. Presently he came out and said the
cards were gone. He thought he'd put them away somewhere, but they
weren't to be found. It was queer, too, because he remembered replacing
them in their prayer-book sort of case after he'd spread them by the
stove to dry with Thompson's clothes. But his wife said she would find
them and send them over. Which she never did, and I forgot them.
Goodness knows I had reason to.

I did an errand instead of going straight home from Thompson's funeral
that took me into the bush not far from where the boulder had been
placed on my road. It was there or near by I had heard wolves pull down
a man or men; and after I'd tied my horse and done a little looking
around, I found the spot. It was not the scattered bones of two men that
sickened me, or even that the long thighs and shanks of one of them were
the measure of Collins. It was the top of a skull, with the hair still
on it. I did not need the face that was missing. Dunn, with his eternal
chuckle, had had stubbly fair hair without a part in it, clipped close
till it stood on end,--and the same fair hair was on the top of the
skull that lay like a round stone in the frozen bush. Whether the two
had set out to rob me I didn't know. I did know they had not done it,
and that the man Paulette had shot at in the swamp was more of a mystery
than ever.

The ground was too hard to do any burying. I made the bones into a
decent heap and piled rocks into a cairn over them. If I said a kind of
a prayer, too, it was no one's business but that of the God who heard
me; the boys had been young, and they were dead while I lived, which was
enough to make a man pray. I felt better when I had done it.

But when I got home to La Chance the bald story I told Dudley was
wasted. He swore I was a fool, first, for burying two skulls with no
faces and imagining they belonged to Dunn and Collins; and next that
they were still alive and meaning to run a hold-up on us. From where, or
how, he couldn't say. But he kept on at the thing; and the minute he had
half a drink in him--which was usually the first thing in the
morning--he began to worry me to go out and find where they were cached
and hike them out of it; and he kept at it all day. That would not have
worried me much since it was only Dudley, and Macartney and the others
believed my story; but everything else at La Chance began to go crook