look of her gave me a sick
shock. She was deadly pale, and under the light of Charliet's
half-trimmed lamp I saw the blue marks under her eyes, and the tight
look round the nostrils that only come to a woman's face when she is
fighting something that is pretty nearly past her, and is next door to
despair. She looked hunted; that was the only word there was for it. It
struck me that look must stop. If I had to march her out into the bush
with me by force next morning, I meant to get a solitary talk with her;
find out what her mysterious business was at La Chance with a man who
had laid up for our gold; and, with any luck, transfer the hunted look
to the face of the man who was hounding her,--for I felt certain he was
still hanging around La Chance.

After that--but there could be no after that to matter to me, with a
dream girl who scooted to Dudley every time I tried to speak to her! I
took a half-glance at him, and it was plain enough he would be no good
to her in the kind of trouble that was on now. If I couldn't have
her--since she didn't want me--I was the only person who could help
her. She was angel-sweet to Dudley, heaven knows, and he was charming to
her when he was himself. When he was not, he had a patronizing,
half-threatening way of speaking to her, as if he knew something ugly
about her, as Marcia had insinuated, that made me boil. She never
resented it either, and that made me boil too. If I had ever seen her
even shrink from him, I don't know that the curb bit I had on myself
would have held. I wished to heaven she _would_ shrink and give me a
chance to step in between her and a man who might love her, as Marcia
said, but who loved drink and drugs better, or he would not have been
talking between silliness and sobriety, as he was that night. And I was
so busy wishing it that Marcia spoke to me three times before I heard
her.

"Nicky, do make Dudley shut up," she repeated, "he won't let any one
else speak! He's been preaching the whole evening that Collins and Dunn
aren't dead, only laid up somewhere round and making the other men
desert, and you ought to go and find them--and now he's worrying us
about that old idiot Thompson, who got himself drowned! For heaven's
sake tell him no one would have bothered to murder the old wretch!"

"Nobody ever thought he was murdered, and I buried Dunn and Collins
right enough," said I absently, with my thoughts still on Paulette. But
Dudley whisked around on me.