ing
when they saw we were ready--I don't know. But anyhow, something went
wrong. And Dick was black angry. He--the last time I spoke to him--he
wouldn't even tell me what he'd done with his gang; just said he had
them somewhere safe, in the last place you or Dudley would ever look for
them. Oh, you needn't hold me any more; I've given in; I'm not going to
meet Dick to-night. But I had to tell you about his gang, if I can't
about him. And listen, Mr. Stretton. I've tried every possible way to
get it out of him, but Dick won't even answer when I taunt him for a
coward who has to be backed up. I know he has men somewhere, but he
won't tell me where they are, or who they are--now. I believe----" but
her voice changed sharply. "Those two boys, Dunn and Collins! You don't
think Dudley can be right and they _are_ still alive--and have joined
Dick's gang?"

"They're dead!" I was about sick of Dunn and Collins, and anyhow I was
wondering where the devil Hutton's gang could have gone after their
fiasco in the swamp. "They may have meant to join Hutton. But I found
what the wolves left--and that was dead, right enough!"

"I don't believe they're dead," said Paulette quietly.

I shrugged my shoulders. But I never even asked her why. For
suddenly--with that flat knowledge you get when you realize you should
have put two and two together long ago--I knew where Hutton's gang was
now and always had been. "Skunk's Misery," I thought dumbfounded. "By
gad, Skunk's Misery!" For the thing I should have added to the Skunk's
Misery wolf dope was my dream of men talking and playing cards under the
very floor where I slept in the new hut the Frenchwoman's son had built
and gone away from,--because it had been no dream at all. I had actually
heard real men under the bare lean-to where I lay; and knowing the
burrows and runways under the Skunk's Misery houses, I knew where--and
that was just in some hidden den under the rocks the new house had been
built on--that house left with the door open, ostentatiously, for all
the world to see!

I was blazing, as you always are blazing when you have been a fool. But
I could start for Skunk's Misery the first thing in the morning and
start alone, with my mouth shut. None of our four old men could be
spared from the mill, and I had no use for any of Macartney's new ones;
or for Macartney either, for he was no good in the bush. As for Dudley,
nerves and a loose tongue would do him less harm at home. Besid