en he had been standing over. But they
were past helping. They were decent men too, for they were the last of
our own lot,--and it smote me like a hammer that they might have been
alive still if I had not interfered with Paulette that night and kept
her from meeting Hutton.

I knew as I knew there was a roof over my head that it was he who had
fallen on Macartney, and I would have chased straight after him if
common sense had not told me he would be lying up in the bush for just
that, and all I should get for my pains would be a bullet out of the
dark that would end all chance of me personally ever catching Hutton. I
took stock of things where I stood, instead. Whether he had a gang or
not, I knew he had been alone in the thing to-night, and he had done a
capable job. Our four men had been surprised, for they were all shot in
the back, as if they had been caught coming in the office door.

Whether Macartney had been surprised or not I could not tell. The
revolver he had dropped as he fainted lay beside him empty, and there
were slivers out of the doorpost behind the dead men. None of them
seemed to have been much help to him. Three had not fired a shot; the
fourth had just one cartridge missing from his revolver, where he lay
with his face to the door--and I saw it accounted for by a tearing slash
in a blue print stuck on the wall to the left of the doorway. I turned
to the inside wall to see where the bullet that had glanced off
Macartney had landed, and as I swung round he sat up.

"You may well look--it was one of our own men got me," he said thickly,
and his curse turned my stomach; I never knew any good come of cursing
the dead. I told him to shut up and tell how the thing had happened. And
he grinned with sheer rage.

"It was plain damn foolery! I told you I believed I'd seen some one
spying around the mine, and after I'd left you I didn't feel so sure
that I'd cleared him out. I woke those fools up," his glance at the dead
matched his curse at them, "and said if they heard any one prowling
round my door they were to lie low in their own shack, let him get in at
me here, and then bundle out and cut him off from behind. And what they
did was to lose their heads. They heard some one or they didn't--I don't
know. But the crazy fools piled out of their shack and ran in to me; and
a man behind them--_behind_ them, mind you--came on their heels and
plugged every son of them before they were more than inside my door!