r good--had taken him off and
made away with him. Once his last letter was written and posted under
cover from Caraquet to be reposted to Dudley from Montreal by some
unknown hand, Macartney had no more use for Thompson, and a screen
against betrayal on two sides: either by his own men, or that chance
finding of Thompson's body that had actually happened; for Thompson's
own letter would clear his murderer.

As for Thompson's envelope! It's an easy enough thing to do if you just
slip your pencil inside an envelope and write blindly, but it made me
sick to think of poor old Thompson scrawling in the inside of his
envelope, furiously, furtively, while the ink of his neat copperplate
dried on the outside, and Macartney likely stood by poring over the
actual letter, wondering if there was any flaw in it that could show out
and damn him. And the desperate scrawl in the envelope had been _no
good_, thanks to the fool brain and tongue of myself, Nicky Stretton! It
had done more to warn Macartney than either Dudley or me, since if
Thompson had written in the reverse of the envelope he was also likely
to have written on anything that would take a pencil.

It was no wonder Macartney had stood stunned over that envelope, till
Dudley and I believed him heartsick for his friend, for it must have
been then that he remembered Thompson's cards,--that I guessed the old
man had just sat and played with, day in and day out, while he was a
prisoner and about to die. Thompson could have written on them; and
Macartney must have feared it, or he never would have stolen them from
Billy Jones. I hoped grimly that he had been good and worried before he
got his chance to do it and set his mind at ease. And at ease it must
have been, for he had actually known nothing about the cards; he could
only have taken them on chance, from sheer terror, and found them
harmless. He had probably never even noticed one was missing--and
whatever Thompson had not been wise about he had been wise when he took
out a deuce, and not one of the four aces the most casual eye must
miss--or he would never have let me have them, contemptuously, as one
lets a child play with a knife without a blade.

Only I was not so sure this particular knife had no blade,--for
Macartney!

He knew nothing of the desperate scrawl on the bottom flap of that
envelope that his own hasty grab had jerked off and left in my fist;
nothing of the deuce of hearts that made its crazy inscription