f the shack, all the same. And the sudden thought
that we were all in the living room but Dudley, and that he would never
come back to it, gripped my soul between fury and anguish. "Get it
out--about Dudley," I said; and I did not care if my voice were thick.

Macartney looked over at me just as an honest, capable superintendent
ought to have looked. "I can't; because I don't know it. All I do know's
this. After you went off yesterday Wilbraham got to drinking; the wolves
began to howl round the place after dark, and he said they drove him
mad. He got a gun and went out after them--and he never came back. I
didn't even know he was gone till midnight. I thought he'd shut himself
in his office as he often does, till I heard shots outside, and found
he wasn't in the house. I turned out the bunk-house men to look for him
that instant, and when the lot you saw waiting in the shack for me came
home toward morning, and said they couldn't find a sign of Wilbraham,
and the bush was so full of wolves they were scared to go on looking, I
went myself----"

"And took _girls_"--I remembered the reek of my wolf-doped clothes till
I fancied I could smell the stuff there in the room, thought of a half
drunk man walking out on a like baited track, and two girls taken over
it to look for him--"into bush like that!"

"They followed me," curtly. "I didn't know it till it was too late to
turn them back! I couldn't have sent Miss Wilbraham back, anyhow; she
was nearly crazy. And if you're thinking of wolves, it was getting
daylight, and----" he hesitated, and I could have filled in the pause
for myself, remembering how that wolf dope acted: two lambs could have
moved in the bush with safety, so long as they kept away from where it
was smeared on the ground. But Macartney filled it in differently. "And,
anyhow, it was well they did come. It was Marcia--found Wilbraham!"

I don't think I had really believed Dudley was dead till then. I stared
at Marcia, lying on the floor as purple in the face from over-exertion
and fright as if she had had an apoplectic fit, and at Paulette stooping
over her, silent, and white around the mouth. She looked up at me, and
her eyes gave me fierce warning, if I had needed it.

"Marcia got afraid and bolted for home--the wrong way," she spoke up
sharply. "When I ran after her she was standing in some spruces,
screaming and pointing in front of her. I saw the blood on the ground,
and----Here's Dudley's cap! I fou