TREMBLANT 265

XIX. SKUNK'S MISERY 283

XX. THE END 293

THE LA CHANCE MINE MYSTERY

CHAPTER I

I COME HOME: AND THE WOLVES HOWL

I am sick of the bitter wood-smoke,
And sick of the wind and rain:
I will leave the bush behind me,
And look for my love again.

Little as I guessed it, this story really began at Skunk's Misery. But
Skunk's Misery was the last thing in my head, though I had just come
from the place.

Hungry, dog-tired, cross with the crossness of a man in authority whose
orders have been forgotten or disregarded, I drove Billy Jones's old
canoe across Lac Tremblant on my way home to Dudley Wilbraham's gold
mine at La Chance, after an absence of months. It was halfway to dark,
and the bitter November wind blew dead in my teeth. Slaps of spray from
flying wave-crests blinded me with gouts of lake water, that was oddly
warm till the cutting wind froze it to a coating of solid ice on my
bare hands and stinging face, that I had to keep dabbing on my paddling
shoulder to get my eyes clear in order that I might stare in front of my
leaky, borrowed canoe.

To a stranger there might have seemed to be nothing particular to stare
at, out on a lake where the world was all wind and lumpy seas and
growing November twilight; but any one who had lived at La Chance knew
better. By the map Lac Tremblant should have been our nearest gold route
to civilization, but it was a lake that was no lake, as far as transport
was concerned, and we never used it. The five-mile crossing I was making
was just a fair sample of the forty miles of length Lac Tremblant
stretched mockingly past the La Chance mine toward the main road from
Caraquet--our nearest settlement--to railhead: and that was forty miles
of queer water, sown with rocks that were sometimes visible as
tombstones in a cemetery and sometimes hidden like rattlesnakes in a
blanket. For the depth of Lac Tremblant, or its fairway, were two things
no man might ever count on. It would fall in a night to shallows a child
could wade through, among bristling needles of rocks no one had ever
guessed at; and rise in a morning to the tops of the spruce scrub on its
banks,--a sweet spread of water with not a rock to be seen. What hidden
spring fed it was a mystery. But in the bitterest winter it was never
cold enough to freeze, f