crookedly. That was why he tried a _coup_ with that copper mine in
the Urals and had to clear out of Russia. And the La Chance mine that he
came to contemptuously, and just to get hold of me, is a big thing too.
No--listen! You don't know how big, for you've been kept in the dark.
But Dick knows; and that's how I first knew I couldn't manage him any
more, and why I don't think it is I he has done all he has for, nor that
it was even to pay out Dudley. I believe it was to _get the mine_!"

"Then why, in heaven's name, didn't you tell Dudley who he was?"

"I couldn't make Dudley listen, at first. Then," very low, "I didn't
dare; I knew it would mean that Dudley would get killed. I never thought
that--would happen, anyway."

"There was me." I was stung unbearably. "You must have known ever since
the night I first came here that there was always me!"

"Y-you," she stumbled oddly on it. "I couldn't tell _you_! Can't you see
I was afraid, Nicky, that you might--get killed for me, too?"

For the first time that night she looked at me as if she saw me--me,
Nicky Stretton, dark, fierce and dirty--and not Dudley Wilbraham and the
dead. My name in that voice of hers would have caught me at my heart,
if I had dared to be thinking of her. But I was not. It had flashed
through me that Marcia's door had been half open when we went into the
kitchen,--and that now it was shut!

It was a trifling thing to make my heart turn over; but it did. I
covered the passage in two jumps to the living-room door. But as I flung
it open, all I had time to see was that the window was open too; with
Marcia standing by it in her horrible green shooting clothes, just as
she had lain on her bed, and a crowd of bunk-house men swarming through
the open sash behind her and Macartney,--Macartney, standing on his feet
without any clothesline, with his gun in his hand!

I saw, like you do see things, how it had all happened. I had misjudged
Macartney's intellect about the bunk-house men; he had had them within
call. But it was no one but Marcia who had let them in, and she had
freed Macartney. She had overheard Paulette and me in the kitchen, had
shut her door, slipped out of her own window and into the living room,
and cut Macartney's rope. She had no earthly reason to connect him with
Dudley's death, except the scraps of conversation she had overheard from
Paulette and me; she knew nothing of the bottle of wolf dope that had
been meant to smash in my wag