on, or that Dudley--so full up with drink
and drugs that he could not have smelled even that mixture of skunks and
sulphide--could easily have been sent out reeking with it, into bush
that reeked of it too. And that second she screamed at me: "You lie,
Nicky Stretton; you, and that girl! He's not Hutton--he's Macartney!"

But Macartney fired full in my face.

It was Marcia's flying jump that made him miss me. Even though his very
cartridge was one of hers that she always carried in her pockets, and
must have been given to him the first thing, I don't think she had been
prepared to see me killed. I didn't wait to see. I was down the passage
to Paulette before Macartney could get in a second shot. As he, and some
of the bunk-house men tore out of the living room after me, I fired into
the brown mass of them with my own gun, that I snatched from Paulette. I
thought it checked them, and lit out of the kitchen door, into the wind
and the dark and the raving, swirling snow, with my dream girl's hand
gripped in mine. We plunged knee-deep, waist-deep through the drifts,
for our lives,--for mine, anyhow.

"Thompson's stope," I gasped; and she said yes. I couldn't see an inch
before me, but I think we would have made it, since Macartney could not
see, either. I knew we were far ahead of him, but that was all I did
know, till I heard myself shout to Paulette, "_Run!_"--and felt my legs
double under me. If something hit me on the head like a ton of brick I
had no sense of what had happened, as people have in books. I only
realized I had been knocked out when I felt myself coming to. Somehow it
felt quite natural to be deadly faint and sick, and lying flat, like a
log,--till I put out my hand and touched hard rock.

"I don't see how it's rock," I thought dully; "it ought to be snow!
Something hit me--out in the snow with Paulette!" And with that sense
came back to me, like a red-hot iron in my brain. I _had_ been out in
the snow with Paulette; one of Macartney's men must have hit me a swipe
on the head and got her from me. But--where in heaven's name was
Paulette now? The awful, sickening thought made me so wild that I
scrambled to my knees to find out in what ungodly hole I had been put
myself. I had been carried somewhere, and the rock under me felt like
the mine. But somehow the darkness round me did not smell like a mine,
where men worked every day. It smelt cold, desolate, abandoned, like----

And suddenly I knew where Maca