. I moved toward it, and Collins grabbed at me
through the smothering snow.

"Hang on--you don't know who's there! Wait till I ring up Charliet,
number one Wolf!" He stood back from me, and far, far off, with a
perfect illusion of distance broken by the wind, I heard a wolf howl,
once, and then twice again. If he had not stood beside me, I could not
have believed the cry came from Collins's throat. But, remembering
Dudley, it had an ill-omened sound to me.

"Shut up!" I breathed sharply.

Collins might have remembered Dudley too. "I wasn't going to do it
again," he muttered, "but I've had to use it for a signal. It's been a
fashionable kind of a sound around here, if I hadn't sense enough to
know Macartney brought the beasts that made it. But Charliet knows my
howl. He'll come out, if he's----Drop, _quick_!"

But both of us had dropped already. Some one had flung open the kitchen
door and fired a charge of buckshot out into the night. I heard it
scatter over my head, and a burst of uproar on its heels told me
Charliet's kitchen was crowded with Macartney's men. Somebody--not
Charliet--shouted over the noise, "What the devil's that for?" And
another voice yelled something about wolves and firing to scare them.

"The boss'll scare you--if you get to firing guns this night," the first
voice swore; and a man laughed, insolently. Then the kitchen door
banged, and Collins sprang up electrically.

"I don't like this one bit," he muttered. "Macartney's not in the
house, or his men wouldn't dare be yelling like that; and Charliet's not
there, either, or he'd have been out. That devil must have got him
somewhere--him and Miss Paulette! Can't you see there's not a light in
the shack, bar the kitchen one? Come on!"

But I was gone already, around the corner of the shack to Paulette's
side of it, and I knew better. There was a light--in Paulette's
room--shining through a hole in the heavy wooden shutters she had had
made for her window, long before I guessed why she wanted them and their
bars. It ran through me like fire that Macartney was in that room, deaf
to any kind of yells from the kitchen, to everything but Paulette's
voice; and nobody but a man who has had to think it can guess what that
thought was like to me, out there in the snow. I made for my own window,
but it was locked; and God knew who might be watching me out of it, as I
had watched Macartney one night, before I knew he was Hutton. I thought:
"By gad, Nick