d the point of burst!"

"We won't be," said Collins, between his teeth. "I'll burst it _out_ the
tunnel, and blow Macartney's gang to rags!"

But that lighted candle at my back had shown me other than explosives:
the silly, pointless snowshoes I had lugged from my own room in the
shack. My conscious mind knew now what my subconscious mind had wanted
them for, like a mill where some one had turned on the current. I swore
out loud. "By gad, Collins, listen! If we don't smash Macartney, and he
gets in on us, he'll get Paulette! I've got to stop that, somehow.
Macartney doesn't _know_ she's here yet; Marcia only guessed it.
Supposing he were to see only me, alone in Thompson's stope, he might
never know she was here too!"

"Dunno what you mean," Collins snapped. And I snapped back:

"I mean that if we blow a clean hole at the tunnel entrance, and I burst
out of it and run, I can get the whole gang after me--and make time for
you and Charliet to get Paulette away somewhere, by the back door."

"But"--Collins halted where he swarmed up into Thompson's
stope--"where'll you go? You can't, Stretton. It's death!"

"It's sense," said I. "As for where I'll go, Lac Tremblant'll do for
me; and I bet it will finish any man of Macartney's who tries to come
after me! Get through into that stope with your fuse, man; I'll hand you
the blasting stuff. Got it? All right. Here you, gimme that candle!" I
turned and took it--out of Paulette's hand!

I gasped, taken aback all standing, before I lied, "It's all right,
Paulette. I'll be back in a minute." And though I knew she must have
heard what I was going to do, I had no better sense than to stoop before
the girl's blank eyes and snatch up my two pairs of snowshoes, that had
been lying beside the explosive I had just passed up to Collins, before
I clambered up through the hole into Thompson's stope, on to the shelf
from whence I had first dropped into Collins's cave.

Collins was down in Thompson's tunnel already, laying his fuse with
deadly skill. Already, too, we could hear Macartney's men outside,
leveraging away the boulders that had plugged up the tunnel entrance
where I was to starve and die. Collins placed the stuff I carried down
to him. I said, "My God, you can't use all that; the whole stope'll be
down on us!" And he answered, "No; I've done it right." That was every
word we uttered till we were back on our high shelf, with a lit fuse
left behind us in the stope. The fuse bu