, while you could count five. The
boy at the fire started to frozen attention at sight of us, as sharply
as his distorted body could start. But before he could speak, or I did,
another voice answered Paulette's from the dark of the cave behind the
fire,--an unexpected, mind-shattering voice, that took me toward it with
one bound. "By gad," it said, "he would, would he? Two things have to go
to that!"

I stood paralyzed where I had jumped. Paulette's snowshoes dropped
clattering on the cave floor. Dudley Wilbraham, whom the wolves had
eaten--little, fat, with a face more like an egg than ever, but whole
and _alive_--stood in the dimness of the cave behind the fire and my
Skunk's Misery boy!

CHAPTER XIX

SKUNK'S MISERY

Paulette said, "Oh my heavens, Dudley!" and went straight to pieces.

I don't know that I made much of a job of being calm myself. All I could
get out was, "The wolves! We thought they'd eaten you--Paulette found
your cap out by the Caraquet road."

Dudley, for whom the whole of La Chance had beaten the bush all one
livelong night, whom his own sister had sworn was killed and eaten,
Dudley made the best show of the three. He had a flask, of course,--when
had he not? He dosed Paulette and me with what was left in it, but even
with the whisky limbering my parched throat I hadn't sense to ask a
coherent question. Dudley looked from Paulette to me and spoke pretty
collectedly to both of us.

"I wasn't eaten, if that's what brought you two here--though judging
from your conversation I imagine it wasn't. Thank the Lord you are here
though, anyway. I've been pretty wild, tied up here with this snow.
But"--sharply--"where the devil's Marcia?"

"Hidden away from Macartney, with Charliet to look after her." It was
all I could bring myself to say, except that she thought Dudley was
dead.

"Does Macartney think so too?" the corpse demanded.

"He worked hard enough to feel safe in thinking it," I returned
bitterly, and came out with the whole story. How Macartney said the
wolves had howled around the shack till their noise drove Dudley
distracted, and he had slipped out after them unnoticed, with a gun;
that Macartney, the two girls and half the men had gone to look for him,
when he never returned, till Paulette found his wolf-doped cap torn up
by the Caraquet road, and Marcia found him, in the bush--unrecognizable
but for what rags of his sable-lined coat were left on his body. And
Dudley's hard