I'd just
said in his everyday manner, if it had not been for the dog's grin he
always wore when he was angry, "if I hadn't run on single snowshoe
tracks carrying double, where you crossed the Caraquet road. And if one
of you hadn't trailed your shoe tails through Skunk's Misery--that
doesn't wear them!"

"How did you get here?" said I slowly, because I was calculating my
spring to Macartney's gun hand.

"I walked," and I thought he had not noticed I was half a step nearer
him. "If you meant me to drown myself following you over your lake, I
didn't--thanks to the kind warning you made of my men. But I didn't
imagine you'd drowned yourselves either--after I looked through a field
glass! Charliet had plenty of snowshoes cached away; I was always
quick on my feet; and after I struck your track the rest was
simple--especially as you were fool enough to bring a girl here. I----"
but his level voice was suddenly thick with passion. "_Get back!_ If you
try to grab my gun I'll shoot you, and your boy too, like dogs! You'll
stay still and listen--to what I've to say. I've an account to settle
with you, Stretton; now that I've cleaned up Dudley's, and he's dead!"

You could have heard a pin drop on the dead silence of that underground
hole. Neither Dudley nor Baker stirred, and it hit me like a hammer that
Macartney didn't know they were alive; _he didn't know!_

I stood as though I had been struck dumb; so did Paulette. Neither of us
even flickered an eyelash toward the shadows behind us, where Dudley
must be crouching, anything but dead, with Baker beside him. Perhaps it
struck both of us, simultaneously, that Dudley had heard Macartney
coming before we did and disappeared on purpose, thinking Macartney
might speak naked truth to Paulette and myself, where he would have
varnished it up to a mysteriously resurrected employer whom he might yet
bamboozle as he always had bamboozled him. Anyhow, neither of us saw fit
to give Dudley away. Macartney sneered into our silent faces.

"There's not much fight in you," he commented contemptuously. "Though it
was never any good to try to fight me! If you like to have it in
black and white, _I've_ been all the brains of the business
here--single-handed! It was I got the secret of the wolf bait from the
mother of your lame friend here," he pointed with his unoccupied hand to
my grovelling boy, "when first I followed Paulette out from New York and
laid up in Skunk's Misery to wait till I