hat long-heard rustle in the burrow was close on me: was--

"My God, Marcia!" said I. I never even wondered about Collins and Dunn
letting her get away. Marcia stood up in the entrance from the burrow,
panting, purple-faced, exhausted. Marcia sprang to Macartney--not
Dudley, I doubt if she even saw Dudley--with a cry out of her very soul.

"Mack, you're not Hutton--you never took those emeralds--and for that
girl! Say it's a lie, and it's _I_ you love! Mack, say you love me
still!"

Macartney flung back a mechanical hand and swept her away from him like
a fly. She fell and lay there. None of us had said a word since Dudley
came out and faced Macartney. None of us said a word now. I saw, almost
indifferently, Collins burst out of the burrow behind Macartney, as
Marcia had burst out, and grab me. "Stretton," he gasped, "thank
God--found your tracks. But that she-devil Marcia got away from me,
and----" But in his turn he jerked taut where he stood, at sight of
Dudley, and stood speechless.

But I never looked at him. I looked at nothing but Macartney's face.

It was rigid, as if it were a mask that had frozen on him. The
sealing-wax scarlet on his cheeks had gone out like a turned-out lamp.
His eyes went from Dudley to Collins and back again, as if they were the
only living part of his deathly face.

"Ah," said Macartney, "A-ah!" He dropped on the floor all in one piece,
like a cut-down tree.

Collins made a plunge for him. I sent Collins reeling.

"Let him alone, you young fool," I swore. "We've got him, and he's
fainted. I've seen him like this before--the night he shot our own men
in the assay office. It's only his old fainting fits."

"It's his new death," said Dudley, quite quietly. He came forward and
bent over Macartney, laid a hand on his breast. "Can't you see the man's
gone, Stretton? It killed him: the run here--the shock of seeing me. He
must have had a heart like rotten quartz!"

Paulette, Collins, Baker, all of us, stood there blankly. We had not
struck a blow, or raised a voice among the whole lot of us; Macartney's
gun was still warm from his grasp whence I had snatched it; and
Macartney--the secret wolf at La Chance, masquerader, thief,
murderer--lay dead at our feet. I heard myself say out loud: "His heart
was rotten: that was why he fainted in the assay office. But----Oh, the
man was mad besides! He must have been." And over my words came another
voice. It was Marcia's, and it made me sick.