The La Chance Mine Mystery

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Skunk's Misery. But Skunk's Misery was the last thi

a Chance, after an absence of months. It was halfway to dark, and the bitter November wind blew dead in my teeth. Slaps of spray from flying wave-crests blinded me with gouts of lake water, that was oddly warm till the

ettlement-to railhead: and that was forty miles of queer water, sown with rocks that were sometimes visible as tombstones in a cemetery and sometimes hidden like rattlesnakes in a blanket. For the depth of Lac Tremblant, or its fairway, were two things no man might ever count on. It would fall in a night to shallows a child could wade through, among bristling needles of rocks no one had ever guessed at; and rise in a morning to the tops of the spruce scrub on its banks,-a sweet spread of water with not a rock to be seen. What hidden spring fed it was a mystery. But in the bittere

t have to explain the country. But fa

in two sides of a triangle,-except that the La Chance mine was five miles down the far side of the lake from Caraqu

r to have a horse meet me at the Halfway stables I had built at the begin

lt like a warm stove under me, but a five-mile short cut across the apex of the road and lake triangle was better t

, after months of absence and road-making, there was not even a team horse in his stables, let alone my own saddle mare. There was not a

ght. There were not any work horses at the Halfway, because he had doubled up the teams for some heavy hauling from Caraquet, according to my orders sent over from Caraquet the week before, and no horses ha

elsewhere, doing a solid week of hospital nursing over a filthy boy I had found on my just-finished road the morning I had really left Caraquet. From the look of him I guessed he had got hurt cutting down a tree and not getting out of the way in

women-I never saw a man, whether they were away in the lumber woods or not-would lay a hand on him. I will say plainly that I was more than thankful to hand him over to his mother. I had spilt over myself a bottle of some nameless and abominable brew that I'd mistaken for liniment, and my clothes smelt like carrion; also the lean-to I had lived in was so dirty that I scratched from suspicion all day long, ex

ted me a week ago. But I don't walk any twenty-two miles!

on me. "If it was me, I'd walk," he remarked drily. "But take your choice. The lake's a short cut rig

, crossing Lac Tremblant was saving me twenty-two miles on my feet, and I was not wasting any dissatisfaction on the traverse. Only, as I shoved the canoe forward, I was nearer to being played out, from one thing on top of another, than ever I was in my life. I pretended the paddle that began to hang in spite of me was only heavy with freezing spray and that the dead ache in my back was a kink. But I had to put every ounce there was in my six feet of weary bones into lightning-change wrenches to hold the old canoe he

e, that was dry because it was inside my shirt; bailed the unnecessary water out of the canoe and the imme

at, I knew, was rising land, country rock, and again swamp and more swamp,-and all of it harsh, ugly, and inhospitable. But the queer thought that came over me was that it was more than inhospitable: it was forbidding. High over my head poured the bitter wind in a river of sound through th

still of washing myself in brooks and sleeping on the ground,-for I had not been in a house since August. Before I knew it I was speaking out loud as men do in books, only it was something I had thought before, which in b

braham himself, fat, pig-headed, truculent, stumping the devil's sentry-go up and down the bare floor, talking eternally about himself and the mine, till a saint must have loathed the two of them; Thompson, the mine superintendent, silent, slow and stupid, playing ghastly solitaire games

braham's; I could do as well anywhere else, and I was going there-to-morrow; going somewhere, anyhow, so that when my day's work was over I could go home to a blazing fire on a wi

tendrils; eyes that startled you with their clear blue under dark, level eyebrows-I never look twice at a girl with arched brows-the rose-white, satin-smooth skin that goes with all of them, and she would move like--Well, you've seen Pavlova move! Her voice-somehow one of the most important things I knew about her seemed to be her voice-would be the clear, carrying kind that always sounds gay. I was certain I should know my dr

cracked dream of a lonely man. Even if it had not been, and I could have started to look for a real girl to-morrow, I had to get back to Wilbraham's to-night. My dre

he dark of its shadow, the lamplight from Wilbraham's living room shone out on me in a narrow beam, like a moon path on the water. As I crossed it and beached the canoe I must have been in plain s

here no girl had ever set foot!-and she was speaking to me with just that golden, carrying

artled me, till all I could do was to nod in the dark I could just see her in. I could not discern what she looked like, for her head was muffled in a sha

nd you've got to let me alone. If you don't, I-I--" she stammered till I knew she was shaking, but she got hold of herself in the second. "You won't find it safe to play any tricks with the gold here-or me-if that's what you came for," she said superbly, "and you've given me a way to stop it. That

, and when I looked up she was gone. There was nothing to tell me she had really even been there. It was just as probable that I was crazy, or walking in my sleep, as that a girl who talked like that-or even any kind of a girl-should be at La Chance. The cold, collected hatred in her voice still jarred me, since it was no way for even a dream girl to speak. But what jarred m

I went into the house there would be the neglected living room with the smelly stove, and Wilbraham walking up and down there as usual; and Dudley Wilbraham's conve

e was a glowing, blazing log fire in a stone fireplace that must have been built while I was away; and, sitting alone befo