With the hot glare beating back in his face, Dexter stood with blinking eyes, hearing the hiss of falling sparks and the fierce crackle of the mounting flames. Tongues of fire lapped around the windows and darted angrily from the crevices between the logs. As he peered through the pitchy black smoke, a gust of flame lashed out at the corner of the cabin, and he saw that the door was open.
He remembered closing and wedging the door fast when he left the place a while before. It would seem that a visitor had been there some time during his absence. His glance ranged swiftly around the clearing, and came back to the doorway. For a second longer he hesitated, and then suddenly left the concealment of the trees and strode forward across the open ground.
The snow near the cabin had melted and formed pools of muddy water. He drew a handkerchief from his pocket, wetted the fabric, and tied a protecting mask over his nose and mouth. Then he pushed across the threshold into the suffocation of smoke and heat and showering embers.
He was groping his way towards the center of the room, feeling for the table which stood near the fireplace, when he collided blindly in the hazy dark with a soft substance of flesh—something that moved, and breathed, and was alive.
His hands closed instinctively, and he found himself gripping a slight, lithe, human figure that gasped and struggled for release with the fluttering fright of a captured bird. A curl of flame darted out through the smoke, and in the flash of light Dexter had a momentary vision of a youthful, grime-streaked face, a waving tangle of hair, and a pair of luminous dark eyes that stared wildly under the shadowed curve of thickly fringing lashes. It was a woman—a girl—and his startled intuition told him she was the fugitive who had led him the long chase in the forest.
He saw her full lips tremble apart as the smoke cloud rolled about them, heard her stifled cry of fear. Her breath came quick upon his cheek, and he could feel the rapid pulse throb in her straining wrists. She writhed in his grasp, fighting to free herself. He had not counted on the supple strength of softly rounded muscles that desperation called suddenly and fiercely to use.
Before he could overcome his normal reluctance to hurt a weaker being, she had thrust her elbow under his chin; and as his head snapped back before the unexpected attack, she broke the grip of his fingers, wriggled out from the crook of his arm, stumbled beyond his reach, and ran for the doorway.
Dexter recovered himself a second too late. The girl evaded his outstretched hand, brushed lightly past him, and he turned only in time to see her rush out of the burning cabin.
"Stop!" he shouted.
She cast an anxious glance behind her, but did not heed him. In the haze of smoke he vaguely made out her slender shape as she darted across the clearing. She reached the edge of the forest and vanished among the spruces, leaving him with the tingling remembrance of a warm and vivid presence that had touched and eluded him, like an ephemeral fragrance. For the present he did not attempt to hinder her flight.
The fire had broken through the roof, and was swirling up from the interior walls with hot, roaring sounds. With his arm doubled across his face, he turned again towards the bunks where he had left Mudgett and his comrade lying. Either in life or death he always felt a responsibility for the prisoners he arrested. He tried to reach the bunks, but with his first step a gust of flame swept across the room and drove him back.
For a few seconds he lingered, his head bowed under the falling embers, hoping for a momentary lull in the rush of the fire. But as he stood irresolute, trying not to breathe, one of the roof beams cracked overhead and swung crashing to the floor. At the same instant a wreath of flame circled the doorway behind him. It was time to go.
Shielding his face, he turned and plunged for the opening. A searing wind eddied about him, and the next instant he stumbled across the threshold, and found himself choking and panting as his almost bursting lungs took in great draughts of the heated air outside the cabin. He beat out the sparks that smoldered upon his jacket, briskly rubbed his aching eyes, and then drew back farther across the clearing, beyond the scorching waves of heat.
The cabin was enveloped in high leaping flames that threw a blood-red glare above the snowy tree tops. Overhead he could hear the affrighted cries of birds that had awakened in the night to fly in darting confusion among the spruces. As he watched he saw a corner of the cabin roof curl upward like paper, and cave in the middle. The structure was doomed. There was nothing he could accomplish by waiting.
He remained a couple of minutes longer, observing the falling sparks. The flaming embers were snuffed out, he observed, almost as soon as they struck the soft snow. There was no actual danger of fire communicating through the forest. He cast a last regretful glance towards the cabin, but accepted the inevitable with fatalistic calm. What must be had already happened. He listened momentarily to the direful crackling of flames, and then with grimly set lips he turned to seek the departing footprints of the mysterious girl.
The fresh trail was picked up at the edge of the clearing. He scrutinized the familiar impression of the high-arched instep, and knew beyond question that she was the woman who had led him around a wide-drawn circle, from the cabin of death, back to the cabin.
Until this moment he had supposed that her fateful return was brought about haphazard by a changing sense of direction, that nearly always befuddles people who lose themselves in the woods. Now he had reason to wonder whether he had misinterpreted the signs. Had she deliberately drawn him away from the spot so that she might swing back alone, ahead of him? Had the cabin been fired purposely, to destroy the evidence of crime?
The fire might be of incendiary origin, or it might have started from the smoldering coals he himself had carelessly left in the hearth. Of one fact only was he certain. He had found the girl in the cabin. What stress of circumstance had induced her to enter the place, or had kept her there with the walls blazing about her? He could not guess. But if she actually found her way back intentionally, after traveling miles of dark, unblazed forest, her skill in woodcraft surpassed the skill of every woman and almost any man he had ever met.
With troubled and gloomy face, he once more took up the trail of the small footprints. The girl had struck off towards the brook this time, but whether she really knew where she was going, or was fleeing aimlessly, he could not say. As he pushed after her he discovered that continuous use had nearly exhausted his flash-lamp battery. There was still some current left, but from now on he would have to use his light sparingly. He hastened on, determined to end the pursuit as quickly as possible.
He was weaving his way through the icy wattles of a juniper clump, when, in the stillness of the night, shrill and plaintive, he heard the whinnying cry of a horse. For an instant his heart seemed to check a beat, and then he remembered Susy. He had left the pony in the gully, a few hundred yards south of the clearing. The tracks of the girl ran that direction, and the breeze was from the north. Susy must have discovered that somebody was approaching. She was a friendly little beast, and no doubt she had begun to feel lonesome and neglected in the dismal forest. It must have been Susy.
Dexter had halted for a moment to listen. But the cry was not repeated. A faint glow of distant fire still shimmered before him, seeping through the woods like twilight, mottling the coverts with strange, ghostly shadows. His straining senses caught no sound or stir of life. He was starting forward again, but as he bent to pass under a drooping bough, some alert faculty within him prompted him with sharp warning to look behind.
He was conscious of no actual noise; not even the tiny crack of a twig: but like most men who live in constant danger his nerves were as sensitive as a seismograph to any slight movement near him. Turning, he was aware of a muffled shape that had stepped softly from the dark thicket behind him. At the same instant a living weight pressed against his back, he felt the swift, circling contact of arms closing about his waist, and a pair of steely cold hands gripped upon his wrists. As Dexter lurched about to face his unknown antagonist, the night silence was broken sharply by the cry of a woman's voice, a crashing in the underbrush, and then the muffled beat of a horse's hoofs galloping along the winterbound brook.
From the sudden, startling sounds in the direction of the brook, the corporal guessed that the hunted woman had stolen and mounted his horse, and the spirited Susy was bolting through the woods with her unacquainted rider. The intelligence reached him subconsciously; he had no time for actual speculation. The active part of his mind was fully preoccupied just then, as he found himself struggling in the dark with an unidentified someone who had crept upon him from behind and seized him in a crushing embrace.
A second before he was confidently ranging on the trail of the fleeing woman, believing himself the only man existent in that vast area of desolate forest. And without forewarning, he suddenly discovered himself in the grip of a powerful assailant. He did not stop to ask questions.
His arms were pinioned at his sides, and iron muscles were closing tight about his ribs. Instinctively he knew he was no match for the burly strength that held him, but he had wicked recourse in a trick that it behooves all light men to learn. With a deep breath he filled his lungs full, and then as suddenly let go and shrank to his least possible dimension. For an instant he gained the needed laxness, and his arms slipped free.
Before his heavier and slower acting opponent could anticipate the movement Dexter's left hand reached across and gripped the other man's right elbow at the precise spot where a tender nerve runs near the socket bone. Simultaneously his right hand shot over his head and clasped the tendons of a short and stocky neck. Then, with catlike quickness, he dropped crouching almost to his knees. The suddenness of the shift overbalanced the other man, and the wiry corporal took the weight across his left hip. A wrench and a heave, and he might send his victim sprawling with a badly twisted back. But as he gathered himself for the final effort, he noticed something strangely familiar in the texture of the sleeve his fingers were grasping. His hand slipped downward, and touched the metal buttons of a uniform jacket.
With a wondering exclamation he relaxed his body, and straightened erect. Then he squirmed about to confront the panting bulk behind him. He stared in the semi-darkness, and made out in blurred outline a square-shaped face and bristling mustache, shadowed under the brim of a regulation Stetson. For an instant longer he peered in tense questioning, and then he laughed a low, short laugh that wavered between relief and chagrin.
"Hello, colonel," he said.
The other man gazed uncertainly, but slightly let up on the pressure of his grip.
"Superintendent Devreaux of Fort Dauntless," remarked the corporal, grinning. "If you'll give me two more inches space I'll be proud to salute my officer."
The mustached man worked his heavy brows, and blinked in an owlish, nearsighted way. "It's—it's Corporal—" he muttered—"why, bless me, it's Corporal Dexter of Crooked Forks!"
He released his bearlike clutch, and stepped back a pace, gingerly rubbing the indented place in his elbow joint. "I'm just as well pleased that you didn't finish the last movement of the Nipponese spine cracker. I'm not quite as spry as I remember being once, and I suspect—I rather fear you would have had me." He cast a curious glance in the direction of the flaming cabin. "What's the trouble here?" he asked.
Dexter regarded his superior officer with the respect an eaglet might well feel towards a war-scarred eagle. Colonel Devreaux was a grizzled veteran of the R.C.M.P., with a record of two generations of police work behind him, and an ex-army officer of the World War. The commander of a great wilderness superintendency, he was known as a mighty criminal catcher wherever word of the law has traveled, from tide water to the plains beyond the mountains, from the big sticks of the middle country to the little sticks of the frozen Arctic.
Theoretically the superintendent belonged in his office at Fort Dauntless. But in actual fact, he was seldom seen at his desk. He wandered at large, in the thick of all troubles. Lonely constables by remote bivouac fires could never feel quite sure that the next moment might not bring the old man stalking casually into camp to demand pot luck and ask to know how business fared.
"Constable Graves is dead," said Dexter, watching his officer's face. "Ambushed and shot from behind. I found him lying in the snow a short distance down the valley."
Devreaux drew breath with an audible sound. "Young Graves!" he muttered. "Another added to the long score." He shook his head glumly. "I've seen so many go out—fine, strong, valiant boys! And the old man goes on year after year, just getting older. Fate's a queer thing, Dexter, and so unfair!
"Who shot him?" he asked, suddenly curt and business-like.
"A stranger. Never saw him before, and he wouldn't tell his name. Trailed him to a cabin yonder, where you see the fire blazing. Arrested him and a trapper named Mudgett."
"Well?" asked the superintendent, staring sharply.
The corporal gave a hurried account of recent events, telling of the murder of his helpless prisoners, of the woman's voice in the cabin where no woman was found, of the trail of small feet discovered near the clearing and followed in a circle back to the cabin, and finally of the fire, his unexpected encounter with the maker of the footprints, and her subsequent escape and flight.
Devreaux listened without interruption to the singular recital. And, characteristically, he showed no sign of wonderment. "You say this disembodied voice—seemed to be talking over a telephone?" he inquired.
"So I thought, until I had searched for the instrument But I didn't overlook a cubic inch of space anywhere inside or outside the cabin. And I found neither wires nor telephone. And no trace of any intruder, for that matter."
"Radio?"
"No. Impossible. The equipment couldn't have been spirited away so quickly."
"Most people would advise you to consult an ear specialist," remarked the superintendent. "But I'm credulous about—well, anything at all. I've observed so many strange happenings in my time that I've learned to believe the wildest and weirdest things are possible, and I've lost all sense of amazement. What do you think about it all?"
"I honestly don't know what to think."
"It wouldn't surprise me if this business hitches up somehow with the errand that brought me into the mountains," remarked Devreaux musingly. "Poor Graves and I came up here together from the fort. We separated this morning, he to beat along the course of the brook, and I to swing across through the timber. We had planned to meet to-night farther up the valley. Coming through a while ago, I caught the glint of fire, and of course turned aside to investigate. I heard some one coming this direction, and effaced myself. A man came along, and I grabbed him to make him account for himself, and he was you.
"What was the man like whom you arrested?" he asked abruptly—"not Mudgett, the other?"
"Undersize, swarthy, hawk-beaked, glittering black eyes."
"No," interrupted Devreaux. "The one I'm thinking of has light red hair."
"'Pink' Crill?" asked Dexter, mentioning a name that for some reason had stuck disagreeably in his thoughts.
"Where have you heard of Crill?" demanded the officer.
"I found a Bertillon photograph in Graves' jacket."
"I see. Yes—'Pink' Crill! I shouldn't have been sorry if he were the one. Saved us future trouble."
"Yes?" said the corporal expectantly.
"A Chicago safe expert. Killed an officer on his way to jail, and got away. Was traced into Canada, and we were asked to pick him up. We heard later that he was on a Grand Trunk Pacific train, traveling for the coast. But when a constable jumped the train he learned that the red-haired passenger had dropped off between stations and taken to the woods.
"Later we got word that our man had plunged into the uninhabited wilderness, and was making this direction. I decided to make a long patrol myself, and took young Graves along. This Crill is no woodsman, mind you, yet he's outdistanced and outwitted me. And until now I've rather prided myself on being a voyageur."
Devreaux spoke with a peculiar grimness of voice. "Crill of course has had help," he went on. "Oddly, there seems to be quite a crowd of people at large on this side of the ranges. Who they are, what their business, I don't know. But I've touched their trails, seen their ax-blazes on the trees, found their dead camp fires. In this country where nobody ever comes!
"People who always managed to keep out of sight!" added the superintendent moodily. "With all the ranging and stalking we've done, Graves and I haven't clapped eyes on a single human face. Yet I know positively that there are men in this valley—six or eight or ten of them."
"All men?" asked the corporal with a sidewise glance.
"I have seen only the tracks of men's boots. Crill's, undoubtedly—and others." Devreaux cast a quick glance about him. "This unknown woman you speak of—she came this direction?"
"I heard a galloping horse at about the time you jumped me. I have an idea she's taken my pony."
"It sounded that way," observed the officer quietly. "I guess it's up to you, Dexter. How long will it take you to catch her?"
Devreaux spoke with serene assurance, and the corporal nodded coolly in acceptance of what amounted to a command. Both had learned by experience that a man afoot can walk down any horse in a prolonged chase. And Susy was jaded from days of hard travel.
"Can't say," answered Dexter. "That pony doesn't like strangers, and she'll shake her rider off if she can. But in any event, if it doesn't storm again, I should catch her to-morrow afternoon, or by evening at the latest."
"I'll camp here and wait for you," volunteered Devreaux. "Bring the woman with you." The superintendent shot an approving glance at the upright figure before him. "Give you anything I've got," he said.
"Trade flashlights with me, please. My last battery's burned out."
The exchange was made, the two nodded briefly in farewell and Dexter once more set forward on his trail.
Tracks of small shoes led him to the gulley where he had left his horse for the night. The girl must have heard the neighing and turned over that way in hope of picking up a mount. The scuffled snow indicated that there had been a struggle before she succeeded in climbing on the pony's back. Afterwards she had ridden away without a saddle, using a halter rope instead of a bridle.
By the hoof marks Dexter saw that he had correctly interpreted the sounds he heard a few minutes before. Susy had broken into a run the moment she felt the weight on her back. With features unnaturally grave, the trailer followed through the underbrush. In a couple of minutes he reached the bank of the brook and found that the filly had not checked her stride here, but had plunged downward and crossed the ice at full gallop.
The shod tracks swerved abruptly on reaching the opposite embankment, traveling southward along the brook course over a stretch of stony and pitted ground. Dexter walked onward at a fast pace, swinging the shaft of his light, his intent gaze searching before him with ominous expectancy.
And a quarter of a mile farther down the stream the trail ended, as he had known that sooner or later it surely must end. In a hollow of ground, beyond an outcropping shale of rock, he found his pony stretched flat and motionless among the stones, with her head flung backward and her forelegs doubled limply under her body. And a few paces farther on a slim-built, girlish figure was lying prone upon the snow.
With teeth fastened in his lips the corporal stepped forward to bend above the tumbled figure of the woman. She was so quiet he thought she was dead. But her fingers were warm, he found when he pulled off her mitten, and the tide of life still flowed vigorously through the slender, flexible wrist.
His light gleamed upon the curve of a soft cheek, pallid as marble against the faint blue shadow line of the vein throbbing in her temple. Her hair, trimmed in a boyish bob, straggled over eyes and forehead in fine-spun tendrils of golden bronze. The delicate skin of her face was grimed and scratched, and in the palm of her bared hand he found the crimson trickle of a deep, jagged cut. Gingerly he raised her from the snow, and the man, accustomed to dealing with men, marveled at the trifle of weight in his arms.
He was unbuttoning the pocket where he carried his first-aid kit, when he heard a low sigh and felt a quick, stirring movement against his shoulder. Crouched on one foot, he supported the limp figure, and waited breathlessly. He watched the droop of her red nether lip under slowly parting teeth, observed a twitching of her eyelids, and then saw the long lashes suddenly lift. And with the pocket-lamp still shining in her face, he found himself at very close quarters with a pair of velvet eyes, dark blue as violets that looked straight into his.
"Yes—I'll try," he heard her say in a straggling, far-off whisper.
Her eyes were fixed upon him, but there was something in the quality of her gaze to tell him that she was not yet aware of his being there. Awkwardly her hand crept upward and clutched tightly upon his shoulder, as though a reviving consciousness needed some tangible support to cling to. He waited unmoving, and all at once the light of intelligence flickered from the depths of suddenly distending pupils.
A rose bloom of color dyed her cheeks, and her breath came quick and sharp. She stared intently, with wonderment mounting swiftly to confusion and alarm. "It's—who—where am I?" she stammered. Her hand dropped from his shoulder, and she pushed away from him with a gasping cry.
Somehow she got upon her feet, and turned blindly as though to flee into the forest. With her first step, however, she stumbled, and would have fallen. But Dexter sprang after her, and caught her firmly in his arms. She relaxed with a weary, hopeless gesture, and this time did not try to break his grasp.
"The horse," she faltered—"ran away—and we went down in the stones."
"Knocked you out for a couple of minutes." Dexter surveyed her with the impersonal curiosity of a surgeon. "You're able to stand—after a fashion," he remarked. He lifted up her hands, one and then the other, and nodded judicially. "No broken arms or legs. Ribs? See if you feel any twinges?"
She wriggled obediently, and shook her head. "No. I think I'll be all right in a minute."
"Don't try to run again," he advised her. "It would be silly."
She glanced furtively about her, but did not reply. His lips drew straight, in a stern, uncompromising Line. "In case you hadn't noticed the uniform," he said, "I'm Corporal Dexter, R.C.M.P. If you tried to get away, it would be my business to bring you back again, even if it meant a journey of months and thousands of miles. Your hand's badly cut. Sit down while I dress it."
He released her, stepping back a pace, and she managed to keep her feet without his support. Swinging the beam of light towards her, he regarded her with swiftly appraising eyes. His previous impression of fresh and vivid youth was instantly corroborated. She could not have been twenty years old. Under happier circumstances, in any other place, he would have supposed her to be some boarding school Miss who had ventured out of doors for winter sports—tobogganing, perhaps.
Her costume carried out the fiction: fine, shapely boots of soft glove leather, with thick, ribbed arctic hose rolled half way from the knee over the cuffs of laced Mackinaw breeches; gauntlet mittens of white, fluffy lamb's wool, and heavy, white, snug-fitting sweater, "V"-cut at the neck, leaving her rounded throat bare to the weather. She seemed pathetically small and defenseless as she faced him alone in the midst of a great, savage wilderness; but as he recalled the recent encounter in the burning cabin, he smiled with inward cynicism. She had taught him that she was competent to take care of herself.
She stirred uneasily under his cool scrutiny, and finally with short, careful steps, she moved to a snow-covered bowlder by the brook side, and sat down. From the ground at her feet she picked up a white knitted cap and pulled it tightly over her unruly hair. She remained silent, watching Dexter from under lowered lashes.
With a packet of surgical tape in hand, he advanced and dropped on one knee beside her. Indifferently, she allowed him to examine her injured hand.
"What's your name?" he asked, his deft fingers busy with the dressings.
"Alison Rayne," she told him after a second's hesitation.
He touched her wounded palm, and the texture of skin was smooth and soft. Whoever she might be, she certainly did not belong in this harsh country where life is supported by disfiguring toil. "Where are you from?" he inquired.
"From the south," she answered evasively.
He knotted his bandage neatly and was rising to his feet, when from the darkness behind him he heard a dull thumping sound, followed by a snort of heavy breathing. Turning in surprise, he crossed back to the hollow of ground where his pony lay fallen in the snow.
Until this moment he had taken it for granted that Susy had killed herself. But he saw now that she was still alive, trying feebly to lift up her head. He crouched beside her, and at once ascertained that both forelegs were broken.
Momentarily his hand strayed forward to touch the warm muzzle in the snow, and then, with features drawn and set, he stood up to fumble at his holster flap. He and Susy had traveled the ranges together for two years, sharing hardship and peril and the glory of sunny days. But time passes, and weather changes, and companions must sometime separate. Like the men, the horses of the police were employed in an extra-hazardous service. Dexter was used to swift leave-takings; had long since learned to accept death with fatalistic fortitude. He was drawing his pistol from its holster, when a foot crunched behind him, and Alison Rayne stepped forward to gaze over his shoulder.
"It was my fault," the girl whispered. "The horse ran away with me, but I didn't need to—I could have walked. The poor thing—is suffering! And I—it was my—" She choked, unable to finish, and began to cry.
The corporal shouldered her aside, and advanced in the darkness. There was a brief silence, broken by a heavy report, and Dexter stalked back again, thrusting a pistol into his holster. His searchlight discovered the girl standing with her hands over her ears to shut out the sound, sobbing piteously, with great tears welling from her eyes. "I'm sorry—sorry!" she whimpered.
"It was Susy's fault—mostly," he told her gruffly. "She should have known better than to gallop on this ground." He faced the girl in curiosity, marveling at the strange complexity and inconsistencies that make up the nature of womankind. Here was one who cried in remorse and pity because a horse had to be shot. He had observed no tears shed over two men, who had been wantonly and ruthlessly killed. As he studied her sensitive features he found it increasingly difficult to believe that she could be the woman whose footprints led from the scene of tragedy. Yet her boots matched the prints he had followed, and there was no other departing trail.
"Did you set fire to that cabin?" he asked abruptly.
"I?" she exclaimed.
"You were inside the place when I got there."
"Yes. I saw the flames and feared some one might be in there asleep. So I broke the door to give warning. And a man came inside after me—"
"I guess you know I was that man," he said. "Why did you run after I called to you?"
"I didn't know who you were," was her explanation.
"You don't know how the place happened to take fire?"
"I do not."
"How did you happen to return there?"
"Return?" She seemed genuinely puzzled. "I was never there before."
"You're mistaken," he informed her. "You visited the place a couple of hours before the fire broke out. There's no sense in denying it, because there are marks of your feet in the snow, indicating the direction of your arrival, and proving the suddenness of your departure. When you left you roved over a six- or seven-mile circle, and then came straight back to the cabin. I know because I made the same journey, never more than thirty minutes behind you."
The exactness of his information seemed to disconcert her. "I—if this is true—it's the first I knew it," she asserted at length. "But now that you speak of it, I didn't—I wasn't quite sure of my directions. It would be a funny thing to happen, and yet I may have wandered around as you say, and struck the same cabin twice, without recognizing the spot."
"What were you doing there in the first place?" he asked.
"Nothing. I was walking along the brook, and thought I smelled chimney smoke, and turned aside to see what it meant. That was all."
"At that very time two men were killed in the cabin bunks," he told her—"two men, helplessly bound, who could do nothing but scream for mercy."
"I heard!" she blurted out with a shuddering breath. "It was—" She stopped short, and from the frightened look she gave him he fancied she had said more than she meant to say.
"You admit you were there then, when this killing took place?"
"Admit it?" she asked sharply. "Why, what is there to admit? That I happened to be in the neighborhood—that I heard—"
"That you know more than you're telling me about a very strange affair," he soberly interrupted.
The girl's head lifted with a jerk, and Dexter could almost feel the sudden hostility of her eyes staring at him in the dark. She drew a slow breath, and when she spoke her tones were brittle and cold, lacking all inflection. "As long as we've gone so far, let's get this straight," she said in deliberative accents, as though she might be reciting something learned by rote. "Chance brought me to that cabin. I heard a shot, I heard some one cry out in seeming anguish, I heard another shot. I was alone in a strange place at night, and—and I heard that horror. I was terrified—and I did what any other frightened woman would do. I ran—anywhere to get away."
He watched her for a moment with narrowed eyes, but did not openly question her story. "Do you know the men who were killed?" he asked after a pause.
"Know them?" she gasped. "I hadn't seen them! How should I know them?"
"A woman was in the cabin when the shots were fired," he stated darkly.
She drew backward, breathing audibly, and he could see the nervous gripping of her hands. "If there was a woman there, it wasn't I," she declared. "That's easily proven. You found my foot tracks, you say. Where were they?"
"At the edge of the clearing."
"Did they go to the cabin?"
"No," he was forced to confess. "The last print stopped a dozen yards away."
"Then what do you expect to show?" She faced him tensely. "What are you trying to make out?"
He did not answer, but regarded her searchingly, his brow furrowed in thought. The mystery of the double murder apparently was no nearer solution than it had been before he caught the fugitive. The few facts he had gathered summed up in a most contradictory fashion.
As he positively knew, there was a woman in the cabin when the crimes were committed. But in some unaccountable manner she had vanished. In the snow outside he had found a woman's footprints, and the girl was forced to admit that they were hers. But she denied she had entered the cabin, or even crossed the clearing, and the evidence of her tracks apparently bore out her assertion. Nevertheless, by the testimony trampled in the snow, he had learned with certainty that she was the only woman who had approached anywhere near the scene of tragedy.
She had told her story glibly enough, but at the same time her recent actions were not above suspicion. She had tried desperately hard to get away, and now that he had caught her it was clear enough that she was afraid of him—a representative of the law. Even at this moment there was something in her nervous, half-defiant manner to warn him that she would escape at the very first opportunity.
While she was talking he had listened for some tone or inflection that might remind him of the voice he had heard a while back in the cabin. The other voice, however, had carried to him muffled and distorted by thick walls, and he could not really say whether he had detected any resemblance.
"What are you doing here in the wilderness?" he asked the girl after a lengthy interval.
For several seconds she stood silent, and he had a feeling that she was thinking fast, trying to invent a plausible answer. "Are the police in the habit of cross-examining everybody?" she inquired at length. "Isn't this government land, and aren't people allowed to come and go as they please in the forests?"
He regarded her with steady eyes, showing no sign of impatience. "Who brought you here?" he asked. "You never could have come across these mountains alone."
She made a gesture with her hands, almost impudent, altogether evasive. "You see me," she said. "Am I not alone?"
With a slight shrug Dexter gave up his efforts to extract information from her. Whoever she might be, she was a resolute, quick-witted young woman, and apparently she was ready to go to any lengths to prevent his finding out more about her than she wanted him to know. He bore her no malice. She had a right to preserve her secrets if she could. It was the business of the Minister of Justice to coerce unwilling witnesses, and the corporal, for his part, had no intention of browbeating any girl.
"I should have warned you," he said presently.
"Warned me?" she asked, her head held high. "What about?"
"The police are supposed to caution prospective prisoners against too much talking." He smiled dryly, and reached into his pocket for pipe and tobacco pouch. "I must advise you not to say anything incriminating."
"What—what do you mean?" she gasped.
Dexter looked absent-mindedly at his pipe, seemed to have forgotten what he meant to do with it, and returned it to his pocket. "You will come with me," he said mildly. "In the name of His Majesty the King, I arrest you."
The north wind rattled among the dry branches of the brookside junipers, but for a space of ten seconds no other sound broke the straining silence that had fallen upon them. The girl stood motionless, gazing vacantly at Dexter, finding nothing whatever to say.
"I'm not making an accusation," he told her. "But we have to hold you for the time being as a witness. Perhaps it won't amount to more than that."
She swayed a little, as he had sometimes seen a man reel at the first numbing shock of a pistol bullet. But as he watched with troubled eyes, he saw the slender figure straighten with the quick resiliency of a birch sapling in a wind. Her firm chin suddenly lifted, and she spoke slowly, in a voice strongly controlled.
"What have I done?" she asked. "What right have you to detain me?"
Dexter did not reply. The right or wrong of the law's might was a question policemen wisely would not discuss. "We'll start whenever you're ready," he said.
"But—but—" she protested, fighting to keep back her tears, "you wouldn't dare! It would be too high-handed! Why, even the mounted can't go about arresting people right and left, for no reason at all."
"Colonel Devreaux is waiting for us," he remarked with official politeness. "It isn't far, not more than a quarter of a mile from here."
"Oh, no!" she cried, and for just a moment she could not help showing him how badly scared she was. "Don't you understand? I can't go. You mustn't make me! You mustn't! You don't know what you're doing!"
"If you could convince Colonel Devreaux that we have no reason to take you to Fort Dauntless," he said with a trifle less austerity, "why, of course, that would end the matter."
"Convince him of what?" she demanded. "What must I prove that I haven't done?"
"You've refused to answer almost every question I've asked you," he reminded her.
"I've told you—" She checked herself, biting her lips. They had again struck the stumbling block. He knew that she dared not tell the truth about herself.
"We might as well go," he said.
Her glance swept wildly about the dark thickets, as though she were reckoning her chances of escape. But she could not help but realize the madness of attempted flight. Her lips parted in tremulous breathing, but she did not move.
"You're still a bit shaken by your fall," he said, shrewdly watching her. "But we'll travel as slowly as you like, and you can hang on to me."
Her figure stiffened, and she scornfully refused his offered arm. "If we must go, let's go," she said in a chilly voice.
She started forward with tottering steps to retrace the pathway along the brook. Dexter cast a last lingering glance towards the huddled dark bulk in the hollow where Susy had tumbled, and then in silence he turned to follow.
For the present, at least, the girl was forced to resign herself to the bitterness of fate. She walked ahead with shoulders erect, trying to keep her steps from faltering, proudly ignoring the man who stalked behind her.
They crossed the brook, and thence followed the trail northward in the direction of the burning cabin. Presently Dexter caught a tiny point of light flickering in a nearby thicket. He turned aside with a word to his companion, and a moment later they stumbled into the circle of a new-built camp fire, where Colonel Devreaux sat cross-legged on a tarpaulin, contentedly sipping coffee.
"This is Alison Rayne," said the corporal.
"Humph!" grunted Devreaux. He set down his cup and fixed the girl with the stony, unwinking stare that usually frightened evildoers. But Alison Rayne met his eyes, and did not flinch.
"Sit down, Alison," he invited at length. "Do you want some coffee?"
"No, thank you," she answered coldly. Nevertheless, she accepted a corner of the tarpaulin, and sank to the ground with a tired sigh.
"What did you have to do with the killings in that cabin yonder?" he inquired bluntly.
The girl's face went deathly white for an instant, and then an angry scarlet suddenly flamed in her cheeks. "Nothing!" she said in a choking voice. "I don't know a thing about that—what happened. You—you're very—you shan't say such abominable things to me."
"I want to talk to you," remarked the superintendent placidly, "and I thought we'd get the hardest part over first." He hitched his weight around so he could observe the reflecting firelight upon her face, and proceeded with his ruthless catechism.
Under the fire of questions the girl sat inert, scarcely breathing, her tormented eyes veiled by heavy drooping lashes. Sometimes she answered Devreaux's sharp interrogations in seeming frankness, sometimes she only pretended to answer, sometimes her lips closed, trembling, as she stubbornly shook her head. Now and then her glance strayed surreptitiously towards the corporal, as though seeking some hope of mercy from the younger man.
But Dexter did not once look her direction. He sat a little apart, and his face was revealed to her only in profile, its firm, rugged lines showing almost gaunt in the firelight, changeless and unreadable as sculptured bronze. His straight lips were mutely compressed, and his eyes, darkened by night to murky gray, never once left off their brooding contemplation of the fire. The girl watched him at first in faintly hopeful appeal, then with a baffled knitting of arched brows, and finally she turned from him altogether to bow her head drearily before Devreaux's volley of questions.
Her ordeal lasted for some time, but finally the superintendent decided that he was wasting his breath. His method of attack was direct and forceful, like bludgeon work, but when he finished he knew no more about the mysterious young woman than Dexter could have told him. "All right, Alison," he observed with a ponderous shrug. "Without a rack and thumbscrews, I guess we've gone as far as we're going to go."
He scrutinized her for a moment with puckered eyes. "You know, of course, that you're putting yourself in the worst possible light. That's up to you. I give you credit for this much, though: you haven't tried to make us swallow any lies." He relaxed for a moment in an iron-visaged smile. "All tired out, aren't you, Alison?"
"Dead tired," she murmured.
Devreaux nodded towards a sheltercloth that he had staked up, forester fashion, in front of the fire. He was a fastidious campaigner, and during Dexter's absence had taken the trouble to shingle a foot-deep couch of feathery balsam tips. "You'd better turn in and try to sleep."
The girl accepted the invitation with a slight nod, took the blanket the colonel gave her, and crept underneath the shelter cloth. Devreaux glanced after her, and then turned ruefully to the corporal. "It's the snow for you and me to-night, both tugging on your blanket," he remarked in an undertone.
"What do you make of her?" asked Dexter, as they stepped beyond earshot of the tent.
"Pretty, sweet-looking girl," muttered the superintendent. "It goes hard to think evil things about her. But I've had some beautiful illusions smashed in my time, and I learned long ago that you never can tell by appearances. You can bank on one thing: she never found her way alone into this back-of-beyond country. She's got friends hereabouts, and whoever they are, I've a feeling it'll be a good job when we put hands on 'em."
Dexter looked dubiously at his chief, but made no comment. "What are you going to do with her?" he asked after a moment.
"Hang on to her. Lodge some kind of a complaint, and wait until we get the real facts. One of us had better take her down to Fort Dauntless, where we'll have her safe."
Devreaux eyed the corporal for a moment with a peculiar slanting of his heavy brows. "On the other hand, we want this 'Pink' Crill, and whoever's with him—and we want 'em badly. One of us has got to stay behind and tackle that business." He cast a squinting glance skyward, and shook his head. "The difficulty is that big snow is due to fly almost any day. Once the pass is choked this country will be shut off from the outside world. Whichever one of us stays behind is almost certain to be stuck here until spring. Which job do you choose—Fort Dauntless or Crill?"
Dexter grinned. It was a tradition in the mounted that an officer never assigned a subordinate to any task, dangerous or disagreeable, that the officer was not perfectly willing to undertake himself. He knew that the superintendent was sincere in his offer, and that the decision rested with him.
"You're needed at the post," said the corporal at once. "I'll go after Crill, of course."
The older man nodded curtly. "Graves and I picketed our horses by the forks in the lower valley. I'll cache all my extra grub there where you can find it, and you'll weather the winter all right, even if the snow catches you."
He measured the corporal with his deep-searching gaze. "There were two of us hunting Crill up to this afternoon. You know what happened to poor Graves. Crill and his friends are out to get the police before the police get them. And after I'm gone you'll be playing a lone hand. You'll be careful, Dexter."
"Sure," said the corporal lightly.
"I'll send you reinforcements," the colonel pursued, "but I doubt if anybody can get in here in time to beat the snows. You may have to hold out by yourself until spring. But rest assured that the first thaw will bring men to your help."
"Thanks, chief," said Dexter. "And don't worry about me. I'll manage."
He left camp for a few minutes to saunter down into the gulley where he had dropped his saddle packs, and when he returned he brought a blanket to spread on the ground across the fire from the tent. For a while longer he and the colonel sat together arranging their final plans, but at length they kicked off their boots, donned their night woolens, and rolled up together in the common blanket.
Both were light sleepers, accustomed to arousing at the least disturbing sound. There was a little of downwood scattered about under the snow, and they had no fear of an enemy approaching unannounced, or of their prisoner's escaping.
Twice during the night Dexter got up automatically to replenish the fire, and on another occasion he awakened sharply to find the girl tiptoeing out of her tent. He was on his feet, almost before his eyes had opened, and smiled grimly at the sight of her startled face. "It's too early to get up now," he remarked pleasantly. "We'll call you when it's time."
She gave him a disconcerted glance, and then turned slowly, without a word, and crept back under the shelter-cloth. Dexter tossed a couple of billets of wood on the fire, and calmly returned to his blanket. After that he got in two hours of unbroken rest before the approach of dawn finally banished sleep.
He and Devreaux awakened at about the same moment and bestirred themselves in the lingering darkness. While the superintendent was poking up the embers of the fire, Dexter went to the brook to chop a wash basin in the ice. He came back, bearing a filled bucket, his hands and face tingling after a heroic soaping in the chilly water.
When breakfast was ready they called the girl, and she came forth, drowsy and shivering, to sit by the tiny fire. There was a little droop of dejection about her shoulders, but the courage of her blue eyes was not yet dimmed. As Dexter observed her covertly in the steel gray dawn, some vagrant stirring of memory brought back to him for an instant the lovely image of a nameless blue and white flower he had one day discovered, blooming valiantly and unaccountably beside a mountain snow drift. To him this woman seemed as much out of place in a bleak camp of the police, as the pretty, stray blossom that had got lost above timberline.
She greeted the two men with a distant nod, but had nothing to say to them; and they respected her mood, and did not try to draw her into conversation.
When breakfast was finished and the back packs had been made up, the three strolled through the spruces to the neighboring clearing. The fire had burned out during the night, and all that was left of the cabin was the fireplace and chimney, scorched and blackened, standing solitary over a heap of smoldering ruins.
Devreaux viewed the desolate scene with down-drawn brows, and presently moved forward in the smoke to prowl among the debris. For several minutes his squat figure was seen moving and stooping in the dingy haze; and when he returned his boots and gloves were sooted black.
"I've been poking around where you said the bunks stood," he remarked, shouldering the corporal beyond their companion's hearing. "Found your manacles, and—not much else. Those pitch logs burn with a frightful heat."
"I tried to get in there when I discovered the fire," Dexter told him. "But it was too late. I couldn't make it."
"No fault of yours. You did all you could, of course."
The superintendent surveyed the smoking wreckage. "The center of fire seems to have been in the timbers near the chimney. It must have started there."
"We can put the cause down to accident," remarked Dexter. "The girl couldn't have started an incendiary blaze. I was right at her heels when she circled back here last night, and I realize now she wouldn't have had time to touch it off. And there were no tracks to indicate that any one else visited the clearing during our absence."
"Caught from the fireplace, then," observed Devreaux.
"Undoubtedly. There was a hot fire in the grate, and as you remarked, those pitch floor timbers would easily catch ablaze. A chance ember popping out would set it going."
The superintendent gave Dexter a sidewise glance and regretfully shook his head. "Sorry, just the same. I should like to have identified the man who killed Constable Graves. Now we may never know.
"Young Graves!" he echoed gently. "He'll have to do for the present as you left him. We'll send in for him when we can."
The colonel lapsed into silence for a moment, while his glance roved about him in the ghostly twilight. But presently he turned aside to move through the fringes of the clearing. He was absent for some time, and when he came back he said he had circled the area of timber surrounding the cabin.
"Just to make sure that you overlooked nothing when you searched last night in the dark," he remarked to the corporal. "I'm satisfied. There are no wires strung to the cabin." He faced his companion with a quizzical expression. "It couldn't have been a telephone you heard."
"I heard the whirr of a bell, and I heard a voice give forewarning," Dexter reiterated. "I can tell you no more than that. As for the rest, it all seems as bizarre and unreal this morning as the memory of a nightmare."
"The rest is real enough," said Devreaux somberly. "Graves and your two prisoners murdered, the cabin burned, this strange young woman left on our hands, and 'Pink' Crill and other unknown skulkers at large in the woods. Hard, ugly facts, Dexter!" He looked at the younger man in gloomy foreboding, and sighed, and shook his head. "I hate like thunder to leave you here alone," he ended.
"Pshaw!" said the corporal, with his quick, bright smile.
"Yes, I know. You boys always say that. And that's why I'm able to run this territory with no more than a dozen of you standing by me." The colonel stooped abruptly for his pack, and then straightened with a brusque movement and stuck out his hand. "We'll foot it down the valley to the horses, and ride on out," he said as his iron grip closed for an instant in a farewell handshake. "So-long, David."
Without further speech he beckoned to Alison Rayne. "Ready!" he announced.
The girl hesitated for only a second, and then with a helpless gesture she turned to follow. Devreaux motioned her to go in advance, and she passed by with shut lips and high-poised head, without a single backward glance. The colonel paused to wave his hand, and then the black forest closed upon the retreating figures, and Dexter was left alone in the clearing.
The corporal lingered by the smoking embers, gazing with a queer, ruminative look in his eyes towards the spot where quaking branches cut off his last sight of the departing travelers. Behind him he could hear the faint sputter and hiss of live fire still gnawing under the cabin timbers. A chorus of shrill, thin pipings sounded from the dimness of the woods, and a band of chickadees wheeled forth in elfin flight, whisked past his face, and vanished across the clearing. He stirred abruptly at the breaking of his thoughts, and turned for a final scrutiny of the ground about him.
For more than an hour he ranged back and forth in the misty dawn, searching for any small clew or minutiæ of fact that might in some way throw light upon last night's grewsome mysteries. What had actually happened in those few intense moments before the prisoners were killed? What was the bell that rang? Who had barred the door and fired the shots, and dropped a discharged pistol on the floor, and departed afterwards, noiseless and unseen, with no human footprint left outside? How was it all accomplished? He did not know. And an exhaustive researching in the daylight still left him at his wit's end, without one tangible hint to suggest the explanation of an inexplicable business. He prowled with nervous energy about the clearing and through the neighboring strip of forest, and his sharp vision missed nothing that mortal eyes could see. But the riddle of the tragic visitation remained inviolate. It was as though he dealt with factors and forces that hovered beyond the scope of human sight and comprehension.
Finishing his profitless investigations at last, he stood irresolute for a space, frowning, not quite decided what he ought to do next. His future plans were as yet indefinite. He was assigned on roving patrol, cast upon his own resources, dependent in all matters upon his own judgment. Before he looked upon civilized places again he must hold some sort of accounting with the elusive outlaw, Crill. But in this thousand-mile stretch of mountain wilderness, the game of hide-and-seek might drag along through weeks and months. Meanwhile, he knew he would find no peace of mind until he had gained some inkling of truth concerning Alison Rayne.
Who was she? What possible errand could have brought her alone into this shut-in region of silence? What concern had she in the affairs of Mudgett and the dark-visaged stranger, or of the other intruders who prowled somewhere behind the range? Was it her voice he had heard last night in the cabin? He drew a sharp breath, and slowly shook his head. The questions clamored unanswered. He knew no more about the girl than she had allowed him to read in her level-gazing eyes.
There remained one possibility: if the fresh snow lasted long enough he at least could find the place she came from. The sought-for information might possibly be picked up at the end of the back trail. In a moment he made his decision. Other matters might wait; meanwhile he would try to settle definitely, one way or another, the disturbing enigma that had haunted his thoughts since his first meeting with Alison Rayne.
No longer hesitating, he shouldered his pack and picked up his carbine. He cast a final glance towards the pile of blackened litter where the cabin had stood, and then, with the relieved breath of one who quits a place of evil, he swung on his heel and started northward through the silent forest.
He struck the line of familiar little footprints in the runway where he had first discovered them the evening before. This time, however, he took the trail that approached the cabin clearing, and let the heel marks point his direction of travel. Treading the reversed pathway, he found himself branching to the right, and in a few moments had reached the edge of the brook.
The girl had followed the stream down from the north, walking in the middle of the frozen watercourse. But at this point she had struck off at a right angle through the timber, making straight for the clearing. Across the way an old, lightning-blasted sugar pine towered high above the spruces. This tree would serve as an unmistakable landmark, even in the darkness. By the abruptness of the trail's turning, it looked very much as though the girl knew where she was going when she left the stream here to shape a direct course for the cabin. Dexter paused for a moment to examine the ground, and then, with a half nod of conviction, he continued on his way.
The footprints kept to the ice, leading him back towards the headwaters of the brook. Dexter followed the windings of the stream, but for reasons of his own, he did not stay in the open course, as the girl had done. There was no knowing what peril might be lurking at each new bending of the densely wooded shore line. It was an ideal country for bushwhacking. Remembering what had happened to Constable Graves, he refrained from exposing himself unwarily. He clung to the shelter of the bank, treading cautiously, gliding like a shadow through the fringes of alder and willow.
His progress was necessarily slow. All morning he traveled, keeping along with the tortuous meanderings of the brook, and when he finally halted for noonday tea, he estimated that he had advanced no more than five or six miles as a bird might fly. The backward trail of small shoe prints continued with the stream.
The girl evidently had come down that way from some deeper fastness of the forest-clad mountains. As the corporal recalled, the country above here had never been officially mapped or explored. His own farthest wanderings had never taken him into the valley of this nameless stream, and he had no notion what was hidden beyond.
He resumed his journey, moving always among the concealing thickets, pausing at every sharp bend of the brook to reconnoiter the ground ahead. The afternoon advanced, and he trudged onward in the white stillness, finding no sign of human intrusion other than the trail unraveling from the north, seemingly without any place of beginning. No wonder the girl was in a state of physical exhaustion last night when he escorted her to Devreaux's camp. She had walked many miles to reach the cabin clearing.
All day the corporal kept on the move, back-tracking her yesterday's footsteps up the valley of silence. Sometimes he paused to listen, and once he imagined that he caught a far-off sound of chopping. He turned aside to investigate, and lost more than an hour ranging through the forest tangle. But he did not hear the sound again, and no sign of any axman was found. A while later his alert eyes discovered a shifting patch of brown that appeared and instantly vanished in a distant hillside covert. Again he made a cautious detour, only to come at last upon the fresh tracks of a mule deer.
When he returned to the brook after this last excursion, he left the shielding thickets, where travel was slow and difficult, and strode on with quickened step along the open course. The sun was sinking over the snow-capped peaks that stood in serried outline against the westward sky, and he realized that unless he made haste darkness was likely to overtake him before the riddle of the trail was solved.
For half an hour longer he pushed ahead through the endless stretches of forest, and then, most unexpectedly, as he rounded a sharp bend of the brook, he found himself at the edge of an open glade where there stood a log cabin, half hidden among the bordering trees. He stopped with up jerked head, staring through the tracery of branches, and saw that he had reached his journey's end. The line of the girl's footprints descended to the brook from the cabin door. It was from this place that she had set forth on her fateful errand.
Dusk was falling, and a hush of emptiness and desolation brooded over the clearing. The cabin door was closed, and no smoke came from the mud-daubed chimney. Dexter's eyes searched over the ground, and he saw only the single track of footprints. Evidently the girl was the only one who had crossed here, either departing or arriving, since the fall of yesterday's snow.
Quite certain that the dwelling had no present tenant, the corporal nevertheless was taking no chances. Slinging his carbine at his back, he drew his heavy service pistol. Then, without further ado, he stepped forward to investigate.
The cabin was constructed of freshly peeled logs, saddle-notched, and in size and method of building, it was a practical duplication of the other mysterious habitation which he had stumbled upon last night in this same lonesome valley. He recalled the story told him by Mudgett—of a so-called settler and trapper named Stark who had put up a shack somewhere in this direction. Possibly this was the cabin mentioned.
The latchstring dangled invitingly on the outside, and, without pausing to reconnoiter, the corporal pulled up the fastening bar and shoved the door open. He crossed the threshold, and found himself in a large, square room, dimly revealed in the failing daylight. In the gloom he made out a stone fireplace, and a pole bunk built against the opposite wall.
As he stood blinking, trying to accustom his vision to the semi-darkness, he heard a quick rustling sound, and was suddenly aware of a white face and a pair of gleaming eyes staring at him from the bunk.
"Hello!" he ejaculated, taken aback for an instant by the unexpected apparition. "If I'd imagined any one was here I'd have knocked."
He crossed the floor and saw a man's blanketed shape, propped half erect in the bunk. A glance told the corporal that the other was a stranger. He was a smooth-faced youth, nineteen or twenty years old probably, with drawn, haggard features, dank, uncut hair, and wide-spaced, staring eyes that glowed with feverish brightness in the gathering dusk. His weight was rigidly supported on one elbow, and a look of seeming consternation flitted across his face as he caught sight of the police uniform.
"What—what do you want here?" he faltered in a straining undertone.
Dexter did not answer. "Who are you?" he countered. "What's your name?"
"Why, it's—Smith," said the boy with a noticeable stumbling. "Tom Smith."
The corporal's mouth twisted skeptically. "Seems to me I've heard that name somewhere else. Smith, eh? Well, Smith, what's the matter with you? Sick?"
The boy stirred and brought his bare arm from under the blanket. "Ax slipped and cut me, and the thing's got infected," he said. "I've been in agony for two days."
"I should think so!" exclaimed Dexter. The forearm was darkly inflamed, swollen to twice its normal dimensions, and reddish purple streaks had begun to creep upward to the shoulder joint. "You've neglected this for two days?"
"I didn't know what to do with it."
"Then you've no business in this country." Dexter regarded the young man curiously. "These little accidents are always apt to occur, and unless you've got the nerve and sense to do your own surgery, you'd better stay where hospitals are handy."
He turned his back for a moment and put away his pistol. Then, unobserved, he drew a small, thin bladed knife from his pocket. "Here!" he said. "Let's see that."
Gripping the injured arm firmly, he leaned forward and found the seat of the wound. Then, with merciful swiftness, before the other could guess his purpose, he slashed with his sharp blade, cutting deep into the throbbing flesh. The boy jerked away, screaming in sudden anguish.
"Oh, you—what have you done?" he moaned.
"In town they'd have given you an anæsthetic," remarked the officer. "Here we've got to take what comes, and bear it. You should have done that for yourself yesterday."
The stranger groaned feebly, and hugged his wrist, and for the moment, evidently, speech was beyond him.
"All we need now is hot water, and plenty of antiseptics," said Dexter. "We can do."
He crossed to the hearth, laid kindling, and ignited a fire. This done, he went outside, and returned a moment later with a snow-filled kettle to hang over the flame.
"How do you feel now?" he asked, going back to the bunk.
"I think—a little better," came a weak answer from the pillow. "It's a different kind of hurt."
"If I hadn't come along you would have died—about four days from now," said the policeman lightly. "As it is, you should be able to handle an ax again in about four days."
"I suppose I ought to thank you," said Smith after a little silence.
"I expect you ought to. You'll sleep to-night." Dexter grinned encouragingly. "Hungry?"
"Not very."
"I am." The corporal unslung his pack, and turned to investigate the culinary resources of the shack. His search discovered a well stocked larder, and he calmly helped himself to such things as he required. He kneaded dough for bannock bread and set the loaf baking, started coffee, and sliced a liberal quantity of bacon. By the time these preparations were made, the kettle of snow water was boiling.
He dissolved tablets from his emergency kit in a strong solution, and then swathed the arm of his wincing patient in steaming bandages. "We'll keep that about ten degrees hotter than you think you can stand it," he asserted. "And the first thing you know you'll be off the casualty list."
Dexter returned to his cooking, and when the simple meal was finally ready, he heaped a plate for Smith, and then set a place for himself at a slab table near the bunk.
"Whose cabin is this?" he asked abruptly as he pulled up a stool.
The boy hesitated for a second, and then apparently decided that there was no harm in telling the truth. "It belongs to Owen Stark," he said.
"Stark!" the corporal nodded. So this was the shack that Mudgett had mentioned. "Who's Owen Stark? I don't know him."
"A trapper," was the reply. "He intends to live here this winter."
"What about you? You're not a woodsman."
"No," admitted the other after a pause. "Stark invited me to visit him—for the fall hunting. I don't expect to stay much longer."
"Where's Stark now?" the policeman asked as he applied himself to his plate.
"He went up the valley somewhere—probably twenty miles or so north of here. Left two days ago, and I wouldn't expect him back much before to-morrow. Looking for places to run his trap line."
Dexter offered no comment. It was a plausible enough story—if Stark were really a trapper. Yet there was something anxious and overstrained in the boy's speech, as though he might be inventing his answers. Or again, perhaps it was only his arm that troubled him.
"Stark went off and left you here alone?" the corporal asked with a slantwise glance.
"Yes. I wasn't so bad at the time."
During his inspection of the cabin interior, Dexter had noticed a woman's cloak and hat hanging on one of the wall pegs. Now he suddenly turned, and pointed with his thumb. "Whom do those belong to?" he demanded.
The patient moved gingerly under his blanket, rolling his head so he might see. "Those are Mrs. Stark's," he said.
"What?" The exclamation came sharply, before Dexter could control his voice, and his knife and fork dropped on the table. "You mean to say—she's married?" He stared for a moment with puckered brows, and then almost instantly recalled himself. "I mean—Stark has a wife?"
"Yes."
"She left here yesterday?" asked the corporal in low, curiously restrained accents.
"No," returned the other unhesitatingly. "She left a couple of weeks ago for a visit in the settlements. She hasn't come back yet."
"Let's get this straight," said Dexter after a tense interlude, "She's been away for a couple of weeks, you say. What's she like? Rather pretty girl, copper-tinted hair, large blue eyes—wearing—"
"No," interrupted Smith. "Not at all."
Dexter drew a short breath. "Well?" he demanded.
"Vera Stark's not a girl, but a woman about thirty-five," stated the boy. "Thin—dark complexion—jet black hair and eyes."
"Oh, I see." Dexter picked up his knife and fork, and started to eat once more with a healthy man's appetite. For the moment his attention was fixed upon his plate, but he was somehow aware that furtive eyes were watching him from the shadow of the bunk.
"You seem to have got her mixed up with some one else," his companion presently ventured to remark.