The roar of the gale drowned all sound of departing footsteps. Two seconds after the girl had bade him farewell, Dexter had lost sight and knowledge of her. He did not call after her, or attempt to stay her flight. His first concern was for Devreaux; and with a muscular strength surprising in a man of his slender frame, he lifted the wounded officer's weighty bulk in his arms, and trudged forward in search of shelter.
With his head bowed before the freezing blast, his shoulders stooped under the burden he carried, he labored across the open ground and eventually found himself at the edge of the standing timber. The snow swept about him in flying vortices, pelting his face like bird shot, blinding his eyes and robbing him of breath. The trees on the mountain slope swayed and writhed like living things before the fury of the blizzard, and he could hear the splinter and crash of rotted limbs wrested from their trunks. Heedless of the danger of falling boughs, he stumbled, panting, into the dense timber, and started to climb the gullied slope, seeking with storm-blurred sight for any barricaded nook that could serve as a temporary haven of refuge.
At the best he hoped for no more than the lee side of a windfall, or else a fissure among the rocks that could be roofed over with a thatching of branches. He did not dream that the fates might deal more kindly with him. But as he struggled up the steep slope, through a thick fir coppice, he chanced to notice a peculiar, smooth-sided hole in the snow crust above him. It was a small opening, scarcely large enough to admit a man's hand, but with his first glance he halted, stared incredulously for an instant, and then, with a grim tightening of his lips, he lowered Devreaux's body to the ground, and climbed upward to investigate.
Pressing his face to the aperture, he was conscious of a rank, furry scent that a bear hunter could never fail to identify. He laughed softly under his breath. For once fortune had dealt munificently with him. Chance had led him to the winter den of a hibernating bear, and in his desperate extremity he was ready to contest possession with its owner.
The popular belief that bears lie torpid in winter is a fallacy, as Dexter knew only too well. A grizzly will hole-up with the first frosts, living on his own fat during the famine time of cold, dozing and sleeping through the short days and long freezing nights. If left undisturbed in his chosen nook, he will nap in sluggish contentment until spring comes around; but there is nothing trancelike about his sleep. His nose and ears are always cocked towards the entrance of his snug retreat, and at the sound or scent of intrusion he will arouse instantly, with every savage instinct alert and primed for battle. A man who intrudes on a hibernating silver-tip takes his life in his hands. The corporal was aware of the penalty he might have to pay for rashness, but the thought of holding back now did not occur to him. He must get Devreaux under cover, and for the sake of a stricken comrade he would not scruple to fight for a den with a grizzly bear.
From a fallen tree near by he broke off a pitch knot to use as a torch. Then, without giving himself time for reflection, he climbed the embankment again and started deliberately to enlarge the breathing hole that had been thawed through the snow.
As quietly as possible, he broke out chunks of the frozen crust, and in a couple of minutes had uncovered a low, tunneled opening that ran back in darkness, somewhere among the rocks. Before him lay a cavern of some sort that time and weather had hollowed under the pitch of the mountainside. How far it extended he could not guess, but the entrance would admit his body if he stooped low, and he knew that where a grizzly had gone, a man could follow.
He knelt for a space, listening, and fancied that he felt the rhythm of slow, heavy breathing in fetid gloom beyond. With hand steadied by enforced calmness, he struck a match and ignited his torch. The resinous wood took fire almost at once, burning with a sputtering, smoky flame. He whipped the brand about his head to assure himself that it was not likely to flicker out, and then drew his heavy service pistol and started forward into the tunnel.
Crouching, he advanced in the cramped passageway, but he had taken no more than three steps, when he was aware of a sudden heaving movement in front of him. The next instant the silence was broken by a loud snortingwhoof, and as he peered into the warm, rancid darkness, he caught sight of two greenish sparks—lambent points of flame, that he knew were a pair of glaring eyes.
His first shot might be his last, and he leveled his pistol point-blank at one of the glittering marks, aiming with great care and pulling the trigger with slow, even pressure.
With the battering explosion in his ears, he was conscious of a shadowy bulk heaving up before him, and then the walls of the cave seemed to tremble before a terrible, hot-breathed roar that reverberated in his brain like a thunder clap. He felt a surging movement in the darkness, and jerked his head back just in time to save his face from the mangling stroke of a steel-hooked paw that batted the air with a ton-weight of fury behind it.
Through the reek of smoke he still saw the flaming eyes, and he poked forward the pistol at full stretch and once more fired. Again and again the red streak of flame spouted from the muzzle of his weapon, and the rapid concussions crashed back and forth in his head, buffeting his senses as a swimmer is buffeted by the surf. The noise and confusion, the suffocating powder fumes filling his nostrils and lungs began after a moment to overcloud his faculties, leaving him only the subconscious will and determination to keep on shooting. His finger was working automatically on the trigger, sending bullet after bullet into the looming bulk before him.
But after wild and tumultuous moments, his mind suddenly awakened to the knowledge of a great stillness that had fallen about him, and all at once he realized that he was pulling the trigger vainly on an empty magazine. The pistol dropped from his nerveless fingers, and he peered vacuously into obscurity, expecting each instant to feel the lightning shock of death.
He waited for a second in benumbed resignation, but nothing happened. As he blinked his eyes, trying to see, he heard a moaning sound, like an uncanny human voice, and then his ears caught a faint trickle and gurgle that might have come from a hidden rivulet of water.
An unaccountable fit of trembling seized him, and for seconds he found it difficult to keep the torch in his hand. But he managed to swing forward his smoldering light, and in the dim illumination he made out a huge, shapeless mass of fur sprawled on the red-stained rocks.
With extreme caution he crept forward and looked down upon the matted head of an enormous silvertip bear. The lips of the beast were drawn back in a snarl over the ugly yellow teeth, but the eyes had both disappeared, and a stream of blood ran out from the piglike snout. Dexter thrust the end of his torch against the wet muzzle, and not a tremor of life passed through the tumbled carcass.
For seconds the man crouched motionless, staring at the grotesque heap before him. And with his feeling of relief there came also a certain sense of regret and shame. The bear had found the den first, and by every law of right and justice he was entitled to sleep there unmolested. But for the intruders life had been stripped to primitive necessity. To live meant to kill.
The corporal held his torch aloft and saw that the cavern opened farther back into the mountain, forming a roomy and sheltered retreat. If need be, a man might safely spend the winter there. He nodded in grim satisfaction. By killing the bear he had obtained at a stroke the very essentials of existence—meat, blankets, a lodging-place.
Dexter stripped off his jacket and fanned the powder smoke out of the cabin entrance; and as soon as the air was fit to breathe he went outside for Devreaux.
He picked up the wounded man, lugging him into the cave, and pillowed his head on the warm, shaggy body of the dead bear. Then he made his preparations for a dreaded undertaking.
Building a fire in the cavern entrance, he set snow to melt in the colonel's camp kettle. From his own emergency case he brought forth a tourniquet, forceps and a small, whetted knife. He boiled the instruments in a strong bichloride solution, scrubbed his hands and forearms in the same steaming fluid, pared his nails to the quick, and then stripped off the wounded man's jacket and undergarments, and set silently to work.
Men who dwell in the wilderness are forced to do all things for themselves, without expert help or advice. The troopers of the royal police are expected to acquire a rough and ready knowledge of surgery, but Dexter was not at all confident that his skill was equal to the present emergency. But his comrade did not have a chance of surviving with a bullet in his lungs, and so he steeled himself to the ordeal and went ahead with a task that had to be done.
For nearly a half hour Dexter labored over the stricken man under the ghastly flicker of a pitch torch, stuck in a crack of the cave wall. Devreaux regained consciousness, and fainted, and revived again; but never once during those dreadful moments did he move or flinch, and not one cry was wrung from his ashen, stern-set lips. Dexter was cool and self-contained when he began his work; when he finally finished his features were contracted in drawn and haggard lines, his forehead was dank and wet, and every nerve was aquiver. But he stood up with a red bullet clutched in his fingers, persuaded that Devreaux at least had a fighting chance for life.
The wounded man mercifully had fallen into a stupor at the last. Dexter looked questioningly for a moment at the twisted, pain-racked body on the rock floor; then he unstrapped a blanket roll and laid a covering over the unconscious figure. The colonel's discarded jacket was lying near by, and he picked it up as an afterthought to spread over the blanket. By accident he held the garment upside down, and a bundle of loose papers fell from one of the pockets and scattered over the ground.
As soon as he had placed the tunic over the sleeping man's shoulders, he stooped to gather up the papers. They were official reports, he noticed, with a few stray newspaper cuttings among them. He was shuffling the bundle together, when his attention was caught by a half tone newspaper photograph that accompanied the printed matter of one of the clippings.
The photograph was of a boy, a pleasant-faced, dreamy-eyed youth of eighteen or nineteen years; and as the corporal examined the likeness under the flaring torch, his lips puckered suddenly in a soundless whistle of astonishment. There was no mistaking the features: it was the face of the boy he had left that morning in the lonely cabin on the farther side of the valley. As he stared at the print the headlines that went with the photograph seemed to leap forward to meet his startled gaze. Inked across the top of the clipping in remorseless black type, the caption read:
BROTHER AND SISTERWANTED FOR MURDEROF WEALTHY UNCLE
With brows bent in almost painful concentration Dexter perused the appended account, and as he read his lips pressed hard against his teeth and a look of sadness crept into his somber eyes. The story told of a rich retired merchant of Detroit, Michigan, Oscar Preston, who adopted and brought up a nephew and niece as his own children. In a recent slight illness the uncle had unaccountably died, and on investigation it was discovered that a slow poison had been administered in the medicines he had taken. The physician in attendance had filed charges of a capital crime against the nephew, claiming to have proof that the young man had deliberately killed his uncle for the sake of the inheritance. But when the police showed up with a warrant of arrest, the nephew had vanished, and his pretty twenty-year-old sister apparently had fled with him. The boy's name was Archibald Smith Preston; the girl's, Anne Alison Rayne Preston.
Dexter sighed deeply as he finished reading the story. For a space he stood motionless, his brow darkened in brooding thought, his listless fingers folding and refolding the edge of the clipped newspaper. Alison! He need wonder no longer over the incongruous circumstances of fate that had forced this attractive, delicately nurtured girl to rove as a forest vagabond in the terrible northland. The boy in the cabin yonder, who denied knowing her, was her brother. And like "Pink" Crill, they were hunted fugitives, wanted by the law for a capital offense.
Dexter found it hard indeed to think evil of the clear blue eyes that had met his eyes a while before with such seeming honesty and frankness. But he could not question the fact that Alison must be the girl referred to in the newspaper, as likewise he could not deny or explain away her presence at the cabin of murder in the lower valley. The news story did not actually accuse her of complicity in her brother's crime, but to the reasoning mind of the policeman her flight under such circumstances amounted virtually to a confession of guilt. And knowing what he now knew, his remorseless duty imposed upon him a double obligation to find her again and force her to answer the law's solemn accounting.
As he listened to the shrieking of the wind outside, there came to him a mental vision of her, struggling and fighting her way against the storm; and the thought occurred to him that perhaps it might be for the best if the clean, white death of the snows should overtake her—better for her and for him. To stumble on the little huddled figure, frozen in the drift, would be a tragic finding; but then, at least, he would not be called upon to go through with a business that it would take all of his stoic resolution to face.
He folded the newspaper clipping, and, without realizing what he was doing, thrust it into the pocket of his own tunic. Then, with heavy steps, he moved back to the mouth of the cave to look out into the gathering twilight. The temperature was falling rapidly, and the wind had risen to a gale. Driving gusts of snow obscured the landscape. He gazed through a seething haze towards the mountain slopes above, and shivered as though with a sudden chill. Somewhere off there were Alison and Crill, and the men who had shot Devreaux: wandering through the snow in search of shelter. Their situation was unenviable; but as he bowed his head before an icy gust that swept the mouth of the cave, he reminded himself that his own lot was not much better.
The new fallen snow was beginning to bank up in great drifts. A few more hours would see the passes blocked, and all communication would be shut off from the outside world. He was trapped for the winter—snowbound in a lonely valley of the mountains with a band of criminals whom he was hunting, and who in turn had taken to hunting him. His rifle and pack were lost, he lacked supplies and adequate clothing; his comrade was wounded, probably dying. And he knew that if his enemies survived the blizzard they would seek out his hiding place, to finish him too, if they could.
While the storm raged over the mountains Dexter was confined in his cave for three days and nights, watching over a man who slumbered on the shadowy borderline of death. He performed the herculean task of skinning and dismembering his bear, and hanging out great haunches of meat to refrigerate in the below-zero cold. Also he contrived to gather enough downwood to keep a small fire going in the entrance of the cavern. Otherwise he could do nothing but sit in brooding loneliness, listening to the faint, irregular breathing of his companion, waiting for the blizzard to abate.
On the morning of the fourth day he tumbled out through the drift that choked his front passage, to find the sun shining down on a frozen world of dazzling whiteness. The wind had died during the night, and a silence of utter desolation had fallen upon the earth. The trees of the forest stood motionless, with drooping, over-weighted branches. A vast blanket of white smoothed and soothed the rugged landscape. He listened, and gazed about him, and nowhere was there sound or stir of life. Yesterday's slate had been wiped clean: all trails were buried deep under the winter's snow.
Dexter stared off across the dreary wastes, blinking owlishly under the scintillating sun, feeling an awed sense of lonesomeness and littleness, such as the last survivor of the world's final cataclysm may some day feel. What had become of the men who crossed that direction he did not know. He could not guess where Alison was. Perhaps all had perished in the storm. He shook his head in gentle melancholy. At present there was no way of finding out what had happened, and it was futile to speculate.
As far as he himself was concerned, he tried to think that he ought to be grateful. He was alive and in health, and his own trail had been erased by the storm. He was housed for the winter, and so long as he did not wander far abroad, nobody could track him to his place of concealment. If his enemies were still alive, they too were imprisoned in the mountain-walled valley, and there would be no escape for any one before the spring thaws set in. Outnumbered and outgunned as he was, he still nursed a dogged determination to hunt these men down. He would have to take them one by one, and in cool self-assurance he believed somehow that he might manage. But there was no hurry. He would not know what to do with prisoners now, if he caught them; and he could not leave Devreaux. He would keep out of sight for the present, biding his time, waiting for spring and the opening of the trails.
Meanwhile Dexter faced months of appalling hardship. The ordinary backwoods settler, owning his cabin and tools and provision store, nevertheless must toil and struggle heroically to exist through the cruel northland winters. But the most destitute of settlers had an easy job compared to the labors that Dexter was called upon to undertake. Knowing that two lives were dependent upon his efforts, however, he went about his work with cheerful energy.
First of all, wood had to be cut—enormous stacks of it—to meet the hungry demands of a fire that must not be allowed to go out. While the weather hardened and the new snows piled up, he went into the nearby timber, day after day and week after week, chopping great logs with an absurd little pocket ax—chopping for hours at a stretch, until somehow he would get to thinking of the ax handle as just another numb, half-frozen member of his body. Between his wood gathering forays he found time somehow to make and set traps and snares for hare, ptarmigan, lynx and a gluttonous wolverine that raided his larder nights; to cure pelts, and manufacture moccasins and clothing and blankets and snowshoes; to cook and sweep, to render bear fat for lard and candles, and leach lye for soap; to bathe and shave and keep up at any cost the pretext that he was still a respectable member of society. And Devreaux needed constant, devoted care.
For more than three weeks the wounded man lay in the coma of darkness, an inert, senseless human bulk, whom death had claimed, and who did not die. And day and night the corporal kept his untiring vigil, and fought the powers of fate for his comrade's life.
The days grew shorter and shorter, and November's cold gripped the earth tighter and tighter, like locking fetters of steel. And still the spark smoldered in the stricken man's body. There came a night at last when Dexter, stooping to force a spoonful of broth between his patient's teeth, was suddenly aware that the sunken eyes had opened to look at him with a feeble light of intelligence.
"Hello, colonel!" he ejaculated.
"Not yet, David?" A whimsical smile flickered upon Devreaux's lips. "Tough on you. Old ram too stubborn to quit. How long now?"
"About a month."
"You looking after me all that time. Thanks." Devreaux surveyed his companion with misty gaze. "You all right?"
"Fine."
"Pull me through if you can," said the colonel with failing breath. "I'd like to last now to—to meet the man who—shot—" his voice faltered, faded away, his eyelids closed, and he slipped back gently into oblivion. But this time his unconsciousness was not like a stupor. He was asleep.
November passed, and December came in with snow and more snow, with a frigid breath that froze the surface crust as hard and solid as stone. Devreaux slumbered on with only brief and fitful awakenings, day after day, and night after night: his body and spirit wearied to utter exhaustion, needing the recuperating balm of sleep. And while he slept the beat of his pulse slowly strengthened, and his breathing gradually lost its wheezing sound. He had weathered the crisis, and by almost imperceptible degrees the throb of life was renewing. Dexter hovered over him constantly, watching and hoping, with the grateful, awed feeling of a man who has been permitted to help work a miracle.
The colonel was on the road of convalescence, but otherwise life was not pleasant for the tenants of the bear den under Saddle Mountain. The fearful storms of the holiday season swept down upon them in howling fury. Dexter had kept track of the days with charcoal marks on the cavern wall. Christmas was only a week away. His gaunt, frost-bitten features twisted into a grin as he thought of Christmas. Their salt, pepper, baking powder and tea had been used up weeks ago; the flour was out long since, likewise the bacon and sugar; his stock of matches was running low. Hares were becoming scarce, and wary, and there hadn't been a ptarmigan around that direction in a month. As for bear meat, he felt certain that the very next rich, black, savory bear steak he tried to eat surely would choke him.
Thanks to a habit of absent-mindedness, he still had plenty of tobacco. Usually when it occurred to him that it was time to smoke, he would find his pipe bowl filled with the tobacco that he had forgotten to light the last time; and when he started to reach for an ember from the fire, as likely as not he would get to thinking about something else and shove the pipe heedlessly back into his pocket again. It was a satisfaction to know that his pouch still held a winter's supply of tobacco; but his craving for a change from bear diet was becoming an obsession that gave him no rest. Finally, one day, he left Devreaux asleep and snowshoed several miles farther up the valley looking for anything he could find, except grizzlies. And to his intense joy he stumbled upon a winter deer yard.
There are only two varieties of meat that the human digestion can tolerate for breakfast, dinner and supper, day after day and week after week: beef and venison. Dexter trimmed the branches from a springy sapling, devised a rude block and tackle to bend the tough stem to the ground, and whittled a trigger and made a hangman's noose of rawhide. He baited his evil contraption with lily bulbs, chopped with great labor from under the ice of a near-by pond; and the next morning he owned the strangled carcass of a mule deer buck, which he skinned and quartered, and lugged by sections to the cave.
That night there was something like contentment in the stuffy hole where two members of the royal mounted dwelt. The unusual odors from the cooking fire aroused the colonel to one of his short spells of wakefulness, and he watched the supper preparations with famishing eyes.
"Any sign of our neighbors?" he asked as Dexter filled him a plate of steaming venison soup.
Dexter shook his head. "Since that afternoon I have not seen or heard of—of anybody."
"I seem to remember your telling me that the girl—Alison, wasn't it?—walked out on you."
"To bring you here—I had to let her go."
"You don't know where she went?"
"She—perhaps she didn't get through that night." Dexter had found a seat on a log, and as he spoke he settled his chin in the palm of his hand and stared vacantly into the fire. "I've been wondering—a lot—lately."
Devreaux eyed him for a moment with a curious, sidewise glance. "She reminds me of a girl I once knew," he said after a pause of constraint.
"Yes?" said the corporal in a dreamy voice.
"I was a constable in those days," went on the superintendent—"a swaggering youngster in a proud uniform. The girl was so pretty you felt breathless just from looking at her. I can see her even now, without half trying, as she used to sit near me at camp fires that have been cold for forty years.
"Her father was wanted for a border robbery," the colonel resumed as Dexter sat silent, watching the flames, "and she was supposed to have helped him. My inspector sent me after them, and I rounded them up in a corner of Northern Ontario.
"During the weeks of the back trip," Devreaux pursued, "that girl worked on me with those innocent eyes of hers, and I soon found myself trying to think that we had made a dreadful mistake. And because I wanted to, I soon was thinking so. I got so I would have staked my life on that girl. She told me she was guiltless, and begged me to let her go." The old officer's jaw muscles hardened as he smiled his granite smile, "Now you're the only man besides myself who knows how near a police constable once came to betraying his trust.
"Do you know what saved me, corporal? My uniform was too tight in the back." Devreaux nodded soberly. "Nothing but that. I couldn't move or breathe without remembering the tunic I wore. In my moments of weakening that tunic somehow would tug at my back. I believed in that girl, but also I passionately believed in the Royal North-West Mounted Police. And so I escorted my prisoners to the fort, and my heart was breaking when the inspector returned my salute and told me that some day I might make a good policeman.
"As it turned out," Devreaux added, and deliberately refrained from looking at his companion, "this girl was all wrong—thoroughly no account—not worth wasting a thought on. Yet I think about her sometimes, because it was through her that I lost a lot of fine boyish illusions. And there was another thing I almost lost, but didn't quite: the thing that generations of us will go on to the last man and the last breath fighting for: the honor of the service."
A deep silence settled in the cavern as the superintendent broke off his low, monotones of speech. Dexter sat quietly, his spare body hunched over the fire, gazing into vacancy. But at length he stirred on his log, and abruptly turned, and squarely met his officer's eyes. "You didn't need to tell me this," he said.
"The one romance of my life," remarked the colonel, his voice tinged with something akin to embarrassment. "I just happened to be reminded of it."
"A homily for young policemen." Dexter laughed harshly, and then suddenly stood up, and from his pocket he produced a dog-eared newspaper clipping. "This fell from among your papers," he said. "Have you ever read it?"
"I have a scrapbook at the fort in which I file away items of general police interest," observed Devreaux. "I must have clipped this before I left the fort, and lacked the time to paste it up."
While Dexter held the candle near, he ran his glance through the paragraph of type.
"Alison Rayne," said the corporal, as Devreaux finished reading.
"Hum!" mused the superintendent, handing back the clipping. "I thought I remembered that name from somewhere, but didn't quite place it." He suddenly shrugged his shoulders. "Well! There we are!" His gnarled fingers strayed forward to rest lightly for an instant on his companion's sleeve. "You never can tell about 'em, David."
Dexter started to reply, but checked himself with tight-shutting teeth. He turned, and with precise care, arranged a couple of logs on the fire. Then, without a word, he stepped outside the cave, to stand bareheaded in the night, watching the play of auroral lights upon the frigid reaches of the northern horizon.
Through January and February the temperature fell lower and lower, and winter, like a white, constricting monster, bound the forest country in tighter embrace. The gray specter of famine walked through the wilderness, reaching here and there and everywhere with a blighting touch of death, threatening at the last to take off the surviving creatures of the coverts and runways, that still tried so hard to live. March came with high winds, with clear sunny days and nights that crackled under the frosty stars. The two policemen continued to live in their cave, and while Dexter grew thin and gaunt with the privations of the passing months, the convalescent Devreaux, astonishingly, began to pick up in weight and strength.
The sun swung gradually northward, and the silvery pale rays changed to gold; for a few minutes at noon-day a faint warmth might be felt, and water dripped from the snow-laden trees. In a short while the thick ground crust would drop in, and after that release from the frozen bonds of winter would come swiftly.
It was the season of avalanches. The snow piled on the higher mountain peaks was beginning to soften and settle; and sometimes the overweighted masses would slip loose and start for the lower valleys, picking up more snow and ice chunks and bowlders, gaining in momentum and size until great trees were snapped off like match sticks; and all was carried to the bottom in a rush of sound that shook the mountainsides. Dexter was often awakened nights by the dreaded thunder of a timber wreck, and knew that somewhere a forested slope had been suddenly razed as bare as his own clean-shaven jaw.
By every sign and sound the inmates of the Saddle Mountain cave knew that spring was at hand. "The travelways will be open in a few more weeks," Devreaux remarked one morning as he peered out from the cavern mouth. "If our fellow sojourners are still alive they'll soon be hitting for the outlet—north."
"I've been puzzling over the singular events of last fall," said Dexter, "and I can think of but one explanation. There are at least three fugitives from the country below—as far as we know there may be more—desperate groups who suddenly bob up in a far-off valley of the wilderness. It isn't likely that they all just happened to drop in like that; it's too much like deliberate planning. I shouldn't be at all surprised to discover that we've stumbled upon a sort of 'underground railroad'—a chain of settlers and trappers reaching clear through the woods, banded together in a scheme to help people who, for one reason or another, must flee from the States."
"Passing 'em from hand to hand," Devreaux cut in with quickening interest. "Run 'em across country to one of the lonely fiords along the northwest coast, where a yacht or tramp steamer could put in undetected, and cruise off for the Orient, say, with a passenger list of folks who have said ta-ta to the police back home." He nodded with growing conviction. "It wouldn't astonish me if that is exactly what is being done."
"Profitable scheme for a man who organized the business properly," observed Dexter. "All he would have to do would be to establish his chain of way stations—cabins and shacks of so-called trappers. Agents in the states to dicker with people who needed such help, and were willing to pay. And they'd pay heavy. Take Crill: he probably couldn't find his way two miles through the forest without a guide. He'll be hanged in the Cook County jail, if he's caught. You can imagine what he'd give to an organization that promised to escort him to safety: ten, fifty thousand dollars—any sum he could scrape together!"
"Assuming that you may have guessed the truth," mused the superintendent, "we accidentally derailed the train. To settle with us they were delayed a few precious days, and the snows came and hung 'em up here for the winter."
"If I've anything to say about it," said Dexter with outthrust jaw, "the train's going into another ditch this spring."
The colonel glanced sharply at his companion. "What are you planning to do?"
"Going after them."
"They're too many for you, corporal, and you haven't even a rifle." Devreaux studied the fire for a moment with scowling face. "I'll tell you," he said at length. "There's only one thing to do. It'll be hot weather before this lung of mine is equal to heavy breathing. You'll have to work alone, I'm afraid. If I were you, the minute mountain travel is possible, I'd make for the north pass, and hide in the neighborhood. When the gang comes along, as they undoubtedly will, pick up the trail, but don't show yourself. Our men from the fort are bound to come to hunt for me as soon as they can get through the mountains. I'll make my way by easy stages to the lower pass, and meet them. Meanwhile, you blaze your path behind you, and it shouldn't be long before you have a squad of Mounties trailing by forced marches to your help."
Dexter considered for a moment, and nodded a tentative agreement. "We'll put it over somehow—when the time comes," he said.
By the middle of March the colonel was able to shed his bearskin robes and sit up by the fire, and he even essayed a few tottering steps about the cave. He could attend the fire now, or defend himself in case of an unexpected attack, and Dexter one morning decided that he might safely leave his patient alone for a day or two, while he made the trip to the lower valley to recover the packs of provisions that Devreaux and Constable Graves had cached there the previous fall.
The colonel, who had grown very weary of a diet of meat straight, readily assented to the plan; so the corporal lashed on his snowshoes and set forth on a long and difficult journey.
The surface crust had fallen through on the exposed hillsides, and wet sticky snow clogged the racket webs, making each footstep a dragging effort; but the corporal broke out his toilsome trail down the length of the valley, and by nightfall had sighted the landmarks that led him to the place where the packs were buried. He tied up a bundle of the priceless luxuries he found—evaporated fruits, tea, coffee, sugar, flour—as much as he could carry on his back. That night he fed himself to repletion, and bivouacked until morning in the lee of a thicket that hid the glow of his tiny camp fire. Before daylight he was on his feet again, tramping north in the frosty dawn.
His course led him up along the banks of a small ice-bound brook that twisted through gulley and gorge, in the shadow of towering mountains. He swung along with a steady crunching of snowshoes, feeling a tingle of spring in the air, breathing deeply, almost with elation, his keen gray eyes busy everywhere, taking in the multifarious signs of life awakening. Wherever he looked he saw the tracks of feet—pads and claws; and birds were darting among the thickets. All the forest creatures that had weathered the winter, were out that morning looking for a meal. As Dexter strode onward, curiously watching the runways, he came to the mouth of a dry gulley that sloped up the steep mountainside; and in snow underfoot he saw a mark that halted him as abruptly as a battery shock. It was the print of a man's boot.
The track was freshly made. It was a peculiarly shaped pattern of sole—long and narrow—and as the corporal stooped, staring, he recalled the afternoon on the Saddle Mountain plateau, when Devreaux was shot. The trail he failed to follow that day! Those old prints were identical in outline with this mark, newly tramped in the snow; and he knew that the man who had just passed this place could be none other than "Pink" Crill.
Strange metallic lights gleamed in Dexter's eyes as he surveyed the ground about him. The man had been there only a few minutes before, apparently. He had sat on a fallen log and taken off his snowshoes—probably to rest a pair of sore feet. And then he had tied on his rackets again, and had gone scuffling off up the gulley.
So Crill was alive, prowling through the forest once more. Dexter drew a full breath, and had any one been present to observe the look of satisfaction in his face, it might almost have been supposed that he had stumbled on the tracks of a long-lost friend. He inspected the mechanism of a pistol that had not left its holster in months, and then, with the buoyant step of a man who returns to business after fretting confinement, he started to follow.
The trail led through a clump of giant spruces that choked the mouth of the gulley. Dexter pushed upward through the timber, and presently the heavier growths thinned out, and he gained an unobstructed view of the steep slopes above him. He was standing in a chasm-like fissure, deep, rockwalled, thirty or forty feet in width, which extended on upward in a jagged, crooked course, halfway to the frowning crest of the mountain.
As he gazed towards the heights he caught a movement at the farther end of the crevice, and saw a man climb out of the draw to the bare snow-field that pitched downward sharply from the lofty ridge above. The distance was too great for actual identification, but Dexter was certain that the climber must be Crill.
The man had started to mount the slope, but after his first balancing step or two he stopped, and for some reason decided to look down behind him. And by the sudden tensing attitude of his body, Dexter knew that he had seen his pursuer.
For a second or two the figure remained motionless, gazing down the long fissure. Then, abruptly, the man straightened and turned to wave his arm frantically, as though he were trying to attract the attention of some one on the upper ridge.
Dexter cast a wary glance towards the distant heights. Several hundred yards above him the ridge of the mountain loomed in stark white outline against the glaring sky; and at the topmost point a faint bluish shadow marked the position of an overhanging drift—a formation known as a "snow cornice"—dreaded by mountaineers.
With a sudden feeling of disquiet, Dexter shaded his eyes to survey the upper ridge; and all at once he made out a tiny figure standing erect and sentinel-like, clearly outlined against the limpid horizon. As he looked, a second figure hove into view—a third: three human shapes—men!
The climber on the middle slope was waving one hand, and pointing down the gulley with the other. Dexter had the unpleasant knowledge that the group on the ridge had caught sight of him. In the moment of his hesitation he saw one of the small figures leave the others and move cautiously towards the edge of the snow cornice. And then, as he peered upward, his eyes widened in horrified comprehension. The man had a stick or a rifle in his hands, and he was bending forward, apparently prying at the overhanging drift. The mass of snow, almost loosened by its own soggy weight, was ready to break off at the slightest touch.
Dexter saw the shadow disappear as the cornice gave way; saw a flash of white, a spurting cloud of snow. And as he turned ignominiously to flee for his life, he heard a crash from the ridge top, and then the gathering roar of an avalanche that descended the slope behind him.
The walls of the gulley hemmed Dexter in on two sides, and he saw at a glance that it would be foolish to try to climb out of the trap into which he had blundered. Either he must gain the lower exit in time to fling himself from the path of onrushing death, or else go down, crushed and buried, under hurtling tons of ice and snow and shattered tree trunks. A single misstep, a fraction of a second lost, and his one slender chance was forfeit. He went down the steep pitch of the gulley with snowshoes creaking, fairly hissing in the snow, gliding when he could, taking obstacles with flying leaps, as a ski jumper covers the ground, throwing himself bodily towards the mouth of the chasm. But fast as he traveled, the avalanche came faster behind him.
From the first rumbling crash the sound grew thunderous, and then rapidly gained volume beyond all sense of hearing. The mountainsides reverberated and he could feel the earth shake and tremble underfoot. Once he dared to glance over his shoulder, and from the tail of his eye he saw a mass of snow and rocks and gyrating trees, all mixed up in a white cloud and pouring down upon him like foam in a waterfall. And he ran faster than he ever thought he could run.
He was among the spruces, with the brook in sight, and he plunged on between the trunks like a dodging rabbit. Twelve yards—six—three long strides needed to reach the mouth of the gulley: he strained onward in his final spurt. But the snowslide was almost upon him. The clump of sturdy spruces might have been so much wheat straw standing in the way of the scythe. The impact was like a hundred freight trains in head-on collision. Branches swayed and tossed overhead; great trunks splintered, snapped, and went down in scrambled wreckage.
Dexter took a last leap, passed the mouth of the fissure, whirling out beyond a jutting corner of rock. But as his foot touched ground, irresistible forces caught him from behind. He felt himself lifted, hurled through the air, flung aside. And masses of rock and snow and trees poured past him, out of the gulley, across the creek—and hit the slope on the other side. For seconds afterwards the earth quivered as an organ pipe vibrates with the undernotes of a deep bass chord. Then an unbelievable silence closed over the valley.
And from out of the silence Dexter's mind returned to troubled wakefulness, and struggled slowly to think about things. It gave him a queer sensation to find himself alive and able to see about him with his dim, distorted vision. But he could look, and move his head a little, and try to puzzle it all out.
A ship's cargo of debris had been dumped across the creek and all about were the butts of uprooted trees, sticking out funny directions, like things in a pin cushion. He was partly buried under a drift, and there was snow beneath his shirt collar. His shoulders were flat on the ground and the lower part of his body was twisted around in an uncomfortable posture, but somehow he felt no inclination to get up.
For a while he lay quiet, blinking up at the serene, cloudless sky. Gradually his senses began to clear. He was aware now of a dull, aching feeling in his right shoulder. The fog was lifting from his brain; he remembered what had happened to him. And all at once the pain in his shoulder became a hot, excruciating torment. He shifted his position slightly, and heard a harsh grating sound. Bones were broken somewhere, he realized.
Curiously he tried to lift his arm, and the muscles would not respond. Arm or shoulder broken, he decided. He strained forward to sit up, and was surprised to discover he could not raise himself. A weight seemed to hold him down. He experimented with his left arm, and found he could use it. He groped across his chest, and his fingers scuffed on the rough bark of a tree trunk. Then he knew what was wrong. A falling tree had caught him on the edge of the timber wreck, throwing him to one side, and then dropping across him. And the tree now lay upon his shoulder—a crushing weight that he could not budge or squirm from under. He strained in desperation for a moment, but it was no use, and he relaxed with a gasp. The tree pinned him to the ground, and he resigned himself to the fatal knowledge that no effort of his own could free him. He lay helpless, at the mercy of men who had sent an avalanche upon him.
As long as he remained quiet the pain in his shoulder was endurable, and there was nothing to be done but take it easy and wait. And he was not long kept in suspense. In a few minutes he heard voices talking, a squeak and crunch of snowshoes, and presently a file of men hove into view on the mountain slope. He twisted his head back and surveyed the approaching group with something of the detached curiosity a man on a gallows might feel concerning the physiognomy of his executioner.
There were four men in the party, and he was not greatly surprised to discover that he knew three of them by sight. First came Crill, sleek and fat as ever, his face glowing pink from his exertions, shuffling awkwardly on his snowshoes, his thick lips sagging in evil-grinning triumph as he advanced. Next in the file appeared 'Phonse Doucet, Jess Mudgett's accomplice in the assault on the Crooked Forks storekeeper, whose warrant of arrest the corporal still carried; a morose and murderous half-breed, given to drunkenness and ugly bluster; a Hercules of a man, capable of breaking an ax-helve between his hands; a brawler and maimer, who held an unsavory reputation for jumping his victims from behind. The third member of the party, an undersized, wizened, beetle-browed man, Dexter identified as a forest skulker and petty scamp, Norbert Croix by name. Croix would sometimes show himself furtively at Crooked Forks, only to slink mysteriously back into the woods again. He was known to be a hanger-on around Indian encampments, and was suspected of whiskey peddling, and of trap line thieving. But his misdemeanors were cautiously undertaken, and it was not generally believed that he held an ounce of real danger in his shrunken make-up.
Dexter surveyed the trio, and his lips drew downward contemptuously. A well chosen and congenial crew they were indeed, conscienceless, treacherous, lawless, with almost every crime of the calendar chalked to their account; there was not a scrap of genuine courage in the lot. He was convinced that the three of them together would never have faced him in clean, open combat, with weapons in their hands. They found him helpless now, and he knew why they were trailing down the mountainside towards him. But as a life of constant danger had robbed death of its strangeness, so he no longer feared death; and he could assure himself honestly and thankfully that men such as these did not have it in their power to make him afraid.
As he watched the approaching party the corporal's glance strayed towards the fourth member, the man who sauntered in the rear. This one he had never seen before. The stranger was short in stature and slight in build, a clean-shaven, dark-visaged man, who, even in his heavy, ill-fitting suit of Mackinaws, bore himself with an air of distinction and grace. There was something adequate and self-possessed in his easy stride, and Dexter guessed instinctively that he was the only one of the four who would have dared to creep to the brink of a snow cornice and set off an avalanche. The corporal was certain that the stranger was the man with whom he must hold the final reckoning. But it was Crill who first reached the bottom of the mountain slope.
The Chicago outlaw slouched forward to stand over the defenseless policeman, his leering eyes hard and lusterless as frosted glass. He stared gloatingly for a second, and then launched into a stream of abuse that poured with horrid fluency from his full red lips. His fat chin was drawn back in his collar, and he had a trick of swaying his head slowly as he spat the venom of his remarks. Dexter observed the man's pinkish, flat-topped skull, with the queer sunken hollows above the cheek bones, and was reminded more forcibly than ever of a copperhead in the act of striking.
"I bounced out a United States cop not long ago," Crill asserted as he moistened his lips in hideous anticipation, "and now I'm gonna croak one in Canada."
With a throaty laugh, he lifted his rifle. He deliberately snapped off the safety, and then, slowly aiming, he thrust the muzzle almost into Dexter's face, and started to pull the trigger.
Held to the ground by the fallen tree trunk, Dexter could make no move in self-defense. His own pistol was buttoned in its holster, strapped to the right side of his body. His right arm was broken, and it was impossible to reach far enough over the trunk with his left hand to touch the butt of his weapon. He waited, quiet and relaxed, his eyes clear and unwavering as he gazed into the bore of a blue steel barrel, pointed exactly at the center of his forehead.
There being no help for it, he could resign himself to fate, even to the indignity of death at a murderer's hands. After all, it did not matter much how, or by whom, the act was accomplished. He at least might dignify the last moment of life by meeting it unflinchingly. Singularly, the habits of an inquisitive mind persisted even now. He found himself wondering, almost with tranquillity, what this final adventure would be like. Would he have time to see the flash of fire and to feel the shock before the great darkness engulfed him? He would know in a second or two, and he waited with a shadow of a smile on his lips, watching with wide open eyes.
Crill's finger was tightening very slowly on the trigger, as though he was purposely prolonging a moment of cruel enjoyment. But as Dexter stared upward, observing the gradual muscular contraction of the plump hand that gripped the rifle, an expert knowledge of firearms told him that another pound of pressure must discharge the weapon. The last instant had come; but as he instinctively stopped breathing, he heard a shout behind him, a commotion of rushing feet, and a human figure flung itself upon the outlaw, and struck violently at his outstretched arm.
A shattering explosion echoed across the brookside, a bullet spattered bark along the tree trunk, and the rifle spun through the air and fell into the snow near Dexter's head. Gazing upward in astonishment, the corporal saw the dark-faced stranger standing between him and his intended murderer.
Utter silence held for two or three seconds after the reverberation of the report had died. Then, with a sudden snarling sound in his throat, Crill stooped to recover his gun, and swung back savagely to confront the man who had interfered.
"You—you—" he raged in a voice that nearly choked him. "I'll lay you alongside him, you—you—" He broke off for lack of breath, and glowered hot and menacing at the small man who dared to face him.
The newcomer measured the gross bulk before him, and quietly shook his head. "Every time I look at you, Crill, you come within a hair's breadth of dying," he remarked in a mild, drawling voice. "I can't stand you. If you didn't mean ready money to me, delivered on the hoof, I'd have put a bullet through you months ago. Stand aside!"
Without pausing to note the effect of his speech, he turned to look down at Dexter. But before he found anything to say, an interruption came in the form of the giant Doucet.
The half-breed strode to the foot of the slope, and pushed forward to take part in the argument. "I teenk lak Peenk, we keel 'im. Mebby we don' shoot 'em, eh? Dan we keek an' tromp 'im, w'at?" His saturnine face wrinkled for a moment in a sinister grin, and he glanced significantly at his heavy, nail-studded boots—weapons he had used before now with frightful effect, when his victims were sprawled helplessly before him.
The slight-built stranger surveyed the huge Doucet scornfully. "My, you're brave—you and Crill!" he observed with cutting irony. "You don't fear any policeman when you've got him crushed under a tree. One wants to shoot him, and the other's going to kick him to death." He turned suavely towards his third companion. "What method do you prefer, Croix?" he asked.
"Whatever way you say's right, Mr. Stark," answered Croix with a furtive glance from one of his comrades to another.
Dexter caught the name, and looked up curiously at the mild-spoken stranger. The man was Stark—presumably the Owen Stark whom Mudgett had mentioned—who owned the trapper's cabin farther up the valley, where Alison Rayne's brother was found last fall. And it needed no more than a glance at his confident black eyes and lean resolute jaw to mark him as the controlling mind and spirit among the scamps with whom he kept company.
Stark looked at each of his companions in turn, and his mouth curved faintly in a coldly whimsical smile that somehow was more formidable in quality than Crill's venomous scowl, or Doucet's swaggering ferocity, or the evil, hangdog demeanor of Norbert Croix.
"You're a pack of rats!" said Stark. "Get away from me!" Then, indicating that the incident was closed, he turned his back on his comrades, and bent forward to face Corporal Dexter.
"You're the last of your outfit, I take it," he remarked blandly. "There were three of you. One was a young constable who got his several months ago. Then there was the old man—Colonel Devreaux, wasn't he? I'm afraid he went out too, didn't he—one stormy day last October?"
In spite of the agony of the pain that throbbed and flamed through his body, Dexter's mind was still functioning. He had not forgotten that his own back trail led to the cave where Devreaux was hiding. If he could convince these men that the colonel was dead, they probably would not bother to follow his footsteps to Saddle Mountain. "A thirty caliber bullet through the lungs will finish almost any man," he stated. "I put Devreaux away under the ground that same evening."
"Lung shot, eh?" Stark nodded with the pleased air of a man who has been paid a compliment. "Not bad marksmanship at that distance. And in that hazy atmosphere, just before the snow struck us. But I was certain I had—I knew at the time that the final shot rang the bell."
He took off his mittens, brought paper and tobacco from his pocket, and casually rolled himself a cigarette. "You chaps annoyed us a bit last fall," he pursued in a voice of gentleness. "But we forgive you." He struck a match and puffed deeply for a moment, filling his lungs with smoke. "Policemen are something that can't be helped, I suppose. But it doesn't matter." He blew a lazy stream of smoke from his nostrils. "We can go our way as though you'd never happened, now that all three of you are dead."
Again Stark smiled his faint, quizzical smile, and for the first time Dexter felt a chill of horror seeping through his veins. Of his four enemies, this was the man to be feared: and as he looked into the cool, mocking eyes above him he realized that fate would have been more merciful if Crill or Doucet had been allowed to have his way.
Still refusing to show dismay, however, the corporal met Stark's glance with seeming unconcern. "You four traveling for the north pass?" he asked after a little pause.
"Looking for information?" Stark regarded him curiously for a moment, and silently laughed. "Yes. We're working along northward. Ought to be able to break our way through the snows two or three weeks from now. As long as I'm talking to a dead man there's no harm telling." He nodded amiably, apparently amused. "If you were still a policeman, it would have interested you to know more about me. I run what you might call a touring agency for murderers, and others who have to depart fast to save their necks. This Crill here, for instance—I've guaranteed to run him out of the country." He nodded towards the pink-cheeked outlaw. "I'll put him through safely, and then I'll collect the belt of gold he wears around his fat waist."
Crill stirred uneasily, and shot a lowering glance of suspicion at his smaller companion. Stark showed his teeth in a twisted grin. "It would give me pleasure to see this one hanging," he remarked genially, "but business before pleasure is my motto. Crill is scared all the time that I'm going to knock him off and take his money ahead of time. But I don't really think I shall. Never kill a waddling goose for his belt of gold. If I let Crill live, he'll probably write to his friends from his hiding place abroad, and tell them that I played fair. I'm counting on him to recommend me to new clients. Honesty always pays when you're building up business."
As Dexter listened to the man's cynical remarks, it occurred to him that while the mood of frankness was on he might receive a truthful answer to the question that had dwelt uppermost in his thoughts through the long winter months. "What became of the girl—Miss Rayne?" he asked.
Stark eyed him slantwise for a space, and his face was furrowed for an instant with lines of mocking humor. "Oh, yes," he said, "the only one the three of you succeeded in catching. A girl! And even she got away from you."
"What happened to her?" Dexter persisted in a faint voice.
"We haven't seen her all winter," answered Stark with a shrug of unconcern. "Maybe she got through the storm, and found shelter somewhere. Maybe she didn't. Perhaps she is dead." He laughed unpleasantly. "Crill saw her that afternoon, and like you he's been worrying about her. Wanted to go hunt for her. Rut I wouldn't let him out of my sight. I'm keeping my eyes on that belt of money."
Dexter's stoical mask had left him for a moment, and the intensity of his mental torment was revealed in his drawn features. Stark grinned at him tauntingly. "If she's dead you'll meet her shortly," he remarked; and then he turned abruptly to face his companions.
"As for the three of you," he observed, "you're a bunch of half-wits. Not one of you has brains enough to think ahead of the moment. Suppose this man were left here with a bullet in him or the marks of hobnails on him? Other policemen will be in here as soon as the way is open, and if they found him like that, they'd go after us like a pack of wolves.
"As it stands now," he pursued quietly, "nobody's had a chance to find out much about us. Of the three policemen who came into this country last fall, two are out of sight under the ground, and they'll probably never be found. As for the third, we're going to make certain that he doesn't bear evidence against us."
"Yeh!" interrupted Crill with a surly stare. "But what's to stop us planting this one too?"
"Nothing," returned Stark in his genial drawl. "Only in my opinion it's better to leave one of them to be found, apparently the victim of a timber wreck. Such accidents often happen in these mountains. If the police discover one of their three men laid out like this, they're apt to think that the hazards of winter travel took off the other two as well. They'll search around a while, and then give it up, figuring probably that all three have perished by accident. And nobody can blame us." He glanced down coolly at the stricken officer. "What's your opinion?" he inquired.
Dexter lay with eyes half closed, listening to the cold-blooded discussion. His enemies seemed to be agreed on the question of his death; they differed only as to the manner of execution. But somehow he was not greatly interested in the argument. As long as the end was foredoomed, it did not matter much how the final act was done. He met Stark's gaze, and smiled wanly. "I agree with you," he said. "Your chances of life are much better if my comrades are kept from guessing the truth."
"But wan leetle knock on de head!" cut in Doucet eagerly. He illustrated with an imaginary club wielded in his great sinewy hands. "Wham! Voila tout!" He nodded vigorously. "Dey fin' him wid skull smash. Den dey t'ink de tree she hit 'im so. De snow all melt before anybody come. No foot track lef' from us. Nobody suspec'. An' nobody bodder us ever any more. Is it not so?"
"No!" said Stark decisively. "I owe this man a private accounting, and it's for me to decide the form of payment. And he's not going to die quick and easy."
Stark's air of careless indifference was suddenly cast aside, and as he bent over the policeman, malevolence and hatred gleamed openly in his deep-sunk eyes. "I've been waiting, hoping for a chance like this for months and months," he declared, his voice as frigid and brittle as tinkling ice in a glass. "My only fear was that I wouldn't get you alive. But I have! And for what you've done to me, I'm going to make you pay to your last ounce of endurance, to the last breath you've got!"
Dexter gazed at the man in speechless wonder, unable to account for the venomous outburst. As far as he recalled, he and Stark had never met before, and he could not imagine what he had ever done to call upon himself the malice and detestation so unexpectedly revealed in the bloodless face above him. As he looked up in mute questioning the notion struck him that the man had gone suddenly insane. Stark apparently read the thought in his mind.
"No!" said Stark, tense and hoarse, his affected urbanity of a moment before lost in a demoniacal scowl. "I'm not crazy. You're Corporal David Dexter—and you're the one I've wanted. If you don't know why, I won't give you the satisfaction of being told. Think back—maybe you'll remember!" His lips drew back from his white teeth, and his laugh echoed hideously. "You'll have time to do plenty of thinking before you finish."
With a stiff movement, as though he found it difficult to hold himself in hand, he dropped on one knee and extracted the corporal's pistol from his holster. "You might manage to reach it after we're gone and put a bullet through your head," he grated. "Nothing so nice as that for you!"
With swift, nervous hands Stark searched through the policeman's pockets, and possessed himself of all spare cartridges, hunting knife, match safe, and notebook and pencils. "Just to make sure you don't scribble any farewell messages," he remarked.
The pipe and tobacco pouch, he did not bother to take, and in his haste he accidentally overlooked the small revolver Dexter had kept as evidence from the murder cabin, and which he carried buttoned in the right hand pocket of his stag shirt. With the fallen tree pressing upon his chest and right shoulder, Dexter could not have reached the weapon if he tried; nevertheless he took a strange satisfaction in the knowledge that he had not been stripped entirely of firearms.
Stark finished his rummaging, and stood up; and his eyes glittered as he looked upon his helpless enemy. "Unless somebody takes that tree off you, you're pinned there forever," he declared. "It'll be three weeks anyhow before any of your people can get into this valley, and you'll pass out before that. But you'll go slow. Hunger may do it, or exposure, or blood poisoning from broken bones, or maybe the beasts will get you." He sucked in his lips with morbid anticipation. "I heard a pack of timber wolves howling a couple of nights ago. We don't know how the end will come, but for you there's no escape. And you can lie there with the nerve oozing out and the fear creeping on—hours and days of it, perhaps—and all that time you can be telling yourself that Owen Stark did this thing to you."
The man stooped to unfasten the policeman's pack, and slung the weight over his own shoulder. He regarded Dexter for a moment with a smile that lacked all human semblance. Then he shouldered Dexter's provision pack, beckoned his companions, and turned away. "Come on!" he commanded. He moved off at a brisk pace along the course of the thawing brooklet, and Crill and Doucet trailed silently after him.
With his head bent backwards, Dexter watched the file of men make their way up the banks of the stream. Stark walked ahead, his eyes on the ground before him, never once deigning to glance behind. The others paused now and then to look covertly over their shoulders, as though still reluctant about obeying orders. But it would seem that none of them dared to interfere with their leader's plans while the black mood oppressed him, and they trudged, hushed and subdued, at his heels. Stark reached a bend of the brook and passed behind a flanking clump of alders, and his companions followed like straggling sheep, and, one by one, vanished from sight. Dexter was left alone by the silent brook.
He lay frowning, puzzled by the mystery of Stark's behavior. The man said he owed him a private grudge, but think back as he would, the corporal was unable to account for the bitter malice that could take satisfaction in his suffering and lingering death. As far as he recalled, he had never crossed Stark's trail before. He could not imagine what he had done to arouse such enmity. The riddle was beyond his power of guessing, and he had to give it up. It didn't matter a great deal anyhow. If he could not lift the tree trunk from his shoulder, earthly affairs would soon cease to vex him.
But while a spark of life remained he was not ready to abandon hope. There was no chance of help coming to him. By to-morrow morning his absence would begin to alarm Devreaux. But the colonel was incapable of travel. If he started out to search it would take him days to drag himself this distance from the cave, and long before he could possibly make such a trip, the trail would be washed away in the thawing snows. As Stark had said, it would be another fortnight before officers could break their way through from the outside. Yet Dexter would not let himself despair. It was up to him somehow to free himself.
Two men could not have raised the tree butt. But Dexter thought of an alternative possibility. He might be able to burrow out from under. The chance of accomplishment was slight. But any effort was better than lying supine, awaiting death. He gave his enemies time to pass out of sight and hearing, and then experimented to see what might be done.
By twisting his body he could force his left arm under his back far enough to touch his right shoulder blade. He pulled out handfuls of snow, and at length touched the bare ground. The frost was still in the earth, but warming suns of the last week had somewhat softened the surface soil, and he found he could scratch out small particles with his fingernails. He kept it up, digging and clawing, until his fingers grew numb and his nails had broken down to the quick. The hole he had scooped out was no more than the span of his thumb, but he took encouragement from the knowledge that he had made even such slight impression upon the frozen earth. He searched the pockets he could reach for some tool to use in place of fingernails, and found his watch had been left with him. It would have to serve. Breaking the hinges, he removed the lid from the case, and set to work again.
All that morning he scraped and chiseled at the soil under his body. Progress was infinitely slow, but each excavated grain of earth meant just that much advance towards freedom, and he began to believe that if his strength held out he might in time liberate himself. The weight of the tree gradually crushed the feeling from his broken shoulder, and the twinges of pain were endurable.
The sun climbed high, beating upon him with blazing warmth. Everywhere about him he could hear the drip and trickle of melting snows. From the creek an occasional crackling sound told him that the softening ice was preparing to release the stream from its winter toils. Birds twittered restlessly above him, without finding time to look his direction. A pika, the little chief hare of the mountains, shambled forth from a hole in a nearby drift to bask on a rock. A brilliant harlequin duck whistled past overhead, searching for open water. The air was sweet and balmy, redolent of the scent of approaching spring. He wondered if spring would ever come again for him, and the thought always seemed to revive his flagging strength.
The afternoon wore on by dragging, aching minutes, and still he chipped and scratched at the ground below the tree. At long intervals he paused briefly to rest, and then went doggedly back to work. From time to time he quenched his thirst with melted snow. He felt no hunger. But as the sun disappeared and the blue shadows of early twilight began to creep up the mountain slopes, a growing weakness threatened at last to overcome his bravest resolution. He had cut out a six inch hollow beneath his shoulder blade, but the tree still pinned his upper arm and shoulder to the ground. He clenched his teeth and tried to wriggle clear, but the effort was useless, and he fell back gasping as the old pain stabbed again through his tormented body. The hole must be scooped twice as large before he could hope to release himself.
He had the will to keep on digging, but physical endurance failed him. Queer, mottled shadows had begun to swim before his eyes, and a gray fog seemed to be stealing upon his brain. He tried desperately to stay awake, but his eyelids kept closing as though weighted with lead. At last he gave up the effort. Perhaps a few hours' rest would recruit his energies, and he could return afresh to his digging. Meanwhile he was overpowered by the drowsiness of utter exhaustion. He relaxed with a sigh, pillowed his head against the rough bark of the tree, and without actual knowledge of what was happening he slipped away into the stupor of sleep.
The sense of time was lost to him. It might have been minutes, or many hours later, when his slumbering faculties aroused to a vague perception of some sound that tried to reach his ears. The impression came like something heard in the depths of a dream: a faint, far-off voice—a voice calling him by name. By a tremendous effort he struggled back to dim wakefulness, forced his eyelids apart.
Still dazed by sleep, he attempted to sit up; but a sharp spasm of pain reminded him of his hapless plight. He was still lying in the snow, held down by the weight of the fallen tree. His lips set with a groan, as he blinked vacantly before him. It was night, and the rim of a new moon had pushed up through a notch in the mountains, flooding the white landscape with a soft, silvery glow. As he listened in the breathless silence, he again caught the sound that had aroused him, heard his own name called in the night.
"Corporal Dexter!" The cry carried to him from the other side of the brook, clear, anxious, insistent. It was a woman's voice, and the tone was strangely familiar.
With a wondering breath he bent his head backward to stare towards the dismal thicket across the way. He told himself that he must be asleep, dreaming. But as he waited with bated breath he heard the voice again. "David!" cried the unseen speaker. "Where are you? Answer me. Oh, please!"
An unaccountable trembling seized him. The call came to him in beseeching accents. It was the voice that he had kept alive in memory through the dreary months of winter, and now he was certain that his imagination was cruelly tantalizing him. He could not believe his hearing. Nevertheless he would have answered if he could. He tried to call out, but his tongue refused to move, and speech choked back into his throat. It was as though he feared the spell would break at the slightest sound from his own lips.
But as he peered across the brook in an agony of suspense he was aware of a soft rustling movement in the brush, and his incredulous eyes made out a slim, straight figure that had pushed forward to stand on the snowy embankment beyond. He stared for a moment in the dazed wonderment of a man who suddenly looks upon a miraculous apparition. And then, unable to endure the anguish of uncertainty, he forced himself to speak.
"I'm over here under a tree," he said, striving to hold his voice in control. "If you're real, won't you please come across?"
He thought he heard a sobbing breath on the other side of the brook, and as he gazed with straining vision, the figure started forward, crossed like a shadow on the ice, and halted, to bend silently above him. The moonlight searched out the contours of a pale, bewitching face, revealing a pair of luminous eyes that gazed softly upon him.
He raised his head, watching with something of fear in his glance, as though half expecting an illusion of his dreams to melt away before him. "Alison!" he whispered unsteadily. "Alison Rayne! They said you were dead. It's you—?"