Chapter X: Blind-Man's Chase

With face cold and inscrutable, Dexter crossed the cabin to stand by the bunk. For a moment he regarded the boy in silent speculation. Whatever the young man's hidden thoughts, he was taking good care to keep them to himself. And there was no way to force him to betray secrets. An officer has no right to employ extreme methods in dealing with a law-abiding citizen; and there was no evidence to accuse Smith of any illegal act. Grounds for his arrest or detention were lacking. Even the time-worn pretext of holding a suspected offender as a "witness" wouldn't stand in his case. He had witnessed nothing he could be called to the box for--unless, indeed, he testified to the fact that he had watched a policeman rummaging vainly, and without written warrant, through another man's dwelling. Apparently there was nothing to be done except to grant him the best of the encounter.

Dexter suppressed a rueful laugh, and reached forward abruptly to touch the boy's bandaged arm. "Let's see how you're doing this morning," he suggested lightly.

The patient's condition appeared to be much improved since last night. Dexter heated water and applied new dressings, and gave the sufferer detailed instruction for self-treatment. He lingered long enough to cook breakfast, and then picked up his pack and carbine and turned towards the door.

"Where are you going?" asked Smith, with a sudden display of interest.

The corporal looked back with a faint quirk of his mouth. "If I should walk in my sleep, we'll be quits," he remarked. "So long, Smith."

"So long, officer," a pleasant voice called after him; and he opened the door and stepped out into the snow.

It was a dull, gray morning, with a sodden chill in the air. The dense, leaden atmosphere was like an oppressive stillness upon the earth, and the dingy sky of the northwest held the threat of dark forces gathering. Colonel Devreaux apparently was wise in his prognostication. Winter's first deadly storm was brewing behind the ranges, and before nightfall the big snow was surely due.

Dexter observed the weather signs with a brooding glance, and then, with a fatalistic shrug, he buttoned his collar tight, and strode across the brook. By the fringe of the streamside alders he paused for a moment to consult his pocket compass. As he remembered his direction points, the saddle mountain lay behind two intervening ridges, almost on a south by west line. The easier route would be to follow the brook back past the burned cabin, and then turn north along a branch stream that cut through dense timber on the farther side of the valley. But this course would take him miles out of his way. The shorter path lay through a difficult country of forest and hills, but, without horse or baggage, he ought to be able to make his way across. For a second he hesitated, and then decided on the straightaway route. Hitching his pack higher on his shoulders, he left the brook and struck off through the woods.

Anxious to reach his destination before the storm descended, he set himself a pace that might have killed a man unused to wilderness travel. Head bent forward, body relaxed at the hips, feet balancing on a straight line, as a moccasined Indian walks, he swung forward with a long, flexible stride, dodging under branches, weaving back and forth among windfalls and thickets, leaping over down-trunks, moving onward without halt or hesitation, like a shadow gliding through the white mazes of the forest.

It was still early morning when he climbed up through a tangle of hillside brush, and passed over the watershed of the brook he had left behind. By noon he had crossed the jungle hollow beyond and ascended to the top of the next parallel ridge; and through an open vista on the higher ground he caught his first glimpse of the distant mountain peaks, towering ghostly white against the reaches of the sullen sky.

He paused only to make sure of his bearings, and then plunged forward once more into the thick forest. For nearly two hours he worked out his tortuous trail, descending a long slope, broken by gulleys and ravines, through a wilderness of ancient spruces, where smothering undergrowths contested his pathway and shut him in on all sides as a swimmer is surrounded by the waves of the sea. But he struggled on doggedly, and passed in time through the worst of it. Eventually the smaller growths began to thin out, and the spruces gradually made way for the jack pines. He had more frequent glimpses of the sky, and presently, through a rift in the branches, he once more discovered the smoky outlines of mountain caps.

Pushing rapidly forward, he soon left the forest behind, and came at last to the border of an open field of snow, whence he viewed the full majestic sweep of the country before him.

For a mile or more straight ahead, and right and left as far as he could see the ground stretched away, level and treeless, to the foot of a cliff-like palisade--an appalling hundred foot terrace, rising sheer from the flat below. From the top of this first high point a sort of broad shelf, or plateau, dipped back for another couple of miles into the dark, ringing circle of a twin-peaked mountain. And farther still, like a faint smoke haze upon the middle sky, stood the towering saw edge of the coastal divide, the final great barrier that forbade the crossing from valley to valley of all things that did not follow the soaring eagle's route.

A dank wind drew down through the flue of the mountains, bringing a first warning flutter of snowflakes. In the immediate foreground the double peaks loomed in bold outline, and it would have needed a dull imagination, indeed, that lacked a name for this individual mountain. It was like a saddle sculptured on colossal proportions--pommel, cantle, even the stirrup--chiseled realistically in sweeping, thousand-foot strokes. A dip of the ridge formed a horse's back and withers; pointed ears and grotesquely shaped head were blocked out in strong relief by an up-jutting pinnacle beyond; and in order that nothing should be lacking, a broad, snow-filled crevice twisted down the mountainside to give the appearance of a long, flowing tail.

Dexter viewed the stupendous statue with critical appreciation, but as he looked, for some reason, he began to feel a trifle foolish. The Saddle Mountain was a sight worth observing, but he had not come on a wearying journey to awe himself with scenery. He found himself wondering why he really had come. Whom did he expect to find here? Alison Rayne? He shook his head incredulously. After traveling all this distance it suddenly struck him that he had blundered off through the forest on a vain and brainless errand--chasing the chimera of another man's dream.

With a flat feeling of disillusionment, he stood for a moment gazing vacantly at the lonesome, barren peaks. Gradually his glance shifted downward to the plateau that formed the base of the mountain. He was scanning the top of the nearest palisade, without expecting to make any discovery of interest, when his body suddenly stiffened and his pupils contracted sharply. Something was moving along the rim of the precipice.

It was a grayish-white object, diminished by distance to a pin-head speck, and barely discernible against the snowy background. Whatever it was, it was walking, and while Dexter watched, the tiny shape moved to the edge of the palisade, passed over the brink, and then started to climb down the steep side of the cliff.

He nodded to himself when he saw what had happened. Only a sheep or mountain goat would be apt to attempt the perilous descent of a sheer wall of rock. Probably it was a bighorn sheep, driven from the summits by the approaching storm, and taking the shortest route down to the valley pastures. To make certain, however, he uncased his binoculars to observe the creature in magnified view.

He trained the lenses upon the distant cliff-side, and once more picked up the climbing shape. For an instant he gazed dubiously, and then his wrist tendons drew taut as wires as he tried to steady the leveled glasses. It was not a sheep he saw, but a human shape--clinging against the precipitous height.

Amazed--unbelieving--he gingerly readjusted the focus of his binoculars, and in a moment the distant cliff-side seemed to draw towards him in sharper perspective. The diminutive shape suddenly enlarged to doll-size, and he made out a straight, slender figure, clad in white sweater and knickers. He stared with straining vision, and recognition came like a blow between the eyes. The mountain climber was Alison Rayne.