Chapter XVIII: Lodging for Two

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 snorting _whoof_, 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 SISTER
WANTED FOR MURDER
OF 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.