Chapter XIX: The Honor of the Service

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.