Chapter XXI: Path of the Avalanche

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.