Chapter XXIII: Fair Warning

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--?"

"It's I," a thrilling voice replied in his ear, and then, as though to dispel all further doubt, warm hands touched him, and he felt the vital contact of fingers closing over his. "You're hurt!" she faltered. "How badly?"

"Cracked shoulder, I think," he said. "If this tree were off me I could tell better."

The girl withdrew her hand from his lingering clasp, and knelt down to investigate. "It's crushing you," she said, with a catch of pity in her throat, "and you--you've had the courage to--you've nearly dug yourself loose. You must have been working for hours."

"I kept it up as long as I could stay awake," he answered with a faint laugh. "I was going to have a nap, and then try again."

She had been examining the underside of the trunk, and now she nodded with quick decision. "I can finish it by cutting through from the other direction," she asserted. "Only a few minutes!" She brought a clasp knife from her pocket, and moving around the tree, she crouched in the snow and began feverishly digging.

For a moment Dexter remained silent, but as he observed her tense, anxious face his eyelids drew together and the muscles of his jaw set with sudden resolution. "Wait!" he commanded. "Have you thought what you're doing?"

She paused for a space to look at him in the moonlight. "What do you mean?" she asked.

"Feel in the pocket of my tunic," he said somberly. "You'll find a folded slip of newspaper cutting. Read it."

For the length of a breath she hesitated, and then, wonderingly, she complied with his request. Fumbling, she drew forth the clipping. From her sweater pocket she produced a match safe, and struck a light. She glanced at the headlines, read the first paragraph of print; then the paper fluttered from her fingers, and she sighed bitterly.

"You know!" she said in a harsh undertone. "We--my brother and I--that's why we're here. There's no use trying to pretend anything else."

"Not a bit of use," he asserted. He regarded her steadily, his eyes murky in the pallid light. "You are wanted in the states for a capital crime. I'm an officer of the law. If you're wise you'll go back where you came from, and leave me here as I am."

"Leave you," she stammered--"I--what do you mean?"

"Simply that I'd rather not accept freedom at your hands," he returned. "If you pull me out of this mess, I'll repay you by arresting you again, and this time I'll make sure that you don't escape. It's a cruel position to be placed in, and in fairness to both of us--you'd better go."

"And leave you like this?" she cried.

"Possibly I can dig myself out," he answered. "I'm going to keep trying. If I succeed, you'll know about it some day, because it'll be my business to hunt until I find you. If I fail, we won't meet again." His features relaxed for an instant in a smile of gentle melancholy. "I guess that would be the kindest way out for both of us." He reached forward with his free arm, and his hand pressed softly over her closed fist. "Do you want to say good-by, Alison--before you go?"

She was bending above him, looking into his face with tear-wet eyes. But suddenly he felt her wrist grow tense, and with a quick movement she drew away her hand and stumbled to her feet. "You must think very badly of me," she said, "to believe that I would--that I could--" She stopped with a gulp, unable to go on. And then, without further speech, she stepped back around the tree trunk, and returned in moody silence to her digging.

Dexter lay quiet, hearing the scraping and chipping of the knife blade hacking the icy ground, feeling the movements of her hands as she pulled the earth from under his shoulder. He had forewarned her, and if she still saw fit to play the Samaritan, he would make no further attempt to stop her. So he waited, grim and alert, ready to extricate himself the instant the hole was sufficiently enlarged.

The girl worked with breathless energy at her self-imposed task, and in a few minutes she had burrowed through to meet Dexter's excavation. There seemed to be no sense of feeling in his shoulder, yet somehow he knew when the pressure was taken away. He flexed his cramped muscles, and found he could still move his body. Slowly he wriggled free, and then, concentrating his will force into the effort, he gripped at the rough tree trunk and weakly hoisted himself to his feet.

The corporal's face was immutable as a death mask as he bent forward to confront the crouching girl. "I'm sorry you didn't go when you could," he said. "Now it's too late. You're my prisoner."

Alison got to her feet and stood erect, her breast heaving. "I had to do that much," she returned. "You did more than that for me one time. But now--now I've got to think of myself, and of my brother. Neither of us is going to let anybody arrest us, if we can help it--and so--" She stopped with a gulp and started to back away.

But Dexter had foreseen what she meant to do. The fallen tree lay between them, and the girl had counted on her ability to slip beyond reach before the officer could stumble after her. She failed to realize, however, that with some indomitable men, the physical body may be held subservient to the power of mind. Dexter was watching, and anticipated her intention a second before she started to leave him. Weak and giddy as he felt, he nevertheless held a last reserve of strength to answer the mental summons. As a runner spurs himself onward with the final gasp of breath, so he sprang forward and somehow managed to clear the log. Alison was taken by surprise, and before she could turn to flee, he had planted himself before her. "I warned you!" he muttered; and then his left hand shot out and closed tightly about her wrist.