Chapter XXVII: The Faltering Faith

It was disconcerting to meet an armed and hostile man at the place where he supposed his friend was waiting, yet Dexter did not for an instant lose his self-possession. He noticed that the rifle barrel did not hold quite steady, and he was aware that the inexperienced youth might fire in nervous excitement at any second, without giving him a chance. Before he could make up his mind what to do, however, a voice screamed out behind him, and Alison stumbled forward, apparently with some wild notion of intervening.

"Archie!" the girl cried in an agonized tone.

The corporal flung out his arm as a barrier, and thrust her back. He was watching young Preston's face, observing the line of the tensely compressed lips, staring into the blue eyes that squinted at him along the gun barrel. And it struck him all at once that the boy lacked the hardihood to pull the trigger.

They faced each other in silence for a moment, and Dexter smiled in icy contempt, "I can't obey your order about the hands," he said, "because I have only one to put up. So I won't bother at all."

With a slow, deliberate movement he unbuttoned his tunic and thrust his hand into his inside pocket. Quite casually, as though he might have reached only for a handkerchief or a match, he drew forth the small, pearl-handled revolver that he had picked up months before from the floor of the murder cabin. He knew that any instant might be his last, but he was banking on the irresolution he had read in the other's face, and was ready to accept a gambler's hazard. Gazing with cool fixity into the boy's eyes, he cocked his weapon and leveled the barrel.

"Drop that gun!" he commanded.

There was a quality in the corporal's tone to warn Preston that this was not a moment for trifling. The boy shrank backward half a pace, and his bolstered-up attitude of recklessness seemed suddenly to slip away from him. The muzzle of the rifle wavered downward; and the next instant his hands unclosed, and the weapon fell in the snow at his feet.

Dexter laughed aloud in relief. "I think I told you last fall when we met," he remarked pleasantly--"it's foolish to play with things that we don't understand."

The boy drew a short breath, and reached up unsteadily to wipe his sleeve over his moist forehead. "The rifle--it isn't loaded," he managed to gulp out. "I was just--trying to bluff."

"Eh?" Dexter regarded him sharply for an instant, and then stooped to the ground and picked up the fallen firearm.

"I ran out of cartridges several weeks ago, and--well, that's all there is to it."

"It doesn't pay to bluff in this country, unless you're ready to back it up," observed the corporal. "It's so easy to get hurt." He thrust the rifle muzzle in the snow, and with his left hand he jerked open the magazine lever, and assured himself that the weapon really held no cartridge. "I don't believe you'd have shot me anyhow, Archie," he remarked. "I honestly don't think so. Anyhow, we'll let bygones be bygones, and just forget that it happened."

During the few seconds of the swift encounter Alison had stood by, a hushed and terrified spectator. But now she moved forward suddenly to her brother's side. "Archie!" she gasped. "How did you get here? What does it mean?"

"I was looking for you," was the answer. "Just happened over this direction. Looked through the brush, and saw you coming--with the officer." The boy shook his head dejectedly. "I thought--I had hoped that I might be able to get you away from him."

"Where's Colonel Devreaux?" interrupted the corporal.

"I don't know him," said Preston. "I haven't seen anybody."

Dexter raised his head and called the superintendent's name, shouting with all the power of his lungs. He repeated the cry several times, but only echoes answered him from the mountainsides.

"Can anything have happened?" he muttered after a lengthy pause. He turned abruptly to Preston. "I want to look inside the cave," he said. "Go in ahead of me, please."

With the boy accompanying him, Dexter searched the cavern from one end to the other. But the place was empty, and he found no clew to tell him what had happened to his missing officer.

"How long have you been here?" he asked, when they finally emerged into the sunlight.

"I don't know," replied Preston. "About a half hour, I guess."

"There was no one here then?"

"Nobody."

"How'd you find the place?"

"Just accident." The boy glanced up in seeming frankness. "I was looking for--for--"

"For your sister," supplemented the corporal as the other hesitated. "You needn't be afraid of betraying any secrets. I know all about you."

"Well, yes," admitted Archie, with a sidewise glance at the girl. "We were stopping over yonder at a cabin--"

"Where I found you last fall."

"Yes. And anyhow--Alison left the other day, saying she was restless and was going for a walk." The boy shot a furtive look towards his sister. "She didn't come back, as she had promised, and so I started out that same night to hunt for her."

"Over this direction?" asked Dexter.

"It was dark," was the answer, "and I somehow lost the trail, and I've been just wandering the last couple of days--lost, I guess.

"Anyhow," Archie went on, wriggling a little under the corporal's iron scrutiny, "I happened into this neighborhood to-day, and discovered some tracks leading up the slope. I followed, just to see what there was to find out, and I came on this cave. I was looking around, trying to decide who had been here, and I caught sight of you two coming towards me. I saw you would pass this place, and I hid, and--" He smiled ruefully. "Well, you know the rest."

The boy faced about to survey his sister. "What became of you, Alison?" he asked somewhat pettishly. "If you hadn't gone running off that way we wouldn't have gotten into this mess."

"I'm sorry, Archie," she returned gently. "It was my fault, and yet--I couldn't foresee that this would happen."

"But how did it come about?" he persisted. "Where did you go?"

"Down the valley a distance," she answered evasively, and Dexter gathered from her manner that she did not wish her brother to know all that had taken place.

"And let a policeman pick you up!" The boy glanced at the corporal's empty holster, and shook his head in mystification. "I don't see how you ever let him do it. He hasn't any gun of his own, and yet he got the best of you--took your revolver from you?"

"My revolver?" she echoed.

"Yes--yours--the one he just stuck on me. How'd you ever allow him to get his hands on it?"

Dexter threw up his head with a start. "Is this your sister's revolver?" he asked after a trenchant interval. He reached into his pocket again and exhibited the weapon on the palm of his hand.

"Certainly," Preston replied without hesitation. "There's that scratch in the silver plate on the barrel. It's hers."

A look of infinite sadness passed over Dexter's face as he turned to confront the girl. "You admit this is yours?" he asked somberly.

"Admit it?" she faltered. "Why, what--?"

"Do you know where I found it?" he cut in before she could finish.

She faced him with widening eyes, but did not reply.

"On the floor of the cabin where the two murders were done--that night, when I found you there," he stated in low, incisive tones. "Here is the revolver, exactly as I picked it up, with the cases of two discharged cartridges still left in the chamber. The bullets from those cartridges were the bullets that killed the two men in the bunks."

"The revolver--I don't know how it got here," Alison said with a dry sob. "It--I carried it in the bottom of a knapsack I had, and, having no occasion to use it, I hadn't looked for it since early last fall. I may have lost it, or it may have been stolen. I--I don't know."

"That's your explanation?" Dexter asked.

"I can tell you no more than that," she said, and her face was colorless as she bowed her head before him.

"You want me to believe, then, that this revolver was stolen without your knowing: stolen by an unidentified woman who went to a lonely cabin in the wilderness at the same moment you appeared there; who shot two men, threw the smoking weapon behind the front door, and vanished without leaving a trace behind." Dexter stared at her from under lowering brows. "Is that what you want me to believe?"

"Oh, I don't know--I don't know what to think about it all," she answered tonelessly.

"I do," said Dexter. "I'm thinking of a story the colonel told me recently about--well, it was about himself when he was a younger man. And I'm thinking how foolish we are not to profit by the experiences of the men who have gone before us--to save ourselves the bitterness of learning for ourselves." He looked at the girl for a moment with eyes that had grown jaded and hard. Then, with a careless movement, he tossed the revolver in his hand, and thrust it back into his pocket.

"Come on!" he commanded harshly, and turned on his heel. "I've got to find Devreaux."