Chapter VI: The Doorway of Dread

With the hot glare beating back in his face, Dexter stood with blinking eyes, hearing the hiss of falling sparks and the fierce crackle of the mounting flames. Tongues of fire lapped around the windows and darted angrily from the crevices between the logs. As he peered through the pitchy black smoke, a gust of flame lashed out at the corner of the cabin, and he saw that the door was open.

He remembered closing and wedging the door fast when he left the place a while before. It would seem that a visitor had been there some time during his absence. His glance ranged swiftly around the clearing, and came back to the doorway. For a second longer he hesitated, and then suddenly left the concealment of the trees and strode forward across the open ground.

The snow near the cabin had melted and formed pools of muddy water. He drew a handkerchief from his pocket, wetted the fabric, and tied a protecting mask over his nose and mouth. Then he pushed across the threshold into the suffocation of smoke and heat and showering embers.

He was groping his way towards the center of the room, feeling for the table which stood near the fireplace, when he collided blindly in the hazy dark with a soft substance of flesh--something that moved, and breathed, and was alive.

His hands closed instinctively, and he found himself gripping a slight, lithe, human figure that gasped and struggled for release with the fluttering fright of a captured bird. A curl of flame darted out through the smoke, and in the flash of light Dexter had a momentary vision of a youthful, grime-streaked face, a waving tangle of hair, and a pair of luminous dark eyes that stared wildly under the shadowed curve of thickly fringing lashes. It was a woman--a girl--and his startled intuition told him she was the fugitive who had led him the long chase in the forest.

He saw her full lips tremble apart as the smoke cloud rolled about them, heard her stifled cry of fear. Her breath came quick upon his cheek, and he could feel the rapid pulse throb in her straining wrists. She writhed in his grasp, fighting to free herself. He had not counted on the supple strength of softly rounded muscles that desperation called suddenly and fiercely to use.

Before he could overcome his normal reluctance to hurt a weaker being, she had thrust her elbow under his chin; and as his head snapped back before the unexpected attack, she broke the grip of his fingers, wriggled out from the crook of his arm, stumbled beyond his reach, and ran for the doorway.

Dexter recovered himself a second too late. The girl evaded his outstretched hand, brushed lightly past him, and he turned only in time to see her rush out of the burning cabin.

"Stop!" he shouted.

She cast an anxious glance behind her, but did not heed him. In the haze of smoke he vaguely made out her slender shape as she darted across the clearing. She reached the edge of the forest and vanished among the spruces, leaving him with the tingling remembrance of a warm and vivid presence that had touched and eluded him, like an ephemeral fragrance. For the present he did not attempt to hinder her flight.

The fire had broken through the roof, and was swirling up from the interior walls with hot, roaring sounds. With his arm doubled across his face, he turned again towards the bunks where he had left Mudgett and his comrade lying. Either in life or death he always felt a responsibility for the prisoners he arrested. He tried to reach the bunks, but with his first step a gust of flame swept across the room and drove him back.

For a few seconds he lingered, his head bowed under the falling embers, hoping for a momentary lull in the rush of the fire. But as he stood irresolute, trying not to breathe, one of the roof beams cracked overhead and swung crashing to the floor. At the same instant a wreath of flame circled the doorway behind him. It was time to go.

Shielding his face, he turned and plunged for the opening. A searing wind eddied about him, and the next instant he stumbled across the threshold, and found himself choking and panting as his almost bursting lungs took in great draughts of the heated air outside the cabin. He beat out the sparks that smoldered upon his jacket, briskly rubbed his aching eyes, and then drew back farther across the clearing, beyond the scorching waves of heat.

The cabin was enveloped in high leaping flames that threw a blood-red glare above the snowy tree tops. Overhead he could hear the affrighted cries of birds that had awakened in the night to fly in darting confusion among the spruces. As he watched he saw a corner of the cabin roof curl upward like paper, and cave in the middle. The structure was doomed. There was nothing he could accomplish by waiting.

He remained a couple of minutes longer, observing the falling sparks. The flaming embers were snuffed out, he observed, almost as soon as they struck the soft snow. There was no actual danger of fire communicating through the forest. He cast a last regretful glance towards the cabin, but accepted the inevitable with fatalistic calm. What must be had already happened. He listened momentarily to the direful crackling of flames, and then with grimly set lips he turned to seek the departing footprints of the mysterious girl.

The fresh trail was picked up at the edge of the clearing. He scrutinized the familiar impression of the high-arched instep, and knew beyond question that she was the woman who had led him around a wide-drawn circle, from the cabin of death, back to the cabin.

Until this moment he had supposed that her fateful return was brought about haphazard by a changing sense of direction, that nearly always befuddles people who lose themselves in the woods. Now he had reason to wonder whether he had misinterpreted the signs. Had she deliberately drawn him away from the spot so that she might swing back alone, ahead of him? Had the cabin been fired purposely, to destroy the evidence of crime?

The fire might be of incendiary origin, or it might have started from the smoldering coals he himself had carelessly left in the hearth. Of one fact only was he certain. He had found the girl in the cabin. What stress of circumstance had induced her to enter the place, or had kept her there with the walls blazing about her? He could not guess. But if she actually found her way back intentionally, after traveling miles of dark, unblazed forest, her skill in woodcraft surpassed the skill of every woman and almost any man he had ever met.

With troubled and gloomy face, he once more took up the trail of the small footprints. The girl had struck off towards the brook this time, but whether she really knew where she was going, or was fleeing aimlessly, he could not say. As he pushed after her he discovered that continuous use had nearly exhausted his flash-lamp battery. There was still some current left, but from now on he would have to use his light sparingly. He hastened on, determined to end the pursuit as quickly as possible.

He was weaving his way through the icy wattles of a juniper clump, when, in the stillness of the night, shrill and plaintive, he heard the whinnying cry of a horse. For an instant his heart seemed to check a beat, and then he remembered Susy. He had left the pony in the gully, a few hundred yards south of the clearing. The tracks of the girl ran that direction, and the breeze was from the north. Susy must have discovered that somebody was approaching. She was a friendly little beast, and no doubt she had begun to feel lonesome and neglected in the dismal forest. It must have been Susy.

Dexter had halted for a moment to listen. But the cry was not repeated. A faint glow of distant fire still shimmered before him, seeping through the woods like twilight, mottling the coverts with strange, ghostly shadows. His straining senses caught no sound or stir of life. He was starting forward again, but as he bent to pass under a drooping bough, some alert faculty within him prompted him with sharp warning to look behind.

He was conscious of no actual noise; not even the tiny crack of a twig: but like most men who live in constant danger his nerves were as sensitive as a seismograph to any slight movement near him. Turning, he was aware of a muffled shape that had stepped softly from the dark thicket behind him. At the same instant a living weight pressed against his back, he felt the swift, circling contact of arms closing about his waist, and a pair of steely cold hands gripped upon his wrists. As Dexter lurched about to face his unknown antagonist, the night silence was broken sharply by the cry of a woman's voice, a crashing in the underbrush, and then the muffled beat of a horse's hoofs galloping along the winterbound brook.