Chapter VIII: The Runaway Girl

With teeth fastened in his lips the corporal stepped forward to bend above the tumbled figure of the woman. She was so quiet he thought she was dead. But her fingers were warm, he found when he pulled off her mitten, and the tide of life still flowed vigorously through the slender, flexible wrist.

His light gleamed upon the curve of a soft cheek, pallid as marble against the faint blue shadow line of the vein throbbing in her temple. Her hair, trimmed in a boyish bob, straggled over eyes and forehead in fine-spun tendrils of golden bronze. The delicate skin of her face was grimed and scratched, and in the palm of her bared hand he found the crimson trickle of a deep, jagged cut. Gingerly he raised her from the snow, and the man, accustomed to dealing with men, marveled at the trifle of weight in his arms.

He was unbuttoning the pocket where he carried his first-aid kit, when he heard a low sigh and felt a quick, stirring movement against his shoulder. Crouched on one foot, he supported the limp figure, and waited breathlessly. He watched the droop of her red nether lip under slowly parting teeth, observed a twitching of her eyelids, and then saw the long lashes suddenly lift. And with the pocket-lamp still shining in her face, he found himself at very close quarters with a pair of velvet eyes, dark blue as violets that looked straight into his.

"Yes--I'll try," he heard her say in a straggling, far-off whisper.

Her eyes were fixed upon him, but there was something in the quality of her gaze to tell him that she was not yet aware of his being there. Awkwardly her hand crept upward and clutched tightly upon his shoulder, as though a reviving consciousness needed some tangible support to cling to. He waited unmoving, and all at once the light of intelligence flickered from the depths of suddenly distending pupils.

A rose bloom of color dyed her cheeks, and her breath came quick and sharp. She stared intently, with wonderment mounting swiftly to confusion and alarm. "It's--who--where am I?" she stammered. Her hand dropped from his shoulder, and she pushed away from him with a gasping cry.

Somehow she got upon her feet, and turned blindly as though to flee into the forest. With her first step, however, she stumbled, and would have fallen. But Dexter sprang after her, and caught her firmly in his arms. She relaxed with a weary, hopeless gesture, and this time did not try to break his grasp.

"The horse," she faltered--"ran away--and we went down in the stones."

"Knocked you out for a couple of minutes." Dexter surveyed her with the impersonal curiosity of a surgeon. "You're able to stand--after a fashion," he remarked. He lifted up her hands, one and then the other, and nodded judicially. "No broken arms or legs. Ribs? See if you feel any twinges?"

She wriggled obediently, and shook her head. "No. I think I'll be all right in a minute."

"Don't try to run again," he advised her. "It would be silly."

She glanced furtively about her, but did not reply. His lips drew straight, in a stern, uncompromising Line. "In case you hadn't noticed the uniform," he said, "I'm Corporal Dexter, R.C.M.P. If you tried to get away, it would be my business to bring you back again, even if it meant a journey of months and thousands of miles. Your hand's badly cut. Sit down while I dress it."

He released her, stepping back a pace, and she managed to keep her feet without his support. Swinging the beam of light towards her, he regarded her with swiftly appraising eyes. His previous impression of fresh and vivid youth was instantly corroborated. She could not have been twenty years old. Under happier circumstances, in any other place, he would have supposed her to be some boarding school Miss who had ventured out of doors for winter sports--tobogganing, perhaps.

Her costume carried out the fiction: fine, shapely boots of soft glove leather, with thick, ribbed arctic hose rolled half way from the knee over the cuffs of laced Mackinaw breeches; gauntlet mittens of white, fluffy lamb's wool, and heavy, white, snug-fitting sweater, "V"-cut at the neck, leaving her rounded throat bare to the weather. She seemed pathetically small and defenseless as she faced him alone in the midst of a great, savage wilderness; but as he recalled the recent encounter in the burning cabin, he smiled with inward cynicism. She had taught him that she was competent to take care of herself.

She stirred uneasily under his cool scrutiny, and finally with short, careful steps, she moved to a snow-covered bowlder by the brook side, and sat down. From the ground at her feet she picked up a white knitted cap and pulled it tightly over her unruly hair. She remained silent, watching Dexter from under lowered lashes.

With a packet of surgical tape in hand, he advanced and dropped on one knee beside her. Indifferently, she allowed him to examine her injured hand.

"What's your name?" he asked, his deft fingers busy with the dressings.

"Alison Rayne," she told him after a second's hesitation.

He touched her wounded palm, and the texture of skin was smooth and soft. Whoever she might be, she certainly did not belong in this harsh country where life is supported by disfiguring toil. "Where are you from?" he inquired.

"From the south," she answered evasively.

He knotted his bandage neatly and was rising to his feet, when from the darkness behind him he heard a dull thumping sound, followed by a snort of heavy breathing. Turning in surprise, he crossed back to the hollow of ground where his pony lay fallen in the snow.

Until this moment he had taken it for granted that Susy had killed herself. But he saw now that she was still alive, trying feebly to lift up her head. He crouched beside her, and at once ascertained that both forelegs were broken.

Momentarily his hand strayed forward to touch the warm muzzle in the snow, and then, with features drawn and set, he stood up to fumble at his holster flap. He and Susy had traveled the ranges together for two years, sharing hardship and peril and the glory of sunny days. But time passes, and weather changes, and companions must sometime separate. Like the men, the horses of the police were employed in an extra-hazardous service. Dexter was used to swift leave-takings; had long since learned to accept death with fatalistic fortitude. He was drawing his pistol from its holster, when a foot crunched behind him, and Alison Rayne stepped forward to gaze over his shoulder.

"It was my fault," the girl whispered. "The horse ran away with me, but I didn't need to--I could have walked. The poor thing--is suffering! And I--it was my--" She choked, unable to finish, and began to cry.

The corporal shouldered her aside, and advanced in the darkness. There was a brief silence, broken by a heavy report, and Dexter stalked back again, thrusting a pistol into his holster. His searchlight discovered the girl standing with her hands over her ears to shut out the sound, sobbing piteously, with great tears welling from her eyes. "I'm sorry--sorry!" she whimpered.

"It was Susy's fault--mostly," he told her gruffly. "She should have known better than to gallop on this ground." He faced the girl in curiosity, marveling at the strange complexity and inconsistencies that make up the nature of womankind. Here was one who cried in remorse and pity because a horse had to be shot. He had observed no tears shed over two men, who had been wantonly and ruthlessly killed. As he studied her sensitive features he found it increasingly difficult to believe that she could be the woman whose footprints led from the scene of tragedy. Yet her boots matched the prints he had followed, and there was no other departing trail.

"Did you set fire to that cabin?" he asked abruptly.

"I?" she exclaimed.

"You were inside the place when I got there."

"Yes. I saw the flames and feared some one might be in there asleep. So I broke the door to give warning. And a man came inside after me--"

"I guess you know I was that man," he said. "Why did you run after I called to you?"

"I didn't know who you were," was her explanation.

"You don't know how the place happened to take fire?"

"I do not."

"How did you happen to return there?"

"Return?" She seemed genuinely puzzled. "I was never there before."

"You're mistaken," he informed her. "You visited the place a couple of hours before the fire broke out. There's no sense in denying it, because there are marks of your feet in the snow, indicating the direction of your arrival, and proving the suddenness of your departure. When you left you roved over a six- or seven-mile circle, and then came straight back to the cabin. I know because I made the same journey, never more than thirty minutes behind you."

The exactness of his information seemed to disconcert her. "I--if this is true--it's the first I knew it," she asserted at length. "But now that you speak of it, I didn't--I wasn't quite sure of my directions. It would be a funny thing to happen, and yet I may have wandered around as you say, and struck the same cabin twice, without recognizing the spot."

"What were you doing there in the first place?" he asked.

"Nothing. I was walking along the brook, and thought I smelled chimney smoke, and turned aside to see what it meant. That was all."

"At that very time two men were killed in the cabin bunks," he told her--"two men, helplessly bound, who could do nothing but scream for mercy."

"I heard!" she blurted out with a shuddering breath. "It was--" She stopped short, and from the frightened look she gave him he fancied she had said more than she meant to say.

"You admit you were there then, when this killing took place?"

"Admit it?" she asked sharply. "Why, what is there to admit? That I happened to be in the neighborhood--that I heard--"

"That you know more than you're telling me about a very strange affair," he soberly interrupted.

The girl's head lifted with a jerk, and Dexter could almost feel the sudden hostility of her eyes staring at him in the dark. She drew a slow breath, and when she spoke her tones were brittle and cold, lacking all inflection. "As long as we've gone so far, let's get this straight," she said in deliberative accents, as though she might be reciting something learned by rote. "Chance brought me to that cabin. I heard a shot, I heard some one cry out in seeming anguish, I heard another shot. I was alone in a strange place at night, and--and I heard that horror. I was terrified--and I did what any other frightened woman would do. I ran--anywhere to get away."

He watched her for a moment with narrowed eyes, but did not openly question her story. "Do you know the men who were killed?" he asked after a pause.

"Know them?" she gasped. "I hadn't seen them! How should I know them?"

"A woman was in the cabin when the shots were fired," he stated darkly.

She drew backward, breathing audibly, and he could see the nervous gripping of her hands. "If there was a woman there, it wasn't I," she declared. "That's easily proven. You found my foot tracks, you say. Where were they?"

"At the edge of the clearing."

"Did they go to the cabin?"

"No," he was forced to confess. "The last print stopped a dozen yards away."

"Then what do you expect to show?" She faced him tensely. "What are you trying to make out?"

He did not answer, but regarded her searchingly, his brow furrowed in thought. The mystery of the double murder apparently was no nearer solution than it had been before he caught the fugitive. The few facts he had gathered summed up in a most contradictory fashion.

As he positively knew, there was a woman in the cabin when the crimes were committed. But in some unaccountable manner she had vanished. In the snow outside he had found a woman's footprints, and the girl was forced to admit that they were hers. But she denied she had entered the cabin, or even crossed the clearing, and the evidence of her tracks apparently bore out her assertion. Nevertheless, by the testimony trampled in the snow, he had learned with certainty that she was the only woman who had approached anywhere near the scene of tragedy.

She had told her story glibly enough, but at the same time her recent actions were not above suspicion. She had tried desperately hard to get away, and now that he had caught her it was clear enough that she was afraid of him--a representative of the law. Even at this moment there was something in her nervous, half-defiant manner to warn him that she would escape at the very first opportunity.

While she was talking he had listened for some tone or inflection that might remind him of the voice he had heard a while back in the cabin. The other voice, however, had carried to him muffled and distorted by thick walls, and he could not really say whether he had detected any resemblance.

"What are you doing here in the wilderness?" he asked the girl after a lengthy interval.

For several seconds she stood silent, and he had a feeling that she was thinking fast, trying to invent a plausible answer. "Are the police in the habit of cross-examining everybody?" she inquired at length. "Isn't this government land, and aren't people allowed to come and go as they please in the forests?"

He regarded her with steady eyes, showing no sign of impatience. "Who brought you here?" he asked. "You never could have come across these mountains alone."

She made a gesture with her hands, almost impudent, altogether evasive. "You see me," she said. "Am I not alone?"

With a slight shrug Dexter gave up his efforts to extract information from her. Whoever she might be, she was a resolute, quick-witted young woman, and apparently she was ready to go to any lengths to prevent his finding out more about her than she wanted him to know. He bore her no malice. She had a right to preserve her secrets if she could. It was the business of the Minister of Justice to coerce unwilling witnesses, and the corporal, for his part, had no intention of browbeating any girl.

"I should have warned you," he said presently.

"Warned me?" she asked, her head held high. "What about?"

"The police are supposed to caution prospective prisoners against too much talking." He smiled dryly, and reached into his pocket for pipe and tobacco pouch. "I must advise you not to say anything incriminating."

"What--what do you mean?" she gasped.

Dexter looked absent-mindedly at his pipe, seemed to have forgotten what he meant to do with it, and returned it to his pocket. "You will come with me," he said mildly. "In the name of His Majesty the King, I arrest you."