Chapter IX: Go Get 'em!

The north wind rattled among the dry branches of the brookside junipers, but for a space of ten seconds no other sound broke the straining silence that had fallen upon them. The girl stood motionless, gazing vacantly at Dexter, finding nothing whatever to say.

"I'm not making an accusation," he told her. "But we have to hold you for the time being as a witness. Perhaps it won't amount to more than that."

She swayed a little, as he had sometimes seen a man reel at the first numbing shock of a pistol bullet. But as he watched with troubled eyes, he saw the slender figure straighten with the quick resiliency of a birch sapling in a wind. Her firm chin suddenly lifted, and she spoke slowly, in a voice strongly controlled.

"What have I done?" she asked. "What right have you to detain me?"

Dexter did not reply. The right or wrong of the law's might was a question policemen wisely would not discuss. "We'll start whenever you're ready," he said.

"But--but--" she protested, fighting to keep back her tears, "you wouldn't dare! It would be too high-handed! Why, even the mounted can't go about arresting people right and left, for no reason at all."

"Colonel Devreaux is waiting for us," he remarked with official politeness. "It isn't far, not more than a quarter of a mile from here."

"Oh, no!" she cried, and for just a moment she could not help showing him how badly scared she was. "Don't you understand? I can't go. You mustn't make me! You mustn't! You don't know what you're doing!"

"If you could convince Colonel Devreaux that we have no reason to take you to Fort Dauntless," he said with a trifle less austerity, "why, of course, that would end the matter."

"Convince him of what?" she demanded. "What must I prove that I haven't done?"

"You've refused to answer almost every question I've asked you," he reminded her.

"I've told you--" She checked herself, biting her lips. They had again struck the stumbling block. He knew that she dared not tell the truth about herself.

"We might as well go," he said.

Her glance swept wildly about the dark thickets, as though she were reckoning her chances of escape. But she could not help but realize the madness of attempted flight. Her lips parted in tremulous breathing, but she did not move.

"You're still a bit shaken by your fall," he said, shrewdly watching her. "But we'll travel as slowly as you like, and you can hang on to me."

Her figure stiffened, and she scornfully refused his offered arm. "If we must go, let's go," she said in a chilly voice.

She started forward with tottering steps to retrace the pathway along the brook. Dexter cast a last lingering glance towards the huddled dark bulk in the hollow where Susy had tumbled, and then in silence he turned to follow.

For the present, at least, the girl was forced to resign herself to the bitterness of fate. She walked ahead with shoulders erect, trying to keep her steps from faltering, proudly ignoring the man who stalked behind her.

They crossed the brook, and thence followed the trail northward in the direction of the burning cabin. Presently Dexter caught a tiny point of light flickering in a nearby thicket. He turned aside with a word to his companion, and a moment later they stumbled into the circle of a new-built camp fire, where Colonel Devreaux sat cross-legged on a tarpaulin, contentedly sipping coffee.

"This is Alison Rayne," said the corporal.

"Humph!" grunted Devreaux. He set down his cup and fixed the girl with the stony, unwinking stare that usually frightened evildoers. But Alison Rayne met his eyes, and did not flinch.

"Sit down, Alison," he invited at length. "Do you want some coffee?"

"No, thank you," she answered coldly. Nevertheless, she accepted a corner of the tarpaulin, and sank to the ground with a tired sigh.

"What did you have to do with the killings in that cabin yonder?" he inquired bluntly.

The girl's face went deathly white for an instant, and then an angry scarlet suddenly flamed in her cheeks. "Nothing!" she said in a choking voice. "I don't know a thing about that--what happened. You--you're very--you shan't say such abominable things to me."

"I want to talk to you," remarked the superintendent placidly, "and I thought we'd get the hardest part over first." He hitched his weight around so he could observe the reflecting firelight upon her face, and proceeded with his ruthless catechism.

Under the fire of questions the girl sat inert, scarcely breathing, her tormented eyes veiled by heavy drooping lashes. Sometimes she answered Devreaux's sharp interrogations in seeming frankness, sometimes she only pretended to answer, sometimes her lips closed, trembling, as she stubbornly shook her head. Now and then her glance strayed surreptitiously towards the corporal, as though seeking some hope of mercy from the younger man.

But Dexter did not once look her direction. He sat a little apart, and his face was revealed to her only in profile, its firm, rugged lines showing almost gaunt in the firelight, changeless and unreadable as sculptured bronze. His straight lips were mutely compressed, and his eyes, darkened by night to murky gray, never once left off their brooding contemplation of the fire. The girl watched him at first in faintly hopeful appeal, then with a baffled knitting of arched brows, and finally she turned from him altogether to bow her head drearily before Devreaux's volley of questions.

Her ordeal lasted for some time, but finally the superintendent decided that he was wasting his breath. His method of attack was direct and forceful, like bludgeon work, but when he finished he knew no more about the mysterious young woman than Dexter could have told him. "All right, Alison," he observed with a ponderous shrug. "Without a rack and thumbscrews, I guess we've gone as far as we're going to go."

He scrutinized her for a moment with puckered eyes. "You know, of course, that you're putting yourself in the worst possible light. That's up to you. I give you credit for this much, though: you haven't tried to make us swallow any lies." He relaxed for a moment in an iron-visaged smile. "All tired out, aren't you, Alison?"

"Dead tired," she murmured.

Devreaux nodded towards a sheltercloth that he had staked up, forester fashion, in front of the fire. He was a fastidious campaigner, and during Dexter's absence had taken the trouble to shingle a foot-deep couch of feathery balsam tips. "You'd better turn in and try to sleep."

The girl accepted the invitation with a slight nod, took the blanket the colonel gave her, and crept underneath the shelter cloth. Devreaux glanced after her, and then turned ruefully to the corporal. "It's the snow for you and me to-night, both tugging on your blanket," he remarked in an undertone.

"What do you make of her?" asked Dexter, as they stepped beyond earshot of the tent.

"Pretty, sweet-looking girl," muttered the superintendent. "It goes hard to think evil things about her. But I've had some beautiful illusions smashed in my time, and I learned long ago that you never can tell by appearances. You can bank on one thing: she never found her way alone into this back-of-beyond country. She's got friends hereabouts, and whoever they are, I've a feeling it'll be a good job when we put hands on 'em."

Dexter looked dubiously at his chief, but made no comment. "What are you going to do with her?" he asked after a moment.

"Hang on to her. Lodge some kind of a complaint, and wait until we get the real facts. One of us had better take her down to Fort Dauntless, where we'll have her safe."

Devreaux eyed the corporal for a moment with a peculiar slanting of his heavy brows. "On the other hand, we want this 'Pink' Crill, and whoever's with him--and we want 'em badly. One of us has got to stay behind and tackle that business." He cast a squinting glance skyward, and shook his head. "The difficulty is that big snow is due to fly almost any day. Once the pass is choked this country will be shut off from the outside world. Whichever one of us stays behind is almost certain to be stuck here until spring. Which job do you choose--Fort Dauntless or Crill?"

Dexter grinned. It was a tradition in the mounted that an officer never assigned a subordinate to any task, dangerous or disagreeable, that the officer was not perfectly willing to undertake himself. He knew that the superintendent was sincere in his offer, and that the decision rested with him.

"You're needed at the post," said the corporal at once. "I'll go after Crill, of course."

The older man nodded curtly. "Graves and I picketed our horses by the forks in the lower valley. I'll cache all my extra grub there where you can find it, and you'll weather the winter all right, even if the snow catches you."

He measured the corporal with his deep-searching gaze. "There were two of us hunting Crill up to this afternoon. You know what happened to poor Graves. Crill and his friends are out to get the police before the police get them. And after I'm gone you'll be playing a lone hand. You'll be careful, Dexter."

"Sure," said the corporal lightly.

"I'll send you reinforcements," the colonel pursued, "but I doubt if anybody can get in here in time to beat the snows. You may have to hold out by yourself until spring. But rest assured that the first thaw will bring men to your help."

"Thanks, chief," said Dexter. "And don't worry about me. I'll manage."

He left camp for a few minutes to saunter down into the gulley where he had dropped his saddle packs, and when he returned he brought a blanket to spread on the ground across the fire from the tent. For a while longer he and the colonel sat together arranging their final plans, but at length they kicked off their boots, donned their night woolens, and rolled up together in the common blanket.

Both were light sleepers, accustomed to arousing at the least disturbing sound. There was a little of downwood scattered about under the snow, and they had no fear of an enemy approaching unannounced, or of their prisoner's escaping.

Twice during the night Dexter got up automatically to replenish the fire, and on another occasion he awakened sharply to find the girl tiptoeing out of her tent. He was on his feet, almost before his eyes had opened, and smiled grimly at the sight of her startled face. "It's too early to get up now," he remarked pleasantly. "We'll call you when it's time."

She gave him a disconcerted glance, and then turned slowly, without a word, and crept back under the shelter-cloth. Dexter tossed a couple of billets of wood on the fire, and calmly returned to his blanket. After that he got in two hours of unbroken rest before the approach of dawn finally banished sleep.

He and Devreaux awakened at about the same moment and bestirred themselves in the lingering darkness. While the superintendent was poking up the embers of the fire, Dexter went to the brook to chop a wash basin in the ice. He came back, bearing a filled bucket, his hands and face tingling after a heroic soaping in the chilly water.

When breakfast was ready they called the girl, and she came forth, drowsy and shivering, to sit by the tiny fire. There was a little droop of dejection about her shoulders, but the courage of her blue eyes was not yet dimmed. As Dexter observed her covertly in the steel gray dawn, some vagrant stirring of memory brought back to him for an instant the lovely image of a nameless blue and white flower he had one day discovered, blooming valiantly and unaccountably beside a mountain snow drift. To him this woman seemed as much out of place in a bleak camp of the police, as the pretty, stray blossom that had got lost above timberline.

She greeted the two men with a distant nod, but had nothing to say to them; and they respected her mood, and did not try to draw her into conversation.

When breakfast was finished and the back packs had been made up, the three strolled through the spruces to the neighboring clearing. The fire had burned out during the night, and all that was left of the cabin was the fireplace and chimney, scorched and blackened, standing solitary over a heap of smoldering ruins.

Devreaux viewed the desolate scene with down-drawn brows, and presently moved forward in the smoke to prowl among the debris. For several minutes his squat figure was seen moving and stooping in the dingy haze; and when he returned his boots and gloves were sooted black.

"I've been poking around where you said the bunks stood," he remarked, shouldering the corporal beyond their companion's hearing. "Found your manacles, and--not much else. Those pitch logs burn with a frightful heat."

"I tried to get in there when I discovered the fire," Dexter told him. "But it was too late. I couldn't make it."

"No fault of yours. You did all you could, of course."

The superintendent surveyed the smoking wreckage. "The center of fire seems to have been in the timbers near the chimney. It must have started there."

"We can put the cause down to accident," remarked Dexter. "The girl couldn't have started an incendiary blaze. I was right at her heels when she circled back here last night, and I realize now she wouldn't have had time to touch it off. And there were no tracks to indicate that any one else visited the clearing during our absence."

"Caught from the fireplace, then," observed Devreaux.

"Undoubtedly. There was a hot fire in the grate, and as you remarked, those pitch floor timbers would easily catch ablaze. A chance ember popping out would set it going."

The superintendent gave Dexter a sidewise glance and regretfully shook his head. "Sorry, just the same. I should like to have identified the man who killed Constable Graves. Now we may never know.

"Young Graves!" he echoed gently. "He'll have to do for the present as you left him. We'll send in for him when we can."

The colonel lapsed into silence for a moment, while his glance roved about him in the ghostly twilight. But presently he turned aside to move through the fringes of the clearing. He was absent for some time, and when he came back he said he had circled the area of timber surrounding the cabin.

"Just to make sure that you overlooked nothing when you searched last night in the dark," he remarked to the corporal. "I'm satisfied. There are no wires strung to the cabin." He faced his companion with a quizzical expression. "It couldn't have been a telephone you heard."

"I heard the whirr of a bell, and I heard a voice give forewarning," Dexter reiterated. "I can tell you no more than that. As for the rest, it all seems as bizarre and unreal this morning as the memory of a nightmare."

"The rest is real enough," said Devreaux somberly. "Graves and your two prisoners murdered, the cabin burned, this strange young woman left on our hands, and 'Pink' Crill and other unknown skulkers at large in the woods. Hard, ugly facts, Dexter!" He looked at the younger man in gloomy foreboding, and sighed, and shook his head. "I hate like thunder to leave you here alone," he ended.

"Pshaw!" said the corporal, with his quick, bright smile.

"Yes, I know. You boys always say that. And that's why I'm able to run this territory with no more than a dozen of you standing by me." The colonel stooped abruptly for his pack, and then straightened with a brusque movement and stuck out his hand. "We'll foot it down the valley to the horses, and ride on out," he said as his iron grip closed for an instant in a farewell handshake. "So-long, David."

Without further speech he beckoned to Alison Rayne. "Ready!" he announced.

The girl hesitated for only a second, and then with a helpless gesture she turned to follow. Devreaux motioned her to go in advance, and she passed by with shut lips and high-poised head, without a single backward glance. The colonel paused to wave his hand, and then the black forest closed upon the retreating figures, and Dexter was left alone in the clearing.