LODGING FOR TWO
The roar of the gale drowned all sound of departing footsteps. Two
seconds after the girl had bade him farewell, Dexter had lost sight
and knowledge of her. He did not call after her, or attempt to stay
her flight. His first concern was for Devreaux; and with a muscular
strength surprising in a man of his slender frame, he lifted the
wounded officer's weighty bulk in his arms, and trudged forward in
search of shelter.
With his head bowed before the freezing blast, his shoulders stooped
under the burden he carried, he labored across the open ground and
eventually found himself at the edge of the standing timber. The
snow swept about him in flying vortices, pelting his face like bird
shot, blinding his eyes and robbing him of breath. The trees on the
mountain slope swayed and writhed like living things before the fury
of the blizzard, and he could hear the splinter and crash of rotted
limbs wrested from their trunks. Heedless of the danger of falling
boughs, he stumbled, panting, into the dense timber, and started to
climb the gullied slope, seeking with storm-blurred sight for any
barricaded nook that could serve as a temporary haven of refuge.
At the best he hoped for no more than the lee side of a windfall, or
else a fissure among the rocks that could be roofed over with a
thatching of branches. He did not dream that the fates might deal
more kindly with him. But as he struggled up the steep slope,
through a thick fir coppice, he chanced to notice a peculiar,
smooth-sided hole in the snow crust above him. It was a small
opening, scarcely large enough to admit a man's hand, but with his
first glance he halted, stared incredulously for an instant, and
then, with a grim tightening of his lips, he lowered Devreaux's body
to the ground, and climbed upward to investigate.
Pressing his face to the aperture, he was conscious of a rank, furry
scent that a bear hunter could never fail to identify. He laughed
softly under his breath. For once fortune had dealt munificently
with him. Chance had led him to the winter den of a hibernating
bear, and in his desperate extremity he was ready to contest
possession with its owner.
The popular belief that bears lie torpid in winter is a fallacy, as
Dexter knew only too well. A grizzly will hole-up with the first
frosts, living on his own fat during the famine time of cold, dozing
and sleeping through the short days and long freezing nights. If
left undisturbed in his chosen nook, he will nap in sluggish
contentment until spring comes around; but there is nothing
trancelike about his sleep. His nose and ears are always cocked
towards the entrance of his snug retreat, and at the sound or scent
of intrusion he will arouse instantly, with every savage instinct
alert and primed for battle. A man who intrudes on a hibernating
silver-tip takes his life in his hands. The corporal was aware of
the penalty he might have to pay for rashness, but the thought of
holding back now did not occur to him. He must get Devreaux under
cover, and for the sake of a stricken comrade he would not scruple to
fight for a den with a grizzly bear.
From a fallen tree near by he broke off a pitch knot to use as a
torch. Then, without giving himself time for reflection, he climbed
the embankment again and started deliberately to enlarge the
breathing hole that had been thawed through the snow.
As quietly as possible, he broke out chunks of the frozen crust, and
in a couple of minutes had uncovered a low, tunneled opening that ran
back in darkness, somewhere among the rocks. Before him lay a cavern
of some sort that time and weather had hollowed under the pitch of
the mountainside. How far it extended he could not guess, but the
entrance would admit his body if he stooped low, and he knew that
where a grizzly had gone, a man could follow.
He knelt for a space, listening, and fancied that he felt the rhythm
of slow, heavy breathing in fetid gloom beyond. With hand steadied
by enforced calmness, he struck a match and ignited his torch. The
resinous wood took fire almost at once, burning with a sputtering,
smoky flame. He whipped the brand about his head to assure himself
that it was not likely to flicker out, and then drew his heavy
service pistol and started forward into the tunnel.
Crouching, he advanced in the cramped passageway, but he had taken no
more than three steps, when he was aware of a sudden heaving movement
in front of him. The next instant the silence was broken by a loud
snorting _whoof_, and as he peered into the warm, rancid darkness, he
caught sight of two greenish sparks--lambent points of flame, that he
knew were a pair of glaring eyes.
His first shot might be his last, and he leveled his pistol
point-blank at one of the glittering marks, aiming with great care
and pulling the trigger with slow, even pressure.
With the battering explosion in his ears, he was conscious of a
shadowy bulk heaving up before him, and then the walls of the cave
seemed to tremble before a terrible, hot-breathed roar that
reverberated in his brain like a thunder clap. He felt a surging
movement in the darkness, and jerked his head back just in time to
save his face from the mangling stroke of a steel-hooked paw that
batted the air with a ton-weight of fury behind it.
Through the reek of smoke he still saw the flaming eyes, and he poked
forward the pistol at full stretch and once more fired. Again and
again the red streak of flame spouted from the muzzle of his weapon,
and the rapid concussions crashed back and forth in his head,
buffeting his senses as a swimmer is buffeted by the surf. The noise
and confusion, the suffocating powder fumes filling his nostrils and
lungs began after a moment to overcloud his faculties, leaving him
only the subconscious will and determination to keep on shooting.
His finger was working automatically on the trigger, sending bullet
after bullet into the looming bulk before him.
But after wild and tumultuous moments, his mind suddenly awakened to
the knowledge of a great stillness that had fallen about him, and all
at once he realized that he was pulling the trigger vainly on an
empty magazine. The pistol dropped from his nerveless fingers, and
he peered vacuously into obscurity, expecting each instant to feel
the lightning shock of death.
He waited for a second in benumbed resignation, but nothing happened.
As he blinked his eyes, trying to see, he heard a moaning sound, like
an uncanny human voice, and then his ears caught a faint trickle and
gurgle that might have come from a hidden rivulet of water.
An unaccountable fit of trembling seized him, and for seconds he
found it difficult to keep the torch in his hand. But he managed to
swing forward his smoldering light, and in the dim illumination he
made out a huge, shapeless mass of fur sprawled on the red-stained
rocks.
With extreme caution he crept forward and looked down upon the matted
head of an enormous silvertip bear. The lips of the beast were drawn
back in a snarl over the ugly yellow teeth, but the eyes had both
disappeared, and a stream of blood ran out from the piglike snout.
Dexter thrust the end of his torch against the wet muzzle, and not a
tremor of life passed through the tumbled carcass.
For seconds the man crouched motionless, staring at the grotesque
heap before him. And with his feeling of relief there came also a
certain sense of regret and shame. The bear had found the den first,
and by every law of right and justice he was entitled to sleep there
unmolested. But for the intruders life had been stripped to
primitive necessity. To live meant to kill.
The corporal held his torch aloft and saw that the cavern opened
farther back into the mountain, forming a roomy and sheltered
retreat. If need be, a man might safely spend the winter there. He
nodded in grim satisfaction. By killing the bear he had obtained at
a stroke the very essentials of existence--meat, blankets, a
lodging-place.
Dexter stripped off his jacket and fanned the powder smoke out of the
cabin entrance; and as soon as the air was fit to breathe he went
outside for Devreaux.
He picked up the wounded man, lugging him into the cave, and pillowed
his head on the warm, shaggy body of the dead bear. Then he made his
preparations for a dreaded undertaking.
Building a fire in the cavern entrance, he set snow to melt in the
colonel's camp kettle. From his own emergency case he brought forth
a tourniquet, forceps and a small, whetted knife. He boiled the
instruments in a strong bichloride solution, scrubbed his hands and
forearms in the same steaming fluid, pared his nails to the quick,
and then stripped off the wounded man's jacket and undergarments, and
set silently to work.
Men who dwell in the wilderness are forced to do all things for
themselves, without expert help or advice. The troopers of the royal
police are expected to acquire a rough and ready knowledge of
surgery, but Dexter was not at all confident that his skill was equal
to the present emergency. But his comrade did not have a chance of
surviving with a bullet in his lungs, and so he steeled himself to
the ordeal and went ahead with a task that had to be done.
For nearly a half hour Dexter labored over the stricken man under the
ghastly flicker of a pitch torch, stuck in a crack of the cave wall.
Devreaux regained consciousness, and fainted, and revived again; but
never once during those dreadful moments did he move or flinch, and
not one cry was wrung from his ashen, stern-set lips. Dexter was
cool and self-contained when he began his work; when he finally
finished his features were contracted in drawn and haggard lines, his
forehead was dank and wet, and every nerve was aquiver. But he stood
up with a red bullet clutched in his fingers, persuaded that Devreaux
at least had a fighting chance for life.
The wounded man mercifully had fallen into a stupor at the last.
Dexter looked questioningly for a moment at the twisted, pain-racked
body on the rock floor; then he unstrapped a blanket roll and laid a
covering over the unconscious figure. The colonel's discarded jacket
was lying near by, and he picked it up as an afterthought to spread
over the blanket. By accident he held the garment upside down, and a
bundle of loose papers fell from one of the pockets and scattered
over the ground.
As soon as he had placed the tunic over the sleeping man's shoulders,
he stooped to gather up the papers. They were official reports, he
noticed, with a few stray newspaper cuttings among them. He was
shuffling the bundle together, when his attention was caught by a
half tone newspaper photograph that accompanied the printed matter of
one of the clippings.
The photograph was of a boy, a pleasant-faced, dreamy-eyed youth of
eighteen or nineteen years; and as the corporal examined the likeness
under the flaring torch, his lips puckered suddenly in a soundless
whistle of astonishment. There was no mistaking the features: it was
the face of the boy he had left that morning in the lonely cabin on
the farther side of the valley. As he stared at the print the
headlines that went with the photograph seemed to leap forward to
meet his startled gaze. Inked across the top of the clipping in
remorseless black type, the caption read:
BROTHER AND SISTER
WANTED FOR MURDER
OF WEALTHY UNCLE
With brows bent in almost painful concentration Dexter perused the
appended account, and as he read his lips pressed hard against his
teeth and a look of sadness crept into his somber eyes. The story
told of a rich retired merchant of Detroit, Michigan, Oscar Preston,
who adopted and brought up a nephew and niece as his own children.
In a recent slight illness the uncle had unaccountably died, and on
investigation it was discovered that a slow poison had been
administered in the medicines he had taken. The physician in
attendance had filed charges of a capital crime against the nephew,
claiming to have proof that the young man had deliberately killed his
uncle for the sake of the inheritance. But when the police showed up
with a warrant of arrest, the nephew had vanished, and his pretty
twenty-year-old sister apparently had fled with him. The boy's name
was Archibald Smith Preston; the girl's, Anne Alison Rayne Preston.
Dexter sighed deeply as he finished reading the story. For a space
he stood motionless, his brow darkened in brooding thought, his
listless fingers folding and refolding the edge of the clipped
newspaper. Alison! He need wonder no longer over the incongruous
circumstances of fate that had forced this attractive, delicately
nurtured girl to rove as a forest vagabond in the terrible northland.
The boy in the cabin yonder, who denied knowing her, was her brother.
And like "Pink" Crill, they were hunted fugitives, wanted by the law
for a capital offense.
Dexter found it hard indeed to think evil of the clear blue eyes that
had met his eyes a while before with such seeming honesty and
frankness. But he could not question the fact that Alison must be
the girl referred to in the newspaper, as likewise he could not deny
or explain away her presence at the cabin of murder in the lower
valley. The news story did not actually accuse her of complicity in
her brother's crime, but to the reasoning mind of the policeman her
flight under such circumstances amounted virtually to a confession of
guilt. And knowing what he now knew, his remorseless duty imposed
upon him a double obligation to find her again and force her to
answer the law's solemn accounting.
As he listened to the shrieking of the wind outside, there came to
him a mental vision of her, struggling and fighting her way against
the storm; and the thought occurred to him that perhaps it might be
for the best if the clean, white death of the snows should overtake
her--better for her and for him. To stumble on the little huddled
figure, frozen in the drift, would be a tragic finding; but then, at
least, he would not be called upon to go through with a business that
it would take all of his stoic resolution to face.
He folded the newspaper clipping, and, without realizing what he was
doing, thrust it into the pocket of his own tunic. Then, with heavy
steps, he moved back to the mouth of the cave to look out into the
gathering twilight. The temperature was falling rapidly, and the
wind had risen to a gale. Driving gusts of snow obscured the
landscape. He gazed through a seething haze towards the mountain
slopes above, and shivered as though with a sudden chill. Somewhere
off there were Alison and Crill, and the men who had shot Devreaux:
wandering through the snow in search of shelter. Their situation was
unenviable; but as he bowed his head before an icy gust that swept
the mouth of the cave, he reminded himself that his own lot was not
much better.
The new fallen snow was beginning to bank up in great drifts. A few
more hours would see the passes blocked, and all communication would
be shut off from the outside world. He was trapped for the
winter--snowbound in a lonely valley of the mountains with a band of
criminals whom he was hunting, and who in turn had taken to hunting
him. His rifle and pack were lost, he lacked supplies and adequate
clothing; his comrade was wounded, probably dying. And he knew that
if his enemies survived the blizzard they would seek out his hiding
place, to finish him too, if they could.