PATH OF THE AVALANCHE
The walls of the gulley hemmed Dexter in on two sides, and he saw at
a glance that it would be foolish to try to climb out of the trap
into which he had blundered. Either he must gain the lower exit in
time to fling himself from the path of onrushing death, or else go
down, crushed and buried, under hurtling tons of ice and snow and
shattered tree trunks. A single misstep, a fraction of a second
lost, and his one slender chance was forfeit. He went down the steep
pitch of the gulley with snowshoes creaking, fairly hissing in the
snow, gliding when he could, taking obstacles with flying leaps, as a
ski jumper covers the ground, throwing himself bodily towards the
mouth of the chasm. But fast as he traveled, the avalanche came
faster behind him.
From the first rumbling crash the sound grew thunderous, and then
rapidly gained volume beyond all sense of hearing. The mountainsides
reverberated and he could feel the earth shake and tremble underfoot.
Once he dared to glance over his shoulder, and from the tail of his
eye he saw a mass of snow and rocks and gyrating trees, all mixed up
in a white cloud and pouring down upon him like foam in a waterfall.
And he ran faster than he ever thought he could run.
He was among the spruces, with the brook in sight, and he plunged on
between the trunks like a dodging rabbit. Twelve yards--six--three
long strides needed to reach the mouth of the gulley: he strained
onward in his final spurt. But the snowslide was almost upon him.
The clump of sturdy spruces might have been so much wheat straw
standing in the way of the scythe. The impact was like a hundred
freight trains in head-on collision. Branches swayed and tossed
overhead; great trunks splintered, snapped, and went down in
scrambled wreckage.
Dexter took a last leap, passed the mouth of the fissure, whirling
out beyond a jutting corner of rock. But as his foot touched ground,
irresistible forces caught him from behind. He felt himself lifted,
hurled through the air, flung aside. And masses of rock and snow and
trees poured past him, out of the gulley, across the creek--and hit
the slope on the other side. For seconds afterwards the earth
quivered as an organ pipe vibrates with the undernotes of a deep bass
chord. Then an unbelievable silence closed over the valley.
And from out of the silence Dexter's mind returned to troubled
wakefulness, and struggled slowly to think about things. It gave him
a queer sensation to find himself alive and able to see about him
with his dim, distorted vision. But he could look, and move his head
a little, and try to puzzle it all out.
A ship's cargo of debris had been dumped across the creek and all
about were the butts of uprooted trees, sticking out funny
directions, like things in a pin cushion. He was partly buried under
a drift, and there was snow beneath his shirt collar. His shoulders
were flat on the ground and the lower part of his body was twisted
around in an uncomfortable posture, but somehow he felt no
inclination to get up.
For a while he lay quiet, blinking up at the serene, cloudless sky.
Gradually his senses began to clear. He was aware now of a dull,
aching feeling in his right shoulder. The fog was lifting from his
brain; he remembered what had happened to him. And all at once the
pain in his shoulder became a hot, excruciating torment. He shifted
his position slightly, and heard a harsh grating sound. Bones were
broken somewhere, he realized.
Curiously he tried to lift his arm, and the muscles would not
respond. Arm or shoulder broken, he decided. He strained forward to
sit up, and was surprised to discover he could not raise himself. A
weight seemed to hold him down. He experimented with his left arm,
and found he could use it. He groped across his chest, and his
fingers scuffed on the rough bark of a tree trunk. Then he knew what
was wrong. A falling tree had caught him on the edge of the timber
wreck, throwing him to one side, and then dropping across him. And
the tree now lay upon his shoulder--a crushing weight that he could
not budge or squirm from under. He strained in desperation for a
moment, but it was no use, and he relaxed with a gasp. The tree
pinned him to the ground, and he resigned himself to the fatal
knowledge that no effort of his own could free him. He lay helpless,
at the mercy of men who had sent an avalanche upon him.
As long as he remained quiet the pain in his shoulder was endurable,
and there was nothing to be done but take it easy and wait. And he
was not long kept in suspense. In a few minutes he heard voices
talking, a squeak and crunch of snowshoes, and presently a file of
men hove into view on the mountain slope. He twisted his head back
and surveyed the approaching group with something of the detached
curiosity a man on a gallows might feel concerning the physiognomy of
his executioner.
There were four men in the party, and he was not greatly surprised to
discover that he knew three of them by sight. First came Crill,
sleek and fat as ever, his face glowing pink from his exertions,
shuffling awkwardly on his snowshoes, his thick lips sagging in
evil-grinning triumph as he advanced. Next in the file appeared
'Phonse Doucet, Jess Mudgett's accomplice in the assault on the
Crooked Forks storekeeper, whose warrant of arrest the corporal still
carried; a morose and murderous half-breed, given to drunkenness and
ugly bluster; a Hercules of a man, capable of breaking an ax-helve
between his hands; a brawler and maimer, who held an unsavory
reputation for jumping his victims from behind. The third member of
the party, an undersized, wizened, beetle-browed man, Dexter
identified as a forest skulker and petty scamp, Norbert Croix by
name. Croix would sometimes show himself furtively at Crooked Forks,
only to slink mysteriously back into the woods again. He was known
to be a hanger-on around Indian encampments, and was suspected of
whiskey peddling, and of trap line thieving. But his misdemeanors
were cautiously undertaken, and it was not generally believed that he
held an ounce of real danger in his shrunken make-up.
Dexter surveyed the trio, and his lips drew downward contemptuously.
A well chosen and congenial crew they were indeed, conscienceless,
treacherous, lawless, with almost every crime of the calendar chalked
to their account; there was not a scrap of genuine courage in the
lot. He was convinced that the three of them together would never
have faced him in clean, open combat, with weapons in their hands.
They found him helpless now, and he knew why they were trailing down
the mountainside towards him. But as a life of constant danger had
robbed death of its strangeness, so he no longer feared death; and he
could assure himself honestly and thankfully that men such as these
did not have it in their power to make him afraid.
As he watched the approaching party the corporal's glance strayed
towards the fourth member, the man who sauntered in the rear. This
one he had never seen before. The stranger was short in stature and
slight in build, a clean-shaven, dark-visaged man, who, even in his
heavy, ill-fitting suit of Mackinaws, bore himself with an air of
distinction and grace. There was something adequate and
self-possessed in his easy stride, and Dexter guessed instinctively
that he was the only one of the four who would have dared to creep to
the brink of a snow cornice and set off an avalanche. The corporal
was certain that the stranger was the man with whom he must hold the
final reckoning. But it was Crill who first reached the bottom of
the mountain slope.
The Chicago outlaw slouched forward to stand over the defenseless
policeman, his leering eyes hard and lusterless as frosted glass. He
stared gloatingly for a second, and then launched into a stream of
abuse that poured with horrid fluency from his full red lips. His
fat chin was drawn back in his collar, and he had a trick of swaying
his head slowly as he spat the venom of his remarks. Dexter observed
the man's pinkish, flat-topped skull, with the queer sunken hollows
above the cheek bones, and was reminded more forcibly than ever of a
copperhead in the act of striking.
"I bounced out a United States cop not long ago," Crill asserted as
he moistened his lips in hideous anticipation, "and now I'm gonna
croak one in Canada."
With a throaty laugh, he lifted his rifle. He deliberately snapped
off the safety, and then, slowly aiming, he thrust the muzzle almost
into Dexter's face, and started to pull the trigger.