Chapter IV: Find the Woman

The corporal had faced horrors before. It was not the hideous envisioning of tragedy that froze his blood: it was the haunting memory of the voice that he had heard--the voice of a woman. "Lifeless tongues never talk!" she had said in dreadful resolve. And the sound of that voice still echoed in his brain. The fatal shots were fired by a woman.

Somewhere among the shadows this woman must be hiding now, backed in one of the dark corners, probably, crouching cat-like with weapon in hand, watching every move that Dexter made.

The policeman stood in a situation of peril, and for once in an adventurous career he was at a loss to know how to meet an emergency. He never before had been called upon to deal with an armed and desperate woman, and there came over him suddenly a strange feeling of inefficiency as he realized that, no matter who she was or what she had done or might do, he could not make himself draw the trigger of his gun. Masculine pride, the honor of the mounted, every deep-rooted instinct--heritage of a warrior race and breed--cried out against such an unnatural encounter. He would have to take this woman alive and unharmed, or else she must go free, and leave him dead with his two prisoners in the cabin among the spruces.

He still clung to his carbine, on the off-chance of bluffing through a most disagreeable business. But in the show-down he knew he would have to trust to luck and his quickness of movement.

With nerves strung taut as wires he faced about and flashed the bull's-eye of his lamp around the walls of the room. And the bright searching light discovered no resemblance of human shape.

Incredulous, he winked his eyes two or three times, and turned for his second survey of the cabin interior. Slow and deliberate now, he moved the lamp from left to right, dipping the shaft of light from rafters to floor, and upward again; and so wove luminous orbits around the four walls of the room. He scrutinized the underside of the clapboard roof, looked under the bunk, poked behind a row of garments hanging on pegs, and finally even peered up the fireplace chimney. And he saw neither substance nor shadow to betray the existence of any lurking intruder.

There was a quantity of cut brush and fagots piled by the hearth. The policeman stooped for an armful of the kindling, tossed the fuel into the fireplace, and applied a match. The dry, pitchy material took flame instantly, and crackled into a furious blaze. The yellow flare reflected to the farthest corner, searching out every black nook where a person could hide. And there was no one visible.

For a moment he stood irresolute, with puzzled lines drawn between his brows. A woman had been in the cabin a little while before. She must have entered shortly after he went to search for Susy. And she had barred the door behind her. Apparently she had locked him out with deliberate intention, while she did the work she had hardened herself to do.

On his return he had heard the mysterious ringing of a bell. He had heard her quick, overwrought speech; the shots that were fired. His hearing was trustworthy. But if by chance he were tempted to doubt the testimony of his own ears, there remained the two lifeless, huddled objects in the bunks to bear mute witness to the remorseless visitation.

It seemed unlikely that she could have found her chance to escape in the short time it had taken him to pick up the log and batter his way into the cabin. The possibility of some secret cubbyhole, behind the logs or under the floor, suggested itself. As his glance strayed about him, his eye was caught by a metallic glint of something that had been dropped near the wall across the room from the bunks. Crossing the floor, he reached down and picked up a small pearl-handled revolver.

The gun he had knocked from the hand of his first prisoner was a big, heavy-framed weapon. This was a small caliber revolver, light in weight, delicately made--the sort of firearm a woman might choose to carry in her handbag. With a grim tightening of his lips he tilted up the breach and snapped the cartridges from the cylinder. Two were empty cases that had just been fired.

He nodded to himself. This, of course, was the weapon of death. Either it had fallen accidentally from a trembling, guilty hand, or else the owner had flung it away as a hateful possession. Dexter pocketed the revolver, and set about his distasteful task. The woman must be hiding somewhere, and he would find her, he promised himself, if he had to turn the cabin inside out.

He was standing near the doorway, and he started to work systematically around the walls. The structure, which contained the single, barren, four-square room, was built of six inch logs, saddle-notched at the corners and chinked with moss and clay. An inspection of the cubical interior quickly convinced him that the walls could hold no closet or compartment large enough for the concealment of a human being. From the floor to the slanting roof overhead, all space was easily accounted for. He searched high and low, in the fireplace, behind the bunks, back of the door, under the window sills. Every log and chinked crevice between the logs was subjected to minutest scrutiny. He even climbed up on the bunk poles to assure himself that there was no false work between rafters and the outside roof. Nothing of interest was discovered.

There still was the floor to be looked under. The floor was made of adze-hewn puncheons, uneven and loosely laid, without being spiked to the beams. With an old spade he had found, Dexter got a purchase under one of the rude planks, and pried it up. He had eliminated all other possible places of retreat, and as he snapped on the button of his pocket-lamp and dropped to his knees, he felt with a certain sense of disquiet that something at last was due to happen.

A dank odor of forest mold came up from the hole he had made, and from the under darkness he heard the squeak and sudden scampering of a family of pack rats. But there was no other sound or movement of life.

He raised a second strip of flooring, and then, with a quick-drawn breath, he squeezed his lean body through the opening. There was no knowing what he might find under here, and as he flattened upon his chest to avoid the beams, he could not help reminding himself that quarters were a bit cramped for active maneuvering. The ground under him was littered with decaying forest stuff, and evidently had never been disturbed by rake or spade. There was barely enough space under the floor for him to move, but by wriggling along at full length, he made his way to the end of the cabin and back again. And he found nothing whatever. The mystery of the voice remained unsolved.

Emerging from the opening in the floor, he brushed the leaves and dirt from his uniform, and stood motionless for a space, a look of perplexity clouding his keen, weather-bronzed face. He had heard a sound like a whirring bell that, amazingly, had made him think of a telephone. But a telephone in service must have wires leading somewhere. He had examined every square foot of ground and walls and roof, and had found no connected instrument, nor any vestige of electric wiring in the cabin. There was no way to account for the bell. It was bewildering.

For the time being, however, he was most concerned about the woman. She was not in the cabin--that much was settled. She must have managed to get away somehow.

His glance strayed to the door, hanging partly open on its broken hinges. There remained this one possibility. She might have been standing by the wall when he battered his way into the cabin. Waiting her chance, she could have slipped behind him in the darkness as he stumbled over the threshold, and then passed out unseen through the open doorway. In which event her departing footsteps would betray her. Dexter crossed the cabin, and stepped outside.

His flash-lamp served him once more. The light scintillated upon the fresh fallen snow, awakening a sparkle of diamonds. From the darkness beyond the clearing came the trail of hobnail boots that had led him in the first place to this dismal habitation in the forest. Also the marks of his own making were clearly defined. But there were no other prints.

He rubbed his wet sleeve across his eyes, and gazed searchingly about him. And there was nothing to be seen but whited stumps, and the soft, unscuffled surface of snowy ground. The woman had not come out that direction.

There were windows in the cabin--one on each side and two in the rear--which were large enough, perhaps, to allow a small and frightened fugitive to squeeze her body through. He walked around the building, throwing the light rays back and forth as he advanced, examining the ground underfoot and each window sill as well. So he made the circuit of the cabin, and came back, hopelessly perplexed, to his starting place at the front door. The snow lay as it had fallen on the sills and under the windows, without any imprints of human making. The slayer of the two men in the cabin bunks had vanished without leaving any trace behind.

Dexter was ready to confess his utter mystification. A queer feeling of unreality gripped him, as though he suddenly discovered himself in contention with some strange, unnatural denizen of the forest, who flitted about on darksome errands without touching foot to the earth. Some one was there a few minutes ago; murder had been done; and now this some one was gone--disappeared like a shadow in a dream.

The ringing sound he had heard only added to his bewilderment. It really was absurd to suspect the existence of a telephone circuit in the wilderness, nevertheless in his tour of the outer premises the corporal had looked for telephone wires. Had there been a line of any sort leading to the cabin, the snow-covered strands would have revealed themselves in the bright glare of his flashlight. He had found no wires.

The idea of a radio set occurred to him, and was immediately abandoned. Such a means of communication would require aerials and a connecting wire running to the cabin; or, if not that, at least an inside loop. Also there would have to be batteries, not to mention the bulky receiving and transmitting instruments. There was no such equipment on the premises; and an escaping fugitive could not have had time to dismantle and lug away a radio outfit. Of this he was positive: the voice he heard was not talking by wireless.

He checked up his facts, and considered the last remaining possibility--a chance so remote that it was scarcely worth thinking about. Could there be a tunnel or conduit leading underground to the cabin? He could conceive of no motive that would induce men to undertake the enormous labor of digging a trench through the forest. The notion was preposterous. But he had his report to write, and he was trained to thoroughness in all matters of investigation. It would be easy enough to determine if the ground had ever been broken.

Equipping himself with the spade he had used to pry up the floor boards, he proceeded to shovel a narrow pathway around the cabin, tossing aside the light covering of snow, and inspecting the bare soil underneath. He worked assiduously, and it did not take him a great while to complete the full circuit of the building. The ground was strewn naturally with the season's carpet of leaves and fallen twigs, and the topsoil below was the rich forest loam that requires ages in making. The experienced woodsman needed only a glance around the circular pathway to assure himself that the ground hereabouts had never been disturbed since the beginning of time. He was convinced finally, beyond all doubt. There was no tunnel.

Dexter tossed his shovel aside, and stood for a while by the open door of the cabin. His lips had fallen apart, and his head was thrown up to listen. But he heard only the familiar sounds of the forest, the moaning of the north wind in the trees, the crack and snap of sap-frozen branches. All else was silence. The eerie plaint of the owl came wavering from the darkness, but the empty, ghostly note seemed only a part of the great hush that brooded over the wilderness. The last man left on earth could not feel a sense of lonesomeness more poignant than Dexter felt at that moment, as he stood before the doorway of death, vainly waiting for some sound or movement to break the stillness about him. But for the discharged revolver in his pocket, and his knowledge of what lay in the two sleeping bunks, he might almost have persuaded himself that the events of the last two hours were the illusions of a strangely disordered brain.

He had investigated the cabin inside and outside, had left nothing undone that a searcher could possibly do. The mystery of it all seemed to lie beyond human power of solving. As he remained there, sentinel-like in the darkness, his hand strayed to his pocket and brought out a pipe and tobacco pouch. He carefully stuffed the bowl with fine cut leaf, and then absent-mindedly returned both pouch and pipe to his pocket. For a while longer he lingered by the doorway, his unseeing glance roving slowly about him. Then, with an ironic shrug, he suddenly stirred and stepped out into the clearing.

Inasmuch as he had seen everything there was to be seen about the cabin and its immediate premises, it occurred to him that he might as well extend his circle. The intuitive sense that belongs to all ramblers of the silent places seemed to tell him during the last few minutes that he was alone in the valley. The "feel," the woodsmen and mountaineers say, has nothing to do with the consciousness of smell or hearing or sight. Dexter merely felt that now there was no one else in the neighborhood. He did not expect to make any momentous discoveries, but a restive will demanded action of some sort. Flashing his light before him, he chose his direction at random and strode across the clearing.

At the edge of the open ground he found a runway that wild animals had trod out through the thicket during seasons past. He glanced among the trailing branches and checked himself abruptly, his eyes blankly staring. In the snow he saw the freshly made outline of a narrow, high-arched foot--a woman's shoeprint.