Chapter V: Shadows of Silence

In a moment Dexter was on his knees, with his face close to the ground, and he studied the marks in the snow with the peering concentration of a man trying to read a page of fine-lettered type. A light dusting of wind-blown drift had begun to form in the trampled depression, and instead of crumbling there now was a slight banking up around the edges. As near as he could reckon by the faint clews vouchsafed him, the print was less than an hour and more than a half hour old. So this woman, whoever she was, had evidently been there when the murders were committed.

The officer's mouth was set in a harsh line as he scrambled to his feet. He had found a trail at last, and the fact that the prints were narrow and small and gracefully arched, in nowise softened his recollection of the ugly affair in the cabin. It was not so easy to forget the faces of the two men left behind in the bunks.

With the tense, quick movements of a hunting dog, the policeman cast back a distance along the runway. There were other tracks, clean-cut and plain to read. It was a double trail, with some of the prints pointing towards the cabin, and others turned the opposite direction. The woman had approached from the north, and departed over her same pathway, and the deeper toe marks of the retreating prints indicated the fact she had fled from the scene, almost running.

Dexter followed for a short distance through the underbrush, and then retraced his steps to the clearing. There was no hurry. A few faint stars were beginning to prick through the darkness of the sky. The weather was clearing, and he knew there was little likelihood of further snowfall for thirty hours at least. When he was ready to follow, the trail would still lie in the forest. The fugitive was in the situation of a fish firmly hooked at the end of a fisherman's line. Wherever she went, the line of her footprints tethered her relentlessly to the place of tragedy. Dexter could overtake her, and pick her up, whenever he was ready.

Meanwhile he lingered for a final scrutiny of the marks at the edge of the cabin clearing. And singularly, the high-arched tracks stopped short on the margin of the thicket, at the spot where he had first picked up the trail. Unbelieving, he searched about with his light, and finally made out the entire outer circuit of the stumpy ground. And he was much puzzled when he failed to find any small footprints within a radius of ten yards of the cabin.

Here was mystery piling upon mystery. He had heard a woman's voice in the cabin, and he knew as positively as any one may be positive in matters of evidence, that it was a woman who had shot and killed the two helpless victims in the locked room. And here was a trail, obviously feminine, in an almost unexplored region of the snowy wilderness, where he was quite certain that a white woman had never set foot before.

These facts were left behind, within the cabin and without, in the grim record of events. But there was a startling discrepancy to be explained. Between the thicket, where the footprints halted, and the cabin, where the two prisoners lay dead, a thirty-foot area of smooth-fallen snow intervened. If the maker of the tracks had been in the cabin, how had she crossed the open stretch? In what manner had she escaped, without leaving shoe marks in the clearing? There was no way she could have swung across above the ground, and there was no underground passage. Dexter's stern mouth relaxed for a moment in a grin of self-depreciation. He did not know the answer. There was nothing he could do but follow the trail, and try to wring the truth from the woman when he caught her.

Still he felt no great need for haste. He returned to the cabin, and paused for a final survey of the scene of crime. Again he bent over the lifeless forms in the bunks, and this time ascertained the caliber of the bullets that had carried sudden death. Mudgett had been shot through the heart; a brain shot had flicked out the life of his dark-faced comrade. The muzzle of the weapon had been thrust close in each instance. The bullets were short .32 caliber, but the killer evidently had aimed with deliberate care, and at such nearness of range, the small bits of lead were instantly effective.

The weapon with the two fired chambers, which Dexter had picked up from the floor was a .32 caliber revolver. As in the tragic case of Constable Graves, cause and consequence were logically brought together. The fouled firearms and the bullets were left in his hands as grewsome relics; but the murderers had escaped him--one by death, the other by inexplicably vanishing.

In the bushwhacking of the constable, followed by the killing of his assassin, Dexter sensed the working out of some strange, vaguely revealed drama that apparently involved the fate of several actors. He had pushed his way into an uninhabited country, expecting eventually to encounter a single individual who was fleeing from the penalty attached to a lesser offense; and he had walked unexpectedly upon the stage of wholesale crime.

The motive underlying the attack upon the constable was understandable. The young policeman had traveled across the range on official business, and his slayer no doubt had reason to put him out of the way. But the man who shot Graves, in his turn was shot and killed. And Mudgett also! It was not so easy to fathom the motive of this double affair in the cabin.

Dexter recalled every word spoken by the mysterious voice, before the gun reports sounded behind the closed door. The woman had mentioned the prisoners under arrest, and expressed the fear that they might be forced to talk. What could they talk about--what dangerous secret did they know? It must be something dreadful, if such a desperate method were needed to enforce their silence.

From the scanty facts in his possession the corporal tried to pick out some logical thread of connection between the people thus far enmeshed in the threefold tragedy of the wilderness: Mudgett, the stranger in the upper bunk, the woman from nowhere. Besides these there was the trapper, Stark, who, Mudgett declared, had built himself a winter shack farther up the valley. 'Phonse Doucet, the assailant of the Crooked Forks store keeper, had escaped somewhere on this side of the mountains. So there were five, at least, who had suddenly pushed across into this lonesome, isolated territory where even the marks of squaw-hatchets were seldom found.

Nor had Dexter forgotten the face of the man in the Bertillon photograph, which Constable Graves carried in his pocket. And for some reason the name of "Pink" Crill stuck insistently in his mind. Was this outlander also sojourning in the wilderness? And if so, was he in any way involved in the affairs of the others? There was no saying. Yet the corporal could not escape the feeling that he had touched the sinister web of some large criminal business--of plot and counterplot--that entangled the members of some unidentified outlaw band. What hope of profit might draw traffickers in organized crime to such infertile, out-of-the-way fields, he was unable to guess. He only knew that the country had been suddenly invaded by a mysterious and dangerous company of intruders.

His glance returned grimly to the silent figures in the bunks. No doubt these two held the secret, of which he himself had failed to find the key. But he could scarcely believe that murder had been committed just to prevent their telling what they might know. If this were the only motive, why was not the policeman shot instead of his prisoners? Dexter had not dreamed of the presence of a third person in the cabin, and the woman might have left the door unbarred and ambushed him with perfect safety as he entered.

He shook his head grimly. There must have been other reasons for the wanton shooting. Vengeance? The voice had said something about being betrayed. Had Mudgett or his companion sent the word that summoned Constable Graves into the woods? Such a supposition was improbable. If the constable's murderer had betrayed any one to the police, why had he himself shot the policeman? Dexter sighed as he realized that his speculations were leading nowhere. Until he knew a great deal more than he knew now, he was groping vainly, without one enlightening clew to suggest the meaning of this strange and dark affair. It was wiser to leave off theorizing, and go after the woman.

There was nothing further to detain him. He paused only to prop the broken door in place, to prevent the intrusion of forest creatures, and then quit the cabin and struck off across the clearing.

Where his new quest would take him, he could not foresee. In all probability he would have to travel for some distance through the dense forest. Susy, the pony, was sure to prove more or less of a hindrance on such an expedition, and moreover she was tired after her long journey that day across the pass. He had previously unsaddled her, and she would do well enough by herself in the sheltered gully by the brook. So he mercifully left her behind, and set forth on foot.

The trail of the small shoes was easily followed. For a distance the woman had continued her headlong course, but the underbrush was too thick for heedless going, and it was soon evident that she had been forced to moderate her pace. Still she had kept on as fast as darkness and difficult ground permitted.

By the accumulated signs along the way the policeman knew that she traveled without a light, groping her path as best she might. Frequently she had stumbled over some unseen obstruction and now and then walked blindly into a tree trunk or windfall. And in the denser thickets spatterings of snow told how invisible branches had swished back in her face.

Dexter continued to use his pocket lamp, and he had eyes for everything. By the promptness with which she had recovered from each misstep, he gathered that she was an agile, quick-witted woman, probably young. It must have been a painful ordeal to go plunging through the thickets, but she had taken the punishment with apparent stoicism, scarcely pausing at any time in her hurried, free-swinging stride.

At one place, where she had touched the edge of a briary clump, Dexter found a wisp of hair caught on a thorn--three soft, wavy silken threads of a deep bronze shade. He pulled off his glove to twist the gossamer strand about his forefinger, and almost imagined a sensation of human warmth. And somehow he felt a sudden dislike for the work he had to do. There are times when police business calls for sterner qualities than simple courage and loyalty. The corporal was confronted by a duty that revolted every knightly instinct; nevertheless he pushed onward at a faster pace. He could not shirk a disagreeable task, and was resolved to have it over with as soon as possible.

The woman did not turn down towards the more open ground along the course of the valley stream, but continued to travel through the deeper forest. She had soon wandered away from the vaguely defined runway, and was forced to seek out her own pathway. Through occasional openings in the tree-tops Dexter caught glimpses of the north-bearing star Capella, which the Indians call the "little white goat." For a while the fugitive had kept on in a northerly direction, but presently the trail began to bend to the left, turning towards the back hills. And as the corporal followed, he began to realize that he was swinging on a wide arc towards the west. The line of prints meandered back and forth in a rather aimless way, but the trend of divergence was always to the left. By the signs he inferred that the woman had missed her bearings, and, as usually is the case with lost people, was circling gradually around the compass.

Experienced wayfarers of the wilderness learn to "average" their windings, always bearing towards an imaginary fixed point ahead, like a ship tacking at sea. The star Capella served to-night as an infallible guiding beacon for travelers in the trackless country. But the woman, whoever she was, continued to wander farther and farther off her original course. By the time he had followed a half hour on her trail Dexter was certain that she was a newcomer in the northland.

In spite of darkness and the denseness of the timber, she still kept up her rapid pace. It seemed to her pursuer that she was in panic-stricken flight. Surely she must tire very soon. But her circling path led Dexter on and on through the dismal forest and still there was no evidence of lagging on the trail. He was beginning to marvel at the story of brave endurance that he read in the trail of the little footprints. The fugitive might not be versed in woodcraft, but nevertheless she seemed to have the pluck and physical stamina of a seasoned voyageur.

The corporal had his lamp to light the way before him, and he plowed through the snow with enormous energy. He was certain that he gained steadily, yet at the end of an hour he had not overtaken the woman.

By almost imperceptible degrees the line of tracks kept on curving in a left hand arc, and after winding his way for another twenty or thirty minutes through the hushed labyrinths of the woods, he became aware that he was now heading more southerly than west. He trudged onward until a rift in the drooping branches overhead gave him a momentary glimpse of the sky, and he found the beacon star twinkling above his left shoulder. The trail he followed had swung around the compass, and he was traveling back to the east. He half smiled to himself as he reckoned distance and direction. The hunted woman had wandered by tortuous paths through miles of darkness, only to turn back at last towards the tragic spot from which she had fearfully fled.

By the freshly trod prints, the skilled tracker knew that he was running down the fugitive. In places, fluffy bits of snow were still breaking at the edges of the new-made tracks. He should overtake her any minute now. As he lengthened his stride he listened for sounds of lightly crunching feet, and peered sharply ahead, expecting with every step to catch sight of a hurrying figure among the spruces.

He was advancing through a tangle of snow-sheeted brush, his arm thrusting aside the trailing branches, when suddenly he caught a red glint of light in the darkness beyond. At the same instant a stray breath of wind brought to him a resinous smell of wood smoke. A fire of some sort apparently had been kindled in the forest ahead.

Wondering, he broke his way out of the thicket, and paused for a moment to stare before him. A flaming glow flickered among the trees, throwing ruddy reflections upon the wintry landscape. A glance told him it was too big a blaze to be a camp fire. He knew that a forest conflagration seldom starts and never gains much headway when the trees are laden with snow, but for the instant he felt the sharp sense of alarm that communicates itself to all woodland dwellers at the sight and scent of burning timber. He left the trail he was following, and plunged straight through the underbrush towards the crimson flaring light.

Crashing forward, heedless of the lash of branches, he forced his path through the densest thicket. As he advanced he caught glimpses of fire and saw sparks leaping among the trees. He passed through the intervening stretch of forest, and stumbled to the edge of an ax-hewn clearing. In the middle of the snowy ground stood a log building, with smoke and flames spouting upward from the walls and roof. The surrounding area was illuminated with the brightness of day, and at a glance Dexter identified the place. He had circled back to the scene of murder. The cabin had been fired, and was blazing in the forest like a lighted torch.