"The revolver—I don't know how it got here," Alison said with a dry sob. "It—I carried it in the bottom of a knapsack I had, and, having no occasion to use it, I hadn't looked for it since early last fall. I may have lost it, or it may have been stolen. I—I don't know."
"That's your explanation?" Dexter asked.
"I can tell you no more than that," she said, and her face was colorless as she bowed her head before him.
"You want me to believe, then, that this revolver was stolen without your knowing: stolen by an unidentified woman who went to a lonely cabin in the wilderness at the same moment you appeared there; who shot two men, threw the smoking weapon behind the front door, and vanished without leaving a trace behind." Dexter stared at her from under lowering brows. "Is that what you want me to believe?"
"Oh, I don't know—I don't know what to think about it all," she answered tonelessly.
"I do," said Dexter. "I'm thinking of a story the colonel told me recently about—well, it was about himself when he was a younger man. And I'm thinking how foolish we are not to profit by the experiences of the men who have gone before us—to save ourselves the bitterness of learning for ourselves." He looked at the girl for a moment with eyes that had grown jaded and hard. Then, with a careless movement, he tossed the revolver in his hand, and thrust it back into his pocket.
"Come on!" he commanded harshly, and turned on his heel. "I've got to find Devreaux."
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE ESCAPE
Inspection of the ground in the neighborhood of the cave discovered only one line of fresh bootmarks, and these, it was self evident, had been made by Archie Preston. But there were older tracks, still visible in the thawing snow, and after investigation, Dexter decided that the stale prints corresponded in size and pattern to the soles of Devreaux's service boots. In places where the sun's rays reached the ground the impressions had almost disappeared, and the corporal estimated that the trail must be at least two days old. It would seem that the colonel, for some reason, had permanently abandoned his safe quarters under Saddle Mountain. The presumption might be that he had grown uneasy after long waiting, and had ventured into the wilderness to seek his missing comrade.