CHAPTER XXX
DANGEROUS WATERS
Dexter searched about him with wide bewildered eyes. A deep, lifeless hush brooded once more over the forest, and he saw nothing anywhere but the still shadows of trees. His woodsman's instinct assured him that no human being lurked within hailing distance. Yet he could not doubt the testimony of his own senses. He had heard the thin, far call; a muffled, impalpable voice, that was the voice of Alison Rayne.
As he waited with bated breath, the murmur of sound again flickered through space—microscopic syllables of speech, apparently sent from nowhere. "Cabin—lower pass—help!" He made out the words distinctly, and in spite of reason, he knew that he could not be mistaken. Alison Rayne was calling him from somewhere, needing him for some reason, and as though his mind were attuned telepathically to hers, he heard.
He did not stop to wonder what it all might mean. On occasions before this he had observed the effects of strange phenomena at work in the wilderness, and by now he would not allow himself to be surprised at anything that might happen. He knew only that he had received a mysterious appeal for help, and if Alison wanted him, he would go the world over to find her.
Luckily the directions were clear. The voice had mentioned a cabin in the lower pass. How far it might be, he did not know, but he had already puzzled his way through the mountains, and was confident that he would have no difficulty in locating the mouth of the valley beyond. And if there were a cabin along the route, he could not miss it. He did not linger even to pack his traveling equipment, but started forward as fast as darkness and difficult ground permitted.
The mountain slope tumbled downward at a sharp slant, and he pushed blindly on through obscurity, feeling his way among the trees, crashing recklessly through briary patches, stumbling and sometimes falling over unseen obstacles in his path. How he traversed that length of dangerous hillside, without broken bones, he could not have said. But the luck of the mounted was with him, and when dawn finally overtook him, he had gained the bottom levels and found safer ground opening before him.
He found himself in a wild, steep-walled gulley, where a mountain torrent rushed and swirled among ugly bowlders. Fed from the distant heights by melting snows, the stream had already flooded level with the high spring marks, and the water still appeared to be rising. The upper embankment shelved above the surface of the rapids and he struck a slippery pathway that enabled him to follow along with the current.
For four or five miles he descended through the cut, and then the walls of the ravine began to widen, and at length he reached an open stretch of valley land, where a second stream came plunging out of a forking gulch to join the creek that had led him from the heights. He halted briefly to peer ahead through the morning mist.
Before him lay a strip of rising ground—a wooded hummock that, in ordinary stages of the water, would have been accessible from the embankment on which he stood. But the branching creeks had overflown their banks and the flood washed around the spit of land forming a small, triangular-shaped island. As he gazed across the swollen current, he discerned the dim outline of a log cabin, half hidden among the trees.