The long patrol

by Albert M. Treynor

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.