The footprints kept to the ice, leading him back towards the headwaters of the brook. Dexter followed the windings of the stream, but for reasons of his own, he did not stay in the open course, as the girl had done. There was no knowing what peril might be lurking at each new bending of the densely wooded shore line. It was an ideal country for bushwhacking. Remembering what had happened to Constable Graves, he refrained from exposing himself unwarily. He clung to the shelter of the bank, treading cautiously, gliding like a shadow through the fringes of alder and willow.
His progress was necessarily slow. All morning he traveled, keeping along with the tortuous meanderings of the brook, and when he finally halted for noonday tea, he estimated that he had advanced no more than five or six miles as a bird might fly. The backward trail of small shoe prints continued with the stream.
The girl evidently had come down that way from some deeper fastness of the forest-clad mountains. As the corporal recalled, the country above here had never been officially mapped or explored. His own farthest wanderings had never taken him into the valley of this nameless stream, and he had no notion what was hidden beyond.
He resumed his journey, moving always among the concealing thickets, pausing at every sharp bend of the brook to reconnoiter the ground ahead. The afternoon advanced, and he trudged onward in the white stillness, finding no sign of human intrusion other than the trail unraveling from the north, seemingly without any place of beginning. No wonder the girl was in a state of physical exhaustion last night when he escorted her to Devreaux's camp. She had walked many miles to reach the cabin clearing.
All day the corporal kept on the move, back-tracking her yesterday's footsteps up the valley of silence. Sometimes he paused to listen, and once he imagined that he caught a far-off sound of chopping. He turned aside to investigate, and lost more than an hour ranging through the forest tangle. But he did not hear the sound again, and no sign of any axman was found. A while later his alert eyes discovered a shifting patch of brown that appeared and instantly vanished in a distant hillside covert. Again he made a cautious detour, only to come at last upon the fresh tracks of a mule deer.
When he returned to the brook after this last excursion, he left the shielding thickets, where travel was slow and difficult, and strode on with quickened step along the open course. The sun was sinking over the snow-capped peaks that stood in serried outline against the westward sky, and he realized that unless he made haste darkness was likely to overtake him before the riddle of the trail was solved.
For half an hour longer he pushed ahead through the endless stretches of forest, and then, most unexpectedly, as he rounded a sharp bend of the brook, he found himself at the edge of an open glade where there stood a log cabin, half hidden among the bordering trees. He stopped with up jerked head, staring through the tracery of branches, and saw that he had reached his journey's end. The line of the girl's footprints descended to the brook from the cabin door. It was from this place that she had set forth on her fateful errand.
CHAPTER XI
THE VOICE OF WARNING
Dusk was falling, and a hush of emptiness and desolation brooded over the clearing. The cabin door was closed, and no smoke came from the mud-daubed chimney. Dexter's eyes searched over the ground, and he saw only the single track of footprints. Evidently the girl was the only one who had crossed here, either departing or arriving, since the fall of yesterday's snow.