The patient's condition appeared to be much improved since last night. Dexter heated water and applied new dressings, and gave the sufferer detailed instruction for self-treatment. He lingered long enough to cook breakfast, and then picked up his pack and carbine and turned towards the door.
"Where are you going?" asked Smith, with a sudden display of interest.
The corporal looked back with a faint quirk of his mouth. "If I should walk in my sleep, we'll be quits," he remarked. "So long, Smith."
"So long, officer," a pleasant voice called after him; and he opened the door and stepped out into the snow.
It was a dull, gray morning, with a sodden chill in the air. The dense, leaden atmosphere was like an oppressive stillness upon the earth, and the dingy sky of the northwest held the threat of dark forces gathering. Colonel Devreaux apparently was wise in his prognostication. Winter's first deadly storm was brewing behind the ranges, and before nightfall the big snow was surely due.
Dexter observed the weather signs with a brooding glance, and then, with a fatalistic shrug, he buttoned his collar tight, and strode across the brook. By the fringe of the streamside alders he paused for a moment to consult his pocket compass. As he remembered his direction points, the saddle mountain lay behind two intervening ridges, almost on a south by west line. The easier route would be to follow the brook back past the burned cabin, and then turn north along a branch stream that cut through dense timber on the farther side of the valley. But this course would take him miles out of his way. The shorter path lay through a difficult country of forest and hills, but, without horse or baggage, he ought to be able to make his way across. For a second he hesitated, and then decided on the straightaway route. Hitching his pack higher on his shoulders, he left the brook and struck off through the woods.
Anxious to reach his destination before the storm descended, he set himself a pace that might have killed a man unused to wilderness travel. Head bent forward, body relaxed at the hips, feet balancing on a straight line, as a moccasined Indian walks, he swung forward with a long, flexible stride, dodging under branches, weaving back and forth among windfalls and thickets, leaping over down-trunks, moving onward without halt or hesitation, like a shadow gliding through the white mazes of the forest.
It was still early morning when he climbed up through a tangle of hillside brush, and passed over the watershed of the brook he had left behind. By noon he had crossed the jungle hollow beyond and ascended to the top of the next parallel ridge; and through an open vista on the higher ground he caught his first glimpse of the distant mountain peaks, towering ghostly white against the reaches of the sullen sky.
He paused only to make sure of his bearings, and then plunged forward once more into the thick forest. For nearly two hours he worked out his tortuous trail, descending a long slope, broken by gulleys and ravines, through a wilderness of ancient spruces, where smothering undergrowths contested his pathway and shut him in on all sides as a swimmer is surrounded by the waves of the sea. But he struggled on doggedly, and passed in time through the worst of it. Eventually the smaller growths began to thin out, and the spruces gradually made way for the jack pines. He had more frequent glimpses of the sky, and presently, through a rift in the branches, he once more discovered the smoky outlines of mountain caps.
Pushing rapidly forward, he soon left the forest behind, and came at last to the border of an open field of snow, whence he viewed the full majestic sweep of the country before him.