"You will die if you go blundering off in this blizzard," he assured her.
"So be it then!" She took a step away, but the next instant turned back impulsively to face him. "I know what you think," she declared with a shudder. "You think I shot those two men in that cabin back there. I didn't—I swear I had nothing to do with that horror. But I can't prove that I didn't do it, and you—you want to prove that I did." She measured him with a tragic glance. "You won't leave Colonel Devreaux to try to hold me. You'll save your officer if you can."
"Stop!" he thundered as she started to turn away into the storm.
She looked back and saw that he was supporting Devreaux with his left arm, while his right hand had dropped to touch the butt of his pistol. "Yes," she said. "You'll have to shoot me to stop me. Rather that than go to the fort with you." She gave a short, mirthless laugh. "But I've heard that the men of the mounted never fire first. I'll find out if it's true."
His hand left his holster, and he fixed her with a stony gaze. "You're right," he said. "We're not like your people up there who crawl and slink and pot their victims from behind. Go! Go find your friends." He smiled contemptuously, and his words fell with the sharpness of whip strokes. "Tell 'em Corporal Dexter's still alive, and advise 'em when they see him again to shoot on sight, to kill. There's no truce after this. I'm more than ever set on getting them—and you too, Alison!" He pointed with his thumb towards the mountain slope, hidden behind the welter of snow. "Meanwhile there's nothing to keep you. Why don't you go?"
A dull flush suffused her cheeks and temples, and as he spoke her lips fell tremulously apart and her open hand moved towards him in a faint gesture of appeal. "I—" she began, and stopped. She drew a harsh breath that was almost a sob, and her lashes drooped for an instant to touch her snow-wet cheeks. "Good-by!" she cried suddenly in a breaking voice. Then she walked away and the next moment had vanished in the white swirl of the storm.
CHAPTER XVIII
LODGING FOR TWO
The roar of the gale drowned all sound of departing footsteps. Two seconds after the girl had bade him farewell, Dexter had lost sight and knowledge of her. He did not call after her, or attempt to stay her flight. His first concern was for Devreaux; and with a muscular strength surprising in a man of his slender frame, he lifted the wounded officer's weighty bulk in his arms, and trudged forward in search of shelter.
With his head bowed before the freezing blast, his shoulders stooped under the burden he carried, he labored across the open ground and eventually found himself at the edge of the standing timber. The snow swept about him in flying vortices, pelting his face like bird shot, blinding his eyes and robbing him of breath. The trees on the mountain slope swayed and writhed like living things before the fury of the blizzard, and he could hear the splinter and crash of rotted limbs wrested from their trunks. Heedless of the danger of falling boughs, he stumbled, panting, into the dense timber, and started to climb the gullied slope, seeking with storm-blurred sight for any barricaded nook that could serve as a temporary haven of refuge.