The long patrol

by Albert M. Treynor

But after wild and tumultuous moments, his mind suddenly awakened to the knowledge of a great stillness that had fallen about him, and all at once he realized that he was pulling the trigger vainly on an empty magazine. The pistol dropped from his nerveless fingers, and he peered vacuously into obscurity, expecting each instant to feel the lightning shock of death.

He waited for a second in benumbed resignation, but nothing happened. As he blinked his eyes, trying to see, he heard a moaning sound, like an uncanny human voice, and then his ears caught a faint trickle and gurgle that might have come from a hidden rivulet of water.

An unaccountable fit of trembling seized him, and for seconds he found it difficult to keep the torch in his hand. But he managed to swing forward his smoldering light, and in the dim illumination he made out a huge, shapeless mass of fur sprawled on the red-stained rocks.

With extreme caution he crept forward and looked down upon the matted head of an enormous silvertip bear. The lips of the beast were drawn back in a snarl over the ugly yellow teeth, but the eyes had both disappeared, and a stream of blood ran out from the piglike snout. Dexter thrust the end of his torch against the wet muzzle, and not a tremor of life passed through the tumbled carcass.

For seconds the man crouched motionless, staring at the grotesque heap before him. And with his feeling of relief there came also a certain sense of regret and shame. The bear had found the den first, and by every law of right and justice he was entitled to sleep there unmolested. But for the intruders life had been stripped to primitive necessity. To live meant to kill.

The corporal held his torch aloft and saw that the cavern opened farther back into the mountain, forming a roomy and sheltered retreat. If need be, a man might safely spend the winter there. He nodded in grim satisfaction. By killing the bear he had obtained at a stroke the very essentials of existence—meat, blankets, a lodging-place.

Dexter stripped off his jacket and fanned the powder smoke out of the cabin entrance; and as soon as the air was fit to breathe he went outside for Devreaux.

He picked up the wounded man, lugging him into the cave, and pillowed his head on the warm, shaggy body of the dead bear. Then he made his preparations for a dreaded undertaking.

Building a fire in the cavern entrance, he set snow to melt in the colonel's camp kettle. From his own emergency case he brought forth a tourniquet, forceps and a small, whetted knife. He boiled the instruments in a strong bichloride solution, scrubbed his hands and forearms in the same steaming fluid, pared his nails to the quick, and then stripped off the wounded man's jacket and undergarments, and set silently to work.

Men who dwell in the wilderness are forced to do all things for themselves, without expert help or advice. The troopers of the royal police are expected to acquire a rough and ready knowledge of surgery, but Dexter was not at all confident that his skill was equal to the present emergency. But his comrade did not have a chance of surviving with a bullet in his lungs, and so he steeled himself to the ordeal and went ahead with a task that had to be done.