For nearly a half hour Dexter labored over the stricken man under the ghastly flicker of a pitch torch, stuck in a crack of the cave wall. Devreaux regained consciousness, and fainted, and revived again; but never once during those dreadful moments did he move or flinch, and not one cry was wrung from his ashen, stern-set lips. Dexter was cool and self-contained when he began his work; when he finally finished his features were contracted in drawn and haggard lines, his forehead was dank and wet, and every nerve was aquiver. But he stood up with a red bullet clutched in his fingers, persuaded that Devreaux at least had a fighting chance for life.
The wounded man mercifully had fallen into a stupor at the last. Dexter looked questioningly for a moment at the twisted, pain-racked body on the rock floor; then he unstrapped a blanket roll and laid a covering over the unconscious figure. The colonel's discarded jacket was lying near by, and he picked it up as an afterthought to spread over the blanket. By accident he held the garment upside down, and a bundle of loose papers fell from one of the pockets and scattered over the ground.
As soon as he had placed the tunic over the sleeping man's shoulders, he stooped to gather up the papers. They were official reports, he noticed, with a few stray newspaper cuttings among them. He was shuffling the bundle together, when his attention was caught by a half tone newspaper photograph that accompanied the printed matter of one of the clippings.
The photograph was of a boy, a pleasant-faced, dreamy-eyed youth of eighteen or nineteen years; and as the corporal examined the likeness under the flaring torch, his lips puckered suddenly in a soundless whistle of astonishment. There was no mistaking the features: it was the face of the boy he had left that morning in the lonely cabin on the farther side of the valley. As he stared at the print the headlines that went with the photograph seemed to leap forward to meet his startled gaze. Inked across the top of the clipping in remorseless black type, the caption read:
BROTHER AND SISTER
WANTED FOR MURDER
OF WEALTHY UNCLE
With brows bent in almost painful concentration Dexter perused the appended account, and as he read his lips pressed hard against his teeth and a look of sadness crept into his somber eyes. The story told of a rich retired merchant of Detroit, Michigan, Oscar Preston, who adopted and brought up a nephew and niece as his own children. In a recent slight illness the uncle had unaccountably died, and on investigation it was discovered that a slow poison had been administered in the medicines he had taken. The physician in attendance had filed charges of a capital crime against the nephew, claiming to have proof that the young man had deliberately killed his uncle for the sake of the inheritance. But when the police showed up with a warrant of arrest, the nephew had vanished, and his pretty twenty-year-old sister apparently had fled with him. The boy's name was Archibald Smith Preston; the girl's, Anne Alison Rayne Preston.
Dexter sighed deeply as he finished reading the story. For a space he stood motionless, his brow darkened in brooding thought, his listless fingers folding and refolding the edge of the clipped newspaper. Alison! He need wonder no longer over the incongruous circumstances of fate that had forced this attractive, delicately nurtured girl to rove as a forest vagabond in the terrible northland. The boy in the cabin yonder, who denied knowing her, was her brother. And like "Pink" Crill, they were hunted fugitives, wanted by the law for a capital offense.
Dexter found it hard indeed to think evil of the clear blue eyes that had met his eyes a while before with such seeming honesty and frankness. But he could not question the fact that Alison must be the girl referred to in the newspaper, as likewise he could not deny or explain away her presence at the cabin of murder in the lower valley. The news story did not actually accuse her of complicity in her brother's crime, but to the reasoning mind of the policeman her flight under such circumstances amounted virtually to a confession of guilt. And knowing what he now knew, his remorseless duty imposed upon him a double obligation to find her again and force her to answer the law's solemn accounting.
As he listened to the shrieking of the wind outside, there came to him a mental vision of her, struggling and fighting her way against the storm; and the thought occurred to him that perhaps it might be for the best if the clean, white death of the snows should overtake her—better for her and for him. To stumble on the little huddled figure, frozen in the drift, would be a tragic finding; but then, at least, he would not be called upon to go through with a business that it would take all of his stoic resolution to face.
He folded the newspaper clipping, and, without realizing what he was doing, thrust it into the pocket of his own tunic. Then, with heavy steps, he moved back to the mouth of the cave to look out into the gathering twilight. The temperature was falling rapidly, and the wind had risen to a gale. Driving gusts of snow obscured the landscape. He gazed through a seething haze towards the mountain slopes above, and shivered as though with a sudden chill. Somewhere off there were Alison and Crill, and the men who had shot Devreaux: wandering through the snow in search of shelter. Their situation was unenviable; but as he bowed his head before an icy gust that swept the mouth of the cave, he reminded himself that his own lot was not much better.