The new fallen snow was beginning to bank up in great drifts. A few more hours would see the passes blocked, and all communication would be shut off from the outside world. He was trapped for the winter—snowbound in a lonely valley of the mountains with a band of criminals whom he was hunting, and who in turn had taken to hunting him. His rifle and pack were lost, he lacked supplies and adequate clothing; his comrade was wounded, probably dying. And he knew that if his enemies survived the blizzard they would seek out his hiding place, to finish him too, if they could.
CHAPTER XIX
THE HONOR OF THE SERVICE
While the storm raged over the mountains Dexter was confined in his cave for three days and nights, watching over a man who slumbered on the shadowy borderline of death. He performed the herculean task of skinning and dismembering his bear, and hanging out great haunches of meat to refrigerate in the below-zero cold. Also he contrived to gather enough downwood to keep a small fire going in the entrance of the cavern. Otherwise he could do nothing but sit in brooding loneliness, listening to the faint, irregular breathing of his companion, waiting for the blizzard to abate.
On the morning of the fourth day he tumbled out through the drift that choked his front passage, to find the sun shining down on a frozen world of dazzling whiteness. The wind had died during the night, and a silence of utter desolation had fallen upon the earth. The trees of the forest stood motionless, with drooping, over-weighted branches. A vast blanket of white smoothed and soothed the rugged landscape. He listened, and gazed about him, and nowhere was there sound or stir of life. Yesterday's slate had been wiped clean: all trails were buried deep under the winter's snow.
Dexter stared off across the dreary wastes, blinking owlishly under the scintillating sun, feeling an awed sense of lonesomeness and littleness, such as the last survivor of the world's final cataclysm may some day feel. What had become of the men who crossed that direction he did not know. He could not guess where Alison was. Perhaps all had perished in the storm. He shook his head in gentle melancholy. At present there was no way of finding out what had happened, and it was futile to speculate.
As far as he himself was concerned, he tried to think that he ought to be grateful. He was alive and in health, and his own trail had been erased by the storm. He was housed for the winter, and so long as he did not wander far abroad, nobody could track him to his place of concealment. If his enemies were still alive, they too were imprisoned in the mountain-walled valley, and there would be no escape for any one before the spring thaws set in. Outnumbered and outgunned as he was, he still nursed a dogged determination to hunt these men down. He would have to take them one by one, and in cool self-assurance he believed somehow that he might manage. But there was no hurry. He would not know what to do with prisoners now, if he caught them; and he could not leave Devreaux. He would keep out of sight for the present, biding his time, waiting for spring and the opening of the trails.
Meanwhile Dexter faced months of appalling hardship. The ordinary backwoods settler, owning his cabin and tools and provision store, nevertheless must toil and struggle heroically to exist through the cruel northland winters. But the most destitute of settlers had an easy job compared to the labors that Dexter was called upon to undertake. Knowing that two lives were dependent upon his efforts, however, he went about his work with cheerful energy.
First of all, wood had to be cut—enormous stacks of it—to meet the hungry demands of a fire that must not be allowed to go out. While the weather hardened and the new snows piled up, he went into the nearby timber, day after day and week after week, chopping great logs with an absurd little pocket ax—chopping for hours at a stretch, until somehow he would get to thinking of the ax handle as just another numb, half-frozen member of his body. Between his wood gathering forays he found time somehow to make and set traps and snares for hare, ptarmigan, lynx and a gluttonous wolverine that raided his larder nights; to cure pelts, and manufacture moccasins and clothing and blankets and snowshoes; to cook and sweep, to render bear fat for lard and candles, and leach lye for soap; to bathe and shave and keep up at any cost the pretext that he was still a respectable member of society. And Devreaux needed constant, devoted care.
For more than three weeks the wounded man lay in the coma of darkness, an inert, senseless human bulk, whom death had claimed, and who did not die. And day and night the corporal kept his untiring vigil, and fought the powers of fate for his comrade's life.