There are only two varieties of meat that the human digestion can tolerate for breakfast, dinner and supper, day after day and week after week: beef and venison. Dexter trimmed the branches from a springy sapling, devised a rude block and tackle to bend the tough stem to the ground, and whittled a trigger and made a hangman's noose of rawhide. He baited his evil contraption with lily bulbs, chopped with great labor from under the ice of a near-by pond; and the next morning he owned the strangled carcass of a mule deer buck, which he skinned and quartered, and lugged by sections to the cave.
That night there was something like contentment in the stuffy hole where two members of the royal mounted dwelt. The unusual odors from the cooking fire aroused the colonel to one of his short spells of wakefulness, and he watched the supper preparations with famishing eyes.
"Any sign of our neighbors?" he asked as Dexter filled him a plate of steaming venison soup.
Dexter shook his head. "Since that afternoon I have not seen or heard of—of anybody."
"I seem to remember your telling me that the girl—Alison, wasn't it?—walked out on you."
"To bring you here—I had to let her go."
"You don't know where she went?"
"She—perhaps she didn't get through that night." Dexter had found a seat on a log, and as he spoke he settled his chin in the palm of his hand and stared vacantly into the fire. "I've been wondering—a lot—lately."
Devreaux eyed him for a moment with a curious, sidewise glance. "She reminds me of a girl I once knew," he said after a pause of constraint.
"Yes?" said the corporal in a dreamy voice.