"Alison Rayne," said the corporal, as Devreaux finished reading.
"Hum!" mused the superintendent, handing back the clipping. "I thought I remembered that name from somewhere, but didn't quite place it." He suddenly shrugged his shoulders. "Well! There we are!" His gnarled fingers strayed forward to rest lightly for an instant on his companion's sleeve. "You never can tell about 'em, David."
Dexter started to reply, but checked himself with tight-shutting teeth. He turned, and with precise care, arranged a couple of logs on the fire. Then, without a word, he stepped outside the cave, to stand bareheaded in the night, watching the play of auroral lights upon the frigid reaches of the northern horizon.
CHAPTER XX
WHEN SPRING CAME BACK
Through January and February the temperature fell lower and lower, and winter, like a white, constricting monster, bound the forest country in tighter embrace. The gray specter of famine walked through the wilderness, reaching here and there and everywhere with a blighting touch of death, threatening at the last to take off the surviving creatures of the coverts and runways, that still tried so hard to live. March came with high winds, with clear sunny days and nights that crackled under the frosty stars. The two policemen continued to live in their cave, and while Dexter grew thin and gaunt with the privations of the passing months, the convalescent Devreaux, astonishingly, began to pick up in weight and strength.
The sun swung gradually northward, and the silvery pale rays changed to gold; for a few minutes at noon-day a faint warmth might be felt, and water dripped from the snow-laden trees. In a short while the thick ground crust would drop in, and after that release from the frozen bonds of winter would come swiftly.
It was the season of avalanches. The snow piled on the higher mountain peaks was beginning to soften and settle; and sometimes the overweighted masses would slip loose and start for the lower valleys, picking up more snow and ice chunks and bowlders, gaining in momentum and size until great trees were snapped off like match sticks; and all was carried to the bottom in a rush of sound that shook the mountainsides. Dexter was often awakened nights by the dreaded thunder of a timber wreck, and knew that somewhere a forested slope had been suddenly razed as bare as his own clean-shaven jaw.
By every sign and sound the inmates of the Saddle Mountain cave knew that spring was at hand. "The travelways will be open in a few more weeks," Devreaux remarked one morning as he peered out from the cavern mouth. "If our fellow sojourners are still alive they'll soon be hitting for the outlet—north."
"I've been puzzling over the singular events of last fall," said Dexter, "and I can think of but one explanation. There are at least three fugitives from the country below—as far as we know there may be more—desperate groups who suddenly bob up in a far-off valley of the wilderness. It isn't likely that they all just happened to drop in like that; it's too much like deliberate planning. I shouldn't be at all surprised to discover that we've stumbled upon a sort of 'underground railroad'—a chain of settlers and trappers reaching clear through the woods, banded together in a scheme to help people who, for one reason or another, must flee from the States."