The surface crust had fallen through on the exposed hillsides, and wet sticky snow clogged the racket webs, making each footstep a dragging effort; but the corporal broke out his toilsome trail down the length of the valley, and by nightfall had sighted the landmarks that led him to the place where the packs were buried. He tied up a bundle of the priceless luxuries he found—evaporated fruits, tea, coffee, sugar, flour—as much as he could carry on his back. That night he fed himself to repletion, and bivouacked until morning in the lee of a thicket that hid the glow of his tiny camp fire. Before daylight he was on his feet again, tramping north in the frosty dawn.
His course led him up along the banks of a small ice-bound brook that twisted through gulley and gorge, in the shadow of towering mountains. He swung along with a steady crunching of snowshoes, feeling a tingle of spring in the air, breathing deeply, almost with elation, his keen gray eyes busy everywhere, taking in the multifarious signs of life awakening. Wherever he looked he saw the tracks of feet—pads and claws; and birds were darting among the thickets. All the forest creatures that had weathered the winter, were out that morning looking for a meal. As Dexter strode onward, curiously watching the runways, he came to the mouth of a dry gulley that sloped up the steep mountainside; and in snow underfoot he saw a mark that halted him as abruptly as a battery shock. It was the print of a man's boot.
The track was freshly made. It was a peculiarly shaped pattern of sole—long and narrow—and as the corporal stooped, staring, he recalled the afternoon on the Saddle Mountain plateau, when Devreaux was shot. The trail he failed to follow that day! Those old prints were identical in outline with this mark, newly tramped in the snow; and he knew that the man who had just passed this place could be none other than "Pink" Crill.
Strange metallic lights gleamed in Dexter's eyes as he surveyed the ground about him. The man had been there only a few minutes before, apparently. He had sat on a fallen log and taken off his snowshoes—probably to rest a pair of sore feet. And then he had tied on his rackets again, and had gone scuffling off up the gulley.
So Crill was alive, prowling through the forest once more. Dexter drew a full breath, and had any one been present to observe the look of satisfaction in his face, it might almost have been supposed that he had stumbled on the tracks of a long-lost friend. He inspected the mechanism of a pistol that had not left its holster in months, and then, with the buoyant step of a man who returns to business after fretting confinement, he started to follow.
The trail led through a clump of giant spruces that choked the mouth of the gulley. Dexter pushed upward through the timber, and presently the heavier growths thinned out, and he gained an unobstructed view of the steep slopes above him. He was standing in a chasm-like fissure, deep, rockwalled, thirty or forty feet in width, which extended on upward in a jagged, crooked course, halfway to the frowning crest of the mountain.
As he gazed towards the heights he caught a movement at the farther end of the crevice, and saw a man climb out of the draw to the bare snow-field that pitched downward sharply from the lofty ridge above. The distance was too great for actual identification, but Dexter was certain that the climber must be Crill.
The man had started to mount the slope, but after his first balancing step or two he stopped, and for some reason decided to look down behind him. And by the sudden tensing attitude of his body, Dexter knew that he had seen his pursuer.
For a second or two the figure remained motionless, gazing down the long fissure. Then, abruptly, the man straightened and turned to wave his arm frantically, as though he were trying to attract the attention of some one on the upper ridge.
Dexter cast a wary glance towards the distant heights. Several hundred yards above him the ridge of the mountain loomed in stark white outline against the glaring sky; and at the topmost point a faint bluish shadow marked the position of an overhanging drift—a formation known as a "snow cornice"—dreaded by mountaineers.