The half-breed strode to the foot of the slope, and pushed forward to take part in the argument. "I teenk lak Peenk, we keel 'im. Mebby we don' shoot 'em, eh? Dan we keek an' tromp 'im, w'at?" His saturnine face wrinkled for a moment in a sinister grin, and he glanced significantly at his heavy, nail-studded boots—weapons he had used before now with frightful effect, when his victims were sprawled helplessly before him.
The slight-built stranger surveyed the huge Doucet scornfully. "My, you're brave—you and Crill!" he observed with cutting irony. "You don't fear any policeman when you've got him crushed under a tree. One wants to shoot him, and the other's going to kick him to death." He turned suavely towards his third companion. "What method do you prefer, Croix?" he asked.
"Whatever way you say's right, Mr. Stark," answered Croix with a furtive glance from one of his comrades to another.
Dexter caught the name, and looked up curiously at the mild-spoken stranger. The man was Stark—presumably the Owen Stark whom Mudgett had mentioned—who owned the trapper's cabin farther up the valley, where Alison Rayne's brother was found last fall. And it needed no more than a glance at his confident black eyes and lean resolute jaw to mark him as the controlling mind and spirit among the scamps with whom he kept company.
Stark looked at each of his companions in turn, and his mouth curved faintly in a coldly whimsical smile that somehow was more formidable in quality than Crill's venomous scowl, or Doucet's swaggering ferocity, or the evil, hangdog demeanor of Norbert Croix.
"You're a pack of rats!" said Stark. "Get away from me!" Then, indicating that the incident was closed, he turned his back on his comrades, and bent forward to face Corporal Dexter.
"You're the last of your outfit, I take it," he remarked blandly. "There were three of you. One was a young constable who got his several months ago. Then there was the old man—Colonel Devreaux, wasn't he? I'm afraid he went out too, didn't he—one stormy day last October?"
In spite of the agony of the pain that throbbed and flamed through his body, Dexter's mind was still functioning. He had not forgotten that his own back trail led to the cave where Devreaux was hiding. If he could convince these men that the colonel was dead, they probably would not bother to follow his footsteps to Saddle Mountain. "A thirty caliber bullet through the lungs will finish almost any man," he stated. "I put Devreaux away under the ground that same evening."
"Lung shot, eh?" Stark nodded with the pleased air of a man who has been paid a compliment. "Not bad marksmanship at that distance. And in that hazy atmosphere, just before the snow struck us. But I was certain I had—I knew at the time that the final shot rang the bell."
He took off his mittens, brought paper and tobacco from his pocket, and casually rolled himself a cigarette. "You chaps annoyed us a bit last fall," he pursued in a voice of gentleness. "But we forgive you." He struck a match and puffed deeply for a moment, filling his lungs with smoke. "Policemen are something that can't be helped, I suppose. But it doesn't matter." He blew a lazy stream of smoke from his nostrils. "We can go our way as though you'd never happened, now that all three of you are dead."