"And to-day," he concluded, "while trying again to kill me, he shot you instead."
Slowly the girl turned her averted gaze. With a glad throbbing of heart, he saw she was convinced.
"And I believed—a thief," she mourned. "I started for the provinces with him that I might the sooner have the law on you. My heart told me—why, why didn't I listen—that it could not be you. Oh, Sergeant Scarlet, can you ever forgive me?"
"Forgiven already—and forgotten, all but Karmack's devilish part," he assured her.
Now, for the first time, the girl noticed the gash across his scalp. "But you—you're wounded. How——who?——"
"It's just a scratch," said he cheerfully. "Knocked me out for a bit, you know, but all right now. The how and who don't matter. Suppose we see how slightly you're hurt?"
Koplock stood in the tent door with a pan of boiling water, heated at Seymour's orders. The sergeant took this from him and sent him to bring in the police team. Then, with deft fingers, he set about an examination of what proved to be a shoulder wound.
To his great relief, he found that the bullet had gone entirely through, leaving a clean bore through the muscles, with no need for probing. The girl's coma, so like death as to deceive the excited factor, evidently had been from shock. Applying a first-aid dressing, he bundled the injured shoulder against the cold.
Koplock, with fingers none too gentle, looked after Seymour's own injury and bandaged it with material from the police emergency kit. Then they gathered brush from the thicket and built a rousing fire before the tent.
That they would make no attempt to move that day was Seymour's first decision. The girl, he felt, needed rest after the shock of her wounding more than immediate attention from one with more surgical experience than he possessed. Whether to take her back to Armistice or across country to Wolf Lake required more consideration. The fact that there was a missionary surgeon at the lake who had more skill than Luke Morrow finally decided him. Moreover, by going to the trading post, he would be much nearer the frozen highway of the Mackenzie over which his pursuit of Karmack must continue.