Chapter I
The Ambushed Trail

Near the foot of the valley slope lay an inanimate, drab-colored object of some sort, barely defined against the smooth sweep of the snowy mountainside. From the wooded ridge above, it appeared as a faint speck upon the panorama of wintry landscape. Ninety-nine travelers in a hundred might have passed that direction and never noticed any break in the monotonous waste of white. But on that evening, a little before the fall of dusk, there rode by chance, from out of the pass and over the trail, the one man of a hundred. There were few things worth seeing in the wilderness that escaped the restless scrutiny of Corporal David Dexter of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

A glance ranging across space, as the eagle gazes, and the horseman tightened rein and checked his pony on the brow of the slide. He sat immobile, looking downward. The dun-tinted shape could have been mistaken at the distance for a hillside bowlder or a rotted stump or a tussock of dried grass. But Corporal Dexter was not deceived. October's first snow had swirled over the ranges that day, and the three inch fall spread its covering impartially over mountain and forest and open park. The brownish object below should have been sheeted white, like everything else in view. Whatever it was it must have fallen there in the new snow, some time after the last flurry had passed, not more than a couple of hours before.

The place was a lonely, isolated spot, deep-shut among the remoter fastnesses of the northern Rockies: a haunt of big horn sheep and wandering grizzly bears. Probably there were not five white men alive who had ever sighted the line of unnamed mountain peaks that jutted like broken saw teeth against the eastward sky. The evidence of any recent visitation was of interest to the police.

The rider paused only to reconnoiter the ground below him, and then thrust his knee into his horse's withers, and urged the animal over the shoulder of the declivity. The slope was steep and slippery, but the wise little mountain pony was used to hazardous going. She settled back almost upon her shaggy haunches, and with forelegs reaching stiffly before her, she went scrambling and sliding to the bottom. A quick jog carried the horseman across the snow-smoothed level beyond, and then he knew what it was he had come out of his way to find.

At his pony's feet lay the drab-colored object that had caught his attention on the heights. It was a stiff-brimmed hat--a banded uniform Stetson, such as he himself wore tilted to the crease of his 

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