face. His temple was black with powder burn, and just behind his eye there showed the red drilled mark of an entering bullet. Dexter observed certain other details of fact, and it needed no closer examination to tell him that both prisoners had been delivered from his hands by death.

CHAPTER IV
FIND THE WOMAN

The corporal had faced horrors before. It was not the hideous envisioning of tragedy that froze his blood: it was the haunting memory of the voice that he had heard--the voice of a woman. "Lifeless tongues never talk!" she had said in dreadful resolve. And the sound of that voice still echoed in his brain. The fatal shots were fired by a woman.

Somewhere among the shadows this woman must be hiding now, backed in one of the dark corners, probably, crouching cat-like with weapon in hand, watching every move that Dexter made.

The policeman stood in a situation of peril, and for once in an adventurous career he was at a loss to know how to meet an emergency. He never before had been called upon to deal with an armed and desperate woman, and there came over him suddenly a strange feeling of inefficiency as he realized that, no matter who she was or what she had done or might do, he could not make himself draw the trigger of his gun. Masculine pride, the honor of the mounted, every deep-rooted instinct--heritage of a warrior race and breed--cried out against such an unnatural encounter. He would have to take this woman alive and unharmed, or else she must go free, and leave him dead with his two prisoners in the cabin among the spruces.

He still clung to his carbine, on the off-chance of bluffing through a most disagreeable business. But in the show-down he knew he would have to trust to luck and his quickness of movement.

With nerves strung taut as wires he faced about and flashed the bull's-eye of his lamp around the walls of the room. And the bright searching light discovered no resemblance of human shape.

Incredulous, he winked his eyes two or three times, and turned for his second survey of the cabin interior. Slow and deliberate now, he moved the lamp from left to right, dipping the shaft of light from rafters to floor, and upward again; and so wove luminous orbits around the four walls of the room. He scrutinized the underside of the clapboard roof, looked under the bunk, poked behind a row of garments hanging on pegs, and finally even peered up the fireplace chimney. And he saw neither substance nor shadow to betray 

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