the fact that the prints were narrow and small and gracefully arched, in nowise softened his recollection of the ugly affair in the cabin.  It was not so easy to forget the faces of the two men left behind in the bunks.

With the tense, quick movements of a hunting dog, the policeman cast back a distance along the runway.  There were other tracks, clean-cut and plain to read.  It was a double trail, with some of the prints pointing towards the cabin, and others turned the opposite direction.  The woman had approached from the north, and departed over her same pathway, and the deeper toe marks of the retreating prints indicated the fact she had fled from the scene, almost running.

Dexter followed for a short distance through the underbrush, and then retraced his steps to the clearing.  There was no hurry.  A few faint stars were beginning to prick through the darkness of the sky.  The weather was clearing, and he knew there was little likelihood of further snowfall for thirty hours at least.  When he was ready to follow, the trail would still lie in the forest.  The fugitive was in the situation of a fish firmly hooked at the end of a fisherman's line.  Wherever she went, the line of her footprints tethered her relentlessly to the place of tragedy.  Dexter could overtake her, and pick her up, whenever he was ready.

Meanwhile he lingered for a final scrutiny of the marks at the edge of the cabin clearing.  And singularly, the high-arched tracks stopped short on the margin of the thicket, at the spot where he had first picked up the trail.  Unbelieving, he searched about with his light, and finally made out the entire outer circuit of the stumpy ground.  And he was much puzzled when he failed to find any small footprints within a radius of ten yards of the cabin.

Here was mystery piling upon mystery.  He had heard a woman's voice in the cabin, and he knew as positively as any one may be positive in matters of evidence, that it was a woman who had shot and killed the two helpless victims in the locked room.  And here was a trail, obviously feminine, in an almost unexplored region of the snowy wilderness, where he was quite certain that a white woman had never set foot before.

These facts were left behind, within the cabin and without, in the grim record of events.  But there was a startling discrepancy to be explained.  Between the thicket, where the footprints halted, and the cabin, where the two prisoners lay dead, a thirty-foot area of smooth-fallen snow intervened.  If the maker of the tracks had been in the cabin, 

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