He worked on his boots, dry and hard after yesterday's wetting, fried

his bacon and dropped some crackers into the sizzling fat, and ate

quickly. After that he went out to the trail and inspected it. He had

an idea that range horses were mostly unshod, and that perhaps the trail

would reveal something. But it was unused and overgrown. Not until he

had gone some distance did he find anything. Then in a small bare spot

he found in the dust the imprints of a horse's shoes, turned down the

trail up which he had come.

Even then he was slow to read into the incident anything that related to

himself or to his errand. He went over the various contingencies of the

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trail: a ranger, on his way to town; a forest fire somewhere; a belated

hound from the newspaper pack. He was convinced now that human eyes had

watched him for some time through the log wall the night before, but he

could not connect them with the business in hand.

He set resolutely about his business, which was to turn up, somehow,

some way, a proof of the truth of Maggie Donaldson's dying statement. To

begin with then he accepted that statement, to find where it would lead

him, and it led him, eventually, to the broken-down stove under the

fallen roof of the lean-to.

He deliberately set himself to work, at first, to reconstruct the life

in the cabin. Jud would have had the lower bunk, David the upper. The

skeleton of a cot bed in the lean-to would have been Maggie's. But none

of them yielded anything.

Very well. Having accepted that they lived here, it was from here that

the escape was made. They would have started the moment the snow was

melted enough to let them get out, and they would have taken, not the

trail toward the town, but some other and circuitous route toward the

railroad. But there had been things to do before they left. They would

have cleared the cabin of every trace of occupancy; the tin cans,

Clark's clothing, such bedding as they could not carry. The cans must

have been a problem; the clothes, of course, could have been burned.

But there were things, like buttons, that did not burn easily. Clark's

watch, if he wore one, his cuff links. Buried?

It occurred to him that they might have disposed of some of the

unburnable articles under the floor, and he lifted a rough board or two.

But to pursue the search systematically he would have needed a pickaxe,

and reluctantly he gave it up and turned his attention to the lean-to

and the buried stove.




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