Sheriff Catlin nodded approvingly. “You’re doing right well,” he said.
“I think you’ll find,” Dewitt told him, with some dignity, “that the principles of investigating a crime both in the city and in the country are the same. In the country you have, perhaps, a wider area, which tends to increase the difficulty of finding clues. But, on the other hand, you have a smaller population, which makes the job of finding what you want much more simple.”
“Yes, I reckon you’re right,” the sheriff said. “You’ve done some good reasoning there. I guess he couldn’t hitchhike. I guess he had to have someone meet him.”
“And you can see what that means,” Dewitt went on. “It means deliberate murder. The crime had to be committed according to a certain schedule. The person with the car had to be there on a certain date. It’s your county, Sheriff, and I don’t want to dictate, but if it comes to a showdown. I’m going to have to. I want Miss Benton arrested as one of the two persons who murdered Frank Adrian. I want her arrested now.”
The sheriff turned to Marion Benton. “Miss Benton, if you don't mind, I’d like to ask you a question or two. I know it’s sort of embarrassing, but you’ll help things along a bit if you’ll just talk frankly... Your brother is sort of wild, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“Done quite a lot of camping and packing?”
“A lot.”
“Lived in the hills a good part of his life?”
“Yes.”
“Pretty good prospector?”
“Yes.”'
“Packer and trapper?”
“Yes.”
“Hank tells me you sit a horse pretty good. Take it you’ve done quite a bit of riding in the mountains, haven’t you?”
“Some.”
“With your brother?”
“Yes.”
“Your brother have anyone along to do the packing or anything when he took those trips?”
“No, of course not. He likes to do it.”
The sheriff turned back to Dewitt. “Now, then, Hank tells me,” he said, “that when you found the cabin there was a shovel on the inside of the cabin by the stove, some blood spots on one of the walls, but no other blood spots anywhere. There were dishes in the little cupboard, dishes that had been washed and put away. There wasn’t any firewood or kindling inside the cabin. The stove had ashes that hadn't been cleaned out, and there were some buttons in the ashes. There was this here note that had been stuck behind the boxes that formed the cupboard, and there wasn’t a single, solitary thing left in the cabin to show that, of the two men who occupied that cabin, one of them had stayed behind. The packhorse was found at the end of the trail, some skinned-up places on his back.”
Dewitt nodded, then said somewhat impatiently, “I've gone all over that before. Hang it, Sheriff, I’ve given that cabin my personal attention. I’ve seen the evidence.”
“Well, you’ve looked at the cabin,” the sheriff said. “Sometimes we don’t always see what we look at... Now, let’s see. Mrs. Adrian, you registered over here at the hotel and left some baggage, I believe, to be picked up when you came out of the mountains.”
“That’s right. Hank told me to make the load as light as I could, just take the things I really needed to get along with.”
“Hank tells me you ain’t done much mountain riding.”
“This is my first trip.”
“Now, then,” the sheriff said to Dewitt, “I think you've got it right. This here murderer had to have somebody meet him. That means it was a premeditated crime. It means he had an accomplice. It means the thing was worked out according to schedule.”
“That's what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Dewitt snapped. “It means it was premeditated murder.”
“That’s right. But a couple of things you’ve sort of overlooked. Let’s do a little thinking out loud. Take that photographic postcard, for instance.”
“What about it?”
“Notice the shadows?”
“The shadows! What have the shadows to do with the murder of Frank Adrian?”
“They’re pretty short shadows,” Gatlin said. “The picture must have been taken right at noon, but, even so, shadows don’t get that short up here in Idaho except right during the summer months. Now, Tom Morton, the photographer who printed that picture, put it on paper that he says must have been used up by the last part of July. The shadows say it was July. The postcard says it was October. How you going to reconcile the shadows and—”
Dewitt laughed. “I’m not even going to try. Frank Adrian didn't disappear until September.”
Bill Catlin nodded and went on, calmly, “And this here picture was taken with a folding camera that has a little light leak in the bellows. That’s how come this little patch of white fog is down here in the corner. Now, I know I’m just sort of boring you, but there’s one more thing you’d ought to consider. Remember when that packhorse showed up, his back had been rubbed raw' and then healed over?”
Dewitt said, “For heaven’s sake, are you crazy? I don’t care about the damn packhorse.”
“Well, now,” the sheriff went on, “you’d ought to know the mountains, if you’re going to work in ’em. Of course, in packing a lot of dude duffel, even a good man will sometimes get sore backs on one or two of the pack string. You just can’t help that. But when you’re packing just one horse, and when you’re leading him on foot, which is generally a slower proposition than working from horseback, a man that knew anything about packing wouldn't get a sore back on his packhorse.
“Now, another thing. The murderer tried to leave the cabin so that anybody that happened to stumble onto it wouldn’t think there was anything wrong. Everything would seem to be all nice and shipshape, just the way the trappers would have left it at the close of the winter season.
“But up here in this country we have a custom that’s an unwritten law. When a man leaves a cabin, he always leaves dry stovewood and kindling in by the stove. That’s so that if he happens to come back in a rainstorm or a blizzard, he’s got dry wood to start the fire with. And if somebody else happens to come in looking for shelter, there’s always dry wood with which to build a fire.
“Now, I don’t want to bore you by telling you all these local customs, but this one in particular is pretty rigidly enforced. Now do you get it?”
“Get what?” Dewitt asked.
“There were two men in that cabin. One of them was a tenderfoot, a city dude. The other was a woodsman. One of them killed the other and pulled out. Whoever it was that slicked the cabin up and washed the dishes and made it look as though everything was the way two trappers had left it certainly wasn’t the murdered man; it was the guy who did the killing.”
“Naturally,” Dewitt said.
“And,” Bill Catlin pointed out, “in this case, the man who did that was the tenderfoot.”
The idea hit Dewitt suddenly and hard. “But look here,” he said. “His wife identified the body. There was a ring on—”
“Sure, sure, she ‘identified the body,’ ” Catlin said. “Naturally, the murderer saw to it that the right ring was there to be identified. But she'd have made a positive identification in any event. You remember what you said about the crime having to be premeditated and someone having to be at the right place to meet the packhorse on a definite date.”
Corliss Adrian pushed her chair back from the table. “Are you,” she demanded angrily, “trying to insinuate that I—?”