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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
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.