Hank said, “Well, I’ve got my pack string where I could take a party into the Middle Fork. Of course. I don’t know what sort this city detective is, and—”
“Let’s you an’ me go to see Tom Morton,” the sheriff suggested...
The sheriff and Hank Lucas left the wooden courthouse and went out into the sun. The sprawling Idaho town was deceptive to those who didn’t know it. A single long main street stretching in a thin ribbon of frame business structures, many of which were in need of paint, gave little indication of the innate prosperity of the place. For a radius of more than fifty miles, cattlemen used the facilities of the town to service their ranches. Business from a county as big as some of the eastern states flowed into the county scat. The bank, housed in a one-story frame structure, casually discussed financial deals which would have jarred many a more pretentious city bank to its granite foundations.
The sheriff and Hank Lucas turned in at Tom Morton’s doorway. The entrance room was bleak and cold, decorated with pictures of familiar faces, young men in uniform, girls at the time of high-school graduation. Here and there were hand-colored photographs of the mountainous backcountry.
Ignoring the sign, “Ring for Photographer,” the sheriff and Lucas clumped noisily along the uncarpeted corridor toward the living quarters and the darkroom in the rear.
“Hi, Tom,” the sheriff called.
“Hello,” a voice answered from behind a door marked “Darkroom.”
“This is the sheriff. Watcha doin’?”
“Just taking some films out of the developer. Stick around a minute, and I'll be with you.”
Making themselves entirely at home with the assurance of people who live in neighborly harmony, the pair moved on into the living room, settled down in chairs by a potbellied stove which radiated welcome warmth, and waited for Tom Morton to emerge from the darkroom.
A few minutes later the photographer, tall, thin, wrapped in an aura of acid-fixing bath which gave him the odor of a dill pickle, said, “What can I do for you boys?”
Bill Catlin showed him the photograph. “You make this postcard, Tom?”
“Cosh, I don’t know.”
“Ain’t these figures in pen and ink up in the corner yours?”
The photographer took the print, turned it over, and examined the figures in the upper right-hand corner. “That's right,” he said.
“How come?” the sheriff asked.
Morton grinned. “Well, if you guys have got to know something that’s none of your business, I don’t have a very big margin in this business. All photographic stuff has an expiration date put on it by the manufacturer. That's the limit during which the manufacturer will guarantee it’s okay. But stuff will last for months or even years after that if it’s had the right kind of care. And once the expiration date is past, you can pick it up cheap if you know where to go.
“Well, last year I had a chance to pick up three or four lots of postcard paper on which the expiration date had passed. I put figures on them so I’d know which lots was which, in case I had to discard one. Sometimes just before the paper begins to go bad the prints get a little muddy. But I was lucky. I didn’t have any trouble at all.”
“So you’re sure this was a print you made?”
“That’s right.”
“Try to think when you made it.”
“Gosh, Bill, have a heart!”
“Take a good look at it,” the sheriff invited.
Morton studied the postcard, while the sheriff regarded him anxiously. Hank Lucas, having tilted himself back in his chair, put his boots up to the arm of another chair and perused an illustrated periodical.
Morton examined the figure on the postcard and said, “Say, wait a minute. I’m kind of beginning to remember something about that picture.”
“ ’Atta boy,” the sheriff encouraged.
Morton said, “There was something funny about it... Yeah, I remember what it was now. The guy wanted just one print made.”
“What's so funny about that?”
“Well, when people want a picture put on postcards, usually they want at least a dozen, to send to friends. This fellow came in and said he wanted one print made, and only one.”
“You developed the film? Or do you remember?”
“No, I didn't. That was another thing. He brought the film with him, all developed. And he handed me this one postcard-sized film and told me to make one print on a postcard. He said he wanted to send it to his girl.”
“Remember what he looked like?”
“He was the guy in the picture.”
“Well, now, that's interesting. Probably along about last September?”
“I thought it was earlier. I thought it was some time in the summer.”
“Couldn't have been in the summer,” the sheriff said. “Must have been in September.”
Morton studied the pen-and-ink number on the upper right-hand corner of the postcard and said, “I didn’t think the stuff was still on hand in September. This was a batch I got around April. I thought it was gone by August. Guess I'm wrong, though.”
“Well, we got the date on the postcard and the time of the man’s disappearance.”
“What disappearance?”
“He went off the beam. Had amnesia. His wife’s looking for him. You wouldn’t remember anything about him — the name he gave or anything of that sort?”
“Gosh, no. Along during the fishing season I get a lot of work from dudes, and I just keep the names long enough to deliver the pictures.”
“Well, Tom, just make a photo of this here postcard and make us half a dozen prints right quick. Can you do that?”
Tom Morton looked at his watch. “How soon you want ’em?”
“Soon as I can get ’em.”
“Don't know why I asked,” Morton said, aggrieved. “You been making that same answer to that question ever since you been sheriff...”
As the two men went clump-clump-clumping out along the broad corridor, Hank Lucas said to the sheriff, “You know, Bill, if that fellow’d been in the Middle Fork country ever since last fall, I’d have known about it. He could have gone in for a month or two and holed up in a cabin somewhere, but— Let me see that description again.”
Catlin passed over the description from Ed Harvel’s letter.
“Five feet nine,” Hank said. “Age, thirty-two. Weight, a hundred and eighty-five pounds. Red hair. Blue eyes. Fair complexion. Freckles... Shucks, Bill, he hasn’t been in the country very long. And if he went in, he didn’t stay.”
“I know,” the sheriff said soothingly, “but this here Ed Harvel, he thinks the only way to make a search is to go on into the Middle Fork and prowl up and down the country looking for this cabin.”
“The cabin,” Hank said, “can probably be located. It’s up on a ridge, was built by someone who had a line of traps, was started in the fall before there was any snow on the ground, and finished after there’d been a storm that brought in about three feet of snow. You can tell where the stumps were cut close to the ground and then higher up. And those last saplings that stick out over the door to hang traps and stuff on were cut off five feet above the ground. The stumps are right near the cabin.”
Bill Catlin grinned at him. “I wouldn’t say anything like that to this detective that’s coming out, Hank.”