There was no time to lose. In another minute or so Koenig would reach the safety of the distant trees, where the horses were tied.
Nicholson didn’t wait. He snatched up his rifle, poked the muzzle through the window, took deliberate aim at the fleeing form and fired. It was his only chance.
Koenig dropped the coat, but kept on running. Now he was lost to sight behind the brush. The bullet had lodged in the rolled coat, and he had escaped uninjured.
A moment later Nicholson heard the receding beat of horses’ hoofs, two of them, for Koenig had taken both horses.
III
Nicholson received the punishment he expected when he returned to headquarters at Edmonton. He had allowed a prisoner to escape. There was no other alternative. He was reduced in rank on November 6. Sergeant Nicholson became Constable Nicholson.
Although his rank was taken from him, the opportunity to “get his man,” was not. Aside from the blot of the Koenig affair, his record was perfect, so his plea to be allowed to recapture the horse thief and try to solve the mystery of the charred skull and bones, which he had found in the stove of the abandoned ranch house, did not fall upon deaf ears.
He was detailed to “get Koenig” and to clear up the mystery.
On the surface of things, there wasn’t much to work on, but Nicholson had given considerable thought to the murder during his trek back to Edmonton, and the more he thought about it now that he was back, the more definite conclusions stood out.
When Koenig was grumbling about being double-crossed, it seemed logical enough. But now as Constable Nicholson had occasion to view the horse thief’s actions from long range, so to speak, it seemed to him that Koenig’s desire for vengeance had been somewhat overdone.
Calling upon his long experience as a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, he asked himself:
Would the average criminal act as Koenig had done? Wouldn’t he wait and when released from jail seek revenge in his own way?
Nicholson decided he would.
Why then, he asked himself, had Koenig acted as he had if he was not sincere?
In endeavoring to discover a reason, Nicholson went back over the events leading up to the discovery of the human remains in the cabin stove.
The more he thought of them, the more two questions perplexed him.
If Koenig, as he had said, had only heard bits of the conversation that passed between Burke and Skinner regarding the murder, would he have been able to know exactly where to find the key to the cabin and where the remains had been disposed of?
On the second question, Nicholson decided that it was altogether possible. After all, there was only one stove in the shack.
But the key! The murder wasn’t a recent one. All the evidence pointed conclusively to that fact. But how much time had elapsed since it was committed, the trooper wasn’t certain. From the appearance of the interior of the cabin, however, he judged that it had not been used for at least six months. Perhaps longer. At the minimum though, the murder had been committed six months before.
During the intervening period, autumn had passed into winter and winter into spring. It had rained and it had snowed. Much of the pile of dirt and refuse in which the key had been hidden had undoubtedly been washed away, leaving the pile no larger or any different in appearance from those near it.
Certainly no man could have known just where to look for the key simply by hearing snatches of conversation. It didn’t ring true.
When this fact impressed itself upon Nicholson’s mind the reason for Koenig’s professed bitterness to the two escaped horse thieves stood out in bold relief.
Koenig, and not Burke and Skinner, had committed the murder. He had built up the story of double-crossing so that suspicion would fall on his two former companions and not on himself. He, and not Burke and Skinner, was doing the double-crossing.
It was all supposition, of course, and the Constable knew it. Even if he should arrest Koenig, there was no way of pinning the murder on him. Supposition and direct evidence were two entirely different things.
Why, the identity of the murdered man was still unknown! Even if it was possible to charge Koenig with murder, whom would one charge him with having killed?
Nicholson decided to let suppositions go by the board for the time being and to put all his efforts on trying to learn the identity of the murdered man.
But though he engaged in an exhaustive investigation, it was of no avail. No evidence was brought to light. No one, apparently, was missing from the whole province of Alberta who could not be accounted for.
Then it was that Nicholson had a break — the sort of a break that so often crops up unexpectedly to play an important role in the solving of a mysterious crime.
He happened to think of the muskrat skin hat that had been found some two years before on the snow-covered trail east of Ponoka.
The Mounted Police had never learned to whom the hat belonged.
Could it be possible that it had belonged to the man whose crushed-in skull had been found in the rusty stove?
Nicholson’s heart beat fast as he rushed from the barrack to seek the trooper who had had charge of the hat.
“Had orders to destroy it,” the Mounty told him. “Guess I burned it with the rubbish.”
Nicholson’s heart sank.
“No — wait a minute,” his companion went on. “Seems to me I didn’t, though. I think it’s down in the basement somewhere.”
A search of the barrack basement was undertaken at once. And after a time the headgear was found, thick with dust, lodged in back of one of the overhead beams.
Nicholson’s hands trembled ever so slightly as he pulled the cap over the broken skull. Would he discover what he wanted to find? Yes, the torn part of the hat, its edges ruffled with dried blood, corresponded exactly with the break in the skull.
One mystery had been solved.
The man who owned the hat was the man who had been murdered. But his identity remained as much of a mystery as before.
Still, there was something definite to work on now. The hat had been found near Ponoka.
But no one in or around Ponoka had been able to shed any light on the torn, blood-stained headgear when the Mounties had made their investigations there two years before. Was it reasonable to expect that they would now?
However, Constable Nicholson did not go to Ponoka to ask questions about the muskrat skin hat.
He went to pick up the trail of Koenig, for he was convinced that Koenig was the murderer.
It was several weeks before Nicholson picked up the trail he was seeking. In a crowded city it would have been a well-nigh impossible task, but in the sparsely settled regions around Ponoka it was a different matter. In such localities ordinary activities are subjects of common gossip.
So it was that at length the Constable stumbled upon two German settlers who recalled that two years before they had seen two men set out from Ponoka in a sleigh drawn by a team of shaggy bays.
Now it is nothing unusual for one to see sleighs or bay horses, for that matter, in Ponoka in winter time. It is a common sight. Nothing one would be expected to remember for over two years. But in this case the Germans had remembered.
They had remembered one of the men had ugly, scowling eyes, a hostile mouth and bow legs.
What had fixed the instance in their minds was that later they had met the bow-legged man returning alone in the sleigh. He had a bulky object covered with tarpaulin in the bottom of the sleigh.
This was the first definite proof that Nicholson’s supposition that Koenig was the murderer was correct. The bow legs cinched the matter.