“No thanks, it’s all right,” Roberta said, jumping up and bustling about. “I just got a little over-tired coming down the trail. I think it’s the elevation.”
“You don’t want me—”
“No, thank you,” Roberta said with a tone of finality which meant that the conversation was terminated.
Roberta crossed over to the lantern, turned it out, and the tent was in warm darkness, save for little ruddy spots which glowed on the canvas where small holes in the wood stove gave shafts of red light from the glowing embers.
Sylvia hesitated a moment, then Roberta could hear her steps going back toward the campfire. Sylvia undoubtedly was bursting with curiosity. She realized that Roberta would hardly have walked back alone over the mountain trail at night, and Sylvia was a prying little sneak as far as Roberta was concerned.
But somehow that momentary interlude, that flare of feeling against Sylvia Jessup, made Roberta Coe reappraise herself and the situation.
She knew instinctively that Frank Ames would not be back. Perhaps his coolness had not been because he had learned of her prior marriage. Perhaps — it could have been that it had made no difference to him. His constrained attitude, his abrupt departure might have been merely the result of what he had said previously — that they were worlds apart.
The doubt, the reaction, left her with the most devastating loneliness she had ever experienced.
Almost without thinking, she put her coat back on, quickly glanced around the tent to see that she was leaving no telltale shadow, then she slipped to the flap and out into the night, detouring so that she kept the tent between her and the campfire until she had reached the circle of scrub pine which surrounded the camp.
Once or twice she stumbled in the shadows. There was no moonlight here in this little valley, and the light from the campfire served only to make the terrain more deceiving, but Roberta kept moving rapidly, heedless of the natural obstacles, stumbling over roots and little hummocks until she was able to skirt the sheltering rim of pines and come to the main trail.
The cold, crisp air of the mountain night seemed like a stimulus which enabled her to rush along the trail. In the starlight, the trail showed as a faint gray thread, and Roberta, feeling as weightless as some gliding creature of the woods, buoyed up by surging hope, moved rapidly along this faint thread.
But after a few minutes the strange exhilaration left her. All at once her body mechanism asserted itself, and her laboring lungs told her all too plainly that she needed air. The unaccustomed effort of running, the steady upgrade, the elevation, all contributed to a breathlessness which made the strength drain out of her legs.
She knew she couldn’t make it. Frank Ames had had too much of a headstart on her, and his own hurt pride would make for an emotional unrest which would demand some physical outlet. He would be swinging along up the trail, with his long legs devouring the space.
“Frank!” she called, and there was desperate pleading in her voice.
She had not brought her flashlight. The moon had now settled almost to the mountains. Only occasionally, where there was a break in the pines, was there a field of weak illumination over the trail.
She could hear steps ahead of her. She wanted to call out again, but her laboring lungs had barely enough air for breath. Her pounding heart threatened to push itself out of her chest.
“Frank!” she called with the very last bit of breath that she could muster. And then her laboring heart gave a wild surge as she saw motion in the shadow ahead.
But the figure that stepped out to meet her was not that of Frank Ames. A shrill, metallic whistle, harsh as the strum of an overtaxed taut wire, knifed her eardrums. Cold horror gripped her.
“No— No!” she half sobbed.
She turned, but there was no more strength left for flight. Her feet were like heavy rocks, the legs limber.
The figure moved swiftly.
Sheriff Bill Eldon, down on hands and knees, poked slowly around the two parallel piles of ashes. Undoubtedly these two campfires marked the spot where some man had been camping the night before, a man who was a seasoned veteran of the woods, who had spent a cold night without blankets, yet without inconvenience.
John Olney, standing a little to one side, watching with keen interest, was careful not to disturb the ground so that any remaining tracks would be obscured. The long western slant of the sunlight built up shadows, gave a transverse lighting which made tracks far more easy to see than would have been the case during the middle of the day.
The sheriff’s forefinger pointed to slight disturbances in the ground that would have escaped the attention of any except the most skilled tracker. “Now here,” he said, “is where Carl Raymond came along. Raymond was hunting deer. You can see that he skirted the edge of the plateau, keeping in the shadows, hoping he’d catch something still feeding in this little meadow.
“Anything out there would have been most apt to be a doe with a fawn, a spike buck, or perhaps a good fat barren doe. So you can figure Raymond was hunting for meat.
“Now, he got to this place right here and then could see where the campfire had been, so he moved over to investigate. Now that accounts for Raymond’s tracks.”
Olney nodded. The ground to that point was to him as plain as a blueprint to an architect.
“Now then, these two fires,” the sheriff went on, “tell quite a story. The man used wood from that dead pine over there. Then he cut fir boughs, raked the coals to one side, slept on the warm ground with a fire on each side of him, and early in the morning threw the fir boughs on the flames. You can see where the stuff caught into instant flame and burnt up until it left only the naked branches. Those were still green and didn’t burn easily. The man didn’t try to burn them at all. He simply brought water over here from that little spring and doused the fire and covered it up, so as to eliminate that much of the fire hazard. He certainly didn’t want the faintest wisp of smoke to show when it came daylight.”
Again Olney nodded.
“So the fir boughs must have been burned up pretty early, probably just as it started to turn daylight. Now, notice the way these boughs are cut. They’re not cut through with a single clean stroke. Every one of them has taken two or three cuts, but the cuts are clean. Our man wasn’t carrying a hatchet, but he was carrying a big knife and it was razor-sharp.”
Again Olney nodded.
“You can see his tracks around here,” the sheriff went on. “He’s wearing a good sensible boot, a wide last, with a composition cord sole and heel. That man could move through the forest without making any noise at all. He could be as quiet as a panther. Now then, he had to have something to carry the water from the spring to put out this fire. What do you suppose it was?”
“His hat?” Olney asked.
“Could have been,” the sheriff said, “but somehow I doubt it. Notice the number of trips he made here to the spring. He’s worn a regular trail up there, and the place where the little trickle of water has carried the charcoal down from the fire shows that he was using something that didn’t hold much water. Let’s sort of look around over here in the brush. Wait a minute!”
The sheriff stood up by the edge of the blackened space, made throwing motions in several different directions, said, “Over here is the best place to look. There’s no high ground here. He could have thrown a can farther this way than in any other direction.”
The sheriff and the ranger moved over to a place where the brush was lower and the ground sloped away from the fire.
“Getting dark,” the sheriff said. “We’re going to have to move along fast if we’re going to find what we— Here it is.”
With the deft swiftness of a cat pouncing on a gopher, the sheriff dove into a little clump of mountain manzanita and came out triumphantly bearing a soot-covered can. The top of the can showed an irregular, jagged crosscut, indicating that it had been opened by a few thrusts with a wide-bladed knife.