Sheriff Lafe Ogden, long-barreled blue revolver in his hand, knocked
lightly on the rough pine door of the Red Rock ranger station. Then he
stepped back softly and pressed himself close to the log-and-plaster
wall beside his deputy, Seth Markey, and young Otis Carr.
There was no answer from within. The Sheriff raised his shaggy brows,
pursed his lips and whistled softly. With a jerk of his head in the
direction of the others, he stepped forward again. Suddenly he flung
the door wide.
“Good God!” The exclamation burst from his lips, and checked the sudden
advance of the two pushing forward on his heels.
“It’s Joe Fyffe himself!” He nodded toward the crumpled figure which
lay face downward on the floor.
“Dead?” asked Otis Carr in a strange, strained voice as he squeezed his
huge bulk through the door. He wondered why he had experienced no great
shock at the gruesome discovery. For Joe Fyffe, forest ranger, silent,
odd and retiring, had been his friend.
The Sheriff dropped to one knee. He placed a hand on the ranger’s
wrist.
“Been dead quite a spell,” he announced without looking up.
“Blood shows that,” the deputy volunteered.
“Looky here how it’s dried round the edges, on the floor underneath his
arms there. Two, three hours, I reckon.”
Otis Carr bent awkwardly over the huddled body.
“Shot, I s’pose,” he speculated, his tanned face, somehow attractive
despite its homeliness, showing a trace of awe and concern. Most of his
life had been spent in the cattle country east of Jackson’s Hole; yet
the acts of violence which it had been his lot to witness had failed to
render him callous in the presence of death.
Sheriff Ogden turned the ranger’s stiffening body on one side.
“That’s where he bled from,” he said shortly, pointing with the muzzle
of his revolver to a tiny, stained hole in the ranger’s shirt, under
the right shoulder. “But that’s what done the work,” he added,
indicating a similar hole in the back, just above the ranger’s belt.
“It’s a cinch it wasn’t any accident,” Otis drawled, glancing curiously
about the interior of the ranger cabin. “I tell you, somebody plugged
him.”
“I don’t see any gun,” observed the Sheriff, rising, stepping over the
body and walking to the door of the only other room.
“He couldn’t ’a’ had a chance. Nasty job, this!”
Otis followed him to the room which served as a sleeping chamber and
office. Ogden removed a rifle from two wooden pegs in the log wall
above the desk, examined it carefully, and shook his head. His scrutiny
of a holstered revolver which swung by a cartridge belt from a nail in
the wall was likewise barren of results.
“Neither one’s been fired,” he asserted, frowning and turning to the
maps and papers on the rude pine desk. “He never had a chance to shoot
back. You knew him pretty well, didn’t you, Otis? D’you know whether he
had any other guns?”
Otis shook his head.
“Don’t think he did,” he replied uneasily, casting his eye about the
room. “He hardly ever packed the revolver. Sometimes he carried the
rifle in his saddle scabbard, but it was on the chance of seeing a cat
or something, and not for protection from--well, you know. He never
seemed to worry about the threats of the boys that the Gov’ment
couldn’t send in any damned ranger to collect grazing-fees for using
the open range.”
The Sheriff turned from the desk to a workbench containing a shallow
tank, wooden racks and a row of bottles.
“I know,” he remarked gravely. “But between you and me, it aint like
any of the boys to shoot him down like this. What’s this junk?”
“Dark-room equipment,” Otis answered, fingering a developing tray. “Joe
was a nut on wild-animal photography, you know. Got some of the best
animal pictures I’ve ever seen. Did his own finishing here at night.
See that blanket rolled up over the window? He’d let that down, and
have a first-class dark-room.”
“That’s right,” the Sheriff affirmed. “I remember now. He was the
feller that bragged he was the only man that ever got a close-up
picture of a wild mountain sheep, wasn’t he?”
“I wouldn’t say he bragged about it. But it was something worth
boasting about, anyway.”
Sheriff Ogden, his barren search of the office and bedroom completed,
led the way back to the room where the body lay.
“Lucky we run into you, Otis,” he remarked as he began a hurried search
of its interior. “When I seen you ridin’ down the Buffalo Forks road, I
says to Seth, here: ‘There’s Otis Carr, who knows Joe Fyffe right
well--maybe better’n anyone else in these parts. We’ll ask him to go
along.’
“We didn’t know what had happened, then. Just knew somethin’ funny was
pulled off here at the ranger station. Forest supervisor in Jackson
called me before daylight, an’ said he’d just got a flash on his phone,
an’ that some one was callin’ for help. Operator told him the call was
from Red Rock ranger station.
“He’d ’a’ come along, only for a wrenched leg. Between you and me, he’s
a pretty decent feller, that supervisor, even if he is tryin’ to
collect grazin’-fees for the Gov’ment. I says to Seth here: ‘Lucky
thing these here ranger stations is connected with telephones for
fire-calls. Man could have an accident an’ lay there for a week if it
wasn’t for that wire.’ I had a hunch it might be somethin’ more than an
accident, ’count of hearin’ more or less how the boys been shootin’ off
their mouths. You been over the hill to Dubois, I s’pose?”
* * * * *
Otis, who had stepped to the pine table to retrieve the telephone,
which was hanging close to the floor, turned quickly after restoring
the instrument to its accustomed place and shot an odd, questioning
glance at the Sheriff, who was stooping over the stove. Then he peered
uncertainly at the deputy, who was kneeling by the outer door.
“N-o-o,” he drawled, turning back to the table, nervous fingers
clumsily fingering the telephone. “Guess the old man told you them
rustlers been busy again, working over some of the Footstool calves.
Jess Bledsoe says they been bothering around some of the Flying A
stock, too. Well, I rode over to the cabin of Gus Bernat, the French
trapper, last night, figuring I might get a line on the fellow who’s so
free with the running-iron. Had a hunch he might be working the range
down below Two-Gwo-Tee pass, but I couldn’t see a thing--”
Deputy Seth Markey, seemingly impatient that the others should waste
their time on such casual remarks with the mystery of the Fyffe killing
confronting them, arose with an exclamation.
“Looky here, boss,” he cried to the Sheriff, directing his attention to
two tiny brown spots near the doorsill. “See them blood-drops? That
means Fyffe was outside when he was shot, and run in here afterward.
Let’s take a look outside the cabin.”
Ogden abandoned his examination of the stove, and the pair of worn,
hobnailed Canadian pack boots hanging from the log ceiling above it by
their leather laces, and joined his deputy at the door.
“Sure ’nough,” he observed as he led the way outside the cabin,
carefully scrutinizing the ground about the doorway. “Here’s another.
We’ll just back-track this trail, an’ see what we can find.”
With difficulty they followed the thin trail of blood over the coarse
gravel surface and pine-needle carpet of the pasture which surrounded
the ranger cabin. It led through the open gate in the barbed-wire fence
which inclosed the pasture. They lost it in the near-by creek bottom.
In vain did they circle the spot where the last bloodstain appeared.
Some fifty yards away they came upon the cold ashes of a tiny wood
fire. Sheriff Ogden pressed his hand among the charred fragments.
“From the feel of her, she might be a week old,” he announced sagely.
“The ashes aint flaky, but black, showin’ that the fire didn’t burn
out, but was doused with water from the crick.”
“But why,” asked Otis curiously, “would anyone want to build a fire so
near the ranger station? I tell you it couldn’t be to cook a meal,
because anyone could have dropped in and eaten with Fyffe.”
“Maybe the ranger built it hisself,” suggested the Sheriff. “What few
tracks show in this coarse gravel is cow-tracks, and that don’t tell us
nothin’. Can’t see any signs of a fight here. Let’s go back to the
cabin.”
“He must have run in here after he was shot,” speculated Otis upon
reentering the shack, “and grabbed for the phone. Like as not he yelled
for help once or twice, and then dropped to the floor. Or maybe he
knocked the phone off the table, and the supervisor heard him calling
for help after he lay on the floor.”
“He knocked that camera off the table too,” the deputy volunteered. “I
found it on the floor while you two was in the other room, and put it
back on the table.”
“What’s this?” asked Otis, stooping and retrieving a stub of a pencil
from the floor a few feet from the body. “I wonder if this means
anything?”
The Sheriff glanced at it and grunted.
“Probably dropped out of his pocket when he fell. Or maybe he knocked
it off the table with the phone and the camera.”
The deputy suddenly dropped to his knees beside the body.
“Looky here!” he cried, eagerness and excitement showing in his face as
he looked up at them. He was pointing with a tanned and stubby finger
at a straggling and meaningless black line upon the floor planking. One
end trailed out to nothingness near where Otis had found the pencil.
The other end of the line was covered with the splotch of blood. “Maybe
he wrote somethin’ before he died!”
Sheriff Ogden seized a dish towel from a nail behind the stove. He
moistened it with a dipperful of water from the bucket in the corner.
Then he too dropped to his knees by Fyffe’s body and commenced to scrub
at the bloodstained floor. Otis bent eagerly over his shoulder.
“There she is!” burst from the Sheriff’s lips as a faint scrawl
appeared beneath his hands. He scrubbed vigorously a moment longer. All
three peered at the pine plank as he desisted.
Five words were scrawled on the floor. Slowly Sheriff Ogden read them
aloud--a damning message from the dead:
“‘_Otis Carr shot me because--_’”