Part 27 (2/2)

But Tharon pushed nearer.

”This is my work,” she said with dignity. ”I started this, I think.”

It was a pitiful job that Service and those with him had done for Old Pete. Rolled head-first into a shallow hole--no doubt with jest and laughter--it was his booted foot which first came to view, sticking grotesquely up through the loose slide-stuff.

It was brief work and grim work that followed, and soon the weazened form, bent and stiffened into something hardly human, lay in the soft pink light on the canon's floor.

Jim Banner knelt and examined it carefully and minutely, then every man in the group did likewise. They found evidence of one simple, staring fact--Old Pete had been shot squarely from behind, a little to the left.

The bullet had undoubtedly pierced the heart--a great gaping hole in the left centre of the breast in front attesting its course.

”Here,” said Albright, coming back from a short distance down, beneath the spray on the wall, ”here's where something was taken up from th'

floor--th' blood he lost, I make no doubt.”

”Gentlemen,--Miss Last,” said Kenset, ”I move we all move back and leave the ground to Albright. There is fine work here.”

With one accord the ma.s.s moved back, clearing a goodly s.p.a.ce.

In the immediate vicinity there was little chance of doing anything, for Service's bunch, and themselves, had trampled over the soft floor until all original traces of the murder were blotted out.

Albright looked around and seemed to hesitate.

”Me, alone?” he asked. ”Gimme d.i.c.k Compos, there.”

”Done,” said Kenset.

A tall, silent half-breed stepped forward and without another word the two began to scan the walls, the floors, the heaps of rotted rock, the loose and tumbled boulders, not yet decomposed, that lined the cut on both sides.

They stood in their tracks and looked, and the concentration in their eyes was akin to that in the eyes of a wild animal, hiding, hard-pressed, and looking for a loophole for life.

The Vigilantes watched them in silence.

Presently d.i.c.k Compos stepped forward, leaned down and searched the wall at the left. Then he went forward, bent over, scanning each inch.

He looked above and below, the height of a man's shoulders, his hips, his knees.

Then he crept back, stopped at a particular upstanding piece of stone, searched it closely--stepped in behind.

When he came out he looked over at Tharon Last standing at the head of her people.

”Some one went along th' Wall here,” he waved a slender brown hand at the canon face. ”Three signs--here--here--here.”

He indicated the heights he had scanned. They stepped a bit nearer and looked. Several pairs of Valley eyes saw what d.i.c.k Compos had seen, a sign so fine that few would have called it that--merely a brus.h.i.+ng, a smoothing of the fine-sandstone surface where a man's shoulders, his hips, his knees might have pressed had he stood waiting there.

A bit nearer the standing pinnacle of rock, they were evident again.

With one accord they turned and looked down the canon to where that thin line sprayed the face. A close shot, such as would be necessary in the darkness of the cut. Albright and Compos both stepped to the rock and stood looking with those narrowed, concentrated eyes.

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