"I?" she exclaimed.

"You were inside the place when I got there."

"Yes. I saw the flames and feared someone might be in there asleep. So I broke the door to give warning. And a man came inside after me—"

"I guess you know I was that man," he said. "Why did you run after I called to you?"

"I didn't know who you were," was her explanation.

"You don't know how the place happened to take fire?"

"I do not."

"How did you happen to return there?"

"Return?" She seemed genuinely puzzled. "I was never there before."

"You're mistaken," he informed her. "You visited the place a couple of hours before the fire broke out. There's no sense in denying it because there are marks of your feet in the snow, indicating the direction of your arrival, and proving the suddenness of your departure. When you left you roved over a six- or seven-mile circle, and then came straight back to the cabin. I know because I made the same journey, never more than thirty minutes behind you."

The exactness of his information seemed to disconcert her. "I—if this is true—it's the first I knew it," she asserted at length. "But now that you speak of it, I didn't—I wasn't quite sure of my directions. It would be a funny thing to happen, and yet I may have wandered around as you say, and struck the same cabin twice, without recognizing the spot."

"What were you doing there in the first place?" he asked.

"Nothing. I was walking along the brook, and thought I smelled chimney smoke, and turned aside to see what it meant. That was all."

"At that very time two men were killed in the cabin bunks," he told her—"two men, helplessly bound, who could do nothing but scream for mercy."

"I heard!" she blurted out with a shuddering breath. "It was—" She stopped short, and from the frightened look she gave him, he fancied she had said more than she meant to say.

"You admit you were there then when this killing took place?"

"Admit 

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