it?" she asked sharply. "Why, what is there to admit? That I happened to be in the neighborhood—that I heard—"

"That you know more than you're telling me about a very strange affair," he soberly interrupted.

The girl's head lifted with a jerk, and Dexter could almost feel the sudden hostility of her eyes staring at him in the dark. She drew a slow breath, and when she spoke, her tones were brittle and cold, lacking all inflection. "As long as we've gone so far, let's get this straight," she said in deliberative accents, as though she might be reciting something learned by rote. "Chance brought me to that cabin. I heard a shot, I heard someone cry out in seeming anguish, I heard another shot. I was alone in a strange place at night, and—and I heard that horror. I was terrified—and I did what any other frightened woman would do. I ran—anywhere to get away."

He watched her for a moment with narrowed eyes but did not openly question her story. "Do you know the men who were killed?" he asked after a pause.

"Know them?" she gasped. "I hadn't seen them! How should I know them?"

"A woman was in the cabin when the shots were fired," he stated darkly.She drew backward, breathing audibly, and he could see the nervous gripping of her hands. "If there was a woman there, it wasn't I," she declared. "That's easily proven. You found my foot tracks, you say. Where were they?"

"At the edge of the clearing."

"Did they go to the cabin?"

"No," he was forced to confess. "The last print stopped a dozen yards away."

"Then what do you expect to show?" She faced him tensely. "What are you trying to make out?"

He did not answer, but regarded her searchingly, his brow furrowed in thought. The mystery of the double murder apparently was no nearer solution than it had been before he caught the fugitive. The few facts he had gathered summed up in a most contradictory fashion.

As he positively knew, there was a woman in the cabin when the crimes were committed. But in some unaccountable manner she had vanished. In the snow outside he had found a woman's footprints, and the girl was forced to admit that they were hers. But she denied she had entered the cabin or even crossed the clearing, and the evidence of her tracks apparently bore out her assertion. 

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