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—’”

 CHAPTER II 

CHAPTER II

“Simple” Sample, cow-hand employed by Sterling Carr, owner of the Footstool outfit, was initiating Mariel Lancaster, visitor from Pennsylvania, into the mysteries of saddling a horse.

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