Before he cooked his breakfast he made a minute examination of the ground beneath the East wall, but the earth was hard, and a broken branch or two might have been caused by his horse.  He had no skill in woodcraft, and in the broad day his alarm seemed almost absurd.  Some free horse on the range had probably wandered into the vicinity of the cabin, and had made off again on a trot.  Nevertheless, he made up his mind not to remain over another night, but to look about after breakfast, and then to start down again.

He worked on his boots, dry and hard after yesterday’s wetting, fried his bacon and dropped some crackers into the sizzling fat, and ate quickly.  After that he went out to the trail and inspected it.  He had an idea that range horses were mostly unshod, and that perhaps the trail would reveal something.  But it was unused and overgrown.  Not until he had gone some distance did he find anything.  Then in a small bare spot he found in the dust the imprints of a horse’s shoes, turned down the trail up which he had come.

Even then he was slow to read into the incident anything that related to himself or to his errand.  He went over the various contingencies of the trail:  a ranger, on his way to town; a forest fire somewhere; a belated hound from the newspaper pack.  He was convinced now that human eyes had watched him for some time through the log wall the night before, but he could not connect them with the business in hand.

He set resolutely about his business, which was to turn up, somehow, some way, a proof of the truth of Maggie Donaldson’s dying statement.  To begin with then he accepted that statement, to find where it would lead him, and it led him, eventually, to the broken-down stove under the fallen roof of the lean-to.

He deliberately set himself to work, at first, to reconstruct the life in the cabin.  Jud would have had the lower bunk, David the upper.  The skeleton of a cot bed in the lean-to would have been Maggie’s.  But none of them yielded anything.

Very well.  Having accepted that they lived here, it was from here that the escape was made.  They would have started the moment the snow was melted enough to let them get out, and they would have taken, not the trail toward the town, but some other and circuitous route toward the railroad.  But there had been things to do before they left.  They would have cleared the cabin of every trace of occupancy; the tin cans, Clark’s clothing, such bedding as they could not carry.  The cans must have been a problem; the clothes, of course, could have been burned.  But there were things, like buttons, that did not burn easily.  Clark’s watch, if he wore one, his cuff links.  Buried?

It occurred to him that they might have disposed of some of the unburnable articles under the floor, and he lifted a rough board or two.  But to pursue the search systematically he would have needed a pickaxe, and reluctantly he gave it up and turned his attention to the lean-to and the buried stove.