"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 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 some one 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."