"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. Nevertheless, by the testimony trampled in the snow, he had learned with certainty that she was the only woman who had approached anywhere near the scene of tragedy.
She had told her story glibly enough, but at the same time her recent actions were not above suspicion. She had tried desperately hard to get away, and now that he had caught her it was clear enough that she was afraid of him—a representative of the law. Even at this moment there was something in her nervous, half-defiant manner to warn him that she would escape at the very first opportunity.
While she was talking he had listened for some tone or inflection that might remind him of the voice he had heard a while back in the cabin. The other voice, however, had carried to him muffled and distorted by thick walls, and he could not really say whether he had detected any resemblance.
"What are you doing here in the wilderness?" he asked the girl after a lengthy interval.
For several seconds she stood silent, and he had a feeling that she was thinking fast, trying to invent a plausible answer. "Are the police in the habit of cross-examining everybody?" she inquired at length. "Isn't this government land, and aren't people allowed to come and go as they please in the forests?"
He regarded her with steady eyes, showing no sign of impatience. "Who brought you here?" he asked. "You never could have come across these mountains alone."