First he produced the shoe button. “You see,” he said, earnestly, “if it was shiny all over it wouldn’t mean much; but it’s rubbed brown on one side, so if we could find the shoe it came off of, we’d know it in a minute.”
“Good work,” said Stone, quietly, “go on.”
“Well, sir, it ain’t Mr. Landon’s, cos he ain’t got any shoes with buttons the least mite like this, and as he came from Denver the day before the murder, he didn’t have time to get some an’ wear ’em to this browniness.”
“It is a point, Fibsy.”
“Yes sir, that’s all it is, a point. Now look at this mud.”
With great care, Fibsy opened a box and showed a piece of soil, about four inches square, in the center of which was clearly defined round hole.
“I cut it out right near the ‘spot’,” said he, in the awed tone in which he always referred to the scene of the crime. “It’s the mark of a—”
“Cane!” said both voices together.
“Yes sir,” went on Fibsy, eagerly, “an’ that ain’t all! I saw the daisies and clovers were sorta switched off all around the spot, as if by sombuddy slashin’ a cane around careless-like. An’ then,” and the boy’s face grew solemn with the bigness of his revelation, “I seemed to see in my mind a—what do you call ’em, sir?—a dirk cane, a sword cane, an’—”
“Cane killed me!”