The hunt out of doors for Betty resulted in nothing at all. There was no kitchen garden, merely a drying plot and a small patch of back yard, mostly stones and hard ground. This was surrounded by dwarfed and stunted pine trees, which not only afforded no hiding place, but shut off no possible nook or cranny where Betty could be hidden. The whole tableland was exposed to view from all parts of it, and it was clear to be seen that Betty Varian could not be hiding out of doors.
And since she could not have left the premises, save by the road where the picnic party was congregated, there was no supposition but that she was still in the house.
“Can you form any theory, Doctor Varian?” Landon asked him.
“No, I can’t. Can you?”
“Only the obvious one,—that Miss Varian killed her father and then hid somewhere.”
“But where? Mind you, I don’t for a moment admit she killed her father, that’s too ridiculous! But whoever killed him, may also have killed her. It is her body I think we are more likely to find.”
“How, then, did the assassin get away?”
“I don’t know. I’m not prepared to say there’s no way out of this place——”
“But I know that to be the fact. There comes the sheriff, Doctor Varian. That’s Potter.”
They went into the house again, and found the sheriff and another man with him.