“Been dead quite a spell,” he announced without looking up.
“Blood shows that,” the deputy volunteered.
“Looky here how it’s dried round the edges, on the floor underneath his arms there. Two, three hours, I reckon.”
Otis Carr bent awkwardly over the huddled body.
“Shot, I s’pose,” he speculated, his tanned face, somehow attractive despite its homeliness, showing a trace of awe and concern. Most of his life had been spent in the cattle country east of Jackson’s Hole; yet the acts of violence which it had been his lot to witness had failed to render him callous in the presence of death.
Sheriff Ogden turned the ranger’s stiffening body on one side.
“That’s where he bled from,” he said shortly, pointing with the muzzle of his revolver to a tiny, stained hole in the ranger’s shirt, under the right shoulder. “But that’s what done the work,” he added, indicating a similar hole in the back, just above the ranger’s belt.
“It’s a cinch it wasn’t any accident,” Otis drawled, glancing curiously about the interior of the ranger cabin. “I tell you, somebody plugged him.”
“I don’t see any gun,” observed the Sheriff, rising, stepping over the body and walking to the door of the only other room.
“He couldn’t ’a’ had a chance. Nasty job, this!”