The deputy suddenly dropped to his knees beside the body.
“Looky here!” he cried, eagerness and excitement showing in his face as he looked up at them. He was pointing with a tanned and stubby finger at a straggling and meaningless black line upon the floor planking. One end trailed out to nothingness near where Otis had found the pencil. The other end of the line was covered with the splotch of blood. “Maybe he wrote somethin’ before he died!”
Sheriff Ogden seized a dish towel from a nail behind the stove. He moistened it with a dipperful of water from the bucket in the corner. Then he too dropped to his knees by Fyffe’s body and commenced to scrub at the bloodstained floor. Otis bent eagerly over his shoulder.
“There she is!” burst from the Sheriff’s lips as a faint scrawl appeared beneath his hands. He scrubbed vigorously a moment longer. All three peered at the pine plank as he desisted.
Five words were scrawled on the floor. Slowly Sheriff Ogden read them aloud—a damning message from the dead:
“‘Otis Carr shot me because—’”
CHAPTER II
“Simple” Sample, cow-hand employed by Sterling Carr, owner of the Footstool outfit, was initiating Mariel Lancaster, visitor from Pennsylvania, into the mysteries of saddling a horse.
“There aint no need for you-all to saddle a horse, long as you’re around the ranch, here, ma’am,” he protested as he led a “plumb gentle” sorrel outside the Footstool corral. “They’s most always some of the boys about, that’s willin’ to he’p you if you say the word.”
Mariel, who had equipped herself with a quirt belonging to Margaret Carr, her school chum who had induced her to pay a visit to the Footstool ranch in Wyoming, frowned slightly and attempted to slap her boot, as if she had held a riding-crop. The quirt, however, was too limber, and refused to slap.