“And the sheriff came up there with me, didn’t he?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Well, we’ll hear from the sheriff,” the coroner said.
Sheriff Barnes eased himself into the witness chair, crossed his legs, and settled back at his ease. “Now, Sheriff,” the coroner said, “suppose you tell us just what you found when we went up there to Sabin’s cabin.”
“Well, the body was lying on the floor, on its left side. The left arm was stretched out, and the fingers clenched. The right arm was lying across the body. Things were pretty bad in there. We opened all the windows and got as much air in as we could... looking over the windows before we opened them, of course, to make certain they were locked on the inside, and there weren’t any evidences that they’d been tampered with.
“There was a spring lock on the door, and that lock was closed, so whoever did the killing, walked out and pulled the door shut behind him. We got the parrot back in the cage, and closed the cage. It had been propped open with a notched pine stick. I took some chalk and traced the position of the body on the floor, and traced the position of the gun, and then the coroner went through the clothes, and then we had a photographer take a few pictures of the body, as it was lying on the floor.”
“You’ve got prints of those pictures with you?” the coroner asked.
“Yes, here they are,” the sheriff said, and produced some photographs. The coroner, taking possession of them, said, “All right, I’ll hand all these over to the jury a little later. Let’s find out, now, what happened.”
“Well, after we moved the body and got the place aired out,” the sheriff said, “we started looking things over. I’ll start with the kitchen. There was a garbage pail in the kitchen; in the garbage pail were the shells of two eggs, and some bacon rind, a piece of stale toast, badly burnt on one side, and a small can of pork and beans, which had been opened. On the gas stove — he had a pressure gas outfit up there — was a frying pan in which some pork and beans had been warmed up quite a while ago. The pan was all dry, and the beans had crusted all around the sides. There was still some coffee, and a lot of coffee grounds, in the pot on the stove. There was a knife and fork and a plate in the sink. There’d been beans eaten out of the plate. In the icebox was part of a roll of butter, a bottle of cream, and a couple of packages of cheese which hadn’t been opened. There was a locker with a lot of canned goods, and a bread box, which had half a loaf of bread in it, and a bag with a couple of dozen assorted cookies.
“In the main room there was a table on which was a jointed fly rod, a book of flies, and a creel, in which was a mess of fish. Those fish had evidently been there about as long as the body. We made a box to put the creel in, got the box as nearly airtight as possible, and put the whole thing in and nailed it up, without touching the contents. Then we checked on the gun and found it was a forty-one caliber derringer, with discharged shells in each of the two barrels. The body had two bullet holes just below the heart, and, from the position of the bullet holes, we figured that both barrels of the gun had been fired at once.