“No one so far as I can tell,” Drake said. “... Tell you what I’ll do, Perry. I’ll go to the Plaza Hotel and wait in the lobby. You get down here as soon as you can. If it’s after five-thirty, I’ll arrange with Gibbs to wait.”
Mason said, “That’ll be fine,” and hung up the telephone to face the coldly suspicious eyes of Sergeant Holcomb.
Sheriff Barnes, apparently not noticing the interruption, said, “When we broke in here, we found a creel filled with fish. We boxed it up in an air-tight container and sent it to the police laboratory in the city. They report that the creel contained a limit of fish which had been cleaned and wrapped in leaves but hadn’t been given a final washing. We’ve found the remains of his breakfast — a couple of eggs and some bacon rinds. We’ve found the remains of his lunch — canned beans. The body was clothed in slippers, slacks, and a light sweater. That leather coat there was on the back of the chair. Those are his fishing boots over there with mud on them. There’s his fly rod and flies on the table, just as he’d left them when he came in.
“Now, I figure he was killed right around eleven o’clock on the morning of Tuesday the sixth. Would you like to know how I figure it?”
“Very much indeed,” Mason said.
Sergeant Holcomb turned on his heel and walked away, showing his silent disgust.
Sheriff Barnes said, “Well, I ain’t had much experience in murder cases, but I know how to figure probabilities. I’ve been in the forest service, and I’ve worked cattle, and I know how to read trail. I don’t know whether the same kind of reasoning will work in a murder case or not, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t. Anyway, here’s the way I figure it. Sabin got up at five-thirty because that’s when the alarm went off. He had breakfast of bacon and eggs. He went out fishing. He caught a limit. He got back here, and he was tired and hungry. He didn’t even bother to wash the fish and put them in the icebox. He took off his boots, chucked the creel of fish over there, went out into the kitchen and cooked himself some canned beans. There was some coffee in the pot — probably still left from breakfast. He warmed that up.
“The next thing he’d have done was to have given the fish a good washing and put them in the icebox. He was murdered right after lunch and before he’d had a chance to do that. I fixed the time at around eleven o’clock.”
“Why not later?” Mason asked.
“Oh, yes,” the sheriff said, “I overlooked that. The sun gets on the cabin here about half past ten or eleven and it starts to get warm. It’s off the cabin by four o’clock in the afternoon, and it gets cold right away. During the middle of the day it’s hot. During the nights it’s cold. So I figured he was murdered after it had warmed up and before it had cooled off, but not during the middle of the day when it was real hot. If it had been real cold, he’d have had his coat on and would have lit the fire over there in the fireplace. You see, it’s all laid. If it had been real hot, he wouldn’t have been wearing his sweater.”