“How are you, this morning, M’Graw?” asked the lawyer. “How about the key?”
“Here ’tis,” said the guide. “Found it just where it should be. Looked as though it had never been touched since I was gone. But, of course, as I tell you, anybody might have been in my cabin. I don’t lock nothin’ up.”
“If the key was used, it was by somebody who knew it was the key and where to find it,” Mr. Howbridge said reflectively.
“You struck it there,” agreed Ike. “And there’s only two keys to that big padlock. Unless there’s been one made since Mr. Birdsall died,” he added.
“If anybody borrowed the key and got in here, they got out again and locked the front door and returned the key.”
“So ’twould seem. You say there wasn’t no marks in the snow when your folks fust came?”
“No.”
“It snowed the day after I went away from here to Ebettsville. They must have come here and gone before that snow then. That snow covered their tracks. How’s that?”
“Not so good,” the lawyer promptly told him. “You forget the live embers in the grate. Those embers would not have stayed alive for five days.”
“Ain’t that a fac’?” muttered the old man.