“What are you doing it for, then?” he asked her, grinning, and would vouchsafe no further explanation of the secret between Mr. Howbridge and himself.
As soon as the lawyer arose from the table to go out to the kitchen to interview Ike, Neale jumped up to go with him. Agnes saw him depart with sparkling eyes and a very red face. She was really angry with Neale O’Neil.
The boy was too much interested in the mystery of the shooter of the fox and how he had got in and out of Red Deer Lodge to be much bothered by Agnes’ vexation. He and the lawyer found the old woodsman sitting in the servants’ dining-room where he had been eating.
“Well, sir,” he began, when Mr. Howbridge and the boy entered, “’twixt us all, I reckon we’re gettin’ to the bottom of this here mystery. Did I tell you I couldn’t find no place where the feller stood out there in the snow last evening to shoot that fox from?”
“No.”
“But it’s a fac’. Now you tell him, sonny, what you told me about what you found in the attic. I’ve been up and made sure ’twas so.”
Neale told the surprised Mr. Howbridge of the proved fact that the fox was shot from one of the attic windows.
“And ’twas a play-toy rifle that done it—a twenty-two,” said the woodsman, as though to clinch some fact that had risen in his own mind, if not in the minds of the others.
“Now, let’s figger it out. We got enough fac’s now to point purty conclusive to who done it. Yes, sir.”
“Why, Ike, I don’t see that,” observed Mr. Howbridge.