“Have you been troubled with visitors up here this winter?”
“No, sir! It’s been right quiet here, you might say.”
“Nobody here at all until my party came yesterday?”
“Well, not many. Some timbermen went through for Neven. His company’s got a camp over beyond the Birdsall line. Yes, sir.”
“Strangers have not been here, then?”
“Why, no. Not to my knowledge,” said M’Graw, with a keener look at the lawyer. “You wasn’t meanin’ nothin’ special, was you? I’ve been away over to Ebettsville for a week. Nothin’ stirring here before I went.”
The conversation had become general again among the main party. Mr. Howbridge drew his chair nearer to the old man’s ear.
“Listen,” he said. “When my men came up yesterday and opened the house with the key I had given them, they found somebody had been in here not many hours before they arrived.”
“How’d they know?”
“The fire had scarcely died out in one of the grates upstairs.”