“Why should he scratch it there?” Brent asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But it’s rather interesting to find that particular word scratched there—right where one of the footprints is.”
“It seems to me,” Brent said, “that whoever scratched that word there wasn’t exactly in his right mind. Nice, intelligent, normal murderers don’t do things like that. Why pick on our missing friend, Peter? How about absent-minded Wes, the young duck-shooter?”
“If you mean Mr. Weston why don’t you say so?” Tom snapped.
“He might have gone crazy at that,” Brent said. “Maybe he—didn’t you say he went to pieces after popping little Rollie?”
“Roland,” said Tom.
“Well, as long as we’re giving guesses,” Brent continued, “Weston was the one who had the best reason to go to pieces. Maybe in that state he fancied the old gent would kill him, so he beat him to it. One guess is as good as another. All we know about Northrop is that he didn’t go home.”
“And that he wasn’t mentioned as being here at all at the time of the accident,” I said.
“That’s one thing I can’t understand,” Tom exclaimed.
“Well,” said Brent, rising, “here we are part way up a mountain playing guess, guess and night coming on. The thing to do is find out who’s been around here if we can. Come on, let’s go down home.”