"Ah!" broke in Bob Wilson. "And what about the chap as done it, Sergeant? He couldn't have got so very far away by the time you came on the scene, and yet you never got on his trail, never found out who he was?"
Sergeant Silk shook his head.
"I have told you that he left no clue that was worth following up," he answered. "The ground was frozen hard, and he made no track. In a lonesome place like that, where there was no one to see him come or go, it was easy for him to disappear."
It was Percy Rapson who made the next remark.
"I should have thought he'd at least have left his finger marks on some of those papers," he said, and he glanced in the direction of Eben Sharrow, who, having at last cleaned out his pipe, was slowly loading it with tobacco. "That was a case in which finger-prints might have been useful."
Sergeant Silk's eyebrows gathered for an instant in a frown of vexation at this reference to finger-prints.
"Quite so," he said. "If one had had any suspicion against any particular person and could have examined his hand, it would have been a means of proving or disproving his connection with the crime."
Percy Rapson's eyes were still lingering curiously upon Eben Sharrow, who now bent forward to get a light from the fire. As he held the light to his pipe, Sharrow looked across at Sergeant Silk.
"Seems ter me," he said, rising to his feet, "as I kinder recollect hearin' as that skunk you're talkin' about—him as you never could find trace of—was eaten by a pack of timber wolves. 'Tain't any wonder you couldn't arrest him."