“Yer figuring quite a ways ahead, Ben,” said Uncle Jim.
“He shoot Balenger a’right, sure ’nough,” said Noel. “But how you show dem police he do it wid one little pen an’ one little comb?”
“It’s simple. You’ll understand about the shooting when you see the place. It’s simple as a picture in a book. And for the rest of it, he must have been a friend of Balenger’s before he became his enemy. Perhaps he and Balenger were partners of some sort. Then he was a bad character, like Balenger—and dangerous. He was dangerous, right enough—and a dead shot. So the police would know something about him, wouldn’t they—the Quebec police? That stands to reason. Didn’t he look like a bad character, Noel?”
“Yep, mighty bad. Nasty grin on him an’ bad eye, too. Dat feller scare me worse nor Balenger scare me. When he look at me, den I can’t look at his eye an’ I look lower down an’ see dat comb an’ dat pen a-stickin’ outer de pocket on his breast.”
“There you are,” said Ben to McAllister. “Very likely the Quebec police have his photograph and thumb prints; and I guess they have more brains than Mel Lunt. I’ll write down Noel’s description of him and all the other particulars I know, and go to Quebec and fix it.”
Ben was in high spirits, gobbled his breakfast and then had to wait impatiently for the others to finish and light their pipes. The tin dishes were left unwashed, the frying pan and griddle unscoured and the three embarked in old Noel’s leaky bark and went up and across the river to the flat rock. On the way Ben told of his experience with the bear, saying that but for the peculiar behavior of bruin he would not have gone ashore and climbed the bank and found the clew that was to clear Sherwood’s name in the eyes of the law.
“Just chance,” he said. “But for that bear, I might have hunted a week and never happened on those things.”
Uncle Jim and Noel were deeply impressed by the story of the bear.
“That was more than chance,” said McAllister, voicing a whisper of his old Highland blood. “I’ve heard of happenings like that from old Gran’pa McAllister when I was a boy. Nature won’t hide murder, he used to say. I guess yer right, Ben, after all. I reckon it’ll work out the way you figure it—but it sure did look kinder mixed up to me when you first told it.”
They climbed the bank above the flat rock, found the spot and there each lay down in his turn, set his elbows in the correct position and looked through and over the sights of an imaginary rifle at the spot three hundred yards away where the bad heart of Louis Balenger had suddenly ceased to function.