“This is my work,” she said with dignity. “I started this, I think.”
It was a pitiful job that Service and those with him had done for Old Pete. Rolled head-first into a shallow hole––no doubt with jest and laughter––it was his booted foot which first came to view, sticking grotesquely up through the loose slide-stuff.
It was brief work and grim work that followed, 201 and soon the weazened form, bent and stiffened into something hardly human, lay in the soft pink light on the cañon’s floor.
Jim Banner knelt and examined it carefully and minutely, then every man in the group did likewise. They found evidence of one simple, staring fact––Old Pete had been shot squarely from behind, a little to the left.
The bullet had undoubtedly pierced the heart––a great gaping hole in the left centre of the breast in front attesting its course.
“Here,” said Albright, coming back from a short distance down, beneath the spray on the wall, “here’s where something was taken up from th’ floor––th’ blood he lost, I make no doubt.”
“Gentlemen,––Miss Last,” said Kenset, “I move we all move back and leave the ground to Albright. There is fine work here.”
With one accord the mass moved back, clearing a goodly space.
In the immediate vicinity there was little chance of doing anything, for Service’s bunch, and themselves, had trampled over the soft floor until all original traces of the murder were blotted out.
Albright looked around and seemed to hesitate.