Jean Backus - Ellery Queen. The Best of Suspense

Here the slope was carpeted by pine needles and deeply shaded. Fifty yards back the towering granite ridge reflected the sunlight with such blinding brilliance that anyone looking up from below would see only the glaring white, and unless he happened to be a trained hunter, could never force his eyes to penetrate into the shadows.

The sheriff slowly lowered his binoculars.

“What do you see?” Olney asked.

Bill Eldon said, “Well, he ain’t going to walk into our trap. He found the gun all right, looked it over and then let it lay there. Now all these other folks have come up and it looks like they aim to stick around.”

“It’s his gun?”

“I figure it that way — sort of figured that if he had been mixed up in it, he’d try to hide the gun. He wouldn’t know we’d found it and he’d figure the safest thing to do would be to hide it.”

“I still think he’ll do just that,” Olney said.

The sheriff said, “Nope, he’s lost his chance now. Somehow I just can’t get that gun business straight. If Ames had done the killing and it’s his gun, you’d think he’d either have hidden it or taken it back home. The way it is now, somebody must have wiped it clean of fingerprints, then dropped it, walked off and left it. That someone had to be either pretty lucky or a pretty fair woodsman; knew that a storm was coming up and knew a heavy rain would wash out all the tracks. Hang it, I thought Ames would give us a lead when he found that gun. Guess we’ve got to figure out a new approach. Well, let’s go on back and tell him we’ve phoned the coroner.”

“When do you reckon Coroner Logan will get here?”

“Going to take him a while,” the sheriff said. “Even if he gets a plane, he’s got a long ride.”

“We just going to wait?”

“Not by a damn sight,” Eldon said cheerfully. “We ain’t supposed to move the body or take anything out of the pockets until the coroner gets here, but I’m not going to sit on my haunches just waiting around. Let’s be kind of careful sneaking back to our horses. We wouldn’t want ’em to know we’d been watching! There’s a lot more people down there now.”

“City guys,” Olney said, snorting.

“I know, but they all have eyes, and the more pairs of eyes there are, the more chance there is of seeing motion. Just take it easy now. Keep in the shadows and back of the trees.”

They worked their way back around the slope carefully.

Bill Eldon led the way to the place where their horses had been tied. The men tightened the cinches and swung into their saddles. “We don’t want to hit that trail too soon,” Sheriff Eldon announced. “Some of those people might be smart enough to follow our tracks back a ways.”

“Not those city folks,” Olney said, and laughed.

“Might not be deliberately backtracking us,” Bill Eldon said, “but they might hike back up the trail. If they do, and should find they ran out of horse tracks before they got very far, even a city dude might get suspicious. Remember when they came walking up the trail, that chap in the sweater stopped when he came to the point where the tracks led up to the place we found the body. He’s probably been around the hills some.”

“Been around as a dude,” Olney said scornfully, “but perhaps we’d better ride up a mile or so before we hit the trail.”

“How do you figure this Ames out?” asked the sheriff.

Olney put his horse into a jog trot behind the sheriff’s fast-stepping mount. “There’s something wrong with him. He broods too much. He’s out there alone and— Well, I always did think he was running away from someone. I think maybe he’s on the lam. I’ve stopped in on him a few times. He’s never opened up. That ain’t right. When a man’s out here in the hills all alone he gets lonesome, and he should talk his head off when he gets a chance to visit with someone.”

Sheriff Eldon merely grunted.

“I think he’s running away,” Olney insisted.

The ridge widened and the ranger put his horse alongside the sheriff.

“Sometimes people try running away from themselves,” the sheriff said. “They go hide out someplace, thinking they’re running away. Then they find — themselves.”

“Well, this man, Ames, hasn’t found anything yet.”

“You can’t ever tell,” Bill Eldon rejoined. “When a man gets out with just himself and the stars, the mountains, the streams and the trees, he sort of soaks up something of the eternal bigness of things. I like the way he looks you in the eye.

“When you’re figurin’ on clues you don’t just figure on the things that exist. You figure on the people who caused ’em to exist.” And Bill Eldon, keeping well to one side of the trail, gently touched the spurs to the flanks of his spirited horse and thereby terminated all further conversation.

The sheriff reined the horse to a stop, swung from the saddle with loose-hipped ease, dropped the reins to the ground and said easily, “Morning, folks.”

He was wearing leather chaps now, and the jangling spurs and broad-brimmed, high-crown hat seemed to add to his weight and stature.

“This is John Olney, the ranger up here,” he said by way of blanket introduction. “I guess I know all you folks and you know me. We ain’t going to move the body, but we’re going to look things over a little bit. Coroner’s not due here for a while and we don’t want to lose any more evidence.”

The spectators made a tight little circle as they gathered around the two men. Sheriff Eldon, crouching beside the corpse, spoke with brisk authority to the ranger.

“I’m going to take a look through his pockets, John. I want to find out who he was. You take your pencil and paper and inventory every single thing as I take it out.”

Olney nodded. In his official olive-green, he stood quietly efficient, notebook in hand.

But there was nothing for the ranger to write down.

One by one the pockets in the clothes of the dead man were explored by the sheriff’s fingers. In each instance the pocket was empty.

The sheriff straightened and regarded the body with a puzzled frown.

The little circle stood watching him, wondering what he would do next. Overhead an occasional wisp of fleecy white cloud drifted slowly across the sky. The faint beginnings of a breeze stirred rustling whispers from the pine trees. Off to the west could be heard, faintly but distinctly, the sounds of the restless water in the North Fork, tumbling over smooth-washed granite boulders into deep pools rippling across gravel bars, plunging down short foam-flecked stretches of swift rapids.

“Maybe he just didn’t have anything in his pockets,” Nottingham suggested.

The sheriff regarded Nottingham with calmly thoughtful eyes. His voice when he spoke withered the young lawyer with remorseless logic. “He probably wouldn’t have carried any keys with him unless he’d taken out the keys to an automobile he’d left somewhere at the foot of the trail. He might not have had a handkerchief. He could have been dumb enough to have come out without a knife, and it’s conceivable he didn’t have a pen or pencil. Perhaps he didn’t care what time it was, so he didn’t carry a watch. But he knew he was going to camp out here in the hills. He was carrying a shoulder pack to travel light. The man would have had matches in his pocket. What’s more, you’ll notice the stain on the inside of the first and second fingers of his left hand. The man was a cigarette smoker. Where are his matches? Where are his cigarettes? Not that I want to wish my problems off on you, young man. But since you’ve volunteered to help, I thought I’d point out the things I’d like to have you think about.”

Nottingham flushed.