hat he seemed like a wooden figure resting
there--an anatomical dummy with its skull-case lifted off.

We looked around for the skull-case, hoping we'd find it, hoping we'd
made a mistake and stumbled by accident into an open-air dissecting
laboratory and were looking at ghastly props made of plastic and
glittering metal instead of bone and muscle and flesh.

But the man on the sand had a name. We'd known him for weeks and talked
to him. He wasn't a medical dummy, but a corpse. His limbs were
hideously convulsed, his eyes wide and staring. The sand beneath his
head was clotted with dried blood. We looked for the weapon which had
crushed his skull but couldn't find it.

We looked for the weapon before we saw the footprints in the sand. Big
they were--incredibly large and massive. A man with a size-twelve shoe
might have left such prints if the leather had become a little soggy and
spread out around the soles.

"The poor guy," Harry whispered.

I knew how he felt. We had all liked Ned. A harmless little guy with a
great love of solitude, a guy who hadn't a malicious hair in his head. A
happy little guy who liked to sing and dance in the light of a
high-leaping fire. He had a banjo and was good at music making. Who
could have hated Ned with a rage so primitive and savage? I looked at
Harry and saw that he was wondering the same thing.

Harry looked pretty bad, about ready to cave in. He was leaning against
the well, a tormented fury in his eyes.

"The murderous bastard," he muttered. "I'd like to get him by the throat
and choke the breath out of him. Who'd want to do a thing like that to
Ned."

"I can't figure it either," I said.

Then I remembered. I don't think Molly Egan really could have loved Ned.
The curious thing about it was that Ned didn't even need the kind of
love she could have given him. He was a self-sufficient little guy
despite his frailness and didn't really need a woman to look after him.
But Molly must have seen something pathetic in him.

Molly was a beautiful woman in her own right, and there wasn't a man in
the camp who hadn't envied Ned. It was puzzling, but it could have
explained why Ned was lying slumped on the sand with a bashed-in skull.
It could have explained why someone had hated him enough to kill him.

Without lifting a finger Ned had won Molly's love. That could make some
other guy as mad as a caged hyena--the wrong sort of other guy. Even a
small man could have shattered Ned'