llet-hole in the back of the head showed how the man had
come to his death. He had been shot from behind.

The Ranger turned the body and recognized it as that of Rutherford
Wadley. The face was crushed and one of the arms broken. It was an easy
guess that the murder had been done on the butte above and the body
flung down.

Jack, on all fours, began to quarter over the ground like a bloodhound
seeking a trail. Every sense in him seemed to quicken to the hunt. His
alert eyes narrowed in concentration. His fingertips, as he crept
forward, touched the sand soft as velvet. His body was tense as a coiled
spring. No cougar stalking its prey could have been more lithely wary.

For the Ranger had found a faint boot-track, and with amazing pains he
was following this delible record of guilt. Some one had come here and
looked at the dead body. Why? To make sure that the victim was quite
dead? To identify the victim? Roberts did not know why, but he meant to
find out.

The footprint was alone. Apparently none led to it or led from it. On
that one impressionable spot alone had been written the signature of a
man's presence.

But "Tex" Roberts was not an old plainsman for nothing. He knew that if
he were patient enough he would find other marks of betrayal.

He found a second track--a third, and from them determined a course to
follow. It brought him to a stretch of soft ground at the edge of a
wash. The footprints here were sharp and distinct. They led up an arroyo
to the bluff above.

The Ranger knelt dose to the most distinct print and studied it for a
long time. All its details and peculiarities were recorded in his mind.
The broken sole, the worn heel, the beveled edge of the toe-cap--all
these fastened themselves in his memory. With a tape-line he measured
minutely the length of the whole foot, of the sole and of the heel.
These he jotted down in his notebook, together with cross-sections of
width. He duplicated this process with the best print he could find of
the left foot.

His investigation led him next to the summit of the bluff. A little
stain of blood on a rock showed him where Wadley had probably been
standing when he was shot. The murder might have been done by treachery
on the part of one of his companions. If so, probably the bullet had
been fired from a revolver. In that case the man who did it would have
made sure by standing close behind his victim. This would have left
powder-marks, and there had been