The riddle of the rangeland

Sheriff Lafe Ogden, long-barreled blue revolver in his hand, knocked lightly on the rough pine door of the Red Rock ranger station. Then he stepped back softly and pressed himself close to the log-and-plaster wall beside his deputy, Seth Markey, and young Otis Carr.

There was no answer from within. The Sheriff raised his shaggy brows, pursed his lips and whistled softly. With a jerk of his head in the direction of the others, he stepped forward again. Suddenly he flung the door wide.

“Good God!” The exclamation burst from his lips, and checked the sudden advance of the two pushing forward on his heels.

“It’s Joe Fyffe himself!” He nodded toward the crumpled figure which lay face downward on the floor.

“Dead?” asked Otis Carr in a strange, strained voice as he squeezed his huge bulk through the door. He wondered why he had experienced no great shock at the gruesome discovery. For Joe Fyffe, forest ranger, silent, odd and retiring, had been his friend.

The Sheriff dropped to one knee. He placed a hand on the ranger’s wrist.

“Been dead quite a spell,” he announced without looking up.

“Blood shows that,” the deputy volunteered.

“Looky here how it’s dried round the edges, on the floor underneath his arms there. Two, three hours, I reckon.”

Otis Carr bent awkwardly over the huddled body.

“Shot, I s’pose,” he speculated, his tanned face, somehow attractive despite its homeliness, showing a trace of awe and concern. Most of his life had been spent in the cattle country east of Jackson’s Hole; yet the acts of violence which it had been his lot to witness had failed to render him callous in the presence of death.

Sheriff Ogden turned the ranger’s stiffening body on one side.

“That’s where he bled from,” he said shortly, pointing with the muzzle of his revolver to a tiny, stained hole in the ranger’s shirt, under the right shoulder. “But that’s what done the work,” he added, indicating a similar hole in the back, just above the ranger’s belt.

“It’s a cinch it wasn’t any accident,” Otis drawled, glancing curiously about the interior of the ranger cabin. “I tell you, somebody plugged him.”

“I don’t see any gun,” observed the Sheriff, rising, stepping over the body and walking to the door of the only other room.

“He couldn’t ’a’ had a chance. Nasty job, this!”

Otis followed him to the room which served as a sleeping chamber and office. Ogden removed a rifle from two wooden pegs in the log wall above the desk, examined it carefully, and shook his head. His scrutiny of a holstered revolver which swung by a cartridge belt from a nail in the wall was likewise barren of results.

“Neither one’s been fired,” he asserted, frowning and turning to the maps and papers on the rude pine desk. “He never had a chance to shoot back. You knew him pretty well, didn’t you, Otis? D’you know whether he had any other guns?”

Otis shook his head.

“Don’t think he did,” he replied uneasily, casting his eye about the room. “He hardly ever packed the revolver. Sometimes he carried the rifle in his saddle scabbard, but it was on the chance of seeing a cat or something, and not for protection from--well, you know. He never seemed to worry about the threats of the boys that the Gov’ment couldn’t send in any damned ranger to collect grazing-fees for using the open range.”

The Sheriff turned from the desk to a workbench containing a shallow tank, wooden racks and a row of bottles.

“I know,” he remarked gravely. “But between you and me, it aint like any of the boys to shoot him down like this. What’s this junk?”

“Dark-room equipment,” Otis answered, fingering a developing tray. “Joe was a nut on wild-animal photography, you know. Got some of the best animal pictures I’ve ever seen. Did his own finishing here at night. See that blanket rolled up over the window? He’d let that down, and have a first-class dark-room.”

“That’s right,” the Sheriff affirmed. “I remember now. He was the feller that bragged he was the only man that ever got a close-up picture of a wild mountain sheep, wasn’t he?”

“I wouldn’t say he bragged about it. But it was something worth boasting about, anyway.”

Sheriff Ogden, his barren search of the office and bedroom completed, led the way back to the room where the body lay.

“Lucky we run into you, Otis,” he remarked as he began a hurried search of its interior. “When I seen you ridin’ down the Buffalo Forks road, I says to Seth, here: ‘There’s Otis Carr, who knows Joe Fyffe right well--maybe better’n anyone else in these parts. We’ll ask him to go along.’

“We didn’t know what had happened, then. Just knew somethin’ funny was pulled off here at the ranger station. Forest supervisor in Jackson called me before daylight, an’ said he’d just got a flash on his phone, an’ that some one was callin’ for help. Operator told him the call was from Red Rock ranger station.

“He’d ’a’ come along, only for a wrenched leg. Between you and me, he’s a pretty decent feller, that supervisor, even if he is tryin’ to collect grazin’-fees for the Gov’ment. I says to Seth here: ‘Lucky thing these here ranger stations is connected with telephones for fire-calls. Man could have an accident an’ lay there for a week if it wasn’t for that wire.’ I had a hunch it might be somethin’ more than an accident, ’count of hearin’ more or less how the boys been shootin’ off their mouths. You been over the hill to Dubois, I s’pose?”