Page:Edison Marshall--The voice of the pack.djvu/238

220 a rope-noose closing about him. And Cranston, knowing this fact, hated him as he hated the buzzard that would claim him in the end and tried to hide his apprehension.

"Go on. Blat it out," Cranston ordered. "Or else go away and let me sleep."

It was a bluff; but it worked. If Gibbs had gone without speaking, Cranston would have known no sleep that night. But the man became more fawning.

"I'm tellin' you, fast as I can," he went on, almost whining. "I went to the cabin, just as you said. But I did n't get a chance to search it—"

"Why not?" Cranston thundered. His voice reëchoed among the snow-wet pines.

"I'll tell you why! Because some one else—evidently a cop—was already searchin' it. Both of us know there's nothin' there anyway. We 've gone over it too many times. After a while he went away—but I did n't turn back yet. That would n't be Jim Gibbs. I shadowed him, just as you'd want me to. And he went straight back to the body."

"Yes?" Cranston had hard work curbing his impatience. Again Gibbs' eyes were full of ominous speculations.

"He stopped at the body, and it was plain he'd been there before. He went crawling