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she?”
    â€œLooks that way. Don’t step in the dirt inside the door. Move to the left so we can see if there are any footprints.”
    â€œThere’s George’s body.” Erv pointed to the corpse of a man in old overalls lying on his back on the floor beside the back door, increasingly visible as more of the morning light gained access.
    Guthrey nodded. He was more shaken by the sight of the naked teenage girl’s corpse tied by the wrists and ankles to the bed. The only reason for that was to rape or torture her. He’d never seen such a sight, but had been at trials where men were tried for doing such crimes and the judge excused all the women in the courtroom when the prosecution got set to produce a drawing of what that looked like.
    â€œI see a perfect boot print right there.”
    â€œFind some newspaper. We need a tracing of that boot. It’s a large one.”
    â€œThe old man don’t own any boots like that either.”
    They found George’s wife facedown on the ground outside. Her head was bloody black from being beaten to death.
    Finding no other good footprints inside the doorway, Guthrey went back in the room and looked at the dead girl. From the look of her bluish face he felt certain they had smothered her to death, perhaps with an old pillow. He searched around the bed. Carefully he shook out each blanket that had been tossed on the floor. He watched a wadded up goatskin roping glove fall out of the last blanket he had shaken and he carefully picked it up. The room had the real bad odor of an unemptied nightjar or unwashed bodies—he didn’t dare swallow much of the foul air.
    Why was this glove in these blankets that were tossed aside? He pocketed it in his vest to examine later. The murderers must have raped her. But why? Lots of ladies of the night in town to use—the murderers must be some crazy, wicked animals. Normal folks would have no stomach for all this horrible violence.
    Candles were melted to hard puddles of hard wax. He had no idea what time of day all this had happened. But it was a recent crime, happened maybe on Friday or even Saturday.
    Guthrey found some butts of roll-your-own cigarettes outside the house. Also the large boot print they’d seen inside the house was there again near the woman’s corpse. Some other ranchers came in about then and tethered their horses a ways from the house. Guthrey went to join them. He told them what they’d found.
    â€œHave you found anything to use in court?” Hal Jones asked him, shaken by his description of the corpses.
    Guthrey shook his head. “Nothing to point a finger. I would say more than one person did this. One was a large man; we have his boot print, not many features except being huge. But to run down three people and murder them like this took some help.”
    Then recalling the glove, he removed it from his pocket and opened it up. “I found this in the blankets that were tossed off the bed.” It was an expensive handmade goatskin glove used by many for roping and thin enough a man could fire a six-gun wearing it. On the cuff there was a very accurate drawing of a star made by an indelible pencil.
    â€œAnyone seen one of these?” he asked, handing the evidence around to the four grim-faced men standing outside, who were obviously shocked by the violence that had occurred there.
    â€œThis is an expensive glove,” one rancher said, handing it on.
    â€œAnyone seen this star before?” another asked.
    Heads shook in the circle. Erv told Guthrey that he had sent one of the men to go get some more horses to transport the corpses to Soda Springs.
    â€œGuthrey, how will we ever catch these killers?” Joe Butler asked.
    â€œGood question. But someone will slip up. Someone will have passed by the killers on the road. They may be transients, just going through the country, or people that they knew. I’ll get the word out and offer a reward