POWELL RIVER COMPANY LIMITED

MANUFACTURERS OF

Head Office:
Standard Bank Building

Vancouver, B.C.

PULP AND PAPER

Mills at
Powell River
British Columbia

while hunting turkey
over to the house he returned with a
weathered bundle of magazines found
some time before near the trail. Jimmy,
the younger lad, produced a greasy cap
he'd been wearing since finding it amongst
the willows near the grave.

Not a soul was able to cast the slightest
light on the circumstances that had
brought this unidentified corpse to the
edge of their little settlement. To the
Constable it seemed obvious that these
hard-working settlers wouldn't be impli-
cated. Yet, if strangers had been around,
it was queer they didn’t recall them.

Frustrated, Hetherington turned to the

nests. Hurrying

Malaspina
Hotel

| Licensed |
Premises‘

LUND, BRITISH COLUMBIA

frayed and weathered magazines. Sewn
together with binder twine, they proved
to be issues of a weekly called The Leisure
Hour Library. “Say,” he turned to Firth,
“I think we've got something here. Look
at these faint pencil marks on one corner.”
Whipping out a magnifying glass he
studied the marks minutely and handed
glass and magazines to Firth.

“Looks like “L. C. Stamer’,”
stable handed them back.

~@r “Stainer’,’
the writing again,
dotted.”

the Con-

Hetherington studied
“only the ‘I isn’t

Faced with the necessity of trailing
down an unknown murderer with no
other clues than the almost unrecogniz-
able visage of the dead man, a greasy
cap, and a bundle of magazines, Hether-
ington scoured farms and ranches in the
vain hope of picking up the trail of two
strangers, one about five-feet-ten, weigh-
ing 170 pounds, with sandy hair re-
sembling that of the corpse, and his un-
known assailant, Equipped only with the
dead man’s clothes and The Leisure Hour
Library, he checked on stores, banks,
land offices and restaurants from Wetas-
kiwin to Ponoka, and north to Edmon-
ton. In vain he searched hotel and board-
ing house registers for the name “LL. C.
Stainer” or “Stamer”. A check-up of

for

post offices
or Kalamazoo, Michigan, |
parties of similar names proved equally —
fruitless. |

mail from Wyoming
addressed to

Monotonously the policeman continued
to pack his grisly exhibit from land
office to bank, from boarding house to
brothel.

“Yah! I know dat guy.” A burly
Swede in a boarding house near Ponoka
turned an appraising eye on the dirt-
stained clothing. ““Me an’ him, we eat
at the same place.” His wife nodded her
agreement.

With pounding pulses Hetherington
pushed his questions, learning that the
Swede and his family had called at a
roadhouse near Red Deer Lake seven
weeks before where they'd talked with
a man answering the description of the
corpse and wearing the identical clothing
arrayed before them.

A hurried trip to Red Deer Lake bore
out the Swede’s assertions, the owner
of the boarding house giving the vital
information that the man had left there,
riding a wall-eyed pinto.

A wall-eyed pinto! Why, anyone could
pick’/such an animal out in the dark. For
the next three days the Constable found
himself hard on the seven-week-old
trail of the blind pinto and the sandy-
haired rider. His heart suddenly dr opped
to his boots as he rode up to a ranch and

LUND -_ -

Page Forty-six

LUND MACHINE SHOP

JENS SORENSEN. Proprietor

Marine Ways—Boat Repairs—Tanks

New and Used Marine Engines
GENERAL MACHINE WORK
ELECTRIC AND ACETYLENE WELDING

- British Columbia

THE SHOULDER STRAP