Page 57 - Ninety Miles From Nowhere

Butler Mystery - Chapter 13
Stotts camp
Before I moved over to Dad’s cabin, the Butlers (for whom the log cabin was built by the neighbors, and whose little girl was one of my pupils) left and no one knew where they had gone. Pete Reed said Mr. Butler came over to Reed’s cabin to borrow a 30-30 rifle for deer hunting, but didn’t bring it back. A couple of days later, when Pete went to Butler’s Cabin to get the gun, their place was completely deserted.
Everyone wondered where they could have gone, and why they didn’t tell anyone they were leaving. Conjectures ran rampant, with each narrator having his own idea of what had happened. I remembered that the abandoned car we’d seen all winter was at the foot of the Butler hill, but had no idea whose it was since they did not own a car. Several people said Butler had posed as a locator of homestead land, and had been showing two California men around over the
countryside. We all assumed the family had left with the two men.
A short while after I’d moved to Railroad Canyon, a young couple from Oklahoma filed on the section where Butler had squatted. They soon had finished the cabin with chinking and daubing and made it more livable altogether.
One day they appeared at my door with a big sack of articles which they had found superficially buried in the frozen ground near their cabin. There was a lunch pail, a pint Thermos bottle, a Coleman camp stove, a belt buckle, a straight razor, cooking and eating utensils, and many other things. There was even a quilt which appeared to have blood on it.
Since the weather had warmed up, the young couple began enjoying picnics on the hillside near the cabin. As the ground thawed out, these articles were revealed. They took me up to their cabin to show me where the items had been buried, a place where clothing had been burned, and a fallen pine tree where the quilt had been stretched across its roots. They explained to me that they were leaving those things with me until the Catron County Sheriff came after them. All of a sudden they had decided to return to Oklahoma. The sheriff, by the way, never did pick up the articles.
The mystery deepened.
All alone in my cabin one night, I had been