He made his way to the blackened area where he had put out the first fire.  The space burned over was small.  Charley stood and looked at it for some moments, thinking the problem over.  Then he walked slowly around the burned area, examining it closely, but not stepping within the fire-line.  Then he wet a finger and held it aloft.  Unmistakably the light breeze was from the west.  It had doubtless been blowing from that quarter all the morning, though this particular fire had been extinguished when there was hardly more than a suspicion of a breeze.  The fire would have spread in an elongated circle, or more exactly an oval.  Charley tried to figure out the exact starting point.  He felt sure he could estimate it within a few yards.

When he had decided about where the fire must have originated, he made his way cautiously, a yard at a time, toward that point.  He was careful not to disturb the leaves any more than was necessary in putting down his feet.  Carefully he scrutinized every inch of the ground he covered.  He was looking for a mound of burned leaves or any other suspicious thing.  But he found none.  Look where he would, the leaves seemed to have been disturbed before the fire started.

Not far from the point selected by Charley as the probable place of the fire’s origin, the ground thrust up in a little, low shoulder, as though there might be an outcropping ledge of rock there.  Immediately around this elevation the ground was clear of brush.  No trees stood near.  Charley paid little attention to the mound until he noticed that it was hollowed out on top.  At the same time a piece of freshly dug earth caught his eye near by.  At least Charley judged it to be freshly dug, although it was blackened by fire.  He made his way very carefully to the little mound.  Now he noticed that the leaves about this mound had been raked together, for the ashes lay thick in the hollow centre in the elevation.

Cautiously Charley began to scratch among the ashes at the edge of the pile.  His fingers encountered many rough chunks of earth, partly hardened by fire.  The rain, the frost, and the cold of winter would naturally have broken those chunks down into loose soil.  So Charley knew they could not be very old.  As he scratched more of them out of the leaves, he blew the ashes from them and examined them critically.  He could think of no connection between these chunks of earth and the fire, yet something made him scrutinize them closely.

All the time he was carefully digging the ashes away, and working toward the centre of the pile.  Suddenly he picked up a chunk that was quite different from the crumbly earth masses he had been handling.  This piece was partly hardened and reddened.  At once Charley saw it was clay.

Charley continued to scrape aside the ashes.  He found more and more little chunks of clay, while the hollow place in the centre of the mound proved to be a square, small depression that must have been made with human hands.  Even before he had it cleared of ashes, Charley knew that.  The depression was much too rectangular to be natural.  It was about eighteen inches square and almost a foot deep.  In the bottom of it were charred ends of sticks and a little candle grease, buried under the mass of ashes.