the stumps shows that he omitted nothing in his scrutiny.

When Pennecuick noted that, he hunted for traces of a trail, and found
such traces leading to the river. He got a broom and swept the whole way
down. Klondikers recall Christmas '98 as soft in the morning and
freezing at night. So marks made that morning would stay, and Pennecuick
found that some heavy body or bodies had been dragged down to a place in
the ice where, though now frozen over, these bodies had been put in the
river. Pennecuick reasoned that if O'Brien was going to kill these men
he would not do it on the river where he might be seen. So the sleuth
went back up into the bush and swept away till he came to some evidences
of blood, then he found three .32 revolver bullets, and one in the earth
from a .45 rifle.

Next day, as Pennecuick came back to work he met a dog on the river.
Dogs crop up all over the Northern history, and many times they were
important links in the chains of evidence. Pennecuick recognized the dog
as O'Brien's, which had been kept in barracks at Dawson by the Police
and fed and petted when O'Brien was in jail there before. The dog
recognized the uniform, fawned on the wearer of it, and when Pennecuick
said "Go home, sir, go home," the dog turned and trotted up the bank and
then turned aside where some slight trail showed. Pennecuick, of course,
followed, and came to a tent cabin in which he found the .45-calibre
rifle. Raking in the snow, he discovered that clothing had been burned,
for he found some buttons with the name of a Seattle firm. Then he went
in and searched the stove and found more relics. But he felt that
probably O'Brien had emptied the pockets of his victims' clothes before
he burned them, and likely had thrown the things away from the fire that
might lead to his identification with the murder if he kept them. So
Pennecuick did the same thing with articles out of his own pocket,
watching where they fell. Then he carefully swept again, and found not
only his own things, but a key that fitted Clayson's safe in Seattle and
the strange coin that Relphe had carried. When the spring came the
bodies were found on sand-bars and were easily identified, even by the
fitting of some fragments of teeth that Pennecuick had found where the
men had been shot in the head by the revolver after they had fallen
before the rifle. And at the trial also the large bills that had been
found in possession of O'Brien were identified as havi