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 having been the property of Clayson, as the nugget and coin were shown to have been Relphe's. There were other items of evidence, the exhibits nearly exhausted the alphabet, and there was a very long list of witnesses brought from many quarters. The Crown Prosecutor was Mr. Fred O. Wade, K.C. (now Agent-General for British Columbia in London), and he handled the case with consummate ability. His address to the jury was a marvel of logical, irresistible emphasis on every point of evidence. Inspector Scarth gave Mr. Wade most valuable assistance during the long trial. The prisoner O'Brien was ably defended, but there is no evidence so strong as circumstantial evidence when it is compactly pieced together, and the jury took only half an hour to reach the verdict of "Guilty." O'Brien received the death sentence, and spent a lot of time before his execution in cursing the Mounted Police who, as another outlaw once said, "would give a gunman no chance in this blamed Canada country." It was a long and costly effort on their part, extending nearly two years in the case of O'Brien, but it gave notice to the world that Canadians would not tolerate lax views on the sacredness of human life.