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Having found nothing in Swing's warbags save his friend's personal belongings, Racey slid the knife up his sleeve and went downstairs to breakfast. On the way he stopped a moment at a fortuitous knothole in the board wall. When he passed on his way the knife was no longer with him. Jack Harpe was still eating when Racey eased himself into the chair at Swing's right hand.
Here it is again the earmark of a crime, and no crime yet. This is getting monotonous." He laid down the knife, settled his hat, and methodically searched Swing Tunstall's warbags. It turned out a needless precaution. He had felt that it would be. But he could not afford to take any risks.
Swing ain't here, but I'll give you permission for him. He won't mind." Jake and Kansas went at the warbags like terriers digging out a badger. Racey leaned on his elbow and watched them. What luck that the door had been ajar and that he had noticed it! If it had not been a life-and-death matter he would have laughed aloud. At the end of twenty minutes the officers stood up.
"Still, Racey," put in Kansas Casey, smoothly, "if you could see yore way to letting us go through yore warbags, yores and Swing's, it would be a great help, and we'd remember it after." "Yeah, we shore would," declared the sheriff. "You save us trouble now, Racey, and I'll guarantee to make you almighty comfortable in the calaboose. You won't have nothing to complain of. Not a thing."
He saw several warbags of the same kind of canvas, evidently used for the storage of clothes and provisions; and in addition there were a couple of guns, rubber ponchos, gray blankets that peeped out of two expensive sleeping bags, and a couple of black japanned boxes the contents of which he could not picture, unless they might be something in the way of surveyors' instruments; for Owen had once seen a party of these gentry running a line through the forest, and hence his vague application now.
"But a feller who'd just found a knife with blood on it in his warbags might go out back of the corral to lose the knife, mightn't he?" "He might." "Well, that's what I did. Naturally, having already lost the knife down through the knothole I couldn't lose her again. But I did the best I could.
But the saddlebags and cantenas lying on the floor at the head of his cot had certainly been moved. He recalled distinctly having, the previous evening, piled the cantenas on top of the saddlebags. And now the saddlebags were on top of the cantenas. He glanced at Swing's warbags. They had not been moved. He wondered if Jack Harpe and the Starlight's owner were still in their rooms.
"Feller after doing a thing like this gets flustrated sometimes and drops the knife. And finding the knife might be a help in locating the feller." All of which seemed sufficiently logical to the bystanders. Racey decided he had seen enough. Besides, he wanted to camp closer to his warbags.
"Smoke yore own, you hunk of misery. You had four extra sacks in yore warbags this morning." "Had? So you been skirmishin' round my warbags, have you? How many of those sacks did you rustle?" "I left two." "Two! Two! Say, I bought that tobacco myself for my own personal use, and not for a lazy, loafing, cow-faced lump of slumgullion to glom and smoke.
"Now I'm betting that if Jack Harpe is the lad tucked away that knife in my warbags he'll go skirmishing out behind the corral to see what I was really doing." "Maybe." Doubtfully. "There ain't any maybe if he's the man turned the trick. And from where we're a-laying under this wagon we can see the back of the corral plain as There he comes now."
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