“How?”

“Remember me this morning telling you how I’d left my saddle-blanket out all night and then going out in the corral for the same.  I said it so Jack could hear me.  He did hear me, and he watched me go.  He saw me go out round the corral, and he saw me come back without the saddle-blanket.  Now anybody’d know I wouldn’t leave my saddle-blanket out behind the corral, would I?”

“Not likely.”

“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.  I dug in the ground with a sharp stick, and I made a li’l hole like, and I filled her in again, and tramped her all down flat, and sort of half smoothed down the roughed-up ground like I was trying to hide my tracks and what I’d been doing.  Then I came away.

“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.”

The posts of the corral were less than a hundred yards from where Racey and Swing lay beneath a pole-propped freight wagon.  From the wagon, which was standing beyond the stage company’s corral, the ground sloped gently to the hotel corral.  Racey had taken the precaution to mask their position with a cedar bush.

Hatless he peered through the branches at the man quartering the ground behind the hotel corral.

“He’s getting close to where I made that hole,” he told Swing.  “Now he’s found it,” he resumed as the man dropped on his knees.  “Jack Harpe all along.  Ain’t he the humoursome codger?”

“He shore couldn’t ‘a’ dug up that hole already,” declared Swing when Jack Harpe jumped to his feet after a sojourn on his knees of possibly thirty seconds’ duration.

“No,” assented Racey, puzzled.  “He couldn’t.  There’s an odd number,” he added, as Jack Harpe pelted back at a brisk trot over the way he had come.  “Le’s not go just yet, Swing.  I have a feeling.”

He was glad of this feeling when ten minutes later Jack Harpe returned with Jake Rule and Kansas Casey.  The latter carried a shovel.  The three men clustered round the spot where Racey had dug his hole.  Kansas Casey set his foot on the shovel and drove it into the ground.  Racey chuckled at the pleasant sight.  What must inevitably follow would be even pleasanter.

The deputy sheriff made the dirt fly for six minutes.  Then he threw down the shovel, pushed back his hat, and wiped his face on his sleeve.  He spoke, but his language was unintelligible.  Jack Harpe said something and picked up the shovel.  He began to dig.  He cast the earth about for possibly five minutes.