Nothing had been subtracted from or added to the heterogeneous collection of articles in the cantenas.  The contents of the off-side saddlebag were in their familiar disorder.  There was nothing in or about the off-side saddlebag to arouse suspicion.  Not a thing.

He unbuckled the flap of the near-side saddlebag, and flipped it back.  Somebody had been at this saddlebag.  He was sure of it.  His extra shirt, instead of being wadded into the fore-end of the saddlebag on top of a pair of socks, had been stuffed into the hinder end on top of a pair of underdrawers.  Which underdrawers should by rights have been at the bottom of the leather hold-all.

But there was something else at the bottom of the saddlebag.  It was something long and hard and wrapped in the buttonless undershirt despised and rejected by Swing.

Racey unrolled the undershirt.  His eyes stared in genuine horror at what the unrolling revealed.  It was the commonest of butcher knives that someone’s busy hand had wrapped in the undershirt.  But what was not nearly so common was that the broad, thin blade was stained with blood.  From point to haft the steel was as red as if it had been dipped in a pail of paint.  Indeed, being dry, it looked not unlike paint.  But Racey knew that it was not paint.

“It was dry before it was wrapped in that undershirt,” he said to himself, testing the blood on the blade with a speculative fingernail.  “There ain’t a mark on the undershirt.  Gawd!  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.  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.  Jack Harpe nodded to Racey and went serenely on with his meal.  Racey seized knife and fork, squared his elbows, and began to saw at his steak.  And as he chewed and swallowed and sloshed the coffee round in his cup in order to get the full benefit of the sugar he wondered whether it was Jack Harpe or Bull to whom he was indebted for the butcher knife.  It was one of the two, he thought.  Who else could it be?

He believed it would be wise to spend most of his spare time in his room.  At least until he knew the inwardness of the butcher-knife incident.  It was possible that the man who had secreted the knife would return.  Racey might well be in line for other even more delicate attentions.

Before going up to his room Racey went to the corral.  He had left his saddle-blanket out all night, he mentioned to Swing in the hearing of Jack Harpe.  He was gone five minutes.  When he returned, strangely enough minus the saddle-blanket, he was in time to see Piney Jackson dart round the corner of the blacksmith shop, cup his hand at his mouth, and raise a stentorian bellow for Jake Rule.