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,"