The Heart of the Range Part 28

"You'll wake up that Starlight proprietor," Racey said, calmly, as he picked up the boot and dropped it out of the window. "Good dog," he continued, presumably addressing a canine friend without, "leave Swing's nice new boot alone, will you? Don't go gnawin' at it thataway. It ain't a bone."

Swing, pulling on his pants, left the room, hopping physically and mentally. Racey rested both elbows on the sill and waited happily for his comrade to appear beneath him.

"Shucks," he said in a tone of great surprise when Swing shot round the corner of the hotel, "I sh.o.r.e thought there was a dog there a-teasin' that boot. I could have took my Bible oath there was a great, big, black, curly-haired feller with lots of teeth down there.

I saw him, Swing. Sh.o.r.e thought I did. Must 'a' been mistaken. And you went and believed me, and got splinters in yore feet because you were in such a hurry. Never mind, Swing, here's the other one."

He jerked the boot in question at his friend's head, and sat down on his cot to complete his own dressing.

Came then the sound of a prodigious yawn from the room next door occupied by Jack Harpe. A cot creaked. A boot was sc.r.a.ped along the floor.

"Sh.o.r.e must be a sound sleeper," said Racey Dawson to himself, "if he really did just wake up."

He buckled on his gunbelt, set his hat a-tilt on one ear, and went down to wash his face and hands in the common basin on the wash-bench outside the kitchen door.

But Swing Tunstall was before him, and was disposed to make an issue of the dropped boots. Only by his superior agility was Racey enabled to dodge all save a few drops of a full bucket of water.

"Djever get left! Djever get left!" singsonged Racey from the corner of the building, and set the thumb of one hand to his nose and twiddled opprobrious fingers at his comrade. "You wanna be a li'l bit quicker when you go to souse me, Swing. Yo're too slow, a lot too slow. Yep. Now I wouldn't go for to fling that pail at me, Swing.

You might bust it, and yore carelessness with crockery thataway has already cost you ten dollars and six bits."

This was too much for the ruffled Swing. Waving the pail he pursued his tormentor round the hotel and into the front doorway. Racey fled up the stairs. At the stair foot Swing gave over the chase and returned to the washbench to resume his face-was.h.i.+ng. Racey went on into their room. There was in it several articles belonging to Swing that he intended to throw out of the window at once.

But when he had entered the room and the door was closed behind him he did not touch any of Swing's belongings. Instead he remained standing in the middle of the room looking thoughtfully at the floor. What had given him pause was the fact that he had found the door ajar. And he knew with absolute certainty that he had closed the door tightly before he went downstairs.

It is the vagrant straw that shows the wind's direction, and since the attempt to bushwhack him Racey was not overlooking any straws. The door had been ajar. Why?

There was no closet, and from where he stood he could see under both cots. No one lay concealed in the room. The bedclothes on Swing's cot had not been touched. At least they were in precisely the position in which they had been landed when thrown back by Swing's careless hand.

Racey did not believe that his own had been touched, either. 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. He listened intently. Hearing no sound he went out into the hall, and knocked gently on Jack Harpe's door and called him softly by name.

Getting no reply, he lifted the latch and walked in. There were Jack Harpe's saddlebags, _cantenas_, and rifle in a corner. A coat lay on the tumbled blankets of the cot. Otherwise the room was empty.

Racey went out, being careful to close the door tightly, and went to the room of the Starlight's owner. This room, too, was empty. Racey returned to his own room, tossed his _cantenas_ and saddlebags on the cot, and began feverishly to paw through their contents.

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 s.h.i.+rt, 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 b.u.t.tonless unders.h.i.+rt despised and rejected by Swing.

Racey unrolled the unders.h.i.+rt. 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 unders.h.i.+rt. 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 unders.h.i.+rt," he said to himself, testing the blood on the blade with a speculative fingernail.

"There ain't a mark on the unders.h.i.+rt. 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 pa.s.sed 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.

Piney did not wait to see whether the sheriff replied to his call.

Instead he beckoned violently to the handful of men grouped on the sidewalk in front of the hotel.

"C'mon over!" he bawled. "Look what I found here this morning."

Jack Harpe and the owner of the Starlight being among those present and responding to the invitation, Racey Dawson took a chance and went with the rest.

"Look at that," said Piney Jackson, indicating a humped-up individual sitting behind the woodpile.

Racey and the other spectators went round the woodpile and viewed the humped-up individual. The latter was Bull, the Starlight bartender.

And he was dead, very dead. His throat had been cut from ear to ear.

He was a ghastly object.

"Who done it?" inquired one of the fools that infest every group of men.

"He didn't leave any card," the blacksmith replied with sarcasm.

The fool asked no more questions. Came then Jake Rule and Kansas Casey. Jake, a rather heavy, well-meaning officer, old at the business, began to sniff about for clues. Kansas Casey laid the body down on its back and thoroughly searched the pockets of the clothing.

"One thing," said Kansas Casey, looking up from what he had found--a handful of silver dollars, a pocket knife, and a silver watch, "robbery wasn't the motive."

Racey looked sidewise from under his eyebrows at Jack Harpe. The latter was staring down unmoved at the dead body.

"Somebody must 'a' had a grudge against Bull," offered the fool.

"You think so?" said Piney. "Yo're a real bright feller."

The fool subsided a second time.

"Lookit here, Jake," Piney continued to the sheriff's address, "you don't have to kick my wood all over the county, do you?"

"I'm lookin' for the knife," explained the sheriff, ceasing not to stub his toes against the solid chunks. "Feller after doing a thing like this gets fl.u.s.trated 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. He should have been in his room before this, and he would have been had he cared to make himself conspicuous by not going along with the crowd to see what Piney Jackson had found.

Declining Swing's earnest invitation to drink he returned to the hotel. Swing went grouchily to the Happy Heart, wondering what was the matter with his friend. It was not like the Racey he knew to play the hermit.

Once in his room Racey again explored his own and Swing's saddlebags and _cantenas_, looked under the cots and through the bedclothes. But he found nothing that did not belong to either himself or Swing.

"They didn't make a second trip," he said to himself. "I'm betting it's Jack Harpe. Sh.o.r.e it is, the polecat."

Then in order to have a water-tight reason for remaining in the room he pulled off his boots and trousers, fished a housewife from a _cantena_, and set about repairing a rip in his trousers. It was a perfectly good rip. He had had it a long time. What more natural that on this particular day he should wish to sew it up?