Which being done Racey took up a strategic position behind an upended crate near the doorway.

He proceeded to wait.  He waited quite a while.  The afternoon drained away.  The sun set.  In the dusk of the evening Racey heard footsteps.  Swing Tunstall.  He’d know his step anywhere.  The individual making the footsteps came to the doorway of the barn, halted an instant, then walked in.  Almost at once he stumbled over the boots.  Then Racey sprang upon his back with a joyous shout and slammed him headforemost over the wagon-seat into the pile of hay.

The man swore—­and the voice was not that of Swing Tunstall.  On the heels of this unwelcome discovery Racey made another.  The man had dragged out a knife from under his armpit, and was squirmingly endeavouring to make play with it.  Racey’s intended practical joke on Swing Tunstall was in a fair way to become a tragedy on himself.

There was no time to make explanations, even had Racey been so inclined.  The man was strong and the knife was long—­and presumably sharp.  Racey, pinioning his opponent’s knife arm with one hand and his teeth, flashed out his gun and smartly clipped the man over the head with the barrel.

Instantly, so far as an active participation in the affair of the moment, the man ceased to function.  He lay limp as a sodden moccasin, and breathed stertorously.  Racey knelt at his side and laid his hand on the top of the man’s head.  The palm came away warmly wet.  Racey replaced his gun in its holster and pulled the senseless one out on the barn floor near the doorway where he could see him better.

The man was Luke Tweezy.

Racey sat down and began to pull on his boots.  There was nothing to be gained by remaining in the barn.  Tweezy was not badly hurt.  The blow on the head had resulted, so far as Racey could discover (later he was to learn that his diagnosis had been correct), in a mere scalp wound.

Racey, when his boots were on, picked up his hat.  At least he thought it was his hat.  When he put it on, however, it proved a poor fit.  He had taken Tweezy’s hat by mistake.  He dropped it on the floor and turned to pick up his own where it lay behind the wagon-seat.

But, as we wheeled, a flicker of white showed inside the crown of Tweezy’s hat where it lay on the floor.  Racey swung back, stooped down, and turned out the leather sweatband of Tweezy’s hat, at the edge of which had been revealed the bit of white.

The latter proved to be one corner of a folded letter.  Without the least compunction Racey tucked this letter into the breast pocket of his flannel shirt.  Then he set about searching Tweezy’s clothing with thoroughness.  But other than the odds and odds usually to be found in a man’s pockets there was nothing to interest the searcher.

Racey carefully turned back the sweatband of the hat, placed the headpiece on top of the wagon-seat, and departed.  He went as far as the Happy Heart corral.  Behind the corral he sat down on his heels, and took out the letter he had purloined from Luke Tweezy.  He opened the envelope and read the finger-marked enclosure by the light of matches shielded behind his hat.  The letter ran: