e."

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 scraped along the
floor.

"Shore 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-washing. 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