“Wasn’t any mistake about that pink tie,” returned Wing o’ the Crow. “Halfaman come sportin’ it ’round the first night he come to see me. Thought it was the grandest thing, the poor nut! And now that cover. Who else would write that foolishness into a book o’ cigarette papers? Halfaman’s wrote that all over the United States. He writes it on everything, or something like it. It’s all the Bible he ever read, and I reckon he’s proud o’ his education. He’s just a big-eared nut, that’s all.”
“What shall we do, Wing-o?”
“Keep this hid, anyway, or burn it up. What’d you write in the other cover that Mart give to the sheriff?”
“Oh, I scarce know what I wrote, I was so rattled at the time. I saw Mart riding in, and I couldn’t think of anything but that fresh creature that had been insulting me. He called himself Blacky Silk. And I wrote that three times. But really I wasn’t trying to implicate the fellow. I was afraid I couldn’t get Mart away from the sheriff before he’d told him there was writing on the inside. And I was right about that. He did tell him, in spite of me. So I just wrote ‘Blacky Silk, Blacky Silk, Blacky Silk’ three times. I couldn’t seem to think of anything else.”
“I guess you didn’t do so bad, after all,” said the girl of the camps. “I’ve heard Blacky Silk’s a bad actor.”
“What is he?”
“Gambler, I guess. He usta smuggle opium and Chinamen into the States over the Mexican border, they say. He did a stretch for it. I heard he was in with the po-lice and slipped ’em somethin’. They call it ‘Black Silk’ when a po-liceman gets a drag from an opium runner or a chink runner. That’s how come it he’s got that name.
“You couldn’t ’a’ done better,” she went on. “I hate that fella. He follies the camps and robs the stiffs and does anything mean. I wouldn’t care if what you wrote was to send ’im up for life.”
“But really I didn’t mean to implicate him, Wing-o. I—I was just all nerves, and so mad and scared I could hardly think or see. And I wrote the first thing that came into my mind, I had to hurry so.”
“Don’t worry about that. Tell me if your Falcon said anythin’ before he pulled out that made you suspicious.”