"Why a sort of birthmark that looks like a knife."
The mining engineer had been looking into the embers of the fire rather dreamily and talking in a low tone to Neil. He now half turned round and said in a voice that showed more than casual interest, "Tell me about it. It sounds interesting."
"Well," said Neil, "it's a mark, sort of brick colored, on his shoulder, that looks exactly like a knife or a dagger. I noticed it one day in the shower-bath room when Teeny-bits first came out for the football team."
"Has he always had it?"
"Yes, I guess so. I suppose it's just chance—the shape of it, but it is such an unusual looking thing that the fellows got interested in him and then of course there was the story about his mother being killed in a railroad wreck. That got around school some way; Teeny-bits himself told it, I think; so there isn't any harm in my repeating it. Some mighty nice people in Hamilton picked him up after a train accident which killed his mother and took him home. They finally adopted him, and gave him their name when they weren't able to find any of his relatives, and of course the mystery of that made the fellows all the more interested in him."
While the former captain of the Ridgley team had been saying these words the mining engineer had looked at him with an intentness that Neil had attributed to the fact that Teeny-bits' story was as interesting to him as it had been to the sons of Ridgley.
"You said that it was his mother who was killed in the railroad accident?"
"Yes," replied Neil, "I guess they never found out what her name was. That seems pretty horrible, but the Holbrooks, who adopted Teeny-bits, are mighty fine people. Daniel Holbrook is the station agent at Hamilton."
The mining engineer settled back in his chair, sighed rather heavily and gazed once more into the embers of the fire. "Well, Teeny-bits is a fine chap," he said finally, "and I don't wonder that the fellows fell for him."
"He nearly caused me nervous prostration," said Neil, "when he didn't show up at the game until the last minute, and the story about what happened to him and how the Chinese who had kidnaped him acted when they saw the knife mark on his shoulder is one of the strangest things I ever heard."