“Well, you see,” spoke Sam, with a whimsical intonation, “you didn’t give us a chance.”
Whereat they all had to break into a laugh, the situation seemed so ridiculous.
“As I suppose you have guessed,” said the woman, “I am Mrs. Chillingworth. That Chinaman you just saw heading off the place I caught hanging round the barn a few moments ago. He was nailing a paper up there. Here it is. Look at it and tell me what you make of it.”
She drew from her apron pocket a bit of paper on which the following was scrawled in a straggly hand:
“Chillingworth: You se what thee byes got. That waz onli a sampil. A Word to the Wize is Enuff. Live and Let Live.”
Sam Hartley’s face grew grave as he read, with the boys peering over his elbow.
“I suspected something like this,” he said, “but I thought we would have reached here ahead of them. I reckon that Chinaman must have known the country hereabouts as well as I did, or better.”
“Well, I allow he ought to,” said Mrs. Chillingworth. “His name is Fu. He worked for my husband, and you can imagine how mystified I was when I came out a short while ago and found him sneaking round the house like a criminal. I asked him what he was doing and he only answered by snarling like a nasty wild cat, and going ahead nailing up his paper. It was then I got the rifle and ordered him off the place.”
The boys explained as rapidly as possible such parts of their adventures as they thought would not alarm Mrs. Chillingworth too much, although it appeared to them that she was a very self-reliant woman—the kind that a rancher in that wild country must have found invaluable. The narration was made in the house, into which Mrs. Chillingworth had invited them. She set out glasses of buttermilk, cool from the cellar, and also produced a dish of fresh fruit, all of which was very inviting to the dusty travelers. In the meantime, Sam had stabled his burro in the corral, and the long-eared little animal was already pitching into the hay stack to the great disgust of the ranch horses.
As soon as she heard the boys’ story, Mrs. Chillingworth set about getting the various medicines for which her husband’s note called. This done, the boys and Sam sat down to a bountiful meal. It was shortly before two that, mounted on two good horses, they set out once more for the cove. Sam Hartley and his burro went off in another direction. The nemesis of the Chinese smugglers said he had a clew he wished to look up in the canyon.