“We’ve got to—you know—what do you call—it—fathom the mystery,” he said.
“I guess there isn’t any mystery, Kid,” I told him. “But there must have been some wild scene, all right.”
Honest, I can’t tell you which had me more interested, that little round hole or the letter. Anyway, it seemed as if one proved the other. I could just see how the bullet had come in there and hit that fellow’s arm, and kind of, I could see him leaning out of the window and I could see one of those fellows dead and the other one trying to limp away, and the train starting with two men dead on it, and another one dying. You bet, Pee-wee was right; if that old car could only talk….
“It happened before we were born,” Pee-wee said.
“Yop,” I said; “jiminy, you can’t stop thinking about it, can you? This very same old car that we’re sitting in was rattling along maybe a mile a minute, to get to a place where there was a hospital.”
Gee whiz, we forgot all about measuring for the lockers, and just sat there in the car, gaping around. It seemed kind of different than before, on account of what we knew had happened in it. And I just couldn’t stop thinking about that.
“Do you know what I think?” I said, all the while looking around. “I think there’s a lot more about this car, too. I think it must have been in a wreck once; look at those shutters.”
There were about half a dozen shutters that we hadn’t been able to pull down, but the men had done it for us, and now I could see why it was they had stuck so. It was because they were all smashed and knocked out of shape. And besides that there was a long board fitted into the side of the car that hadn’t always been there, because it was soft wood, not like the regular wood of the car.
“What shall we do about it?” Pee-wee asked me.
“Nothing, as far as I can see,” I told him. “I don’t see that there’s anything to fathom. I’ll paste the letter in the troop-book, after we’ve shown it to the fellows.”