“Then it must have been put up there while you were asleep?”
“I reckon that was the way of it.”
“Well, forget it. It’s my business, anyway, and nothing for you to bother with.”
At that moment Wing Hi came out of the dining-room and went to the front of the hotel with his brass gong. While he was pounding his summons for dinner—a meal which had been delayed on account of the extra work that had fallen to the two Chinamen—the scout and his pards went into the dining-room and took their accustomed places at one of the tables.
“Nick,” said the scout to his trapper pard, “here’s something for you and Cayuse to think about: Did either of you ever hear of a spook that was able to take a piece of birch bark and scratch words on it?”
The idea rather startled Nomad, but Cayuse kept on quietly with his eating.
“Or,” proceeded the scout, with a wink at Wild Bill, “did you ever hear of a spook that could take an old file and make a dagger out of it?”
He laid the blade, with which the birch bark had been fastened to the door, on the table.
All eyes turned on it curiously. There was no doubt about its having been ground down from a file to a double edge and a point.
“Or,” went on the scout, “who ever knew of a spook stealing to the front of a hotel and fastening a piece of birch bark to the door, and using wit enough to do it so quietly that the proprietor of the hotel, who was asleep in front and not ten feet away, failed to hear a sound?”