“It’s them!” was all Ralph spoke, but it was quite enough.
Hugh did not need to cudgel his brains to understand to what the other was referring. He knew Ralph, in some way, recognized the men inside the deserted smithy as the trio of guards who had come back after being dismissed by the sheriff. Hugh guessed from this that Ralph must have found a much cleaner section of window pane than it had been his luck to run across.
Hugh again tried to discover what the inmates of the room were doing, for he had before that seen them moving around as though busily engaged; and, even the sound of heavy voices, accompanied by hoarse laughter, had drifted to his ears.
At first Hugh was puzzled to account for the apparently strange act of two of the men who were moving about. He saw them open bundles they had doubtless carried with them to the old building. These seemed to contain clothes, for they held them up. They also made some sort of comment, as though inviting the criticism of the third man, who was smoking a pipe and taking it easy, sitting on the bench, with one foot raised, and his back against the wall.
It would appear as though the men might be thinking of opening an old clothes shop, for all that they took out of the bundles looked dilapidated. Hugh could not be quite sure, but somehow it struck him that he had seen just such clothes among the foreign workers.
When he saw one of the men hold up a colored handkerchief, such as the women belonging to the strikers universally wore, his suspicions became a conviction. There was a deep and dark design in what the two men were engaged in doing; it was not the idle horseplay it might appear on the surface.
Hugh remembered of lately reading how unscrupulous prospectors have many times been known to “salt” a mine deemed worthless, so that it could be sold to some innocent, trusting Eastern capitalist. Well, these rascals were doing something of the same sort then and there, only in this case it was their design to unload the entire ignominy of the evil deed they had just carried out on to the shoulders of the wretched strikers.
They had managed to secure some of the garments belonging in the foreign settlement, perhaps by raiding a clothes line; and these garments they meant to scatter about the place. When, later, directed by some clue over the wire, perhaps, the authorities hurried to the old smithy and found the stolen child there, they would never have a single doubt but that the place had been occupied by a party of foreigners, and in this way the crime would be laid at the door of the strikers who had reason to hate Mr. Campertown.
It was a miserable sort of game, Hugh thought, as he continued to watch the way the three hilarious ex-guards were carrying on, all of them having perhaps been drinking more than was good for them, as there were flasks in sight on the table.
He could not understand just how they expected to profit by the deal; but possibly they had this all planned out; or it might be that revenge was all they wanted, which was meant to fall heavily upon both the strikers and the millionaire.