The door of the shack--windows it had none--hung on one crazy hinge made of raw-hide.
“Guess I’ll take a look inside,” said Ralph, feeling a very lively curiosity, “but from general appearances I don’t think our mysterious friend and horse thief actually lives here. Looks to me more as if he used it as a temporary camping place. Yet he could hardly have found his way here unless he previously knew of its existence.”
Cautiously, and with his rifle ready for a surprise, for he did not know what he might encounter next, Ralph entered the hut. It smelled moldy and stuffy, and in the dim light he could not at first see very much of its interior.
Bit by bit the details began to grow out of the gloom. In the center of the shack was a rough board table and on it stood some rusted plates and cups. In a corner hung some old garments and a few moldering furs, skins of raccoons and minks. A rusty stove stood in another corner, one leg missing and sagging drunkenly.
By the door Ralph now noticed a yellow bit of paper tacked up, with some writing on it. He came closer to read it and made out in faded characters:
“Gone on April 16, 1888, Jess Boody, Trapper.”
This inscription made one thing plain to Ralph. The hut had once been occupied by one of those solitaries of the wilds whose trap lines are sometimes forty or fifty miles long. This Jess Boody had been such a man and had either “made his pile,” or getting disgusted with the location as a source for peltries had, as he tersely put it, “gone on.”
There were no traces of more recent occupancy of the hut, and Ralph was compelled to come back to his first theory; the mysterious man had used the place simply as a convenient shelter from time to time. Some ashes in the stove, that looked fairly fresh, appeared to lend color to this belief. Probably the horse thief had spent the night there.
“Well, if this hasn’t the makings of a first-class mystery about it,” gasped Ralph, pushing back his sombrero and running one hand through his curly hair.
As there seemed to be no use in making any further investigation of the tumble-down shanty, Ralph untied the pony left behind by the horse thief, and mounting it rode back toward camp in a thoughtful mood. He was deeply puzzled, and small wonder, by the events of the day.