"Bring in the dinner he caught, too," remarked Ned, "I'm curious to see what it is; because it didn't look like any wild bird around here." "And be careful how you handle the hawk, if he's only winged," warned Jack, "for they can fight like all get-out, and the first thing he'll try to get at will be your eyes. Knock him on the head, Jimmy, before you handle him." "Shucks! tell me somethin' I don't know!" laughed the other, starting off, gun in hand, toward the trees growing along the same stream that passed the door of Hy Adams' dugout, some three miles away. He came back after a little while carrying a dead hawk. "It was a fine shot, for a fact!" admitted Jack, as he took the bird into his hands, the better to see where the bullet had struck. "What's that you've got besides, Jimmy?" asked Harry. "Me to the foolish house if it don't make me think of a pet pigeon I used to have long ago," Jimmy ventured. "It _is_ a pigeon," said Ned, as he handled the dead bird that had been chased and captured by the hungry hawk. "What's that, Ned; a tame pigeon out here on the plains?" Jack questioned. "Well, there are no wild pigeons any more, all gone," Ned explained, "and this bird is a passenger pigeon or a carrier. You can see from the odd shape of its bill." "What they call a homing pigeon, you mean, don't you, Ned?" asked Harry. "Just that," was the reply, "and here, as sure as you live, there's a message tied with a thread to his leg, right now. Why, somebody must have been experimenting sending a message back home by this air post." "Blast that old hawk, he spoiled the whole game!" muttered Jimmy, wrathfully. "But stop and think, Jimmy," Harry told him, "if it hadn't been for the hawk you shot, we wouldn't have known about this thing at all. But there's Ned opening the little piece of tissue paper on which the message is written. Tell us about it, Ned, won't you?" The scout master was staring at the thin piece of paper he had smoothed out, as though it contained certain information that interested him deeply. And as the other three scouts gathered around him, eagerly waiting until he took them more fully into his confidence, they seemed to feel as though the very air was charged with a fresh supply of mystery. CHAPTER X. AT DOUBLE CROSS RANCH. The first words spoken by Ned added to the puzzle, for he turned to his chums and propounded a question. "Did any of you happen to notice which way the pigeon was flying, before the hawk darted out from the trees and chased it?" "Yes," Jack informed him promptly, "I saw the bird coming away in the distance, and it was flying as straight as an arrow, when the hawk shot up out of the screen of the trees and made it swerve to try and escape; but it wasn't quick enough." "Which way was it coming then?" asked Ned. Jack pointed toward the southeast. "Right yonder and in the same direction we're heading," he replied.