The interest in Cunningham's eyes quickened. He laughed. "Aren't you in bad enough already with Uncle? Why another quarrel?"
"This isn't on my own account. There's a girl in his office—"
A rap on the door interrupted Kirby. A young man walked into the room.
He was a good-looking young exquisite, dark-eyed and black-haired. His
clothes had been made by one of the best tailors in New York.
Moreover, he knew how to wear them.
James Cunningham, Junior, introduced him to Kirby as his cousin Jack. After a few moments of talk the broker reverted to the subject of their previous talk.
"Kirby was just telling me that he has come to Denver to meet Uncle James," he explained to his brother. "Some difficulty with him, I understand."
Jack Cunningham's black eyes fastened on his cousin. He waited for further information. It was plain he was interested.
"I'm not quite sure of my facts," Lane said. "But there's evidence to show that he has ruined a young girl in his office. She practically admits that he's the man. I happen to be a friend of her family, an' I'm goin' to call him to account. He can't get away with it."
Kirby chanced to be looking at his cousin Jack. What he saw in that young man's eyes surprised him. There were astonishment, incredulity, and finally a cunning narrowing of the black pupils.
It was James who spoke. His face was grave. "That's a serious charge,
Kirby," he said. "What is the name of the young woman?"
"I'd rather not give it—except to Uncle James himself."
"Better write it," suggested Jack with a reminiscent laugh. "He's a bit impetuous. I saw him throw a man down the stairs yesterday. Picked the fellow up at the foot of the flight. He certainly looked as though he'd like to murder our dear uncle."
"What I'd like to know is this," said Lane. "What sort of a reputation has Uncle James in this way? Have you ever heard of his bein' in anything of this sort before?"
"No, I haven't," James said promptly.
Jack shrugged. "I wouldn't pick nunky for exactly a moral man," he said flippantly. "His idea of living is to grab all the easy things he can."
"Where can I see him most easily? At his office?" asked Kirby.
"He drove down to Colorado Springs to-day on business. At least he told me he was going. Don't know whether he expects to get back to-night or not. He lives at the Paradox Apartments," Jack said.
"Prob'ly I'd better see him there rather than at his office."
"Hope you have a pleasant time with the old boy," Jack murmured.
"Don't think I'd care to be a champion of dames where he's concerned.
He's a damned cantankerous old brute. I'll say that for him."
James arranged a place of meeting for luncheon next day. The young cattleman left. He knew from the fidgety manner of Jack that he had some important business he was anxious to talk over with his brother.
CHAPTER VI
LIGHTS OUT
It was five minutes to ten by his watch when Kirby entered the Paradox Apartments. The bulletin board told him that his uncle's apartment was 12. He did not take the self-serve elevator, but the stairs. The hall on the second floor was dark. Since he did not know whether the rooms he wanted were on this floor or the next he knocked at a door.
Kirby thought he heard the whisper of voices and he knocked again. He had to rap a third time before the door was opened.
"What is it? What do you want?"
If ever Lane had seen stark, naked fear in a human face, it stared at him out of that of the woman in front of him. She was a tall, angular woman of a harsh, forbidding countenance, flat-breasted and middle-aged. Behind her, farther back in the room, the roughrider caught a glimpse of a fat, gross, ashen-faced man fleeing toward the inner door of a bedroom to escape being seen. He was thrusting into his coat pocket what looked to the man in the hall like a revolver.
"Can you tell me where James Cunningham's apartment is?" asked Kirby.
The woman gasped. The hand on the doorknob was trembling violently. Something clicked in her throat when the dry lips tried to frame an answer.
"Head o' the stairs—right hand," she managed to get out, then shut the door swiftly in the face of the man whose simple question had so shocked her.
Kirby heard the latch released from its catch. The key in the lock below also turned.
"She's takin' no chances," he murmured. "Now I wonder why both her an' my fat friend are so darned worried. Who were they lookin' for when they opened the door an' saw me? An' why did it get her goat when I asked where Uncle James lived?"
As he took the treads that brought him to the next landing the cattleman had an impression of a light being flashed off somewhere. He turned to the right as the woman below had directed.
The first door had on the panel a card with his uncle's name. He knocked, and at the same instant noticed that the door was ajar. No answer came. His finger found the electric push button. He could hear it buzzing inside. Twice he pushed it.
"Nobody at home, looks like," he said to himself. "Well, I reckon I'll step in an' leave a note. Or maybe I'll wait. If the door's open he's liable to be right back."
He stepped into the room. It was dark. His fingers groped along the wall for the button to throw on the light. Before he found it a sound startled him.
It was the soft faint panting of some one breathing.
He was a man whose nerves were under the best of control, but the cold feet of mice pattered up and down his spine. Something was wrong. The sixth sense of danger that comes to some men who live constantly in peril was warning him.
"Who's there?" he asked sharply.
No voice replied, but there was a faint rustle of some one or some thing stirring.
He waited, crouched in the darkness.
There came another vague rustle of movement. And presently another, this time closer. Every sense in him was alert, keyed up to closest attention. He knew that some one, for some sinister purpose, had come into this apartment and been trapped here by him.
The moments flew. He thought he could hear his hammering heart. A stifled gasp, a dozen feet from him, was just audible.
He leaped for the sound. His outflung hand struck an arm and slid down it, caught at a small wrist, and fastened there. In the fraction of a second left him he realized, beyond question, that it was a woman he had assaulted.
The hand was wrenched from him. There came a zigzag flash of lightning searing his brain, a crash that filled the world for him—and he floated into unconsciousness.
CHAPTER VII
FOUL PLAY
Lane came back painfully to a world of darkness. His head throbbed distressingly. Querulously he wondered where he was and what had taken place.
He drew the fingers of his outstretched hand along the nap of a rug and he knew he was on the floor. Then his mind cleared and he remembered that a woman's hand had been imprisoned in his just before his brain stopped functioning.
Who was she? What was she doing here? And what under heaven had hit him hard enough to put the lights out so instantly?
He sat up and held his throbbing head. He had been struck on the point of the chin and gone down like an axed bullock. The woman must have lashed out at him with some weapon.
In his pocket he found a match. It flared up and lit a small space in the pit of blackness. Unsteadily he got to his feet and moved toward the door. His mind was quite clear now and his senses abnormally sensitive. For instance, he was aware of a faint perfume of violet in the room, so faint that he had not noticed it before.
There grew on him a horror, an eagerness to be gone from the rooms. It was based on no reasoning, but on some obscure feeling that there had taken place something evil, something that chilled his blood.
Yet he did not go. He had come for a purpose, and it was characteristic of him that he stayed in spite of the dread that grew on him till it filled his breast. Again he groped along the wall for the light switch. A secon
d match flared in his fingers and showed it to him. Light flooded the room.
His first sensation was of relief. This handsome apartment with its Persian rugs, its padded easy-chairs, its harmonious wall tints, had a note of repose quite alien to tragedy. It was the home of a man who had given a good deal of attention to making himself comfortable. Indefinably, it was a man's room. The presiding genius of it was masculine and not feminine. It lacked the touches of adornment that only a woman can give to make a place homelike.
Yet one adornment caught Kirby's eye at once. It was a large photograph in a handsome frame on the table. The picture showed the head and bust of a beautiful woman in evening dress. She was a brunette, young and very attractive. The line of head, throat, and shoulder was perfect. The delicate, disdainful poise and the gay provocation in the dark, slanting eyes were enough to tell that she was no novice in the game of sex. He judged her an expensive orchid produced in the civilization of our twentieth-century hothouse. Across the bottom of the picture was scrawled an inscription in a fashionably angular hand. Lane moved closer to read it. The words were, "Always, Phyllis." Probably this was the young woman to whom, if rumor were true, James Cunningham, Senior, was engaged.
On the floor, near where Kirby had been lying, lay a heavy piece of agate evidently used for a paperweight. He picked up the smooth stone and guessed instantly that this was the weapon which had established contact with his chin. Very likely the woman's hand had closed on it when she heard him coming. She had switched off the light and waited for him. That the blow had found a vulnerable mark and knocked him out had been sheer luck.
Kirby passed into a luxurious bedroom beyond which was a tiled bathroom. He glanced these over and returned to the outer apartment. There was still another door. It was closed. As the man from Wyoming moved toward it he felt once more a strange sensation of dread. It was strong enough to stop him in his stride. What was he going to find behind that door? When he laid his hand on the knob pinpricks played over his scalp and galloped down his spine.
He opened the door. A sweet sickish odor, pungent but not heavy, greeted his nostrils. It was a familiar smell, one he had met only recently. Where? His memory jumped to a corridor of the Cheyenne hospital. He had been passing the operating-room on his way to see Wild Rose. The door had opened and there had been wafted to him faintly the penetrating whiff of chloroform. It was the same drug he sniffed now.
He stood on the threshold, groped for the switch, and flashed on the lights. Sound though Kirby Lane's nerves were, he could not repress a gasp at what he saw.
Leaning back in an armchair, looking up at him with a horrible sardonic grin, was his uncle James Cunningham. His wrists were tied with ropes to the arms of the chair. A towel, passed round his throat, fastened the body to the back of the chair and propped up the head. A bloody clot of hair hung tangled just above the temple. The man was dead beyond any possibility of doubt. There was a small hole in the center of the forehead through which a bullet had crashed. Beneath this was a thin trickle of blood that had run into the heavy eyebrows.
The dead man was wearing a plaid smoking-jacket and oxblood slippers. On the tabouret close to his hand lay a half-smoked cigar. There was a grewsome suggestion in the tilt of the head and the gargoyle grin that this was a hideous and shocking jest he was playing on the world.
Kirby snatched his eyes from the grim spectacle and looked round the room. It was evidently a private den to which the owner of the apartment retired. There were facilities for smoking and for drinking, a lounge which showed marks of wear, and a writing-desk in one corner.
This desk held the young man's gaze. It was open. Papers lay scattered everywhere and its contents had been rifled and flung on the floor. Some one, in a desperate hurry, had searched every pigeon-hole.
The window of the room was open. Perhaps it had been thrown up to let out the fumes of the chloroform. Kirby stepped to it and looked down. The fire escape ran past it to the stories above and below.
The young cattleman had seen more than once the tragedies of the range. He had heard the bark of guns and had looked down on quiet dead men but a minute before full of lusty life. But these had been victims of warfare in the open, usually of sudden passions that had flared and struck. This was different. It was murder, deliberate, cold-blooded, atrocious. The man had been tied up, made helpless, and done to death without mercy. There was a note of the abnormal, of the unhuman, about the affair. Whoever had killed James Cunningham deserved the extreme penalty of the law.
He was a man who no doubt had made many enemies. Always he had demanded his pound of flesh and got it. Some one had waited patiently for his hour and exacted a fearful vengeance for whatever wrong he had suffered.
Kirby decided that he must call the police at once. No time ought to be lost in starting to run down the murderer. He stepped into the living-room to the telephone, lifted the receiver from the hook, and—stood staring down at a glove lying on the table.
As he looked at it the blood washed out of his face. He had a sensation as though his heart had been plunged into cracked ice. For he recognized the glove on the table, knew who its owner was.
It was a small riding-gauntlet with a device of a rose embroidered on the wrist. He would have known that glove among a thousand.
He had seen it, a few hours since, on the hand of Wild Rose.
CHAPTER VIII
BY MEANS OF THE FIRE ESCAPE
Kirby Lane stood with fascinated eyes looking down at the glove, muscles and brain alike paralyzed. The receiver was in his hand, close to his ear.
A voice from the other end of the wire drifted to him. "Number, please."
Automatically he hung the receiver on the hook. Dazed though he was, the rough rider knew that the police were the last people in the world he wanted to see just now.
All his life he had lived the adventure of the outdoors. For twelve months he had served at the front, part of the time with the forces in the Argonne. He had ridden stampedes and fought through blizzards. He had tamed the worst outlaw horses the West could produce. But he had never been so shock-shaken as he was now. A fact impossibly but dreadfully true confronted him. Wild Rose had been alone with his uncle in these rooms, had listened with breathless horror while Kirby climbed the stairs, had been trapped by his arrival, and had fought like a wolf to make her escape. He remembered the wild cry of her outraged heart, "Nothing's too bad for a man like that."
Lane was sick with fear. It ran through him and sapped his supple strength like an illness. It was not possible that Rose could have done this in her right mind. But he had heard a doctor say once that under stress of great emotion people sometimes went momentarily insane. His friend had been greatly wrought up from anxiety, pain, fever, and lack of sleep.
In replacing the telephone he had accidentally pushed aside a book. Beneath it was a slip of paper on which had been penciled a note. He read it, without any interest.
Mr. Hull he come see you. He sorry you not here. He say maybe perhaps make honorable call some other time.
S. HORIKAWA
An electric bell buzzed through the apartment. The sound of it startled Kirby as though it had been the warning of a rattlesnake close to his head. Some one was at the outer door ringing for admission. It would never do for him to be caught here.
He had been trained to swift thought reactions. Quickly but noiselessly he stepped to the door and released the catch of the Yale lock so that it would not open from the outside without a key. He switched off the light and passed through the living-room into the bedchamber. His whole desire now was to be gone from the building as soon as possible. The bedroom also he darkened before he stepped to the window and crept through it to the platform of the fire escape.
The glove was still in his hand. He thrust it into his pocket as he
began the descent. The iron ladder ran down the building to the alley.
It ended ten feet above the ground. Kirby lowered himself and dropped.
He turned to the right down the alley toward Glenarm Street.
A man was standing at the comer of the alley trying to light a cigar. He was a reporter on the "Times," just returning from the Press Club where he had been playing in a pool tournament.
He stopped Lane. "Can you lend me a match, friend?"
The cattleman handed him three or four and started to go.
"Just a mo'," the newspaper-man said, striking a light. "Do you always"—puff, puff—"leave your rooms"—puff, puff, puff—"by the fire escape?"
Kirby looked at him in silence, thinking furiously. He had been caught, after all. There were witnesses to prove he had gone up to his uncle's rooms. Here was another to testify he had left by the fire escape. The best he could say was that he was very unlucky.
"Never mind, friend," the newspaper-man went On. "You don't look like a second-story worker to yours truly." He broke into a little amused chuckle. "I reckon friend husband, who never comes home till Saturday night, happened around unexpectedly and the fire escape looked good to you. Am I right?"
The Wyoming man managed a grin. It was not a mirthful one, but it served.
"You're a wizard," he said admiringly.
The reporter had met a bootlegger earlier in the evening and had two or three drinks. He was mellow. "Oh, I'm wise," he said with a wink. "Chuck Ellis isn't anybody's fool. Beat it, Lothario, while the beating's good." The last sentence and the gesture that accompanied the words were humorous exaggerations of old-time melodrama.
Lane took his advice without delay.
CHAPTER IX
THE STORY IN THE "NEWS"
From a booth in a drug-store on Sixteenth Street Kirby telephoned the police that James Cunningham had been murdered at his home in the Paradox Apartments. He stayed to answer no questions, but hung up at once. From a side door of the store he stepped out to Welton Street and walked to his hotel.
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