The Collected Westerns of William MacLeod Raine: 21 Novels in One Volume

by Unknown

  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 second 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 y
ou 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.

  He passed a wretched night. The distress that flooded his mind was due less to his own danger than to his anxiety for Rose. His course of action was not at all clear to him in case he should be identified as the man who had been seen going to and coming from the apartment of the murdered man. He could not explain why he was there without implicating Rose and her sister. He would not betray them. That of course. But he had told his cousins why he was going. Would their story not start a hunt for the woman in the case?

  Man is an illogical biped. Before Kirby had seen the glove on the table and associated it with the crime, his feeling had been that the gallows was the proper end of so cruel a murderer. Now he not only intended to protect Rose, but his heart was filled with pity for her. He understood her better than he did any other woman, her loyalty and love and swift, upblazing anger. Even if her hand had fired the shot, he told himself, it was not Wild Rose who had done it--not the little friend he had come to know and like so well, but a tortured woman beside herself with grief for the sister to whom she had always been a mother too.

  He slept little, and that brokenly. With the dawn he was out on the street to buy a copy of the "News." The story of the murder had the two columns on the right-hand side of the front page and broke over to the third. He hurried back to his room to read it behind a locked door.

  The story was of a kind in which newspapers revel. Cunningham was a well-known character, several times a millionaire. His death even by illness would have been worth a column. But the horrible and grewsome way of his taking off, the mystery surrounding it, the absence of any apparent motive unless it were revenge, all whetted the appetite of the editors. It was a big "story," one that would run for many days, and the "News" played it strong.

  As Kirby had expected, he was selected as the probable assassin. A reporter had interviewed Mr. and Mrs. Cass Hull, who occupied the apartment just below that of the murdered man. They had told him that a young man, a stranger to them, powerfully built and dressed like a prosperous ranchman, had knocked on their door about 9.20 to ask the way to the apartment of Cunningham. Hull explained that he remembered the time particularly because he happened to be winding the clock at the moment.

  A description of Lane was given in a two-column "box." He read it with no amusement. It was too deadly accurate for comfort.

  The supposed assassin of James Cunningham is described by Mrs. Cass Hull as dressed in a pepper-and-salt suit and a white, pinched-in cattleman's hat. He is about six feet tall, between 25 and 30 years old, weighing about 200 or perhaps 210 pounds. His hair is a light brown and his face tanned from the sun.

  His age and his weight were overstated, and his clothes were almost a khaki brown. Otherwise Mrs. Hull had given a very close description of him, considering her state of mind at the moment when she had seen him.

  There was one sentence of the story he read over two or three times. Hull and his wife agreed that it was about 9.20 when he had knocked on their door, unless it was a printer's error or the reporter had made a mistake. Kirby knew this was wrong. He had looked at his watch just before he had entered the Paradox Apartment. He had stopped directly under a street globe, and the time was 9.55.

  Had the Hulls deliberately shifted the time back thirty-five minutes? If so, why? He remembered how stark terror had stared out of both their faces. Did they know more about the murder than they pretended? When he had mentioned his uncle's name the woman had been close to collapse, though, of course, he could not be sure that had been the reason. To his mind there flashed the memory of the note he had seen on the table. The man had called on Cunningham and left word he might call again. Was it possible the Hulls had just come down from the apartment above when he had knocked on their door? If so, how did the presence of Rose fit into the schedule?

  Lane pounced on the fear and the evasion of the Hulls as an out for Wild Rose. It was only a morsel of hope, but he made the most of it.

  The newspaper was inclined to bring up stage the mysterious man who had called up the police at 10.25 to tell them that Cunningham had been murdered in his rooms. Who was this man? Could he be the murderer? If so, why should he telephone the police and start immediately the hunt after him? If not the killer, how did he know that a crime had been committed less than an hour before?

  As soon as he had eaten breakfast, Kirby walked round to the boarding-house on Cherokee Street where Wild Rose was staying with her sister. Rose was out, he learned from the landlady. He asked if he might see her sister. His anxiety was so great he could not leave without a word of her.

  Presently Esther came down to the parlor where the young man waited for her. Lane introduced himself as a friend of Rose. He was worried about her, he said. She seemed to him in a highly wrought-up, nervous state. He wondered if it would not be well to get her out of Denver.

  Esther swallowed a lump in her throat. She had never seen Rose so jumpy, she agreed. Last night she had gone out for an hour alone. The look in her eyes when she had come back had frightened Esther. She had gone at once to her bedroom and locked the door, but her sister had heard her moving about for hours.

  Then, suddenly, Esther's t
hroat swelled and she began to sob. She knew well enough that she was at the bottom of Wild Rose's worries.

  "Where is she now?" asked Kirby gently.

  "I don't know. She didn't tell me where she was going. There's--there's something queer about her. I--I'm afraid."

  "What are you afraid of?"

  "She's so--so kinda fierce," Esther wailed.

  It was impossible to explain, even to this big brown friend of Rose who looked as though his quiet strength could move mountains. He was a man. Besides, every instinct in her drove to keep hidden the secret that some day would tell itself.

  Her eyes fell. They rested on the "News" some boarder had tossed on the table beside which she stood. Her thoughts were of herself and the plight in which she had become involved. She looked at the big headlines of the paper and for the moment did not see them. What she did see was disgrace, the shipwreck of the young life she loved so much.