CHAPTER VII
FOUL PLAY
Lane came back painfully to a world of darkness. His head throbbeddistressingly. Querulously he wondered where he was and what had takenplace.
He drew the fingers of his outstretched hand along the nap of a rug andhe knew he was on the floor. Then his mind cleared and he rememberedthat a woman's hand had been imprisoned in his just before his brainstopped functioning.
Who was she? What was she doing here? And what under heaven had hithim hard enough to put the lights out so instantly?
He sat up and held his throbbing head. He had been struck on the pointof the chin and gone down like an axed bullock. The woman must havelashed out at him with some weapon.
In his pocket he found a match. It flared up and lit a small space inthe pit of blackness. Unsteadily he got to his feet and moved towardthe door. His mind was quite clear now and his senses abnormallysensitive. For instance, he was aware of a faint perfume of violet inthe room, so faint that he had not noticed it before.
There grew on him a horror, an eagerness to be gone from the rooms. Itwas based on no reasoning, but on some obscure feeling that there hadtaken place something evil, something that chilled his blood.
Yet he did not go. He had come for a purpose, and it wascharacteristic of him that he stayed in spite of the dread that grew onhim till it filled his breast. Again he groped along the wall for thelight switch. A second match flared in his fingers and showed it tohim. Light flooded the room.
His first sensation was of relief. This handsome apartment with itsPersian rugs, its padded easy-chairs, its harmonious wall tints, had anote of repose quite alien to tragedy. It was the home of a man whohad given a good deal of attention to making himself comfortable.Indefinably, it was a man's room. The presiding genius of it wasmasculine and not feminine. It lacked the touches of adornment thatonly a woman can give to make a place homelike.
Yet one adornment caught Kirby's eye at once. It was a largephotograph in a handsome frame on the table. The picture showed thehead and bust of a beautiful woman in evening dress. She was abrunette, young and very attractive. The line of head, throat, andshoulder was perfect. The delicate, disdainful poise and the gayprovocation in the dark, slanting eyes were enough to tell that she wasno novice in the game of sex. He judged her an expensive orchidproduced in the civilization of our twentieth-century hothouse. Acrossthe bottom of the picture was scrawled an inscription in a fashionablyangular hand. Lane moved closer to read it. The words were, "Always,Phyllis." Probably this was the young woman to whom, if rumor weretrue, James Cunningham, Senior, was engaged.
On the floor, near where Kirby had been lying, lay a heavy piece ofagate evidently used for a paperweight. He picked up the smooth stoneand guessed instantly that this was the weapon which had establishedcontact with his chin. Very likely the woman's hand had closed on itwhen she heard him coming. She had switched off the light and waitedfor him. That the blow had found a vulnerable mark and knocked him outhad been sheer luck.
Kirby passed into a luxurious bedroom beyond which was a tiledbathroom. He glanced these over and returned to the outer apartment.There was still another door. It was closed. As the man from Wyomingmoved toward it he felt once more a strange sensation of dread. It wasstrong enough to stop him in his stride. What was he going to findbehind that door? When he laid his hand on the knob pinpricks playedover 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 onlyrecently. Where? His memory jumped to a corridor of the Cheyennehospital. He had been passing the operating-room on his way to seeWild Rose. The door had opened and there had been wafted to himfaintly the penetrating whiff of chloroform. It was the same drug hesniffed now.
He stood on the threshold, groped for the switch, and flashed on thelights. Sound though Kirby Lane's nerves were, he could not repress agasp at what he saw.
Leaning back in an armchair, looking up at him with a horrible sardonicgrin, was his uncle James Cunningham. His wrists were tied with ropesto the arms of the chair. A towel, passed round his throat, fastenedthe body to the back of the chair and propped up the head. A bloodyclot of hair hung tangled just above the temple. The man was deadbeyond any possibility of doubt. There was a small hole in the centerof the forehead through which a bullet had crashed. Beneath this was athin 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 agrewsome suggestion in the tilt of the head and the gargoyle grin thatthis was a hideous and shocking jest he was playing on the world.
Kirby snatched his eyes from the grim spectacle and looked round theroom. It was evidently a private den to which the owner of theapartment 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 layscattered everywhere and its contents had been rifled and flung on thefloor. 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 letout 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 buta minute before full of lusty life. But these had been victims ofwarfare in the open, usually of sudden passions that had flared andstruck. This was different. It was murder, deliberate, cold-blooded,atrocious. The man had been tied up, made helpless, and done to deathwithout mercy. There was a note of the abnormal, of the unhuman, aboutthe affair. Whoever had killed James Cunningham deserved the extremepenalty of the law.
He was a man who no doubt had made many enemies. Always he haddemanded his pound of flesh and got it. Some one had waited patientlyfor his hour and exacted a fearful vengeance for whatever wrong he hadsuffered.
Kirby decided that he must call the police at once. No time ought tobe lost in starting to run down the murderer. He stepped into theliving-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 asensation as though his heart had been plunged into cracked ice. Forhe recognized the glove on the table, knew who its owner was.
It was a small riding-gauntlet with a device of a rose embroidered onthe wrist. He would have known that glove among a thousand.
He had seen it, a few hours since, on the hand of Wild Rose.