Tangled Trails: A Western Detective Story
CHAPTER IX
THE STORY IN THE "NEWS"
From a booth in a drug-store on Sixteenth Street Kirby telephoned thepolice that James Cunningham had been murdered at his home in theParadox Apartments. He stayed to answer no questions, but hung up atonce. From a side door of the store he stepped out to Welton Streetand walked to his hotel.
He passed a wretched night. The distress that flooded his mind was dueless to his own danger than to his anxiety for Rose. His course ofaction was not at all clear to him in case he should be identified asthe man who had been seen going to and coming from the apartment of themurdered man. He could not explain why he was there withoutimplicating Rose and her sister. He would not betray them. That ofcourse. But he had told his cousins why he was going. Would theirstory not start a hunt for the woman in the case?
Man is an illogical biped. Before Kirby had seen the glove on thetable and associated it with the crime, his feeling had been that thegallows was the proper end of so cruel a murderer. Now he not onlyintended to protect Rose, but his heart was filled with pity for her.He understood her better than he did any other woman, her loyalty andlove 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 littlefriend he had come to know and like so well, but a tortured womanbeside herself with grief for the sister to whom she had always been amother too.
He slept little, and that brokenly. With the dawn he was out on thestreet to buy a copy of the "News." The story of the murder had thetwo columns on the right-hand side of the front page and broke over tothe 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 awell-known character, several times a millionaire. His death even byillness would have been worth a column. But the horrible and grewsomeway of his taking off, the mystery surrounding it, the absence of anyapparent motive unless it were revenge, all whetted the appetite of theeditors. It was a big "story," one that would run for many days, andthe "News" played it strong.
As Kirby had expected, he was selected as the probable assassin. Areporter had interviewed Mr. and Mrs. Cass Hull, who occupied theapartment just below that of the murdered man. They had told him thata young man, a stranger to them, powerfully built and dressed like aprosperous ranchman, had knocked on their door about 9.20 to ask theway to the apartment of Cunningham. Hull explained that he rememberedthe time particularly because he happened to be winding the clock atthe moment.
A description of Lane was given in a two-column "box." He read it withno amusement. It was too deadly accurate for comfort.
The supposed assassin of James Cunningham is described by Mrs. CassHull as dressed in a pepper-and-salt suit and a white, pinched-incattleman's hat. He is about six feet tall, between 25 and 30 yearsold, weighing about 200 or perhaps 210 pounds. His hair is a lightbrown and his face tanned from the sun.
His age and his weight were overstated, and his clothes were almost akhaki brown. Otherwise Mrs. Hull had given a very close description ofhim, 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 ontheir door, unless it was a printer's error or the reporter had made amistake. Kirby knew this was wrong. He had looked at his watch justbefore he had entered the Paradox Apartment. He had stopped directlyunder 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 boththeir faces. Did they know more about the murder than they pretended?When he had mentioned his uncle's name the woman had been close tocollapse, though, of course, he could not be sure that had been thereason. To his mind there flashed the memory of the note he had seenon the table. The man had called on Cunningham and left word he mightcall again. Was it possible the Hulls had just come down from theapartment above when he had knocked on their door? If so, how did thepresence of Rose fit into the schedule?
Lane pounced on the fear and the evasion of the Hulls as an out forWild 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 hadcalled up the police at 10.25 to tell them that Cunningham had beenmurdered in his rooms. Who was this man? Could he be the murderer?If so, why should he telephone the police and start immediately thehunt after him? If not the killer, how did he know that a crime hadbeen committed less than an hour before?
As soon as he had eaten breakfast, Kirby walked round to theboarding-house on Cherokee Street where Wild Rose was staying with hersister. Rose was out, he learned from the landlady. He asked if hemight see her sister. His anxiety was so great he could not leavewithout a word of her.
Presently Esther came down to the parlor where the young man waited forher. Lane introduced himself as a friend of Rose. He was worriedabout her, he said. She seemed to him in a highly wrought-up, nervousstate. 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 sojumpy, she agreed. Last night she had gone out for an hour alone. Thelook in her eyes when she had come back had frightened Esther. She hadgone at once to her bedroom and locked the door, but her sister hadheard her moving about for hours.
Then, suddenly, Esther's throat swelled and she began to sob. She knewwell 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 wholooked as though his quiet strength could move mountains. He was aman. Besides, every instinct in her drove to keep hidden the secretthat some day would tell itself.
Her eyes fell. They rested on the "News" some boarder had tossed onthe table beside which she stood. Her thoughts were of herself and theplight in which she had become involved. She looked at the bigheadlines of the paper and for the moment did not see them. What shedid see was disgrace, the shipwreck of the young life she loved so much.
Her pupils dilated. The words of the headline penetrated to the brain.A hand clutched at her heart. She read again hazily--
JAMES CUNNINGHAM MURDERED
--then collapsed fainting into a chair.