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 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.