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 throat 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.
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.