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Tangled Trails

<h2 id="id02281" style="margin-top: 4em">CHAPTER XL</h2> <h5 id="id02282">THE MILLS OF THE GODS</h5> Kirby Lane did not waste the two hours that lay before the appointment he had made for a meeting at the office of his cousin James. He had a talk with the Hulls and another with the Chief of Police. He saw Olson and Rose McLean. He even found the time to forge two initials at the foot of a typewritten note on the stationery of James Cunningham, and to send the note to its destination by a messenger. Rose met him by appointment at the entrance to the Equitable Building and they rode up in the elevator together to the office of his cousin. Miss Harriman, as she still called herself in public, was there with Jack and her husband. James was ice-cold. He bowed very slightly to Rose. Chairs were already placed. For a moment Kirby was embarrassed. He drew James aside. Cunningham murmured an exchange of sentences with his wife, then escorted her to the door. Rose was left with the three cousins. "I suppose Jack has told you of the marriage of Esther McLean," Kirby said as soon as the door had been closed. James bowed, still very stiffly. Kirby met him, eye to eye. He spoke very quietly and clearly. "I want to open the meetin' by tellin' you on behalf of this young woman an' myself that we think you an unmitigated cur. We are debarred from sayin' so before your wife, but it's a pleasure to tell you so in private. Is that quite clear?" The oil broker flushed darkly. He made no answer. "You not only took advantage of a young woman's tender heart. You were willin' our dead uncle should bear the blame for it. Have you any other word than the one I have used to suggest as a more fittin' one?" the Wyoming man asked bitingly. Jack answered for his brother. "Suppose we pass that count of the indictment, unless you have a practical measure to suggest in connection with it. We plead guilty." There wag a little gleam of mirth in Kirby's eyes. "You an' I have discussed the matter already, Jack. I regret I expressed my opinion so vigorously then. We have nothin' practical to suggest, if you are referrin' to any form of compensation. Esther is happily married, thank God. All we want is to make it perfectly plain what we think of Mr. James Cunningham." James acknowledged this and answered. "That is quite clear. I may say that I entirely concur in your estimate of my conduct. I might make explanations, but I can make none that justify me to myself." "In that case we may consider the subject closed, unless Miss McLean has something to say." Kirby turned to Rose. She looked at James Cunningham, and he might have been the dirt under her feet. "I have nothing whatever to say, Kirby. You express my sentiments exactly." "Very well. Then we might open the door and invite in Miss Harriman. There are others who should be along soon that have a claim also to be present." "What others?" asked Jack Cunningham. "The other suspects in the case. I prefer to have them all here." "Any one else?" "The Chief of Police." James looked at him hard. "This is not a private conference, then?" "That's a matter of definitions. I have invited only those who have a claim to be present," Kirby answered. "To my office, I think." "If you prefer the Chief's office we'll adjourn an' go there." The broker shrugged. "Oh, very well." Kirby stepped to the door connecting with an outer office and threw it open. Mr. and Mrs. Hull, Olson, and the Chief of Police followed Phyllis Harriman into the room. More chairs were brought in. The Chief sat nearest the door, one leg thrown lazily across the other. He had a fat brown cigar in his hand. Sometimes he chewed on the end of it, but he was not smoking. He was an Irishman, and as it happened open-minded. He liked this brown-faced young fellow from Wyoming—never had believed him guilty from the first. Moreover, he was willing his detective bureau should get a jolt from an outsider. It might spur them up in future. "Chief, is there anything you want to say?" Kirby asked. "Not a wor-rd. I'm sittin' in a parquet seat. It's your show, son." Kirby's disarming smile won the Chief's heart. "I want to say now that I've talked with the Chief several times. He's given me a lot of good tips an' I've worked under his direction." The head of the police force grinned. The tips he had given Lane had been of no value, but he was quite willing to take any public credit there might be. He sat back and listened now while Kirby told his story. "Outside of the Chief every one here is connected closely with this case an' is involved in it. It happens that every man an' woman of us were in my uncle's apartments either at the time of his death or just before or after." Kirby raised a hand to meet Olson's protest. "Oh, I know. You weren't in the rooms, but you were on the fire escape outside. From the angle of the police you may have been in. All you had to do was to pass through an open window." There was a moment's silence, while Kirby hesitated in what order to tell his facts. Hull mopped the back of his overflowing neck. Phyllis Cunningham moistened her dry lips. A chord in her throat ached tensely. "Suspicion fell first on me an' on Hull," Kirby went on. "You've seen it all thrashed out in the papers. I had been unfriendly to my uncle for years, an' I was seen goin' to his rooms an' leavin' them that evening. My own suspicion was directed to Hull, especially when he an' Mrs. Hull at the coroner's inquest changed the time so as to get me into my uncle's apartment half an hour earlier than I had been there. I'd caught them in a panic of terror when I knocked on their door. They'd lied to get me into trouble. Hull had quarreled with Uncle James an' had threatened to go after him with a gun in two days after that time—and it was just forty-eight hours later he was killed. It looked a lot like Hull to me. "I had one big advantage, Chief, a lot of inside facts not open to you," the cattleman explained. "I knew, for instance, that Miss McLean here had been in the rooms just before me. She was the young woman my uncle had the appointment to meet there before ten o'clock. You will remember Mr. Blanton's testimony. Miss McLean an' I compared notes, so we were able to shave down the time during which the murder must have taken place. We worked together. She gave me other important data. Perhaps she had better tell in her own words about the clue she found that we followed." Rose turned to the Chief. Her young face flew a charming flag of color. Her hair, in crisp tendrils beneath the edge of the small hat she wore, was the ripe gold of wheat-tips in the shock. The tender blue of violets was in her eyes. "I told you about how I found Mr. Cunningham tied to his chair, Chief. I forgot to say that in the living-room there was a faint odor of perfume. On my way upstairs I passed in the dark a man and a woman. I had got a whiff of the same perfume then. It was violet. So I knew they had been in the apartment just before me. Mr. Lane discovered later that Miss Harriman used that scent." "Which opened up a new field of speculation," Kirby went on. "We began to run down facts an' learned that my cousin James had secretly married Miss Harriman at Golden a month before. My uncle had just learned the news. He had a new will made by his lawyer, one that cut James off without a cent an' left his property to Jack Cunningham." "That will was never signed," Jack broke in quickly. Kirby looked at Jack and smiled cynically. "No, it was never signed. Your brother discovered that when he looked the will over at Uncle's desk a few minutes after his death." James did not wink an eye in distress. The hand of the woman sitting beside him went out instantly to his in a warm, swift pressure. She was white to the lips, but her thought was for the man she loved and not for herself. Kirby scored another mark to her credit. "Cumulative evidence pointed to James Cunningham," continued Kirby. "He tried to destroy the proof of his marriage to Miss Harriman. He later pretended to lose an important paper that might have cleared up the case. He tried to get me to drop the matter an' go back to Wyoming. The coil wound closer round him. "About this time another factor attracted my attention. I had the good luck to unearth at Dry Valley the man who had written threatenin' letters to my uncle an' to discover that he was stayin' next door to the Paradox the very night of the murder. More, my friend Sanborn an' I guessed he had actually been on the fire escape of the Wyndham an' seen somethin' of importance through the window. Later I forced a statement from Olson. He told all he had seen that night." Kirby turned to the rancher from Dry Valley and had him tell his story. When he had finished, the cattleman made comment. "On the face of it Olson's story leaves in doubt the question of who actually killed my uncle. If he was tellin' the whole truth, his evidence points either to the Hulls or my cousin James. But it was quite possible he had seen my uncle tied up an' helpless, an' had himself stepped through the window an' shot him. Am I right, Chief?" The Chief nodded grimly. "Right, son." "You told me you didn't think I did it," Olson burst out bitterly. "An' I tell you so again," Kirby answered, smiling. "I was mentionin' possibilities. On your evidence it lies between my cousin James an' the Hulls. It was the Hulls that had tied him up after Cass Hull knocked him senseless. It was Hull who had given him two days more to live. And that's not all. Not an hour an' a half ago I had a talk with Mrs. Hull. She admitted, under pressure, that she returned to my uncle's apartment again to release him from the chair. She was alone with him, an' he was wholly in her power. She is a woman with a passionate sense of injury. What happened then nobody else saw." Mrs. Hull opened her yellow, wrinkled lips to speak, but Kirby checked her. "Not yet, Mrs. Hull. I'll return to the subject. If you wish you can defend yourself then." He stopped a second time to find the logical way of proceeding with his story. The silence in the room was tense. The proverbial pin could have been heard. Only one person in the room except Kirby knew where the lightning was going to strike. That person sat by the door chewing the end of a cigar impassively. A woman gave a strangled little sob of pent emotion. "I've been leaving Horikawa out of the story," the cattleman went on. "I've got to bring him in now. He's the hinge on which it all swings. The man or woman that killed my uncle killed Horikawa too." James Cunningham, sitting opposite Kirby with his cold eyes steadily fixed on him, for the first time gave visible sign of his anxiety. It came in the form of a little gulping sound in his throat. "Cole Sanborn and I found Horikawa in the room where he had been killed. The doctors thought he must have been dead about a day. Just a day before this time Miss McLean an' I met James Cunningham comin' out of the Paragon. He was white an' shaking. He was sufferin' from nausea, an' his arm was badly strained. He explained it by sayin' he had fallen downstairs. Later, I wondered about that fall. I'm still wonderin'. Had he just come out of the apartment where Horikawa was hidin'? Had the tendons of that arm been strained by a jiu-jitsu twist? And had he left Horikawa behind him dead on the bed?" James, white to the lips, looked steadily at his cousin. "A very ingenious theory. I've always complimented you on your imagination," he said, a little hoarsely, as though from a parched throat. "You do not desire to make any explanation?" Kirby asked. "Thanks, no. I'm not on trial for my life here, am I?" answered the oil broker quietly, with obvious irony. His wife was sobbing softly. The man's arm went round her and tightened in wordless comfort. From his pocket Kirby drew the envelope upon which he had a few hours earlier penciled the time schedule relating to his uncle's death. "One of the points that struck me earliest about this mystery was that the man who solved it would have to work out pretty closely the time element. Inside of an hour ten people beside Uncle James were in his rooms. They must 'a' trod on each other's heels right fast, I figured. So I checked up the time as carefully as I could. Here's the schedule I made out. Mebbe you'd like to see it." He handed the envelope to James. Jack rose and looked over his brother's shoulder. His quick eye ran down the list. "I get the rest of it," he said. "But what does X mean?" "X is the ten minutes of Uncle's time I can't account for. Some of us were with him practically every other minute. X is the whole unknown quantity. It is the time in which he was prob'ly actually killed. It is the man who may, by some thousandth chance, have stepped into the room an' killed him while none of us were present," explained Kirby. "If there is such an unknown man you can cut the time down to five minutes instead of ten, providing your schedule is correct," James cut in. "For according to it I was there part of the time and Mrs. Hull part of the rest of it." "Yes," agreed his cousin. "But you may have decided that Mrs. Hull is X or that I am," jeered James. "If so, of course that ends it. No need for a judge or jury." Kirby turned to the man by the door. "Chief, one of the queer things about this mystery is that all the witnesses had somethin' to conceal. Go right through the list, an' it's true of every one of us. I'm talkin' about the important witnesses, of course. Well, Cole an' I found a paper in the living-room of the apartment where Horikawa was killed. It was in Japanese. I ought to have turned it over to you, but I didn't. I was kinda playin' a lone hand. At that time I didn't suspect my cousin James at all. We were workin' together on this thing. At least I thought so. I found out better later. I took the paper to him to get it translated, thinkin' maybe Horikawa might have written some kind of a confession. James lost that paper. Anyhow, he claimed he did. My theory is that Horikawa had some evidence against him. He was afraid of what that paper would tell." "Unfortunately for your theory it was a clerk of mine who lost the paper. I had nothing to do with it," James retorted coldly. "No doubt the paper has been destroyed, but not by me. Quite by accident, I judge." His cousin let off a bomb beneath the broker's feet. "You'll be glad to know that the paper wasn't destroyed," he said. "I have it, with a translation, in my pocket at the present moment." James clutched the arms of his chair. His knuckles grew white with the strain. "Where—where did you find it?" he managed to say. "In the most private drawer of your safe, where you hid it," Kirby replied quietly. Cunningham visibly fought for his composure. He did not speak until he had perfect self-control. Then it was with a sneer. "And this paper which you allege you found in my safe—after a burglary which, no doubt, you know is very much against the law—does it convict me of the murder of my uncle?" The tension in the room was nerve-shattering. Men and women suspended breathing while they waited for an answer. "On the contrary, it acquits you of any guilt whatever in the matter." Phyllis Cunningham gave a broken little sob and collapsed into her husband's arms. Jack rose, his face working, and caught his brother by the shoulder. These two had suffered greatly, not only because of their fear for him, but because of the fear of his guilt that had poisoned their peace. James, too, was moved, as much by their love for him as by the sudden relief that had lifted from his heart. But his pride held him outwardly cold. "Since you've decided I didn't do it, Mr. Lane, perhaps you'll tell us then who did," he suggested presently. There came a knock at the door. A whimsical smile twitched at the corners of Kirby's mouth. He did not often have a chance for dramatics like this. "Why, yes, that seems fair enough," he answered. "He's knockin' at the door now. Enter X." <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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