killin' of my uncle an' was hired by the other man to keep away. Then
he learns from the papers that he's suspected, an' he gets anxious to
go to the police with what he knows. Wouldn't there be reason enough
then to kill him? The other man would have to do it to save himself."

"I reckon." Cole harked back to a preceding suggestion. "The revenge
theory won't hold water. If some friend of yore uncle knew the Jap had
killed him he'd sick the law on him. He wouldn't pull off any private
execution like this."

Kirby accepted this. "That's true. There's another possibility.
We've been forgettin' the two thousand dollars my uncle drew from the
bank the day he was killed. If Horikawa an' some one else are guilty
of the murder an' the theft, they might have quarreled later over the
money. Perhaps the accomplice saw a chance to get away with the whole
of it by gettin' rid of Horikawa."

"Mebbeso. By what you tell me yore uncle was a big, two-fisted
scrapper. It was a two-man job to handle him. This li'l' Jap never in
the world did it alone. What it gets back to is that he was prob'ly in
on it an' later for some reason his pardner gunned him."

"Well, we'd better telephone for the police an' let them do some of the
worryin'."

Kirby stepped into the living-room, followed by his friend. He was
about to reach for the receiver when an exclamation stopped him.
Sanborn was standing before a small writing-desk, of which he had just
let down the top. He had lifted idly a piece of blotting-paper and was
gazing down at a sheet of paper with writing on it.

"Looky here, Kirby," he called.

In three strides Lane was beside him. His eyes, too, fastened on the
sheet and found there the pot-hooks we have learned to associate with
Chinese and Japanese chirography.

"Shows he'd been makin' himself at home," the champion rough rider said.

Lane picked up the paper. There were two or three sheets of the
writing. "Might be a letter to his folks--or it might be--" His
sentence flickered out. He was thinking. "I reckon I'll take this
along with me an' have it translated, Cole."

He put the sheets in his pocket after he had folded them. "You never
can tell. I might as well know what this Horikawa was thinkin' about
first off as the police. There's just an off chance he might 'a' seen
Rose that night an' tells about it here."

A moment later he was telephoning to the City Hall for the police.

There was the sou