n 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
st