ruck. 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.

CHAPTER VIII

BY MEANS OF THE FIRE ESCAPE

Kirby Lane stood with fascinated eyes looking down at the glove,
muscles and brain alike paralyzed. The receiver was in his hand, close
to his ear.

A voice from the other end of the wire drifted to him. "Number,
please."

Automatically he hung the receiver on the hook. Dazed though he was,
the rough rider knew that the police were the last people in the world
he wanted to see just now.

All his life he had lived the adventure of the outdoors. For twelve
months he had served at the front, part of the time with the forces in
the Argonne. He had ridden stampedes and fought through blizzards. He
had tamed the worst outlaw horses the West could produce. But he had
never been so shock-shaken as he was now. A fact impossibly but
dreadfully true confronted him. Wild Rose had been alone with his
uncle in these rooms, had listened with breathless horror while Kirby
climbed the stairs, had been trapped by his arrival, and had fought
like a wolf to make her escape. He remembered the wild cry of her
outraged heart, "Nothing's too bad for a man like that."

Lane was sick with fear. It ran through him and sapped his supple
strength like an illness. It was not possible that Rose could have
done this in her right m