d unexpectedly and the fire escape looked good to
you. Am I right?"

The Wyoming man managed a grin. It was not a mirthful one, but it
served.

"You're a wizard," he said admiringly.

The reporter had met a bootlegger earlier in the evening and had two or
three drinks. He was mellow. "Oh, I'm wise," he said with a wink.
"Chuck Ellis isn't anybody's fool. Beat it, Lothario, while the
beating's good." The last sentence and the gesture that accompanied
the words were humorous exaggerations of old-time melodrama.

Lane took his advice without delay.

CHAPTER IX

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, seve