he
apartment above when he had knocked on their door? If so, how did the
presence of Rose fit into the schedule?

Lane pounced on the fear and the evasion of the Hulls as an out for
Wild Rose. It was only a morsel of hope, but he made the most of it.

The newspaper was inclined to bring up stage the mysterious man who had
called up the police at 10.25 to tell them that Cunningham had been
murdered in his rooms. Who was this man? Could he be the murderer?
If so, why should he telephone the police and start immediately the
hunt after him? If not the killer, how did he know that a crime had
been committed less than an hour before?

As soon as he had eaten breakfast, Kirby walked round to the
boarding-house on Cherokee Street where Wild Rose was staying with her
sister. Rose was out, he learned from the landlady. He asked if he
might see her sister. His anxiety was so great he could not leave
without a word of her.

Presently Esther came down to the parlor where the young man waited for
her. Lane introduced himself as a friend of Rose. He was worried
about her, he said. She seemed to him in a highly wrought-up, nervous
state. He wondered if it would not be well to get her out of Denver.

Esther swallowed a lump in her throat. She had never seen Rose so
jumpy, she agreed. Last night she had gone out for an hour alone. The
look in her eyes when she had come back had frightened Esther. She had
gone at once to her bedroom and locked the door, but her sister had
heard her moving about for hours.

Then, suddenly, Esther's throat swelled and she began to sob. She knew
well enough that she was at the bottom of Wild Rose's worries.

"Where is she now?" asked Kirby gently.

"I don't know. She didn't tell me where she was going.
There's--there's something queer about her. I--I'm afraid."

"What are you afraid of?"

"She's so--so kinda fierce," Esther wailed.

It was impossible to explain, even to this big brown friend of Rose who
looked as though his quiet strength could move mountains. He was a
man. Besides, every instinct in her drove to keep hidden the secret
that some day would tell itself.

Her eyes fell. They rested on the "News" some boarder had tossed on
the table beside which she stood. Her thoughts were of herself and the
plight in which she had become involved. She looked at the big
headlines of the paper and for the moment did not see them. What she
did see was disgrace, the shipwrec