Tangled Trails: A Western Detective StoryRaine, William MacLeod
General
Tangled Trails: A Western Detective Story
Raine, William MacLeod
Detective and mystery stories; Western stories
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, several times a millionaire. His death even by
illness would have been worth a column. But the horrible and grewsome
way of his taking off, the mystery surrounding it, the absence of any
apparent motive unless it were revenge, all whetted the appetite of the
editors. It was a big "story," one that would run for many days, and
the "News" played it strong.
As Kirby had expected, he was selected as the probable assassin. A
reporter had interviewed Mr. and Mrs. Cass Hull, who occupied the
apartment just below that of the murdered man. They had told him that
a young man, a stranger to them, powerfully built and dressed like a
prosperous ranchman, had knocked on their door about 9.20 to ask the
way to the apartment of Cunningham. Hull explained that he remembered
the time particularly because he happened to be winding the clock at
the moment.
A description of Lane was given in a two-column "box." He read it with
no amusement. It was too deadly accurate for comfort.
The supposed assassin of James Cunningham is described by Mrs. Cass
Hull as dressed in a pepper-and-salt suit and a white, pinched-in
cattleman's hat. He is about six feet tall, between 25 and 30 years
old, weighing about 200 or perhaps 210 pounds. His hair is a light
brown and his face tanned from the sun.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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