Tangled Trails A Western Detective Story

His head throbbed distressingly. Querulously he

new he was on the floor. Then his mind cleared and he remembered that a woma

nd what under heaven had hit him hard e

on the point of the chin and gone down like an axed bulloc

to his feet and moved toward the door. His mind was quite clear now and his senses abnormally sensitive. For

It was based on no reasoning, but on some obscure feeling that the

pite of the dread that grew on him till it filled his breast. Again he groped along the wall for t

se quite alien to tragedy. It was the home of a man who had given a good deal of attention to making himself comfortable. Indefinably, it was a man's r

houlder was perfect. The delicate, disdainful poise and the gay provocation in the dark, slanting eyes were enough to tell that she was no novice in the game of sex. He judged her an expensive orchid produced in the civilization of our twentieth-century hothou

ssed instantly that this was the weapon which had established contact with his chin. Very likely the woman's hand had closed on it when she heard

other door. It was closed. As the man from Wyoming moved toward it he felt once more a strange sensation of dread. It was strong enough to stop him in

ntly. Where? His memory jumped to a corridor of the Cheyenne hospital. He had been passing the operating-room on his way to see Wild Ros

flashed on the lights. Sound though Kirby Lane's ner

ed 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 possib

to his hand lay a half-smoked cigar. There was a grewsome suggestion in the tilt of the head

a private den to which the owner of the apartment retired. There were facilities for smoki

red everywhere and its contents had been rifled and flung on the fl

let out the fumes of the chloroform. Kirby stepped to it and looke

d been victims of warfare in the open, usually of sudden passions that had flared and struck. This was different. It was murder, deliberate, cold-blooded, atrocious. The man had been tied up,

his pound of flesh and got it. Some one had waited patiently for his h

ting to run down the murderer. He stepped into the living-room to the telephone, lif

nsation as though his heart had been plunged into cracked ice. F

e of a rose embroidered on the wrist. He wo

w hours since, on th