Tangled Trails Part 47

But this is the point I'm makin' now. If you like I'll leave a statement here signed by me to the effect that neither you nor your husband has confessed killing James Cunningham. It might make your mind a little easier to have it."

She hesitated. "Well, if you like."

He stepped to a desk and found paper and pen. "I'll dictate it if you'll write it, Mrs. Hull."

Not quite easy in her mind, the woman sat down and took the pen he offered.

"This is to certify--" Kirby began, and dictated a few sentences slowly.

She wrote the statement, word for word as he gave it, _using her left hand_. The cattleman signed it. He left the paper with her.

After the arrangement for the private detective to watch Hull had been made, Olson and Lane walked together to the hotel of the latter.

"Come up to my room a minute and let's talk things over," Kirby suggested.

As soon as the door was closed, the man from Twin b.u.t.tes turned on the farmer and flung a swift demand at him.

"Now, Olson, I'll hear the rest of your story."

The eyes of the Swede grew hard and narrow. "What's bitin' you? I've told you my story."

"Some of it. Not all of it."

"Whadjamean?"

"You told me what you saw from the fire escape of the Wyndham, but _you didn't tell what you saw from the fire escape of the Paradox_."

"Who says I saw anything from there?"

"I say so."

"You tryin' to hang this killin' on me?" demanded Olson angrily.

"Not if you didn't do it." Kirby looked at him quietly, speculatively, undisturbed by the heaviness of his frown. "But you come to me an'

tell the story of what you saw. So you say. Yet all the time you're holdin' back. Why? What's your reason?"

"How do you know I'm holdin' back?" the ranchman asked sulkily.

Kirby knew that in his mind suspicion, dread, fear, hatred, and the desire for revenge were once more at open war.

"I'll tell you what you did that night," answered Kirby, without the least trace of doubt in voice or manner. "When Mrs. Hull pulled down the blind, you ran up to the roof an' cut down the clothes-line. You went back to the fire escape, fixed up some kind of a lariat, an' flung the loop over an abutment stickin' from the wall of the Paradox. You swung across to the fire escape of the Paradox. There you could see into the room where Cunningham was tied to the chair."

"How could I if the blind was down?"

"The blind doesn't fit close to the woodwork of the window. Lookin' in from the right, you can see the left half of the room. If you look in from the other side, you see the other part of it. That's just what you did."

For the moment Olson was struck dumb. How could this man know exactly what he had done unless some one had seen him?

"You know so much I reckon I'll let you tell the rest," the Scandinavian said with uneasy sarcasm.

"Afraid you'll have to talk, Olson. Either to me or to the Chief at headquarters. You've become a live suspect. Figure it out yourself.

You threaten Cunningham by mail. You make threats before people orally. You come to Denver an' take a room in the next house to where he lives. On the night he's killed, by your own admission, you stand on the platform a few feet away an' raise no alarm while you see him slugged. Later, you hear the shot that kills him an' still you don't call the officers. Yet you're so interested in the crime that you run upstairs, cut down the clothes-line, an' at some danger swing over to the Paradox. The question the police will want to know is whether the man who does this an' then keeps it secret may not have the best reason in the world for not wanting it known."

"What you mean--the best reason in the world?"

"They'll ask what's to have prevented you from openin' the window an'

steppin' in while my uncle was tied up, from shootin' him an' slippin'

down the fire escape, an' from walkin' back upstairs to your own room at the Wyndham."

"Are you claimin' that I killed him?" Olson wanted to know.

"I'm tellin' you that the police will surely raise the question."

"If they do I'll tell 'em who did," the rancher blurted out wildly.

"I'd tell 'em first, it I were in your place. It'll have a lot more weight than if you keep still until your back's against the wall."

"When I do you'll sit up an' take notice. The man who shot Cunningham is yore own cousin," the Dry Valley man flung out vindictively.

"Which one?"

"The smug one--James."

"You saw him do it?"

"I heard the shot while I was on the roof. When I looked round the edge of the blind five minutes later, he was goin' over the papers in the desk--and an automatic pistol was there right by his hand."

"He was alone?"

"At first he was. In about a minute his brother an' Miss Harriman came into the room. She screamed when she saw yore uncle an' most fainted.

The other brother, the young one, kinda caught her an' steadied her.

He was struck all of a heap himself. You could see that. He looked at James, an' he said, 'My G.o.d, you didn't--' That was all. No need to finish. O' course James denied it. He'd jumped up to help support Miss Harriman outa the room. Maybe a coupla minutes later he came back alone. He went right straight back to the desk, found inside of three seconds the legal doc.u.ment I told you I'd seen his uncle reading glanced it over, turned to the back page, jammed the paper back in the cubby-hole, an' then switched off the light. A minute later the light was switched off in the big room, too. Then I reckoned it was time to beat it down the fire escape. I did. I went back into the Wyndham carryin' the clothes-line under my coat, walked upstairs without meetin' anybody, left the rope on the roof, an' got outa the house without being seen."

"That's the whole story?" Kirby said.

"The whole story. I'd swear it on a stack of Bibles."

"Did you fix the rope for a lariat up on the roof or wait till you came back to the fire escape?"

"I fixed it on the roof--made the loop an' all there. Figured I might be seen if I stood around too long on the platform."

"So that you must 'a' been away quite a little while."

"I reckon so. Prob'ly a quarter of an hour or more."

"Can you locate more definitely the exact time you heard the shot?"

"No, I don't reckon I can."