Kirby stepped lightly to the railing, edged far out with his weight on the ledge, and swung to the window-sill.  The sash yielded to the pressure of his hands and moved up.  A moment later he disappeared from Sanborn’s view into the room.

It was the living-room of the apartment into which Lane had stepped.  The walls were papered with blue and the rug was a figured yellow and blue.  The furniture was of fumed oak, the chairs leather-padded.

The self-invited guest met his first surprise on the table.  It was littered with two or three newspapers.  The date of the uppermost caught his eye.  It was a copy of the “Post” of the twenty-fifth.  He looked at the other papers.  One was the “Times” and another the “News,” dated respectively the twenty-fourth and the twenty-sixth.  There was an “Express” of the twenty-eighth.  Each contained long accounts of the developments in the Cunningham murder mystery.

How did these papers come here?  The apartment was closed, its tenant in Chicago.  The only other persons who had a key and the right of entry were Horikawa and the Paradox janitor, and the house servant had fled to parts unknown.  Who, then, had brought these papers here?  And why?  Some one, Lane guessed, who was vitally interested in the murder.  He based his presumption on one circumstance.  The sections of the newspapers which made no reference to the Cunningham affair had been jammed into the waste-paper basket close to an adjoining desk.

The apartment held two rooms, a buffet kitchen and a bathroom.  Kirby opened the door into the bedroom.

He stood paralyzed on the threshold.  On the bed, fully dressed, his legs stretched in front of him and his feet crossed, was the missing man Horikawa.  His torso was propped up against the brass posts of the bedstead.  A handkerchief encircled each arm and bound it to the brass upright behind.

In the forehead, just above the slant, oval eyes, was a bullet hole.  The man had probably been dead for a day, at least for a good many hours.

The cattleman had no doubt that it was Horikawa.  His picture, a good snapshot taken by a former employer at a picnic where the Japanese had served the luncheon, had appeared in all the papers and on handbills sent out by James Cunningham, Junior.  There was a scar, Y-shaped and ragged, just above the left eye, that made identification easy.

Kirby stepped to the window of the living-room and called to his friend.

“Want me to help you gather the loot?” chaffed Cole.

“Serious business, old man,” Kirby told him, and the look on his face backed the words.

Sanborn swung across to the window and came through.

“What is it?” he asked quickly.

“I’ve found Horikawa.”

“Found him—­where?”

The eyes of the men met and Cole guessed that grim tragedy was in the air.  He followed Kirby to the bedroom.