Yet one adornment caught Kirby’s eye at once.  It was a large photograph in a handsome frame on the table.  The picture showed the head and bust of a beautiful woman in evening dress.  She was a brunette, young and very attractive.  The line of head, throat, and shoulder 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 hothouse.  Across the bottom of the picture was scrawled an inscription in a fashionably angular hand.  Lane moved closer to read it.  The words were, “Always, Phyllis.”  Probably this was the young woman to whom, if rumor were true, James Cunningham, Senior, was engaged.

On the floor, near where Kirby had been lying, lay a heavy piece of agate evidently used for a paperweight.  He picked up the smooth stone and guessed 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 him coming.  She had switched off the light and waited for him.  That the blow had found a vulnerable mark and knocked him out had been sheer luck.

Kirby passed into a luxurious bedroom beyond which was a tiled bathroom.  He glanced these over and returned to the outer apartment.  There was still another 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 his stride.  What was he going to find behind that door?  When he laid his hand on the knob pinpricks played over his scalp and galloped down his spine.

He opened the door.  A sweet sickish odor, pungent but not heavy, greeted his nostrils.  It was a familiar smell, one he had met only recently.  Where?  His memory jumped to a corridor of the Cheyenne hospital.  He had been passing the operating-room on his way to see Wild Rose.  The door had opened and there had been wafted to him faintly the penetrating whiff of chloroform.  It was the same drug he sniffed now.

He stood on the threshold, groped for the switch, and flashed on the lights.  Sound though Kirby Lane’s nerves were, he could not repress a gasp at what he saw.

Leaning back in an armchair, looking up at him with a horrible sardonic grin, was his uncle James Cunningham.  His wrists were tied with ropes to the arms of the chair.  A towel, passed 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 possibility of doubt.  There was a small hole in the center of the forehead through which a bullet had crashed.  Beneath this was a thin trickle of blood that had run into the heavy eyebrows.

The dead man was wearing a plaid smoking-jacket and oxblood slippers.  On the tabouret close to his hand lay a half-smoked cigar.  There was a grewsome suggestion in the tilt of the head and the gargoyle grin that this was a hideous and shocking jest he was playing on the world.