The seventh shot A detective story
ever paid him any wages to speak of; whatever it was that held them
together, it wasn’t cash. He’s touched me more than once, poor old
beggar!”
“You! Why you?”
“I don’t know,” said Willie simply. “People always do!”
Good little fellow! Of course, people always did.
“And you think he’d come and borrow money from you, if he meant to
leave town?”
“I’d not be surprised.”
And, as a matter of fact, he did come that very day and for that very
reason; and Willie, having ascertained his address, gave it to Barrison
over the wire.
“I feel rather rotten about telling you, too,” he added. “I don’t know
what you want him for, and the poor old guy is awfully cut up about
something—scared blue, I should say. Say, Barrison, you don’t suspect
_him_, do you?”
“Lord, no! But I think he knows who did it.”
Willie grunted uncomfortably. “Well, treat him decently,” he urged.
“I’m not exactly an inquisitor in my methods, you know,” Jim told him.
“How much money did you lend him, Willie?”
“Only a ten spot,” said Willie innocently.
Barrison laughed and said good-by.
Within the hour, he was at the address given him by Coster. It proved
to be a shabby, dingy little lodging house east of Second Avenue, and
the few men whom the young man met slouching in and out were as shabby
and dingy as the place, and had, he thought, a furtive look. Sized up
roughly, it had a drably disreputable appearance, as though connected
with small, sordid crimes and the unpicturesque derelicts of the
underworld.
In a dreary hall bedroom on the third floor, he finally found Wrenn.
The old man opened the door with evident caution in response to
Barrison’s knock, and when he saw the detective, his face became rigid
with a terror which he did not even attempt to conceal. Mutely, he
stood back and let the visitor enter, closing the door with trembling
hands. Then, still speechless, he turned and faced him, his anguished
eyes more eloquent than any words could have been. Jim was touched by
the man’s misery. He could guess something of what he must be suffering
on his daughter’s account.
“Don’t look like that, Wrenn,” he said kindly. “I’ve only come to have
a talk with you.”
The old man bent forward with sudden eagerness. “Then,” he faltered,
“you’ve not come to tell me—of—her arrest, sir?”
“No,” said Barrison; “I don’t even know where she is. Sit down, man;
you look done up.”
Wrenn sank onto the bed, and sat there, his wrinkled face working with
emotion.
“I was afraid you’d arrested her, sir!” he managed to say, after a
moment, in broken tones.
“You had been expecting that?”
He nodded. “I’ve known that the—the police were bound to find out some
time that she’d been in the theater that night, and I knew what that
would mean. She _would_ come, though I tried so hard to prevent her!
She _would_ come!”
“Wrenn,” said Barrison deliberately, “it’s a pretty tough question to
put to you, but—did she shoot Mortimer?”
Wrenn looked at him with haggard eyes. “Before God, Mr. Barrison,” he
said earnestly, “I don’t know, I don’t know! I didn’t _see_ her shoot
him, but—I know she meant to.”
“You know that!” exclaimed Barrison.
“I know that she had threatened him more than once, and—it was her
pistol. You knew that, sir?”
“Yes, I knew that. Go on!”
“I’d better tell you the whole story, sir. I’m getting old, and it’s
weighed on me too long—too long! If you don’t mind, sir, I’ll go back
to the beginning.”
CHAPTER XXVI
WRENN’S STORY
“I was born in the West,” said Wrenn, “and I was fairly well educated,
but while I was still in college—a small, fresh-water university—I got
into bad company, and was expelled. My people disowned me after that,
and I drifted into the sort of ‘adventurous’ life that attracts so many
young men. I never really liked the idea of living dishonestly, but I
didn’t seem good for much else. I had not worked hard at college, and I
had no particular ambitions, one way or another. I suppose I was lazy,
and I know that I was very weak. Eventually I became what you, sir,
would call a crook, though for a long time I tried to gloss it over
and pretend it was just taking a chance or living by my wits, and the
rest of it! Then I got more hardened, and admitted even to myself that
I was no better than the rest of the crowd I went with—a cheat, a card
sharper, a petty criminal. Twice I was in jail for short terms, and I
don’t think either experience improved me much.
“Then I married. She was a high-class Mexican girl—very beautiful. She
was a Catholic, and had an idea of reforming me. So she did, for a
short time, but the old wild longings came back. I’d settled down in a
job as foreman on an Arizona ranch, and I was working hard and drawing
good pay. We had two little girls, and things were going pretty well.
Then my wife died, and I got reckless again.
“There was a tough bunch of cow-punchers in our outfit, and we got to
gambling a lot, and pretty soon I found out that it was easier and more
exciting to win when I played crooked than when I played straight.
And there were others who felt the same way. We formed a sort of
combination—a gang. And we did very well, indeed.”
Barrison sat and stared at the mild, respectable old fellow, who so
patently and typically looked the part of a decent, sober, and trusty
servant, and tried to visualize him as a bold, bad man of the wicked
West. But some things are past the powers of the human imagination. He
thought, with a sort of grimly humorous awe, of the strange alchemy of
time, and shook his head, giving the problem up, as have better and
wiser men before him.
Wrenn went on with his story:
“My girls were brought up in a rough-and-tumble way, I’m afraid. It
affected them differently. The older Caterina—she was named for her
mother—never took kindly to it. She was selfish and headstrong—they
both were, for that matter. But I think Marita had more heart. Not that
I ever called out much affection in either of them!”
He bent his gray head for a moment.
“Anyway, I didn’t give them much of a bringing up. Marita knocked
about with the boys and learned to ride like a puncher herself. But
Caterina—Kitty, we called her—hated the whole life, and when a rich
prospector came along, she threw us over like a shot and went away with
him. She was only just eighteen, but she was ambitious already. She
wanted to get some pleasure out of life, as she had said twenty times a
day since she could speak. I—I shall not mention her name, sir—the name
which she is known by now, for—you would know it.”
It was odd, the way he dropped so constantly into the respectful “sir,”
and all the air and manner of a servant. It was clear that his was one
of those pliable natures that can be molded by life and conditions
into almost any shape. His instinct of fatherhood, his late-awakened
sense of conscience, responsibility and compunction, were struggling up
painfully through the accumulated handicap of a lifetime of habit.
“I know her name,” Barrison said quietly. “You mean Kitty Legaye, don’t
you?”
The start that Wrenn gave now betrayed an even livelier terror than had
yet moved him.
“I didn’t say it!” he gasped in fright and agitation. “I have never
said it—never once, through all these years! She always made us swear
we would tell nobody. I don’t know what she would do if she thought
I had spoken! She was so ashamed of us—and I can hardly wonder at
that, sir. She has done so well herself! Oh, sir, if ever it comes up,
you—you’ll see that she knows that it wasn’t I who told?”
“I certainly will,” said the detective, pitying—though with a little
contempt—this father’s abject fear of his unnatural daughter’s
displeasure. “As a matter of fact, I found it out by accident. I only
told you that I knew just now to show you that you have nothing to
conceal about her. Nor,” he added, entirely upon impulse, “about Mr.
Dukane!”
This time Wrenn’s jaw dropped, in the intensity of his astonishment.
“You—you know about—him—too!” he muttered breathlessly. “Is there
anything you—do not know?”
“Several things, else I should not be here now,” rejoined Jim, with
an inner thrill of elation over the success of his half-random shot.
“Suppose you go on with your story, and then I shall know more.”
The other sighed deeply, and proceeded:
“Since you know so much, sir, there is no sense in my hiding anything.
Not that I think I should have hidden anything, in any case. As I told
you, I am an old man, and all this has been hard to bear. But you don’t
want me to tell about my feelings, sir; you want the story.
“When Kitty had been gone a year or more, and Marita was about
seventeen, Nicholas Blankley came to the town where we lived. It was
a little Arizona settlement, where I ran a saloon and gambling place.
Blankley was one of us—I mean he was a natural-born crook, but he
wasn’t a bad sort of fellow at that, if you know what I mean, sir. He
was a good sport, and square with his pals, which is more than can be
said for most of us! He was in the theatrical line, and had worked on
all sorts of jobs of that kind—advance man, stage manager, all sorts of
things. He was interested in Rita from the first—saw her possibilities
as a ‘cowgirl,’ and was fond of her, too—for she was young and fresh in
those days, and the daring, reckless sort that got men. Nick got the
daredevil name from her; that’s what he used to call her.
“His idea was to start a sort of wild-West show, on the cheap; get
some down-and-outers who could ride and shoot and who wouldn’t want
much pay, and do short jumps at low prices. We would have to carry the
horses, but no scenery, and no props to speak of, and we could use a
big tent like the small circus people. It looked like a good venture,
and I was tired of staying in one place. Marita was wild about it from
the first. So I sold out my business, and we started. We made a success
of it, though nothing very big, and kept at it fifteen years! Fifteen
years! It seems impossible that it could have been as long as that,
but it was. In that time Marita married Nick, and we ran across Alan
Morton—I might as well go on calling him Mortimer, though.
“There’s no use pretending that we were running our outfit strictly
on the straight. We weren’t. We were out to get what we could out of
the public, and we didn’t care much how we did it. But we didn’t do
anything very bad; I, for one, was getting careful as time went on,
and Nick had a notion of reforming after he married Rita. We did run a
gambling business in connection with the show, and we did cheat a bit,
and we did take in any sort of thug or gunman or escaped convict who
had ever learned to ride, and Nick got away with a very good thing in
phony change at one place. Very neat, indeed, it was, and he never had
any trouble with it, either.”
Wrenn spoke of this with a sort of pride which made Barrison shake his
head again. He was the queerest felon with whom the detective had ever
come in contact.
“But as I say,” resumed Wrenn, “we got along all right, and did no
great harm for all those years. Then we struck Mortimer. He was a bad
one—just a plain bad one, from the very first.”
“And I always thought you were so fond of him!” ejaculated the
detective.
“But I was, sir,” said the old man at once. “I was very fond of him,
indeed! He was a—a very lovable person, sir, when he cared to be.”
Barrison, again rendered speechless, simply stared at him for a moment
or two.
“Go on!” he managed to articulate, after a bit.
“Well, sir, it was this way. Mortimer’s blood was younger than ours,
and he was more venturesome, more energetic, more daring.”
“Like your daughter.”
“Yes, sir,” said the ex-gambler, rather sadly. “Like her. There was a