The reporter shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, very well, then,” he said. “You’re old enough to decide for yourself. You will find her at the Women’s Hotel. She is staying there.”
CHAPTER SIX
THE event that had driven Caruth to seek Bristow’s aid was the appearance of a man who called himself Tom Wilkins and claimed to be a brother of the deceased valet.
Tom Wilkins was a tall, well built, red-faced individual with a projecting chin and small, sharp eyes. He bore a general resemblance to his brother James, but his eyes had a fiery gleam that Caruth had never noticed in those of his late valet. Perhaps the difference came by nature and perhaps by training; or perhaps there was no difference, the valet having merely hidden his soul behind discreetly down-dropped lids. Since he had played the trick that had led to his death, Caruth had been very uncertain as to his real character.
But he was in little doubt concerning that of Tom Wilkins. The man, he decided almost at first glance, was distinctly dangerous. Years of life in the West had rubbed away any smugness that might have characterized him in early life, and had made him bold and aggressive. The quickly arising necessities of the frontier had developed him, implanting or improving the power of quick decision and action, until it was almost automatic. Caruth had never known a Western “bad man,” but he felt instinctively that Tom Wilkins would fall into that category.
On his first visit to the Chimneystack Building Wilkins had said little to Caruth, but that little had been calculated to disturb the younger man, and to show him how thin was the ice over which he was skating.
“There ain’t been no special affectation lost between me and Jim,” he declared. “I ain’t laid eyes on him for years. Jim stayed here in the effete East and played the human doormat; I went West and played pretty nearly everything and everybody in reach. Once in so often I’d hear of a chance in stocks or horses or something that Jim could use, and I’d put him wise about it. Now and then Jim would learn of something that I could use, and he’d put me wise. Jim cat-footed through life, and I bulled through it. We played into each other’s hands reasonable well.”
“Yes?”
“Yes! I got sort of tired last month, an’ made up my mind to emigrate. I had a bunch of sheep over on the Gunnison that I’d been herdin’, and I was yearning for the company of something that wouldn’t say baa whenever you addressed ’em. Playing collie to a bunch of muttons ain’t what it used to was when shepherds carried crooks and wore loose effects, and I found it mighty monumentous and unsatiated, so I shakes the job and lines out for Denver, and there I finds a letter from Jim telling me to come to New York P. D. Q. So I comes, and gets here to find he got croaked just about the time his essay was postmarked. How about it?”
As gently as he could, Caruth repeated the gist of his tale concerning the theft of the money and the murder. It was a somewhat delicate matter to tell this violent-looking individual that his brother was a thief, and Caruth stumbled more or less over the details.