Morton Stamford sat in his office staring at a blank sheet of copy paper. Already he was an hour behind his schedule for the day, and the compositors upstairs had sent down twice for copy. According to schedule this was his morning for preparing the week's editorials, but, though the town bell would announce noon in less than half an hour, he had not yet written a word.
What he should like to say he dare not. A certain diffidence, impelled by his Western experiences, held his pen from an attack on the Mounted Police. Back East as a newspaperman he had worked in so closely with the local police that he knew their every move in the development of their cases. Yet in the ten days since the murder of his friend, Corporal Faircloth, the Mounted Police seemed to have done nothing. Stamford knew of no clue, no sleuthing, and only vague suspicions. As a dignified newspaperman there was deep within him an instinct that he should, therefore, accept it as evidence of official inertia.
As a newspaperman, too, he had struggled to arrive at definite deductions as to the murderer, only to be confronted with a blank wall that drove him to the beginning again to reconstruct his case. It was the dead body of Kid Loveridge that upset all his calculations. The Kid's reputation was more along the line of proving him a murderer than the murdered, and that there was any connection between the Corporal and one of the wildest cowboys in Western Canada was impossible.
Hitting in and out of his conjectures were the forms of Cockney Aikens and Dakota Fraley, two men apparently as antagonistic in inclinations as they were intimate in business interests. Cockney's careless, good-natured ways appealed to him in a way that denied belief in inherent badness. Yet he had gathered the impression during the Police investigations on the spot that the big Englishman was not outside their suspicions. He resented that. Cockney was a friend of his. If the Police were working on that line he was prepared to stake——
His ruminations were interrupted by the opening of the door to the outer office, and the clumsy tramp of a heavy man. For a moment he waited for the familiar tap on his own door. All Medicine Hat knew where to find him. Not hearing the expected summons, he went out.
A great hulk of a stranger was standing in the middle of the office, feet braced, peering about him through large horn spectacles. His shoulders were stooped, his hands limp and awkward, his whole attitude and appearance more than hinting at anæmia and flabbiness. On his long black hair was perched a ludicrously small stiff hat; and he wore a high white collar and loose black bow tie, a suit built in a factory, and a pair of "health" boots that could not possibly possess any other attraction.
He seemed entirely oblivious of Stamford's presence, continuing to stare about at the untidy arrangement of tables and chairs, and over the partition that separated the office from the "job" room. He was interested; also he was accustomed to concentrating.
Stamford wanted most to laugh. The fellow filled the office with such an air of innocent curiosity that he felt no resentment at his own small share in the scene.
Someone laughed from the doorway, and Stamford started. It was such a merry, chuckling sort of laugh, so much in line with just the feeling Stamford himself had, that, though the laugh was a woman's, he vaguely thought of some uncanny echo that repeated what was in his mind.
When he turned to the doorway he was more doubtful than ever of the reality of the scene. A girl stood there—a beautiful girl—Stamford realised that first of all. Under her soft felt hat, with a sprig of flowers slanting nattily up toward the back, a fluffy bit of dark brown hair protruded. Stamford saw that next. He had a curious feeling that it would be nice to touch—and he flushed at the entrance of such unaccustomed thoughts.