The gallery gods

by Murray Leinster

Beckwith spread out the paper with his uninjured hand and ran his eye over the head lines. Hugh Conway—Hugh Conway. Where was it? Not on the first page. Beckwith glanced at the date with a frown. The date was that of the day after the murder, and surely it should have been a news feature. He looked on the second page. Nothing there. He ran his eye over the third page and the fourth.

He flung the flimsy sheet impatiently aside and picked a second. The date was the same, and the name of the paper was that of one of the most sensational journals in New York. That, at least, would play up the murder in great shape. A new airplane record, a crisis in Europe, a prominent divorce case. Not one word of Hugh Conway. The second page.

Beckwith rumpled the newspaper and threw it away. He bit angrily on his cigar. He had killed Conway, strangled him with his two hands. He took up the third paper, then the fourth. Not a word concerning Conway. Beckwith growled throatily, then an idea struck him.

The police might have concealed the crime for a day or more, hoping to ensnare him before be escaped. A later paper would tell. Beckwith’s brow cleared. Of course that was it. He half smiled as he realized how typical such an action would be. The police would want to announce the crime and the arrest of the murderer at the same time. Wells, the commissioner of police, was fond of just such tricks. He and Beckwith and Conway had gone to school together, and Beckwith knew Wells down to the ground.

With a leisurely gesture he selected a newspaper of the day following, and unfolded it, only to frown again. The first page was still devoted to commonplace events, and the second likewise. Still another one was barren of news on the topic that was all-important to Beckwith. He impatiently cast them down and examined those of the next day, and the next. When the last of his newspapers had joined the crumpled pile at his feet, Beckwith sat helplessly puzzled.

He was both puzzled and annoyed. His left thumb was bandaged, where Conway had dislocated it in his struggle for life. The cumbrous wrapping was still reminder of that event. Conway was dead, had been dead for three weeks, but for at least one week after his death no mention of him had appeared in any New York newspaper.

Why? Conway was well known and an important figure in the financial world. His murder, surely, would be a news item of the first importance. But not one single paragraph had been devoted to him. Beckwith had strangled him in his own motor-car, then knocked the chauffeur unconscious and escaped to a waiting yacht. The mere melodrama of the feat was enough to make it “copy” for the whole United States, let alone the city of New York. But every newspaper in New York had ignored it, as they had ignored Beckwith’s scornful letter, sarcastically giving his address to the police.

Dusk had faded into twilight, and twilight into diamond-studded night. Down in the city the band played faintly in the plaza, while the long lines of dark-eyed señoritas promenaded primly in a duenna-guarded circle, listening decorously to the music, but casting liquid glances at the olive-skinned young men who less primly strolled in the other direction, twirling their budding mustaches for the admiration of the fairer sex. Now and again the muted chords of a guitar tinkled through the air, and now and again bursts of more uproariously amorous festivity came from the section of the town devoted to the cantinas and their less frank adjuncts.

Beckwith put his hat upon his head and sallied into the cobble-stoned street. He would go to the American Club. Soon, he was grimly aware, he would be barred from its precincts, unless his importance under the Garrios government overcame the normal dislike of the Anglo-Saxon for a murderer. He would go there to-night in any event. The newspapers might not have printed details of Conway’s murder, but Melton, the American consul, would surely have been cabled.

Beckwith had told in his sarcastic note to Wells that he would make for Bahia del Toro, and Wells would certainly wire the consulate to find if he had actually appeared. Beckwith grinned as he thought of the touching faith of the civilian American in the efficacy of a demand by a consular representative. Wells would insist that the Nueva Bolivian government turn the criminal over to justice. He would ignore the absence of a treaty of extradition.