The gallery gods

by Murray Leinster

The first, no, the second, no, the third. A curious sensation settled upon him. Bewilderment and unreasoning suspicion, then poignant disappointment, finally a persistent hope. He could not examine them all thoroughly in the launch. The wind threatened to blow them overboard, but he put them together in a compact package and waited impatiently until he could go over them in detail at his home.

He hastened to his house, carrying the parcel himself. He hurried into his smoking-room and flung them on the table, then went over them again, and again, each time more minutely, each time with growing incredulity.

Not one newspaper issued on any day of the second week after the murder of Hugh Conway contained one hint of that event. Not one word, line, or paragraph referred to the murder of Hugh Conway by William Beckwith. Not one faintest indication appeared in any issue of any periodical during the second week after that murder of the defiant note written by the murderer to the commissioner of police. There was nothing to make any one suspect that any harm had come to one of the foremost figures in American finance.

Beckwith rubbed his forehead in amazement and perplexity. His dislocated thumb was still tender where Conway had struggled to save his life. His memory of the event was lucid and complete. He knew that he had killed Conway.

During the following week he brooded almost continuously over his problem. He cabled a confidential message to the Nueva Bolivian consul in New York, who knew his influence with Garrios well enough to heed his requests, asking for information about Conway. The consulate replied with a succinct list of his offices as head of this and that corporation, and added that his present whereabouts were unknown.

The message cheered Beckwith immensely. He made a resolution to wait one more week. If there was still no public news of Conway’s death, he would write to the New York papers and put them in possession of the facts. He, William Beckwith, had killed Conway with his bare hands, and now resided openly in the city of Bahia del Toro. He would defy the police to punish him, and expose the duplicity of the commissioner of police, who had concealed the crime for no less than two weeks.

The steamer date arrived, but Beckwith was no longer impatient. He was calmly confident that there would be no mention of the crime in the newspapers of this week. Wells might prevent the news from ever becoming public. Beckwith had been so long in the Latin countries, where censorship is ruthless and complete, that he did not realize the impracticability of such a plan.

He watched the steamer arrive and drop the mail-bags over the side without emotion other than air abstract interest. When she came back on her way north again, he would have letters to form a part of her cargo; letters which would upset the smug complacency of the city of New York. A sodden, heavy rain was falling when the steamer made port, and it was barely visible from the house on the hill because of the sheets of falling water. Beckwith stood for a moment on his veranda and strained his eyes through the misty obscurity. The grass was exhaling fresh and fragrant odors in the rainfall. The palm-leaves were dark and glistening with the wet. Outside, the cobblestones of the street were running miniature floods of water to the gutter.

Beckwith sat comfortably indoors and smoked one of his thin black cigars, quite tranquil, waiting for the boy to bring him the papers for which he had sent.

Presently, above the humming roar of the rain on the roof and street, he heard the donkey’s hoofs. A door opened. A boy’s voice spoke in liquid Spanish, and then one of the servants brought him a rain-sodden bundle of flimsy printed sheets.