American Gun Mystery (24 page)

“Out, damned spot,” he sighed, and strolled over to the assembling group.

A long table had been set up on the dirt core of the oval, constructed out of wooden horses and boards covered with cloths. The table gleamed with silverware and glassware; there was a profusion of salads and
hors d’oeuvres
and crystalline hams. …He looked around. Nowhere was there the faintest sign of the scene of the night before. The ring, the ringside seats, were gone; as were the lowered overhead arcs and the electrical equipment of the newspapermen and the broadcasting people.

The caterers concluded their preparations; Wild Bill Grant appeared with his arm about his son’s broad shoulders.

“Everybody here?” roared Grant.

The troupe, already dressed in their regalia for the evening performance, applauded vigorously.

“Then set an’ fall to!” roared Grant. “Here’s one cook-wagon gives you more’n slumgullion ’n’ hash!” And he followed his own advice by dropping into the chair at the head of the long table and attacking the sugarbrown carcass of a ham.

Curly sat down at his father’s right, Kit to the left. Ellery was a few seats farther along the table on Kit’s side. Tony Mars sat across the table from Ellery. Next to Curly there was a tall ruddy old gentleman who parked a small Stetson and a lawyer’s brief-case beneath his chair.

The troupe fell to, as directed. A product of the effete East, Ellery marvelled at their appetites. Food began to disappear with alarming speed. There was a constant chatter of chaffing and broad commentary from full mouths and powerfully champing jaws. Only the head of the table fell silent.

And gradually a pall settled over the table, and the clamor of the troupe grew less. Perhaps it was Wild Bill’s own depressed and moody air, or Kit’s grim quiet presence, although she did her best to be sociable. But as the food disappeared, so did the talk; until with the last scrap there was a booming silence over which one might have said the ghost of Buck Horne gloomily presided.

Grant threw down his napkin and rose. His bowed legs shook a little, and his heavy face was a deep brown-red. “Folks!” he shouted, with an attempt at geniality. “You all know the reason fer this barbecue. Today my son Curly is thirty years old.” There was a mild cheer. “Now that he’s a man, (laughter) he comes into his own. His mother, bless ’er soul, who’s dead an’ buried these nineteen years, made out her last will an’ testament ’fore she passed on, an’ in that will she made provision fer our son. She directed that when he got to the age of thutty he was to receive ten thousand dollars. He’s thutty today, an’ he gets it. Mr. Comerford, who’s been the fam’ly lawyer since the French ’n’ Injun Wars, seems like, come all the way from Cheyenne to make the legacy legal, like, an’ pay his respects; though the Lord knows he didn’t tote any
money
from the West, what with gangsters an’—an’ all. I got only one more thing to say.” He stopped, and after their polite grins at his feeble attempts at humor, there was a strained and expectant silence; and suddenly a ripple that had no movement and was the more horrible for that flashed down the long table and left staring eyes behind. “I got only one more thing to say,” Grant repeated, and his voice faltered. “I only wish to the good God my ole pardner Buck Horne was—was here.”

He sat down, and frowned at the cloth.

Kit sat rigid, staring at Curly across the table.

The tall old Westerner rose, stooped for his briefcase, and then straightened up. He fumbled with the catch. “I’ve got here,” he announced, “the sum of ten thousand dollars in cash, done up in one-thousand-dollar bills.” He got the brief-case open, dipped his hand inside, and it emerged with a neat stack of yellow-backs held together by a rubber-band. “Curly my boy, I consider it a great privilege to be the instrument of carrying out your dear mother’s last wishes. Use the money wisely and well, as she wished you to.”

Curly rose and took the sheaf of bills rather mechanically. “Mr. Comerford, thanks. An’ you, pop. I—Hell, I don’t know
what
to say!” and he sat down abruptly.

They chuckled and chortled over that, and the spell was broken.

But only for a moment. Wild Bill, Grant said: “You boys an’ gals better take a last look at yore gear. We don’t want no slip-ups t’night,” and quietly nodded to the chief caterer. Chairs were instantly scuffed back, cowboys wandered off, the caterer’s men-attacked the dishes. …

It was all as simple and uneventful as that. And yet Ellery felt, and saw reflected from the honest brown faces about him, the same feeling, the intangible presence of something unearthly which might have been the efflorescence of a ghost and was merely a manifestation of mass consciousness. Superstitious, impressionable, the group of alien men and women shuffled off, headed by the saturnine One-Arm Woody, bound for their dressing rooms, whispering of portents and dire things in the air. Many repaired to the stables to seek solace in their horses, or to go over their gear, while others felt furtively for their good-luck pieces.

The tables were whisked away and all traces of the festivities, such as they had been, were removed, so that soon not a crumb remained in the arena. A gang of workmen flocked into the amphitheatre through the various entrances above and began to put the finishing touches on the preparations for the evening’s performance.

Ellery stood quietly by himself, off at one side, watching.

Only ten feet away Grant was attempting to talk cheerfully to his son and Kit. Kit was pale, but smiling. And Curly was unnaturally silent. The old lawyer beamed on them from the side. Grant continued to be cheerful. …And then in the midst of a sentence that famous old Indian fighter and United States Marshal stopped, grew white, gulped hard and noisily, and, muttering something, half-ran across the arena to the exit which led most directly to his office.

Curly and Kit were stunned, and Comerford rubbed his face foolishly.

Ellery came alert as a dog to the point. Something had happened. But what? He strove—so imperfect is unprepared and innocent observation—to recall Grant’s precise position at the instant he had ceased talking; and the best he could recall was that the showman had stared over Curly’s shoulder at that peculiar instant, had stared at the eastern main gateway from the arena, the gateway through which the troupe had shuffled a few moments before.

It was almost, Ellery reflected minutes later as he stood a lone and slender figure of puzzlement among Tony Mars’s busy workmen, it was almost as if Grant had seen a strange face in the dark gateway.

B
YRON HAS SAID SOMEWHERE
that history “with all her volumes vast hath but
one
page.” It is a more polite way of saying that history has a habit of repeating herself. Perhaps the ancients had something of this in mind when they created the Muse of history in the form of a woman.

It occurred to Mr. Ellery Queen on that Saturday night as he and the Inspector sat in the self-same box with the self-same people—excepting one—watching much the same performance, that history is not only a repetitious jade, but a malicious one to boot. One expects, knowing the universality of human nature, that the records of human achievement in succeeding eras shall exhibit more or less of the same character. What one does not expect, however, is plaster-of-Paris fidelity.

And that, it seems, was precisely what history was about on the evening of the reopening of Wild Bill Grant’s Rodeo. … a little improvement upon the usual performance.

The fact that the scene was the same was an important contributing circumstance; the
Colosseum
was jammed with a curious, unruly crowd. The fact that, with the exception of Kit Horne, the occupants of the Mars box were the same who had occupied it a month before, aided the illusion not a little. The fact that Major Kirby stood with his crew on a platform erected in exactly the same spot as before, and made exactly the same preparations, was surely not untoward, though worthy of remark. The fact that the same whooping, charging horsemen and horsewomen amused the audience of thousands before the grand announcement was merely a matter of routine, as was Curly’s exhibition of marksmanship with the catapult and the little glass balls. The fact that the troupe disappeared, and that Wild Bill Grant galloped in and, taking up a central position in the arena, discharged his revolver in the air for attention and bellowed an announcement—this began to color the atmosphere and work on strained nerves.

But the great fact was that there was no warning, no slightest sign of what was to happen. And here again history repeated herself.

The police themselves contributed to the tragedy of complete duplication. The arms which had been confiscated after the murder of Buck Horne had perforce been returned. The very same revolvers therefore were in the hands of the very same supernumeraries when the play began its second performance. Only Buck Horne’s twin ivory-handled .45’s had not come back to the scene, for these had been turned over to Kit Horne on her insistent demand and packed away in her trunk at the Barclay. And, of course, Ted Lyons’s automatic was absent, as was Ted Lyons; the journalistic gentleman’s reputation for ubiquitousness had for once destroyed itself. The police and Wild Bill Grant saw to that.

The feeling was strongest in the Mars box. Tony Mars was even more nervous than he had been a month before, and he chewed his cold cigar even more savagely. Mara Gay was as sparkling, as brilliant, as quicksilverish as ever; her eyes were pinpoints; and again she whispered to the bulky athlete at her side, now champion heavyweight of the world. And it seemed strange that Julian Hunter should sit in the same seat at the rear of the box, alone, sardonic, watching his wife and Tommy Black. … quite as if he had never been punched into insensibility by those punishing fists, or had never accused his wife of unfaithfulness with the brute who sat whispering to her before his cupped eyes.

And there it was! Grant’s signal shot, the wide swing of the eastern gate by the old special and—not Buck Horne this time, but One-Arm Woody, the rodeo veteran, charged out on a dappled horse. … even at that distance exultantly triumphant. Followed by Curly Grant and Kit Horne—riding
Rawhide,
that tragic Pegasus—and the rest of the thundering herd. And there was the Roman roar of the crowd as the riders swept around the tanbark track to the accompaniment of blaring music and sharp gun-fire reports of horses’ hooves. And then they halted on the south side of the oval, Woody only a few yards from the Mars box, the others in twos on restless mounts strung out behind, toward the far western turn. Wild Bill’s second announcement! There was the faintly derisive shout of Woody, sitting his horse like a mutilated warrior, and the last sharp signal from Grant’s long-barreled revolver. Then Woody’s sinewy right arm dipped, came up with a weapon, shot toward the roof, dipped down again to his holster as in salute. … and the seething ripple of sinuous motion through forty-one riders—Woody and the forty at his back, many feet behind. And Woody’s horse leaped forward as he shouted the long-drawn out
Yoooooow!
of the wide range, and an instant later the cavalcade shot forward in furious motion.

Woody galloped round the eastern turn of the oval, going like the wind.

The troupe flashed up to the tanbark below the Mars box.

The cameras ground.

The crowd clamored.

The Queens sat silent in the grip of a terrifying premonition. There was no reason for it, and yet the best reason in the world. It was unexpected, and yet it was inevitable.

To the utter and devastating stupefaction of the twenty thousand people in the bowl, flesh turned to stone, hearts suspended, eyes staring like marbles. … in the midst of the answering crash of the volley from, the raised revolvers of the troupe as they thundered past the Mars box, Woody—directly across the arena—jerked convulsively, crumpled in his saddle, and tumbled like a sawdust man to the tanbark to be ground under the horses’ hooves on almost precisely the spot where Buck Horne had fallen dead a month before!

M
UCH LATER, WHEN IT
was all over and the miasma of mental nausea had lifted a little, Ellery Queen was to confess that, taking everything into account, that was the most trying moment of his professional career. It was made doubly trying by the fact that weeks before he had professed—cryptically through some subtle necessity—to know who had killed the first victim of that astounding criminal whose weapon vanished as if by magic and whose very figure seemed cloaked in invisibility.

Recriminations came naturally to shocked minds. It was, for instance, surely in the mind of Major Kirby. And it was certainly uppermost in Inspector Queen’s outraged thoughts. “If you knew,” the Inspector’s distended and astonished eyes might have been saying in that first instant when the Queens sat paralyzed and stared from the swirling horses to each other, “why didn’t you come out with it at that time and prevent this second murder?”

There was no answer that Ellery felt he might at that precise moment put into words. And yet he knew in his heart that the murder of Woody had been unforeseeable, unavoidable; there was nothing he could have done to prevent this supplementary letting of blood; and there was every reason in the world for his compulsion to preserve silence. … now more than ever before.

These things hurtled through his brain, and he tasted a little of the self-constituted martyr’s bitterness. And the cool tenant of every sensitive brain—that little impersonal observer who sits in Gautama serenity in an inner recess among the turbulent gray cells—told him simply: “Wait. This man’s death is not upon your head. Wait.”

An hour later the same group that had surrounded the dead body of Buck Horne a month before surrounded the dead body of the one-armed rider—mangled, crushed, bloody, his limbs all askew and mercifully concealed beneath a blanket.

Police, detectives, were holding the crowd in check.

The arena was strictly guarded.

Major Kirby’s men, under the little man’s direction, were feverishly grinding away at the scene.