Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 104, No. 4, August 22, 1936

All you got more than enough is extra weight and a hell of a long race. You take the bird that’s got a eye for horseflesh and twenty, thirty millions of old stuff and he wants to go to the auctions and pick up that good-looking bay and that brown mare that stands over a lot of ground. But can he buy what he wants? Hell, no! “What is the strain of that bay gelding, Mr. Smith.” “Strain? I don’t know,” says he. “You not just going around picking up trash, are you, Mr. Smith?” “I just got careless the other day,” says Smith. He goes and gets himself a swell jockey that finds the fancy ones, blood all the way back to Moses, all paprika and damn’ little ham. Smith gets a stable full of that stuff. He goes out and says: “Jeffers, have the grey saddled this morning.” “Beg pardon, sir,” said Jeffers. “You’re not forgetting that you rode the grey only yesterday, sir?” “True,” says Smith. “I’ll take Spaghetti, instead.” “Spaghetti is off in the near foreleg, sir,” says Jeffers. “I’ll give you Head Sail, sir. Shaping up very well just now, sir, and needs the work.” “I don’t feel like riding much this morning anyway,” says Smith, and goes back inside and looks at his boots and says: “Hell, what’s the use, anyway?” That’s the way with the fellows with the big capital. All I say is, the bigger you are the more sucker they play you for. You dodge the hooks for a while but finally you get the gaff where the soft is the softest, and there you are in the bag.

O’Rourke stood up from the stone bench where he had been assembling his thoughts. There was no sound in all the island except the windy rushing of the tide through the broken causeway. The moon was higher. His watch, in a patch of the white light, told him that the time was eleven-twenty, so he started back for the house.

When he came to the gate, the porter greeted him with an apologetic smile.

“That’s all right, papa,” said O’Rourke. “We all gotta have our shut-eye. Only around this dump, look out they don’t give you a whiff of poison gas while you’re snoozing.”

While he went up the stairs he kept thinking it over. The poison was the worst part. Take and slam a fellow over the head with a flat-iron and that’s not so bad. It sounds sort of homely and natural, like it might happen any place. But poison is hell.

He got into the upper hall. It was dim, at that end. One of the big lights had burned out and left the place shadowy, so that the bust in the niche stared at him with a lifelike intelligence.

Something stirred just to the left. He turned.

That was the door of the doctor’s room, the crystal knob glittering at him like an eye.

There was the stir of life again — a thin cat’s-claw of light that slid under the edge of the door!

O’Rourke stuck out his head like a bulldog and set his jaw. He walked for that door with his automatic pressed close to the fat of his right hip.

Chapter XXII Artistic Discovery

The knob, turned softly, cleared the latch; the weight of the door came softly into O’Rourke’s left hand.

Over his shoulder, as it were, he gave one thought — rather than a glance — towards Angus Campbell, a good man, damn him, in a pinch; a very good man in any sort of a fight. Because the Scotch are that way — mean, but useful on your own side.

Then O’Rourke snatched the door open and dropped to one knee on the threshold.

That way, you let the first shot go over your head, because instinct makes most men shoot breast high. The figure in the center of the room made a leap for a window.

“Stand still and stick ’em up or I’ll blow the living hell right out of you,” advised O’Rourke savagely.

The man said nothing. He stood still and put his hands up.

“Touching the ceiling, baby,” said O’Rourke. “Don’t move. I was born at night and I can see in the dark... There you are!”

He found the switch with his left hand and turned it on. It was Kearton who stood in the middle of the room with his arms well stretched above his head. He had the cuffs of his coat sleeves turned up. There was a pungent odor in the room.

Kearton’s hands were stained. A bottle of stuff stood on the table.

“Had to come back and see us, brother?” asked O’Rourke.

Kearton, as usual, said nothing. He looked tired. He lifted his weary eyes a little towards the light, blinked, and glanced back at the face of the detective.

A shadow came behind O’Rourke. He jumped back against the wall. The huge shoulders of Gene Chatham loomed in the doorway, where he had appeared with such a noiseless step.

“Same little visitor, sergeant?” he asked.

But he looked not at O’Rourke but straight at Kearton.

“Get the hell out of here!” cried O’Rourke. “Back up and shut that door — don’t try to come in here, Chatham!”

“Certainly not,” Chatham agreed, and stepped back into the hall.

“That’s all right,” said O’Rourke, aware of a quiver that was making his gun unsteady.

He went behind Kearton. “Put your hands behind your back, will you?” he commanded. “Dead slow.”