o."

"Prob'ly."

"Sure they must. Same way exactly."

"Unless tyin' him up here was an afterthought--to make it look like the
other," suggested Lane. He added, after a moment, "Or for revenge,
because Horikawa killed my uncle. If he did, fate couldn't have sent a
retribution more exactly just."

"Sho, that's a heap unlikely. You'd have to figure there were _two_
men that are Apache killers, both connected with this case, both with
minds just alike, one of 'em a Jap an' the other prob'ly a white man.
A hundred to one shot, I'd call it. No, sir. Chances are the same man
bossed both jobs."

"Yes," agreed Kirby. "The odds are all that way."

He stepped closer and looked at the greenish-yellow flesh. "May have
been dead a couple o' days," he continued.

"What was the sense in killin' him? What for? How did he come into
it?" Cole's boyish face wrinkled in perplexity. "I don't make head or
tail of this thing. Cunningham's enemies couldn't be his enemies, too,
do you reckon?"

"More likely he knew too much an' had to be got out of the road."

"Yes, but--" Sanborn stopped, frowning, while he worked out what he
had to say. "He wasn't killed right after yore uncle. Where was he
while the police were huntin' for him everywhere? If he knew somethin'
why didn't he come to bat with it? What was he waitin' for? An' if
the folks that finally bumped him off knew he didn't aim to tell what
he knew, whyfor did they figure they had to get rid of him?"

"I can't answer your questions right off the reel, Cole. Mebbe I could
guess at one or two answers, but they likely wouldn't be right. F'r
instance, I could guess that he was here in this room from the time my
uncle was killed till he met his own death."

"In this room?"

"In these apartments. Never left 'em, most likely. What's more, some
one knew he was here an' kept him supplied with the daily papers."

"Who?"

"If I could tell you that I could tell you who killed him," answered
Kirby with a grim, mirthless smile.

"How do you know all that?"

Lane told him of the mute testimony of the newspapers in the
living-room. "Some one brought those papers to him every day," he
added.

"And then killed him. Does that look reasonable to you?"

"We don't know the circumstances. Say, to make a long shot, that the
Jap had been hired to kill my uncle by this other man, and say he was
beginnin' to get ugly an' make threats. Or say Horikawa knew about the