American Gun Mystery Read Free Page A

skirts. There was the smell of leather, the soft sound of drawling talk, the haze of home-made cigarets. …
    “Curly! Now, isn’t that remarkable!”
    She stood in the doorway to the armory—rack upon rack of long Winchester rifles, blue-steel revolvers, targets—and smiled dreamily. Curly, son of Wild Bill Grant—a young man in dusty corduroys with wide shoulders and no hips at all—lowered the muzzle of a smoking revolver, stared at her, and then whooped.
    “Kit! You ole son-of-a-gun! Shore glad to see you!”
    She smiled again, more dreamily. Curly was as out of place in the Colosseum and Broadway as Kit herself. He was, she assured herself for the thousandth time, good to look at. As he dashed to her, seized her hands, and grinned into her face she wondered if this new atmosphere—with its reek of gin and gimcracks—would spoil him. There was nothing romantically heroic about him; he was not remotely good-looking, and his nose was far too hawk-like for the conventional hero; but there were interesting glints in his curly brown hair which sat his head like a mat, and his eyes were sure and honest.
    “Watch this,” he cried, and dashed back.
    She watched, faintly smiling still.
    He stepped on the pedal of a queer little apparatus with his right foot; it was a catapult. He tested it with the ball of his foot as his hands broke open the long-barreled revolver and swiftly reloaded the chambers with big fat glinting cartridges. Then he snapped the cylinder back, filled the alley of the catapult with small round objects, braced himself, and trod quickly on the pedal. The air became filled with little glass balls. And as fast as they skimmed into the air he made them disappear in a puff of smoke and tiny fragments, shooting at them with supple wrist and careless flips of his weapon.
    She applauded gleefully, and he thrust his revolver into a holster and then bowed and doffed his wide-brimmed hat.
    “Pretty neat, hey? Every time I pull this little stunt I think o’ Buffalo Bill. Pop’s tole me about him many a time. Used to shoot little glass balls, too, “when he was with the Wild West Show. Only he was a rotten shot, an’ used buckshot, so he never missed. …Another legend busted!”
    “You’re almost as good as Buck,” smiled Kit.
    He seized her hands again and stared earnestly into her eyes. “Kit darlin’—”
    “Buck,” she said hastily, coloring a little. “Poor Buck. I’m worried about him.”
    He put her hands gently away from him. “That ole bull?” He laughed. “He’ll be mucho all right, Kit. These old-timers are built out o’ rawhide an’ steel. Like pop. You just tell Wild Bill he ain’t the man he used to be—”
    “ Isn’t the man he used to be, Curly.”
    “Isn’t the man he use to be,” said Curly, meekly. “Anyway, don’t fret, Kit. I saw him go through the last dress rehearsal a while back.”
    “Any slips?” she asked swiftly.
    “Nary a one. You’d never think the ole hellion was in his sixties! Rode like a red Injun. He’ll be swell tonight, Kit, an’ the publicity—”
    “Damn the publicity,” she said in a soft voice. “Did he have a run-in with Woody?”
    Curly stared. “Woody? Why—”
    There was a light step behind them, and they turned. A woman was standing in the armory doorway, smiling inscrutably at them.
    No buckskins here. All silks and furs and scents. This beautiful creature with the lynx eyes, the incredible enamel complexion, the subtle curves of thigh and breasts, was Mara Gay. Darling of Hollywood, star of innumerable successful sex-pictures, three times divorced … the envy of a million shop-girls and the sweet painful dream of a million men.
    Mara Gay ruled a kingdom which had no geographical boundaries and whose subjects were abject slaves. She was the incarnation in painted-rose flesh of a forbidden dream. And yet, at this close range, there was something cheap about her. Or was it the result of the usual disillusionment of adjusted