The young cattleman had seen more than once the tragedies of the range.
He had heard the bark of guns and had looked down on quiet dead men but
a minute before full of lusty life. But these had been victims of
warfare in the open, usually of sudden passions that had flared and
struck. This was different. It was murder, deliberate, cold-blooded,
atrocious. The man had been tied up, made helpless, and done to death
without mercy. There was a note of the abnormal, of the unhuman, about
the affair. Whoever had killed James Cunningham deserved the extreme
penalty of the law.

He was a man who no doubt had made many enemies. Always he had
demanded his pound of flesh and got it. Some one had waited patiently
for his hour and exacted a fearful vengeance for whatever wrong he had
suffered.

Kirby decided that he must call the police at once. No time ought to
be lost in starting to run down the murderer. He stepped into the
living-room to the telephone, lifted the receiver from the hook,
and--stood staring down at a glove lying on the table.

As he looked at it the blood washed out of his face. He had a
sensation as though his heart had been plunged into cracked ice. For
he recognized the glove on the table, knew who its owner was.

It was a small riding-gauntlet with a device of a rose embroidered on
the wrist. He would have known that glove among a thousand.

He had seen it, a few hours since, on the hand of Wild Rose.