Page:Top-Notch Magazine, May 1 1915 (IA tn 1915 05 01).pdf/37

 "Hackett!" exclaimed Ruthven. "Hackett, the detective who has been after Weasel Morrison for weeks and weeks. By George, I'll bet I know why you're here!"

ALL me Robinson," said the detective. "It is just as easy and won't give the snap away. When you knocked, Ruthven, I was expecting some one else. I remember now that you came to Montana from the Catskills. Got fired from the School of Mines because you stayed so long in the East helping Millyar. Your kindness was a sort of boomerang, eh? Never mind—don't get hot. Queer that you should run in on me like this. How did you know I was in this hotel?"

"I didn't know it," answered Ruthven. "I can't say that I really expected to find Weasel Morrison in this room, but I rather hoped that is what would happen."

"Why Morrison?"

"You're here looking for him, aren't you? Haven't you been chasing him ever since he skipped out of the Catskills?"

"Don't publish it, anyhow," said the detective. "There are other things Weasel Morrison has done that make that job in the Catskills look like the work of a piker. For weeks he has known I was after him, and yet he has sown a trail of crime all over the West. I've come within an ace of landing on him half a dozen times, but he always wriggles through. He's the smoothest cracksman at large in this country to-day.

"Why," continued the detective, "he has invented a kit of tools that would enable him, single-handed, to open the vaults of the subtreasury. Other crooks want tools made on the same pattern, and Morrison bleeds them well for duplicate instruments. The Weasel, with these devilish inventions, has helped more of his kind into burglar-proof safes than the police can count. I want to catch that 'gun,' and I want to catch him with his patent kit. To capture Morrison and not the tools would be only half a job; to get hold of both would be the slickest clean-up that was ever pulled off, would mean a lot for law and order, and incidentally would jump yours truly into the king row.

"Now," Hackett went on, changing the subject briskly, "why did you think Weasel Morrison might be in this room?"

Ruthven seated himself; then he began telling of the ride from Burt City to Bluffton with Durfee, to overtake Seventeen. The detective smiled. "I read about that," he interjected. Ruthven continued with the account of how he had seen Morrison's face at a car window as Seventeen was leaving Bluffton, how he had boarded the train, and how an attempt had been made to rob the express car between Bluffton and Okaday.

"Knew about that, too," struck in the detective. The other proceeded with his recital, and briefly recounted the attempted holdup on the trail to Barton's upper ranch, and followed with a statement of his suspicions concerning one of the robbers.

"That was why I returned to Dry Wash instead of going on to the Musselshell," he finished. "I heard when I got back that there was a stranger in town, and that he was occupying this particular room in the hotel. So I came up.

Ruthven had done his talking without the slightest reference to the mysterious Barton package. That was quite apart from the detective's work, he reasoned, and it was not necessary to start a bootless discussion.

Hackett had bitten off the end of a