The seventh shot

It was twelve o’clock—a hot, sunny noon in the latter part of August. Broadway blazed with the last fiery effort of the passing summer; there was a steady stream of humanity pou...

Mortimer had been drinking, else he would never have assumed the entire responsibility of engaging Sybil Merivale for the leading part in his play. When sober, he had a very who...

The stage entrance of the Mirror Theater was on a sort of court or alley which ran at right angles from one of the side streets near Times Square. A high iron gateway which barr...

“Of course it is. They ought to have gone over the whole act again, and lots of the scenes several times. That rescue stuff was rotten! But it’s an off day. Something’s wrong; I...

She was in full evening dress, with her splendid shoulders and arms bare, and her brilliant hair uncovered and elaborately dressed. Her tightly clinging gown was black, embroide...

“I say, Jim, where did you—how did she happen to——Oh, gee! Some people have all the luck! Isn’t she a peach? Isn’t she a wonder? Isn’t she just the——”

Already the house was filling up. From his seat on the aisle half a dozen rows back, Jim Barrison saw that it was going to be a typical first-night audience. As this was a compa...

That scream echoed across the blackness. There was a smell of gunpowder in the air. It seemed an interminably long time before the lights flared up, and the big curtain was rung...

Inspector Lowry was an old friend of Barrison’s, though, like most of the regular force, inclined to treat the younger man as a dilettante rather than an astute professional. Ho...

“I very often get a great deal of blame because I won’t do things in a regulation way. But, even while I get the blame, I also get the results—sometimes, not always.” The inspec...

“That is all, Miss Merivale,” he said, without looking at her. “We shall not want you for a while, though I shall have to speak to you again later. I should advise you, as a fri...

Whether it was strictly correct or not, no one was in a position to question, but, anyway, Inspector Lowry told Sybil finally to go home after leaving her address. A lot of skel...

Then why had Lowry let Sybil go with no further examination? They would have to establish next her possession of a weapon, and the fact that she was sufficiently practiced in th...

Jim Barrison had scarcely grasped this fact when the telephone rang. In the dead silence of that hour, half after two in the morning, the shrill tinkle had a startling effect. B...

Miss Legaye lived at a very smart little hotel near Fifth Avenue. It was not one of the strictly “theatrical” hostelries, since Kitty had always had leanings toward social corre...

There wasn’t much room in Jim Barrison’s mind for anything except self-reproach. He _knew_ that the tidings of Mortimer’s murder had come upon Kitty Legaye like a stroke of ligh...

“Mind you,” Barrison went on hastily, “there are a hundred explanations of a thing like that; it isn’t, strictly speaking, evidence at all. Only—I couldn’t help noticing! Now, T...

It is an experience not unknown to most of us, that of finding ourselves confronting some one or something long familiar, as we thought, but presented all at once in a new guise...

“I had no idea that you would be interested in the Wrenn girl,” she said. “I thought that my information would point rather toward her father. Why are you interested in her?”

“I know that the Wrenn woman probably did it,” said Barrison, speaking to Lowry in the inspector’s office. “And I’m going to move heaven and earth to find her. But I’ve a hunch—...

Barrison often dined at a chop house in the Thirties, near his own rooms. He repaired thither to-night, after having telephoned his whereabouts to Tony Clay’s boarding house, wi...

The house was of the flagrantly cheap variety, to judge by the people then going in. On either side of the glaringly illuminated doorway were vivid lithographs of ladies with ex...

Rita received them in her dressing room, which was frankly a utilitarian apartment. Since she had to share it in turn with other performers, she had not much chance to impress h...

Jim Barrison was dog tired. He felt as though the past twenty-four hours had been twenty-four months; it scarcely seemed possible that the murder had been committed only the nig...

“Oh, it’s you,” said the reporter. “Wanted to tell you something about your friend Rita which might be useful in your business. I strolled round last night to the furnished room...

“I was born in the West,” said Wrenn, “and I was fairly well educated, but while I was still in college—a small, fresh-water university—I got into bad company, and was expelled....

Kitty looked very pretty and quite pathetic in her smartly simple mourning. She saw Barrison at once, and received him with a subdued cordiality that was the perfection of good...

It was barely an hour later, and Lowry and Barrison sat together in the inspector’s office. Before them lay the letter which Kitty Legaye had given Jim, side by side with the th...

Now that he found himself actually in the touring car that he had so impetuously engaged, Jim Barrison found his chaotic thoughts settling into some sort of approximate order, i...

Darkness is a very strange thing. It is probably as strong and mysterious an agent when it comes to transmuting—and to deceiving—as anything on this earth. Nothing known to man...

Things happened very rapidly in Jim Barrison’s rooms after he had made his hasty departure. Tony Clay stood for a moment, holding the telegram in his hand; and then, tossing it...

Ferrati was the selfsame man who had first induced Kitty to run away from her home, her father, and her sister. As she had progressed, she had grown away from him and his evil i...

She was standing, too; and, as she was a tall woman, her eyes were not so very much below his own. She was, he thought, most splendidly beautiful as she stood there gravely look...