The Short Cut by Jackson Gregory Read Free Book Online Page B

checked suit and brilliant necktie, he approached a little nearer and whispered again,
    "Me, I'll just mosey out on the porch while you flash your eyes over Red's handwrite. Delicacy's my other name, times like this."
    Still beaming he winked again, still winking let himself silently out of the front door.
    Considering that all Wayne Shandon had to write a letter about was to tell Wanda that he was hurrying out with the herds to-morrow, that when during the next few weeks he could get back he would signal with smoke from the cliffs above her cave, it must have taken him a long time to say it. Considering how little she had to read Wanda must have been very deliberate in reading Wayne's scrawl. At any rate, long before she had finished, Mr. Willie Dart had gone silently down the porch, peered in the kitchen window at Mrs. Leland and Julia, continued on to the door of Martin's study and let himself in. The door had been locked, at that, when Dart's beautiful fingers first touched it, and they had done what Mr. Dart himself termed "plying his profession."
    "I ain't had a chance like this since I was three," Mr. Dart told himself contentedly. "Honest, I ain't. Now, if these nice old country gents think they can put over something with my old pal Red, and me not know just how they're figuring on the skinning party, they better wise up."
    He closed the door silently, and any sound he made might have been that of a pin dropped on a thick carpet. He surveyed the room with eyes that missed nothing.
    "I knew it," he smiled, as though at the sight of an old friend as he found the safe in the far corner of the room. "I heard your door shut the other day, old party, when I was chumming with Wanda and you and the rest of the combination was talking war talk. Not to waste time we'll begin with you."
    It was an old safe, an old, old make and style, and Mr. Dart sighed and shook his head a little disappointedly as he knelt, brought out of his pockets a set of bright, new tools and set to work.
    "Any time," he mused when the door swung open, "that they put a pal of mine out of the running they better get up-to-date."
    * * *
    Riding furiously with the fury of the storm as though swept onward with it, looking the very spirit of the wintry season that is made of black nights and cold, bright days, a woman was hastening upon a jaded horse toward the Echo Creek ranch house from the direction of El Toyon and the railroad. She rode well, sitting straight in the heavy saddle, and she rode hard. When the horse stumbled or floundered in the loose snow she jerked angrily at the reins and cut sharply with her riding whip.
    She entered the yard and rode up to the porch while Wanda was still deep in Wayne's letter, while Dart was forming his lips to a soft, silent whistle over a document which had passed from a drawer of the safe into his caressing white fingers. The woman dismounted quickly but a little stiffly as though from cold or fatigue, and fastening her horse's reins with numb, gloved fingers hastened up the steps to the living room door. She rapped loudly and Wanda, thinking that this was but a further evidence of the fact that one of Mr. Dart's names was Delicacy, called out, "Come in."
    It was with a little start of surprise that Wanda saw her. A young woman, twenty-five perhaps, of that rare sort of personality that asserts itself in a flash. Exquisitely cloaked and furred, clad from tiny boots to cap in black, her hair black, her eyes large and luminous and black. Furs and cloak failed to hide the erect gracefulness of the slender form, the poise of which as well as the carriage of the head indicated an imperious disposition. The woman was undeniably beautiful, her loveliness the delicately featured, perfectly chiselled beauty that is called classic. The fur cap upon the small head was snow encrusted and sat upon her cold beauty like a coronet; under it the escaping tendrils of jet black hair were fashioned by the cold into a glistening mesh of