The American Gun Mystery (Death At the Rodeo)

23: The Miracle

Ellery continued to wander about the Colosseum. In his wanderings, which were for the moment aimless — being devoted merely to the expenditure of animal energy while his brain was busy with a Brobdingnagian mental jigsaw — he chanced across the large metallic gentleman of few words who was Inspector Queen’s right hand. Sergeant Velie in his stubborn way was engaged in mining. He was attempting to dig nuggets of fact out of what was obviously a salted mine. The facts he unearthed were no facts at all, but fancies. If there were facts beneath the terrain, they were extraordinarily well hidden.

Wild Bill Grant’s troupe of performers sat about with solemn countenances, nodding submissively at every word.

“Trained seals!” mumbled Velie at last, without changing expression. “Got no minds of your own. Can’t you talk without having to get the okay from your boss? Where’s this rat Miller, you bunch of bow-legged, four-flushin’ blowhards from the West?”

Their eyes began to flash.

Ellery, intrigued, paused to watch the performance.

There was a premonitory sigh, like the faint grumbling of a volcano in the’ labor-pains of eruption. Sergeant Velie smiled coldly and continued to address them.

He derided their lingo. He questioned the legitimacy of their birth, and the chastity of their mothers by inference. He sneered at their morals. He laughed outright at their horses. He called them “stinking sheep-herders,” than which there was no more awful accusation. He assailed their code of honor. He even introduced a faint note of doubt concerning their manhood, in the case of the males, and their femininity in the case of the women.

In the pandemonium that ensued, Ellery discovered — among other things — that Sergeant Velie was in his turn a particularly evil-smelling type of coyote, that he was plumb full of rattlesnake juice, that he was the double-distilled son of a pediculous half-breed and a female goat, that he was a poisoner of water-holes, that his heart was full of cactus thorns and his mouth as dry as alkali, that he was slicker than cowlick and lower than a snake’s belly, and finally that he deserved no less protean fate than to be “staked out” — a peculiarly Western form of amusement in which the salient features were the removal of the victim’s eyelids, the pegging of one’s wrists and legs to the ground, and the deposit of one’s residuary carcass, face to the glaring sun, upon an enormous anthill.

Ellery listened with a delighted smile.

He also learned, among the more blasphemous accusations that rattled about the Sergeant’s unmoved head, that they had not known Benjy Miller well, that he had been an “onfriendly cuss,” that they cared nothing for Benjy Miller, and that Sergeant Velie and Benjy Miller might, singly or en double, go to hell.

Ellery sighed and moved on up the corridor.

He prowled about quietly until, with the aid of judicious inquiries, he found the vanished Miller’s dressing room. It was like all the others, a mere hole in the wall equipped with a table, mirror, chair, and wardrobe. He sat down in the chair, placed his cigaret case conveniently on the table, lighted a pill, and devoted himself to thought.

Six cigarets later he muttered: “I begin to see. Yes... Would be consistent with a special psychology in the case of...” He sucked his lip. “But those searches...”

He sprang to his feet, crushed the cigaret out on the floor, and went to the door. He looked about. Ten feet away a tall cowboy was stumping along, talking to himself in an angry undertone.

“Hi, there!” cried Ellery.

The cowboy slued his head about and squinted sourly. It was the gentleman known as Downs.

“Huh?”

“I say, old man,” said Ellery, “did that fellow Miller occupy this dressing room by himself?”

Downs drawled: “Hell, no. Who’d ya think he is — Wild Bill hisself? Dan’l Boone divvied this room with ’im.”

Ellery blinked. “Ah, Boone. That little chap seems to be a child of destiny. Would you mind getting him for me, like a good fellow?”

“Run yer own errands,” suggested Downs, and stamped off.

“Surly brute,” muttered Ellery, and went off in search of Boone. He found the little man communing with himself in an otherwise empty room, seated dolorously on the floor, short legs doubled under him in an Indian-chief attitude, and rocking slowly back and forth with the unconscious rhythm of a graybeard before the Wailing Wall. In his hand there were the fragments of what seemed to have been a stone arrowhead.

“Allus said,” he was groaning to himself aloud, “that damn palomino scrounchin’ on my Injun arrowhead started this jamboree... Hey?” He looked up, a dazed little owl.

Ellery darted in, yanked little Boone to his feet, and hurried him back along the corridor to the room he had been thinking in.

“Whut— whut—” spluttered Boone.

Ellery plumped him in the lone chair and leveled a long forefinger at his shrinking figure. “Miller was your roommate, wasn’t he?”

“Huh? Shore, shore, Mr. Queen!”

“You saw him today, didn’t you, Boone?”

“Huh? Shore. Didn’t I tell ya—” Boone’s eyes were round as mescal buttons, and he opened and shut his mouth like a goldfish.

Ellery smacked his lips with satisfaction. “Did Miller go into this room today?”

“Shore, Mr. Queen!”

“Alone?”

“Reckon!”

Ellery began to whistle a difficult tune from Lakmé, the intricacies of which absorbed his attention for some time. Meanwhile he was gazing about the room speculatively. Still whistling, he went to the table and jerked open the drawer. There was a clutter of odds and ends inside, none of which seemed to interest him after a casual inspection. Boone watched in, bewilderment.

Ellery went to the wardrobe and opened the door. Its interior was hung with various colorful garments, all of them from their small size the property of Boone. But Ellery, poking about among them, turned up one costume which from its large dimensions must have been worn by the vanished Miller for the rodeo performances. “Didn’t even take his duds away,” muttered Ellery, feeling through the pockets of the jeans.

“Weren’t his’n,” said Boone eagerly. “B’longed to th’ show.”

Ellery stiffened; he had felt something hard in one of the pockets. A look of remarkable intelligence came over his face, and then vanished as he wheeled sharply, ordered Boone to remain where he was, and ran to the door.

“Sergeant!” he shouted. “Sergeant Velie!” The name echoed down the corridor.

The good Sergeant popped out of one of the dressing rooms, tense and alert. “Yeah?” he cried. “What’s up, Mr. Queen?” and he lumbered swiftly up the corridor. Heads poked out of rooms; Ellery drew Velie quickly into the Boone-Miller cubicle and shut the door.

Velie looked from the stricken figure of Boone to the open wardrobe. “What’s the trouble?”

“Did you search this room last night, Sergeant?” asked Ellery softly.

“Sure.”

“The wardrobe, the clothes inside?”

“Sure.”

“Did you search it again this afternoon?”

A pucker appeared between Velie’s eyes. “No. Meant to later. Didn’t get round to it.”

Ellery went silently to the wardrobe and brought out the jeans he had been feeling a few moments before. He held it high. “Did you look through these last night, Sergeant?”

Velie’s eyes flickered. “No. Weren’t here last night.”

“Miller was wearin’ them jeans last night!” cried Boone suddenly.

“Ah,” said Ellery, lowering his arm. “Then that accounts for it very satisfactorily. Who searched Miller himself, Sergeant?”

“I did. And the rest o’ the gang, too.” The Sergeant’s reptilian eyes were narrowed.” Why?”

“You didn’t find anything oh Miller?” persisted Ellery gently.

“No!”.

“Don’t take such a belligerent tone, Sergeant,” murmured Ellery. “I’m completely satisfied that you’re a competent searcher. If you didn’t find, anything on Miller last night, it’s because there wasn’t anything to find. Excellent! Then it was brought into this room today, and placed in Miller’s discarded jeans.”

“What was put in Miller’s pants?” growled Velie.

Calmly, with the certainty of omniscience, Ellery wrapped a handkerchief about his right hand and slipped his hand into the pocket. But he did not withdraw it at once. He said sharply: “Who’s been inside the Colosseum today, Sergeant, besides the rank and file, and Grant?”

Velie licked his lips. “Grant’s son. Kit Horne. I think I saw Mars and Black, the pug.”

“Not Hunter or Mara Gay?”

“No.”

Ellery drew his hand out of the pocket of Miller’s jeans.

Whereupon a veritable miracle occurred. For his hand emerged holding a very tangible little piece of reality — an object for which he, Sergeant Velie, Inspector Queen, and the assembled detective strength of the New York City Police Department had been searching for weeks. It was something moreover which had not been found in Boone’s room until this moment for the remarkably simple reason that it had not been in Boone’s room during previous searches. Obviously, then, it had been brought to Boone’s room and Miller’s jeans after the last thorough search.

And the last thorough search, on the authority of Sergeant Velie, had been conducted the night before, directly after the murder of Woody.

That much, at least, was clear.

Dan’l Boone uttered a gasping little cry. And Sergeant Velie stiffened.

Ellery’s hand lightly held a small, flat, innocent-looking little .25 automatic pistol.