Rex Stout - The Mountain Cat

“Have you any reason to suspect him? Any evidence?”

“Just common sense. I know him, that’s all.”

“Could he have done it? Where was he that day?”

“I don’t know. That’s part of what I meant I’d be curious about.” Ty shook his head, scowling, and was silent.

Delia said, “It couldn’t have been Chambers if the ‘mountain cat’ on the paper meant Wynne Cowles. I’m sure it did, Ty. How could there have been any connection between her and Chambers?”

“I don’t know, Del.” Ty let her have the scowl. “That damn paper that no one has even seen except Hurley here, and now it’s gone.” He shifted the scowl again. “Was it good paper or cheap paper?”

“Well — it was white paper.”

“Nothing else on it at all, nothing printed.”

“Not a derned thing.”

“Was it cheap and easy to tear like newspaper, or was it good tough nice white paper?”

“I didn’t tear it. It was just white paper.”

“You carried it in your boot lining for two years. Did it begin to come apart where it was folded?”

“No, it hung together all right. Of course it didn’t improve any as it went along. It got kinda seedy.”

“About as big as your hand?”

“About that. Maybe a little bigger.”

“What was the writing — wait a minute.” From the assortment on the table which he had taken from his pocket with the checkfold, Ty took an envelope, and on the back of it, with his fountain pen, wrote “mountain cat.” He handed it to Hurley, “Was the writing anything like that?”

The prospector squinted at it. “Not a bit. Bigger and more ink.”

“Forget the ink. That depends on the kind of pen you use. Just the kind of writing. Here, Del, you write it. Mountain cat.”

She wrote it on another envelope. Hurley took it and shook his head at it. “That’s even worse.”

“Well, here. Give him the pen, Del. Write it down yourself, as near as you can the way it looked.”

“Not me.” Hurley didn’t take the pen. “Except my name, I ain’t wrote more than a hundred words in forty years.”

“Try it.”

“No, sir. I could do it better with a pick on a chunk of rock.”

“But I just want to get an idea what the writing was like. Turn over that envelope and look on the other side. Was it anything — oh, it’s typewritten. Look at that other one. Anything like that?”

Hurley looked at the inscription on the envelope. “A little more, but not much. This is stubby.”

“Try this one.” Ty tossed another envelope across.

Hurley picked it up. As he regarded it, his lips slowly parted and his squint widened until he nearly had eyes. He lifted them from the envelope and gazed at Ty. “By... all... hell,” he said incredulously. “That’s it!”

“What’s it?”

“That’s the same writing! That’s it!”

Delia reached across and snatched the envelope. She saw, written on paper of good quality: Tyler Dillon, Esq., 214 Mountain Street, Cody, Wyoming .

And in the upper left-hand corner, neatly printed: Broken Circle Ranch — Cody, Wyoming .

She dropped the envelope on the table and Ty picked it up. She said, only half a question, “Wynne Cowles.”

He nodded, glared at the envelope, and then at Hurley. “You mean the writing on the piece of paper was like this?”

“I mean it was that.” Hurley looked as if someone had pulled a coyote out of a hat. “That word ‘mountain.’ I couldn’t mistake that word ‘mountain’ as often as I’ve looked at it.”

“It looks exactly the same?”

“It is the same.”

“I’ll be damned.” Ty stared at the envelope. He looked at Delia. “That’s luck. I got this yesterday at the office, she was sending me a paper connected with her divorce suit, and ordinarily I’d just have tossed the envelope—”

“Oh! It was a paper connected with her divorce suit?”

“Certainly. What did you think— Hey! I’m dumb and so are you! It was there anyway — that WD! Two years ago her name wasn’t Wynne Cowles, it was Wynne Durocher! She not only wrote it, she signed it!”

“I was right, Ty. Mountain cat.”

“Yeah, you were right.”

“And that paper she wrote was found under Dad’s body. So she was — she knows something about it.”

“Not necessarily. You’ve got to go at it logically.” Ty screwed up his lips. “With what Hurley says about the writing, plus the WD at the bottom, we can regard it as settled that she wrote it. Okay. Then either she dropped it in the cabin herself and she did the murder, or it was dropped there by someone else and she knows who she gave it to. That’s easy. Ask her when she wrote that paper and what she did with it. But it’s not so easy if she dropped it in the cabin herself. In that case, since the paper is gone, there’s no evidence or proof of anything and it would be foolish to put her on her guard by asking her about it. So maybe that’s not the thing to do. Look here, Del. This is no time to hide anything, no matter what it is. Do you know of any motive Wynne Cowles might have had for killing your father?”

“No.” Delia looked straight at him. “And I wouldn’t hide anything, Ty. Not now. It’s not a question of vengeance, it’s stopping this... all this horrible... and Clara down there alone...” She swallowed hard. “And I don’t think Wynne Cowles killed Dad. She had no reason to. She wouldn’t do that anyway, I mean take that money from him. I don’t like her, but that isn’t a thing she would do. We must ask her why she wrote that on paper and who she gave it to. Somebody must.”

“It would be a big mistake if she had a hand in it. Maybe she didn’t do it herself but she was behind it.”

“I don’t think so.”

Ty gazed at Hurley. “Did you ever get a stake from Wynne Cowles?”

“Never heard of her.”

“The woman that bought the Broken Circle ranch.”

“Oh. Heard of her but never saw her.”

“Or did you ever get a stake from Paul Emery?”

“Hell no. That little squirt.”

Ty sat and frowned. “Well,” he said finally, “I can go and ask her. It seems pretty damned naïve. Of course there’s another alternative we might want to consider, we can turn it all over to the county attorney. He has resources—”

Hurley growled. “You mean that Baker? And let him lock me up because I told him I can’t read? I swear to God if I get locked up again—”

Ty waved it aside. “It’s no good anyway. Baker’s so deep in the politics of it he couldn’t see straight even if he wanted to, and there’s no assurance he wants to. We can’t trust any of them. The sheriff is only Baker’s office boy. Frank Phelan is Lem Sammis’s man and this may touch Sammis.” He gathered the papers from the table, including the envelope addressed by Wynne Cowles, crammed them into his pocket, abruptly shoved his chair back, and got up. “All right. I’ll go and see her.”

Delia arose. “I’ll go along.”

“No, Del. Please. She’s more apt to spill it to one than to two. I ought to go alone. And you ought to be here if Clara comes home. Another thing. What are you going to do, Hurley?”

“Me?” The prospector grunted. “Go to my room and sit. I’d rather do that than tramp these derned sidewalks.”

“Do you realize you’re a target?”

“Target for what?”

“For a bullet. Jackson was in possession of evidence against the murderer of Brand, and he was killed and it was taken: Rufus Toale — oh, you don’t know about that. But Toale was killed for the same reason. You are now the only living person who can offer a scrap of evidence against Brand’s murderer. You saw that paper and what was written on it. Chances are the murderer knows it. Who knows that you told the county attorney you can’t read?”