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Show Xce- tr -j FfCJIOWi SHORTY OUTMATCHES A KILLER ?m ' By JOE STEEL j C . j '. I Cotnec l , aJ,LLJLM fX'ELL," I says to Shorty No- Legs, "this is it. You bust it i or it busts you." I It was undoubtedly a very tough caae. Sheriff Shorty No-Legs would .first have to prove it accident or (murder. If murder, then he'd have ,'to catch the murderer. And if he (failed anywhere along the line he'd ihave to resign. But that was the way Shorty (World War I veteran had asked (for It. There had been so many unsolved un-solved murders in Dry Creek county that Shorty ran on his word that he (would resign whenever he failed to 'Solve a case. The name Shorty had given when 'he first came to Scenic City came Ifrom the fact that he actually had jno legs. There were barely enough stumps below Shorty's powerful body to enable him to do what he 'cheerfully called walking. "I'm blowing like a winded 'horse," Shorty said, glancing back over the boulder-strewn way down have stayed with medicine or law. Barbers are always skinny." I'd hunted with him many times, and seen him climb around in the mountain lets, but now he amazed even me. He was driving hard on this case. We clambered up to the high -ay just as the ambulance arrived. ar-rived. "Take him to Doc's," No-Legs said. But we found out, after a long-delayed long-delayed breakfast, that the Doc ciidn't find any trace of drugs or liquor on the body. "Maybe he went to sleep," I said. "Maybe," agreed Shorty. "Now just prove it and I can resume my disturbed slumbers." I couldn't, of course. "Who found him?" I asked. "Doc. Corriii)' back from a night call over in the hills somewhere and noticed the broken guard rail." "What do you think?" "I don't," he said. "I ain't got nothing to think on. There's got to be some other angles." ing that now. He never seemed to ! have to ask questions. He'd just i wait the other guy out sqeeze him dry with the weight of dead silence. si-lence. I could see the pressure on Rhodes. Like everybody else he'd a lot rather No-Legs would fire questions ques-tions than just stare. Forced on the defensive and obviously ob-viously angry at having to explain further to the legless owl before him, Rhodes started again. "You see, I came out on the train for a deer hunt while Lefty wound up our business. He was to meet me here today and we'd go on together." to-gether." He ground his conversation conversa-tion to a stop. No-Legs sure surprised both "Chick" and me with his next move. He twisted his wrist and the big gun in his hip holster moved into Rhodes' stomach. "You're under arrest ar-rest for murder," he said. Rhodes soon recovered from his surprise and grinned wickedly. "I The roadster had been moving on the steep down grade toward Scenic City when it failed to make a hairpin turn and jitterbugged its dance of death down the almost sheer mountainside. which he had slipped and slid to where the battered sports roadster and the man's body lay. Several hundred feet above looped the narrow concrete ribbon of Blue River pass highway. The roadster had been moving on the steep down grade toward Scenic City when it failed to make a hairpin turn and Jitterbugged its dance of death down the almost sheer mountainside. No-Legs mopped his face with a huge bandana and began a painstaking pain-staking search of the wreckage. There wasn't much. The dead man wore a rather flashy suit. He had on yellow shoes, so new that match scratches in the instep of the left one could plainly be seen. Cigarettes, Cigar-ettes, odds and ends, and a picture of the dead man and a little geezer evidently named "Chick," rounded out the inventory. "Somebody," said No-Legs, "could have got this guy drunk or drugged, driven him to this curve, headed the roadster for the railing, and stepped out. The pavement wouldn't show any tracks," he added add-ed sadly. "Shorty," I says, "maybe I could carry you pick-a-back back up this mountain." I could see he was ready to leave. "Yeh," he snorted, giving me a backhanded slap in the midriff with one of his ham-hands. "Me weighing weigh-ing 160 without legs, and you weighing weigh-ing 135 legs and all. You should "What do we do now?" "Nothing. When you're hunting geese the first thing to do is stay in the blind. Then If they don't fly in to you after so long, you try to crawl up on them. We ain't stayed in the blind long enough yet." He was right. Soon after dinner a smallish fellow showed up at Shorty's office. He was in hunting togs and would have looked like Little Lit-tle Lord Fauntleroy if it hadn't been for beetling black eyebrows and the vicious looking cigar he was smoking. smok-ing. "I'm 'Chick' Rhodes," he said, "and I wanted to talk with you about the wreck out on Blue River pass. Heard about it at the cafe." No-Legs kept Rhodes talking, then finally tossed the picture he had taken from the dead man on to the desk. Three words were under it "Lefty and Chick." "That's Lefty all right," Rhodes said. "And that's me," pointing to the other figure. "Taken in Chicago just before me and Lefty sold our pool hall and headed for California. Lefty was going to be drafted, and I couldn't run the place myself. Figured Fig-ured maybe I could handle a sandwich sand-wich stand in California for the duration." You could never tell from looking at No-Legs what he was thinking. He'd spread his stumps apart, roll his eyes up at your face and stare as unblinking as an owl. He was do- can prove I was back up in the hills for a week until an hour ago. I couldn't have done it." , "That's right," said No-Legs. "But you probably helped engineer it!" Over Rhodes' threats of suit and vengeance, No-Legs had him locked up. "Let's go to Rhodes' hotel," he said, without giving me a chance to ask questions. Arrived in "Chick's" room, he began digging in suitcases. suit-cases. "Here they are." He said it just like he knew they'd be there. They, were insurance policies on the life of George (Lefty) Ellitto. Twenty-five thousand dollars in all. "That dead man ain't Ellitto," No-Legs said. "I think Ellitto must have done the actual murder." I still couldn't get it. But that evening No-Legs met me in the cafe and gave me the dope. Rhodes had confessed. "It was like I said. Ellitto El-litto killed him. You see Ellitto and Rhodes found a guy in Chicago that looked just like Ellitto. They offered of-fered him a good proposition to go West with them. Up on the pass Ellitto stops the car on a pretense' of getting the other fellow to drive. "Then, he knocks him in the head, stows him behind the wheel and maneuvers the car over the cliff. We couldn't tell whether the fellow had been hit in the head or got the bump in the wreck." I began to see. "Rhodes was to collect the insurance, meet Ellitto in Old Mexico or some place and live happily ever after." Then I got out the question that had tormented tor-mented me all afternoon. "How did you know the dead man wasn't Ellitto?" El-litto?" "That was easy," No-Legs said. "Left-handed guys don't scratch matches on the bottom of their left shoes. Right-handed guys do that." |