The fat man looked again at this brown-faced youngster with the single-track mind who never quit till he got what he wanted.  Why was he shaking the bones of Shibo’s blackmailing.  Did he know more than he had told?  It was on the tip of Hull’s tongue to tell something more, a damnatory fact against himself.  But he stopped in time.  He was in deep enough water already.  He could not afford to tell the dynamic cattleman anything that would make an enemy of him.

“Well, I reckon he can’t get blood from a turnip, as the old sayin’ is,” the land agent returned.

Kirby knew that Hull was concealing something material, but he saw he could not at the present moment wring it from him.  He had not, in point of fact, the faintest idea of what it was.  Therefore he could not lay ’hold of any lever with which to pry it loose.  He harked back to another point.

“Do you know that my cousin and Miss Harriman came to see my uncle that night?  I mean do you know of your own eyesight that they ever reached his apartment?”

“Well, we know they reached the Paradox an’ went up in the elevator.  Me an’ the wife watched at the window.  Yore cousin James wasn’t with Miss Harriman.  The dude one was with her.”

“Jack!” exclaimed Kirby, astonished.

“Yep.”

“How do you know?  How did you recognize them?”

“Saw ’em as they passed under the street light about twenty feet from our window.  We couldn’t ‘a’ been mistook as to the dude fellow.  O’ course we don’t know Miss Harriman, but the woman walkin’ beside the young fellow surely looked like the one that fainted at the inquest when you was testifyin’ how you found yore uncle dead in the chair.  I reckon when you said it she got to seein’ a picture of one of the young fellows gunnin’ their uncle.”

“One of them.  You just said James wasn’t with her.”

“No, he come first.  Maybe three-four minutes before the others.”

“What time did he reach the Paradox?”

“It might ‘a’ been ten or maybe only five minutes after we left yore uncle’s room.  The wife an’ me was talkin’ it over whether I hadn’t ought to slip back upstairs and untie yore uncle before they got here.  Then he come an’ that settled it.  I couldn’t go.”

“Can you give me the exact time he reached the apartment house?”

“Well, I’ll say it was a quarter to ten.”

“Do you know or are you guessin’?”

“I know.  Our clock struck the quarter to whilst we looked at them comin’ down the street.”

“At them or at him?”

“At him, I mean.”

“Can’t stick to his own story,” Olson grunted.

“A slip of the tongue.  I meant him.”

“And Jack and the lady were three or four minutes behind him?” Kirby reiterated.

“Yes.”

“Was your clock exactly right?”

“May be five minutes fast.  It gains.”

“You know they turned in at the Paradox?”