“Five years or so.”

“Where did you carry it?”

“In my hip pocket.”

“Which hip pocket?”

Hull was puzzled at the question.  “Why, this one—­the right one, o’ course.  There wouldn’t be any sense in carryin’ it where I couldn’t reach it.”

“That’s so.  Mr. Johns, you may take the witness again.”

The young lawyer asked questions about the Dry Valley irrigation project.  He wanted to know why there was dissatisfaction among the farmers, and from a reluctant witness drew the information that the water supply was entirely inadequate for the needs of the land under cultivation.

Mrs. Hull, called to the stand, testified that on the evening of the twenty-third a man had knocked at their door to ask in which apartment Mr. Cunningham lived.  She had gone to the door, answered his question, and watched him pass upstairs.

“What time was this?”

“9.20.”

Again Kirby felt a tide of excitement running in his arteries.  Why were this woman and her husband setting back the clock thirty-five minutes?  Was it to divert suspicion from themselves?  Was it to show that this stranger must have been in Cunningham’s rooms for almost an hour, during which time the millionaire promoter had been murdered?

“Describe the man.”

This tall, angular woman, whose sex the years had seemed to have dried out of her personality, made a much better witness than her husband.  She was acid and incisive, but her very forbidding aspect hinted of the “good woman” who never made mistakes.  She described the stranger who had knocked at her door with a good deal of circumstantial detail.

“He was an outdoor man, a rancher, perhaps, or more likely a cattleman,” she concluded.

“You have not seen him since that time?”

She opened her lips to say “No,” but she did not say it.  Her eyes had traveled past the lawyer and fixed themselves on Kirby Lane.  He saw the recognition grow in them, the leap of triumph in her as the long, thin arm shot straight toward him.

“That’s the man!”

A tremendous excitement buzzed in the courtroom.  It was as though some one had exploded a mental bomb.  Men and women craned forward to see the man who had been identified, the man who no doubt had murdered James Cunningham.  The murmur of voices, the rustle of skirts, the shuffling of moving bodies filled the air.

The coroner rapped for order.  “Silence in the court-room,” he said sharply.

“Which man do you mean, Mrs. Hull?” asked the lawyer.

“The big brown man sittin’ at the end of the front bench, the one right behind you.”

Kirby rose.  “Think prob’ly she means me,” he suggested.

An officer in uniform passed down the aisle and laid a hand on the cattleman’s shoulder.  “You’re under arrest,” he said.

“For what, officer?” asked James Cunningham.