hand. Sometimes he chewed on the end
of it, but he was not smoking. He was an Irishman, and as it happened
open-minded. He liked this brown-faced young fellow from
Wyoming--never had believed him guilty from the first. Moreover, he
was willing his detective bureau should get a jolt from an outsider.
It might spur them up in future.

"Chief, is there anything you want to say?" Kirby asked.

"Not a wor-rd. I'm sittin' in a parquet seat. It's your show, son."

Kirby's disarming smile won the Chief's heart. "I want to say now that
I've talked with the Chief several times. He's given me a lot of good
tips an' I've worked under his direction."

The head of the police force grinned. The tips he had given Lane had
been of no value, but he was quite willing to take any public credit
there might be. He sat back and listened now while Kirby told his
story.

"Outside of the Chief every one here is connected closely with this
case an' is involved in it. It happens that every man an' woman of us
were in my uncle's apartments either at the time of his death or just
before or after." Kirby raised a hand to meet Olson's protest. "Oh, I
know. You weren't in the rooms, but you were on the fire escape
outside. From the angle of the police you may have been in. All you
had to do was to pass through an open window."

There was a moment's silence, while Kirby hesitated in what order to
tell his facts. Hull mopped the back of his overflowing neck. Phyllis
Cunningham moistened her dry lips. A chord in her throat ached tensely.

"Suspicion fell first on me an' on Hull," Kirby went on. "You've seen
it all thrashed out in the papers. I had been unfriendly to my uncle
for years, an' I was seen goin' to his rooms an' leavin' them that
evening. My own suspicion was directed to Hull, especially when he an'
Mrs. Hull at the coroner's inquest changed the time so as to get me
into my uncle's apartment half an hour earlier than I had been there.
I'd caught them in a panic of terror when I knocked on their door.
They'd lied to get me into trouble. Hull had quarreled with Uncle
James an' had threatened to go after him with a gun in _two days_ after
that time--and it was _just forty-eight hours later he was killed_. It
looked a lot like Hull to me.

"I had one big advantage, Chief, a lot of inside facts not open to
you," the cattleman explained. "I knew, for instance, that Miss McLean
here had been in the rooms just before m