“Did you ever meet Billy before I took him into your office this afternoon?” he asked.
“No.”
“Ever hear of him before?”
“No.”
“All right; now I’m going to try you out good and hard. You intimate that he is a man with a history. What is his history?”
The expert sat back, thrust his hands into his pockets, and for a moment seemed to go into a trance, with his gaze fixed upon the ornate decorations of the café ceiling.
“I’ll make what you will probably call a series of wild guesses,” he said at length, “prefacing them with the assurance, which you must take at its face value, that Mr. Starbuck has told me nothing whatever of himself—at least, not consciously.”
“Go on,” said Maxwell.
“In the first place, he is an educated man—a college man—and he talks cowboy English only because it suits his fancy to talk it. Also, though he wears khaki and a cowboy hat, he is quite as much at home in evening clothes as you or I. Am I right, so far?”
“Yes.”