"No, you don't deny anything we can prove on you," the Dry Valley man jeered.
"And Shibo didn't let up on you. He kept annoyin' you afterward," the cattleman persisted.
"Well, he—I reckon he aims to be reasonable now," Hull said uneasily.
"Why now? What's changed his views?"
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.