"Don't worry, Slivers; the boss will be here soon." Squint shivered and cast an apprehensive glance at the noose. The sun slowly went down behind the hills and the shadows lengthened. The silence of those men and the sight of the dangling noose further upset Squint's already overwrought nerves. He shrieked curses and tugged at the wire until his hands were raw and bleeding. The uncertainty of the whole thing sapped his courage until he was cowering on the ground, muttering meaningless words. "Mebbe yuh heard tell of me--I'm Jim-twin Allen." Squint Lane looked up with a start. He saw a small man who looked as if he might be a thousand years old. The man's face was covered with wrinkles; his strange eyes were unfathomable; his voice was flat, expressionless. There was something inhuman in the small man, for his face showed neither cruelty, anger, nor hate. Squint swallowed convulsively and then mumbled: "The Killer Wolf." "Yuh heard tell of me?" Allen repeated. Squint nodded. "Who paid yuh to kill Iky Small?" The wretched man had long passed the time when he could think coherently. "I didn't do it--he--I swear I----" "Shut up; that's a lie. If yuh didn't, who did?" Little by little, Allen drew the whole story from Squint. Squint had been drunk at One-wing McCann's hotel for a week before the murder. Then Boston Jack had come to him and taken him away. Squint was ordered to wait for Slivers at the crossroads and send him back to his own ranch on a wild-goose chase. Squint swore he had known nothing about the murder until afterward. He had once quarreled with Iky Small, and Boston Jack had threatened to hang the murder on him unless he ran away. Lefty Simms had accompanied him part of the way on his trip. Lefty had been a friend of Iky Small's, and the two had decided, from various things they had heard and known, that Spur Treadwell was the principal in the plot against Slivers. They had discussed ways of levying blackmail on Spur after he was married to Dot. Jim Allen was disappointed in the little information he had learned from Squint, but it added one more link in the chain of evidence against Spur Treadwell and definitely proved to him that Spur and Boston Jack were partners or at least closely associated. It also linked One-wing McCann with both Boston and Spur and made Allen at last see light in the tangled financial affairs of the ranch. Resolving to pay a visit to Boston Jack's place that night, he briefly told the others what he had learned from Squint and then mounted one of his gray horses. With the other one following, he started toward the Hard Pan for another attempt to discover its secret. "The aggravatin' little cuss! He don't tell no one nothin'," Slivers growled. "Yeh, his trail is sure hard to follow," Jack Allen smiled.