The League of Frightened Men

"Hey, lady, wait a minute! Your fur!"

I got it from Fritz and caught her at the front door and put it around her. Pitney Scott got out of his cab and came over to help her down the stoop, and I went back in. •- • – - – ^ Wolfe was glancing through a letter from Hoehn and Company that had come in the morning mail. When he had finished he put it under a paperweight – a piece of petrified wood that had once been used to bust a guy's skull – and said:

"The things a woman will think of are beyond belief. I knew a woman once in Hungary whose husband had frequent headaches. It was her custom to relieve them by the devoted application of cold compresses. It occurred to her one day to stir into the water with which she wetted the compresses a large quantity of a penetrating poison which she had herself distilled from an herb. The result was gratifying to her. The man on whom she tried the experiment was myself. The woman -"

He was just trying to keep me from annoying him about business. I cut in.

"Yeah. I know. The woman was a witch you had caught riding around in the curl of a pig's tail. In spite of all that, it's time for me to brush up a little on this case we've got. You can give me a shove by explaining in long words how you knew Dora Chapin did her own manicuring."

Wolfe shook his head. "That would not be a shove, Archie; it would be a laborious and sustained propulsion. I shall not undertake it. I remind you merely: I have read all of Paul Chapin's novels. In two of them Dora Chapin is a character.

He of course appears in all. The woman who married Dr. Burton, Paul Chapin's unattainable, seems to be in four out of ^five; I cannot discover her in the latest one. Read the books, and I shall be more inclined to discuss the conclusions they have led me to. But even then, of course, I would not attempt to place plain to your eyes the sights my own have discerned.

God made you and me, in certain respects, quite unequal, and it would be futile to try any interference with His arrangements."

Fritz came to the door and said lunch was ready. »

11

Sometimes I thought it was a wonder