The League of Frightened Men

I nodded. He stuck his paw in his breast pocket and pulled out some papers and began looking through them. He said,

"I'm a damn fool. I carry copies of them around with me, because I can't get rid of a hunch that there's a clue in them somewhere, some kind of a clue, if I could find it. Listen to this one, the one he sent last Friday, three days after Hibbard disappeared: \\

T

One. Two. Three.

Ye cannot see what I see:

His bloody head, his misery, his eyes

Dead but for terror and the wretched hope That this last blow, this finis, will not fall.

One. Two. Three.

Ye cannot hear what I hear:

His moan for pity, now his ^desperate breath To suck the air in through the bubbling blood. •A i • • And I hear, too, in me the happy rhythm, The happy boastful strutting of my soul.

Yes! Hear! It boasts:

One. Two. Three.

Ye should have killed me. ‹(I ask you, does that sound like business?" Cramer folded it up again.

"Did you ever see a guy that had been beaten around the head enough so that things were busted inside? Did you ever notice one? All right, get this: to suck the air in through the bubbling blood. Does that describe it? I'll say it does. The man that wrote that was looking at it, I'm telling you he was looking right at it.

That's why, as far as Andrew Hibbard is concerned, all I'm interested in is stiffs.

Chapin got Hibbard as sure as hell, and the only question is where did he put the leavings. Also, he got Dreyer, only with that one Elkus helped him."

The inspector stopped for a couple of

Pulls at his pipe. When that had been attended to he screwed his nose up at me and demanded, "Why, do you think it was suicide?"

"Hell no. I think Chapin killed him.

And maybe Harrison, and maybe Hibbard. I'm just waiting to see you and Nero Wolfe and the Epworth League prove it on him. Also I'm annoyed about Elkus. If you get Elkus wrong you may gum it." | "Uh-huh." Cramer screwed his nose again. "You don't like me after Elkus? I wonder if Nero Wolfe will like it. I hope not to gum it, I really do. I suppose you know Elkus has got a shadow on Paul Chapin? What's he suspicious about?"

I lifted my brows a little, and hoped that was all I did. "No. I didn't know that."

"The hell you didn't."

"No. Of course you have one, and we • have…" I remembered that I never had* got hold of Del Bascom to ask him about the dick in the brown cap and pink necktie. "I thought that runt keeping the boys company down there was one of Bascom's experts."