to go
straight to Vielhaber's, where they kept an excellent line of Ajax
Invigorators and sold them under their right names. The judge said
"Stuff and nonsense" to this, but the ladies believed, for despite his
levity Dave Cowan knew things. He read books and saw the world. Only the
Wilbur twin still had faith in the invigorator. He had seen the picture.
You couldn't get round that picture.

Having made the judge uncomfortable, Dave rendered Winona so by a brief
lecture upon organic evolution, with the blue jay as his text. He said
it had taken four hundred and fifty million years for man to progress
thus far from the blue-jay stage--if you could call it progress, the
superiority of man's brain to the jay's being still inconsiderable.

Winona was uncomfortable, because she had never been able to persuade
herself that we had come up from the animals, and in any event it was
not talk for the ears of innocent children. She was relieved when the
speaker strayed into the comparatively blameless field of astronomy,
telling of suns so vast that our own sun became to them but a pin point
of light, and of other worlds out in space peopled with beings like Mrs.
Penniman and Winona and the judge, though even here Winona felt that the
lecturer was too daring. The Bible said nothing about these other worlds
out in space. But then Dave had once, in the post office, argued against
religion itself in the most daring manner, with none other than the
Reverend Mallett.

It was not until the meal ended and they were again on the porch in the
summer dusk that Winona made any progress in her criminal
investigations. There, while Dave Cowan played his guitar and sang
sentimental ballads to Mrs. Penniman--these being among the supposed
infirmities of the profligate duchess--Winona drew the twins aside and
managed to gain a blurred impression of the day's tremendous events. She
never did have the thing clearly. The Merle twin was eager to tell too
much, the other determined to tell too little. But the affair had
plainly been less nefarious than reported by Don Paley to Ed Seaver. The
twins persisted in ignoring the social aspects of their adventure. To
them it was a thing of pure finance.

Winona had to give it up at last, for Lyman Teaford came with his flute
in its black case. Dave Cowan finished "In the Gloaming," brazenly,
though it was not thought music by either Lyman or Winona, who would
presently dash into the "Poet and Peasant" ove