ad
reveled for a week burst with a result similar to that of over-inflating
a bubble. And during the brief period while Gizzard was relieving
himself with pleasing combinations of adjectives, Sube contemplated and
rejected suicide, flight, old bachelorhood, and becoming an anarchist so
that he might dynamite the Boon for Baldness factory. He was considering
some sort of legal proceedings based on fraud and misrepresentation,
when Gizzard nudged him to ascertain why they couldn't "catch her
without whiskers."

After all, Sube had his life to live. There were other affairs besides
those of the heart. And perhaps a brilliant piece of detective work
might give him a standing that even a mustache would not have been able
to effect.

"We _gotta_ do some'pm," Gizzard rattled on. "She'll be at the church
to-night, and here we ain't got any whiskers and can't do a thing."

Sube began to pull himself together. "We'll do some'pm all right," he
muttered.

"Well, what?"

"Oh, some'pm; and don't you forget it." Sube did not yet know what it
was to be himself; but an idea soon sprouted. He went into the house for
a sheet of paper and an envelope. Then with the aid of Gizzard and the
stump of a lead pencil he wrote the following letter to the sheriff:

Dear Sherriff

Disgise yourself like an old women and sit on the prebsytearean
church steps at 9 oclock tonight if you want to catch the mother of
the founding baby. When a women comes up and says suffer littel
childern arrest her shes the mother.

yours trully

Two Freinds.

"What's he got to disguise himself like a ol' woman for?" asked Gizzard.

"If we make it too easy," Sube explained, "he wouldn't pay any 'ttention
to it. And besides, a _man_ there on the church steps might scare her
away."

The boys had no way of knowing how much of an uproar the receipt of
their letter precipitated in the sheriff's office. And they would have
been decidedly uneasy if they had known with what celerity the sheriff
exhibited their letter to Mr. Cane, who was acting as Mr. Whiting's
counsel. But they remained in a state of beatific ignorance; and shortly
after nine o'clock that evening, cramped and uncomfortable from their
two hours' vigil among the branches of a large evergreen tree in front
of the Presbyterian Church, they were silent witnesses of a scene that
for a time baffled everybody, not excepting themselves.

They saw a heavily veiled w