arious side tracks, they would take up again the refrain:
"Letter-in-the-chaps! Letter-in-the-chaps!" until Jean thought she
would go crazy if they kept it up much longer.

Little by little they drew near to Los Angeles. And then they were
there, sliding slowly through the yards in a drab drizzle of one of
California's fall rains. Then they were in a taxicab, making for the
Third Street tunnel. Then Jean stared heavy-eyed at the dripping palms
along the boulevard which led away from the smoke of the city and into
Hollywood, snuggled against the misty hills. "Letter-in-the-chaps!"
her tired brain repeated it still.

Then she was in the apartment shared with Muriel Gay and her mother.
These two were over at the studio, the landlady told her when she let
them in, and Jean was glad that they were gone.

She knelt, still in her hat and coat and with her gloves on, and fitted
her trunk key into the lock. And there she stopped. What if the
letter were not in the chaps, after all? What if it were but a trivial
note, concerning a matter long since forgotten; a trivial note that had
not the remotest bearing upon the murder? "Letter-in-the-chaps!" The
phrase returned with a mocking note and beat insistently through her
brain. She sat back on the floor and shivered with the chill of a
fireless room in California, when a fall rain is at its drizzling worst.

In the next room one of the men coughed; afterwards she heard Lite's
voice, saying something in an undertone to Art Osgood. She heard Art's
voice mutter a reply. She raised herself again to her knees, turned
the key in the lock, and lifted the trunk-lid with an air of
determination.

Down next the bottom of her big trunk they lay, just as she had packed
them away, with her dad's six-shooter and belt carefully disposed
between the leathern folds. She groped with her hands under a couple of
riding-skirts and her high, laced boots, got a firm grip on the fringed
leather, and dragged them out. She had forgotten all about the gun and
belt until they fell with a thump on the floor. She pulled out the
belt, left the gun lying there by the trunk, and hurried out with the
chaps dangling over her arm.

She was pale when she stood before the two who sat there waiting with
their hats in their hands and their faces full of repressed eagerness.
Her fingers trembled while she pulled at the stiff, leather flap of the
pocket, to free it from the button.

"Maybe it ain't there