n his fright for his own vindication. "If you'll look at the
neg--"

"I wouldn't touch it for a million dollars!" roared Lobel. "Burn it up,
I tell you! And bury the ashes!"

Still choking, still bellowing, he scrambled to his feet, an ungainly
embodiment of mortal agitation, and ran for the door. But Mr. Geltfin
beat him to it and through it, Quinlan and Appel following in the order
named.

Outside their chief fell up against a wall, panting and wheezing for
breath, his face swollen and all congested with purple spots. They
thought he was about to have a stroke or a seizure of some sort. But
they were wrong. This merely was Nature's warning to a man with a size
seventeen neckband and a forty-six-inch girth measurement. The stroke he
was to have on the following day.

Probably Quinlan and Geltfin as experienced business men should have
known better than to come bursting together into the office of a stout
middle-aged man who so lately had suffered a considerable nervous shock
and still was unstrung; and having after such unseemly fashion burst in,
then to blurt out their tidings in concert without first by soft and
soothing words preparing their hearer's system to receive the tidings
they bore. But themselves, they were upset by what they just had learned
and so perhaps may be pardoned for a seeming unthoughtfulness. Both
speaking at once, both made red of face and vehement by mingled emotions
of rage and chagrin, each nourishing a perfectly natural and human
desire to place the blame for a catastrophe on shoulders other than
their own two pairs, they sought to impart the tale they brought. Ensued
for an exciting moment a baffling confusion of tongues.

"It was that Josephson done it--the mousy little sneak!"

These words became intelligible as Quinlan, exerting his superior vocal
powers, dinned out the sputtering inarticulate accents of Geltfin.

"He fixed it so that you'd spill the beans, Lobel! He fixed The
She-Demon--Josephson. And me trusting him!

"How should I be knowing that all this time him and that girl was
secretly engaged to be married? How should I be knowing that he would
find out for himself the day after the funeral that she was dead and yet
never say a word about it? How should I be knowing that he would have
all tucked away somewhere a roll of film showing her dressed up like a
madonna or a saint or a martyr or a ghost or something which he took
privately one time when they was out together o