rs ago. He impressed me as knowing firearms pretty
thoroughly.... Well, you can look for me tomorrow, say around two. In
the meantime, I'll see Goode, and also Gresham and Arnold Rivers."

CHAPTER 2

After ushering his client out the hall door and closing it behind her,
Rand turned and said:

"All right, Kathie, or Dave; whoever's out there. Come on in."

Then he went to his desk and reached under it, snapping off a switch.
As he straightened, the door from the reception-office opened and
his secretary, Kathie O'Grady, entered, loading a cigarette into an
eight-inch amber holder. She was a handsome woman, built on the generous
lines of a Renaissance goddess; none of the Renaissance masters, however,
had ever employed a model so strikingly Hibernian. She had blue eyes, and
a fair, highly-colored complexion; she wore green, which went well with
her flaming red hair, and a good deal of gold costume-jewelry.

Behind her came Dave Ritter. He was Rand's assistant, and also Kathie's
lover. He was five or six years older than his employer, and slightly
built. His hair, fighting a stubborn rearguard action against baldness,
was an indeterminate mousy gray-brown. It was one of his professional
assets that nobody ever noticed him, not even in a crowd of one; when he
wanted it to, his thin face could assume the weary, baffled expression of
a middle-aged book-keeper with a wife and four children on fifty dollars
a week. Actually, he drew three times that much, had no wife, admitted to
no children. During the war, he and Kathie had kept the Tri-State Agency
in something better than a state of suspended animation while Rand had
been in the Army.

Ritter fumbled a Camel out of his shirt pocket and made a beeline for the
desk, appropriating Rand's lighter and sharing the flame with Kathie.

"You know, Jeff," he said, "one of the reasons why this agency never made
any money while you were away was that I never had the unadulterated
insolence to ask the kind of fees you do. I was listening in on the
extension in the file-room; I could hear Kathie damn near faint when
you said five grand."

"Yes; five thousand dollars for appraising a collection they've been
offered ten for, and she only has a third-interest," Kathie said,
retracting herself into the chair lately vacated by Gladys Fleming.
"If that makes sense, now ..."

"Ah, don't you get it, Kathleen Mavourneen?" Ritter asked. "She doesn't
care about the pistols; she wa