At this exchange, the back of Fleetwood's neck could not have bristled more smartly had someone begun currying operations with a pair of spiked boots. He straightened rigidly on his stool, twitched significantly about the ears and nose and, in short, affected all the most usual aspects of a beagle alerted to the first whiff of a super-scented fox. Coming as it did in the exact moment of his greatest befuddlement, this overheard snatch of conversation had a telling effect. All at once it posed questions, suggested half-answers and plunged him headlong into a whole new field of bewildering conjecture. It all came too suddenly, however, for him to know how to react to it. For a moment he simply froze to his stool and stared straight ahead like a hypnotized hen. It was this reactional delay, then, which bogged him down at the decisive moment. By the time he jarred himself into action and twisted around on the stool, the girls had already moved away. One of them, in fact, was well along in the act of handing over the cash for a copy of the _Saturday Morning Call_ to the cashier by the door. "Hey!" Fleetwood said weakly. "Here, there...!" But time had drained out. The girl completed her transaction with the cashier, joined her friend at the door, and the two of them legged it in unison out to the sidewalk and into the burgeoning sunset. By the time Fleetwood had reached the doorway they had lost themselves in the crowd. "Hey," Fleetwood murmured with limp regret and turned back to find that the girl had returned to the counter and placed a steaming cup at his place. She was watching him with worried interest. "You want this joe, don't you?" she asked as he returned. "Yes," Fleetwood said, settling himself and gazing dully into the cup. "Yes, I want it." He lifted the cup and sampled the coffee which suddenly tasted quite familiar to him. But the greater part of his mind was concerned with other things. He looked up at the waitress who was still standing before him. "I wonder," he said, "did you notice those two young women who were just here? The ones standing there at the magazine racks?" The girl inclined her head thoughtfully for a moment, then nodded. "Clare and Connie?" she said. "You know them?" "Uh-huh. Sort of." "Who are they?" "Who _are_ they? Clare and Connie?" "Yes. What about them?" "Well, that's their names, Clare and Connie," the girl said. "That's all I know." "But what do they do?" Fleetwood said, trying it another way. "Have you ever heard?" "Oh," the girl said. "They're telephone operators. They come in here all the time." "Telephone operators?" Fleetwood did his best to digest this patently indigestible piece of information. No matter how he chewed it it still didn't fit with what had just happened. He drummed his fingers on the counter for a moment. "Are you sure you couldn't be mistaken?" he asked. "It couldn't be that maybe they work for some sort of investigator or the government, could it?"