“Why?” was exactly what they wished most to know. They asked, “When Jerry was one of your family and before he ‘reverted,’ had he ever quarrelled with or taken a particular dislike to Winton Scofield?” They were all full of that “reversion” idea which they played up in their papers. I went to my office that morning, not with an intention of doing any business but to wait by my private wire on which yesterday Jerry had called me. Likely enough it was being watched this morning, I thought; surely I was being watched as a natural consequence of the police knowledge that I was loyal to Jerry. Every few minutes, on the office wire, a newspaper or some friend or some crank was calling me; once mother called me on the private line; but otherwise it was silent. By midforenoon the newspapers were strewing all over the streets the news that Jerry Fanneal, who had vanished since his attack upon Dorothy Crewe, had reappeared in the rôle of murderer and shot down old Winton Scofield, the recently rejuvenated. It gave them full flood tide for all their sensation stuff with the sun of the new murder and the moon of old scandals pulling the same way. Naturally they raked over the robbery of Dorothy Crewe and the fate of old Win with his former wives. You know those pages of pictures which every news sheet seems to have these days,--three-quarters photographs of the people who stopped their car on the railroad crossing, the lady who ate the poison and the lady who sent it, the new back-stroke swimming champion and the tenor who sang at the Auditorium. Well, the Fanneals and the Scofields, with Win’s wives, pushed them all off the page that day; we had it solid. When I looked at the picture of Win’s last wife, Shirley of the yellow hair, knowing she was also Christina, you may imagine I had some arguments with myself about staying silent. A buyer was bothering me all through this time. I’d told the doorkeeper and the telephone girl, “Turn off everybody you can.” But weak words had taken no effect upon this gentleman who, by his own account, was one Klangenberg, a keeper of a delicatessen on a fourth-rate street off Larrabee. He demanded to see me personally about a claim over a shipment of Hawaiian pineapple. “He will see you, sir,” my office manager reported. “He says you promised to see him.” I shook my head. “He says to say to you, sir, if you don’t remember,” my manager continued, “that when you promised, he asked you about Smetsheen of Minneapolis.” I sat up at that; for Jerry was the one who had last asked me about Smetsheen of Minneapolis. I went out to see Klangenberg, who was a tall, phlegmatic Swede entirely positive on the subject of pineapple and quite fluent about it until he had drawn me off alone with him. Then he said, “‘Kidnapped’ and ‘Westward Ho’ says to Steve, ‘They crossed us last night; but stick. Not a word; you can help and we’ll get them. Stick, Steve.’”