"You always did have brains, Alys!" It was Mrs. Frew who expressed herself with emphasis. "I'll persuade her myself. Don't you really think it would be wise, Letitia?" "I guess you're both right." Mrs. Battle stood up. "Now let's go out and have tea. I ordered it for five-thirty. New York's got nothing on us." But Alys, protesting that her mother was old-fashioned and still prepared supper for half past six, excused herself and left the house. She found that Colonel Roosevelt had gone home and was not sorry to cover the half-mile to her own, briskly, on foot. What course she eventually should take was still unformulated, but she was glad that she had not parted with any of her deeper knowledge to those kindly women who, perhaps, would have found it the straw too many. Let Enid Balfame keep her friends if she could. Let her have the whole State on her side if she could, so long as she lost Dwight Rush! CHAPTER XXIV The police, nettled by the sensational coup of the press, made a real effort to discover the identity of the man or woman who had fired the second pistol. For a time they devoted their efforts to implicating Frieda and young Kraus, but the pair emerged triumphantly from a grilling almost as severe as the third degree; furthermore, there was an absolute lack of motive. Conrad had never evinced the least interest in politics; and that Old Dutch should have commissioned the son of whom he was so proud to commit murder when gun-men could be hired for twenty-five dollars apiece was unthinkable to any one familiar with the thoroughly decent home life of the family of Kraus. Old Dutch's establishment was more of a beer garden than a common saloon, and responsible for a very small proportion of the inebriety of the County Seat. He and his sons drank their beer at the family board, but nothing whatever behind the bar. As for Conrad, Jr., industrious, ambitious, persistent, but without a spark of initiative, obstinate and quick-tempered but amiable and rather dull, his tastes and domestic ideals as cautious as his expenditures, it was as easy to trump up a charge of murder against him because he happened to have seen Mrs. Balfame leave her house by the kitchen door a few moments before he heard the shot that killed her husband, as it was to fasten the crime upon the unlovely Frieda because she ran home untimely with a toothache.