That same evening I stayed over time in the Exchange, lending a hand. The work was something awful, and Katie Reilly, the new girl, was most snowed under and on the way to lose her head. I wanted to see her through and I wanted the credit of the office kept up, but it’s also true that I wanted to be on the job myself and hear all that was passing. Believe me, it was hard to quiet down in my bedroom at night after eight hours at the switchboard right in the thick of the excitement. Besides, I’d got to know the reporters pretty well and it was fun making them think I could give them leads and then guying them. I liked Babbitts the best, but there were three others that weren’t bad as men go. One was Jones, a tall thin chap like an actor, with long black hair hanging down to his collar, and Freddy Jasper, who was English and talked with an awful swell dialect, and a sallow-skinned, consumpted-looking guy called Yerrington who belonged on a paper as yellow as his face and always went round with a cigarette hanging from his lip like it was stuck on with glue. It was nearly eight and work was slacking off when I started to go home. What with the jump I’d been on and listening to the gabbing round the door I’d forgotten my supper. It wasn’t till I saw the Gilt Edge window with a nice pile of apples stacked up round a pumpkin, that I remembered I was hungry and walked over. There were only three people in the place, Florrie Stein, the waitress, and a woman with a kid in the corner. I was just finishing my corn beef hash with a cup of coffee at my elbow and stewed prunes on the line of promotion when Soapy and Jones and Jasper came in and asked me if they could sit at my table. "Please yourself," said I, "and you’ll please me," for politeness is one of the things I was bred up to, and they sat down, calling out their orders to Florrie Stein. They naturally began talking about "the case"—it was all anybody talked about just then—and for all I knew so much about it, I generally picked up some new bits from them. So I went to the extravagance of three cents worth of jelly roll, not because I wanted it, but because I could crumb it up and eat it slow and not give away I was sitting on to listen. "We can talk before you, Miss Morganthau," said Babbitts, "because while we all agree you’re the belle of Longwood, we’ve found out by sad experience you’re a belle without a tongue." Florrie Stein, bringing the food then, they were silent till she’d set it out, and when she’d drawn off to the cashier’s desk, they started in again. They were, so to speak, looking over Hines as a suspect. "No, Hines won’t fit," said Babbitts. "The presence of the jewelry on the body eliminates him. They’ve dug up his record and though the place he ran wasn’t to be recommended for Sunday school picnics, the man himself seems to have been fairly decent." "It’s odd about the bag—the fitted bag and the jewelry gone from the room," said Jasper.