"Yes. Your dear friend. Well, Dan was up all night that night with a raging toothache. He said the Grimes' had a party. Purt was there with his car. Dan knows the car was taken away from the house and was gone more than an hour that evening, and that Purt did not go with the car. "See? He's shielding somebody--the poor fish!" added Chet. "That is what Short and Long has been saying. Now, what do you know about that?" CHAPTER XXII THE CASE FOR AND AGAINST PURT The news Chet had divulged was so exciting that the girls quite forgot for the time being the wreck that Hester Grimes seemed to have made of the forthcoming performance of "The Rose Garden." Their chattering tongues mentioned Hester more than once, however, as they discussed Chet's news. Whether Purt Sweet's car had run down the man from Alaska or not, what did Hester know about it? "Can it be possible that Purt is shielding Hester in this matter?" Laura queried gravely. "Oh, it couldn't be! She wasn't in that car that knocked down Mr. Nemo of Nowhere," Bobby declared emphatically. "He has always favored Hester and Lil," Jess "Pooh!" again put in the irrepressible. "That's only because Pretty Sweet thinks there is nothing in this world so good or great as money; and both the Grimes and the Pendleton families have got oodles of it." "I don't know about that," Chet said quite as thoughtfully as his sister. "It may not be their folks' money that attracts Purt to those two girls." "What then?" demanded Bobby. "They flatter him. He can lap that up like our cat laps cream." "That is true," agreed Jess Morse. "Certainly we don't flatter, him," Bobby said bluntly. "It may be that we have never given Purt a fair deal," Laura observed. "Hester and Lil do not make fun of him." "And is he paying Hester back by shouldering something for her?" Jess asked. "Oh, she never was in that car when it was taken away from where Purt had it parked before the Grimes' house," Chet hastened to declare with assurance. "I got all the facts from Dan Smith. He'd swear to them." "Let us hear the particulars," begged Laura. "Why, Dan says he was up at his window on the third floor of their house watching the lights in the Grimes' house. It was a big party. Dancing on the lower floor, and a crowd of folks. He saw two men--or maybe boys--run out of the side door and down to the gate, as though they were sneaking away from some of the others, you know." "Well?" his sister responded. "Go on." "Dan didn't know the fellows. Fact was, he couldn't see their faces very well, and so he could not be sure of their identity in any case." "The street is pretty wide there, it's a fact," murmured Bobby.