Seems Nicky had built up quite a rep. by some work he did over in France on an engineerin' job. Ran some supply tracks where nobody thought they could be laid, bridged a river in a night under fire, and pulled a lot of stuff like that. I don't know just what. Anyway, they pinned all sorts of medals on him for it, made him a colonel, and when it was all over turned him loose as casual as any buck private. That's the army for you. And the railroad people he'd been with before had been shifted around so much that they'd forgotten all about him. He wasn't the kind to tell 'em what a whale of a guy he was, and nobody else did it for him. So there he was, floatin' around, when Mr. Robert happened to hear of him. "Must have got you in some lively spots, runnin' a right of way smack up to the German lines?" I suggests. "M-m-m-m!" says he, through his teeth. "Wasn't it you laid the tracks that got up them big naval guns?" I asks. "I may have helped," says he. So I knew all about it, you see. Quite thrillin' if you had a high speed imagination. And you can bet I was some relieved when Mr. Robert blew in and took him off my hands. Must have been an hour later before he comes out and I goes into the private office to find Mr. Robert with his chin on his wishbone and his brow furrowed up. "Well, I take it the one-syllable champion broke the sad news to you!" says I. "Yes, he wants to quit," says Mr. Robert. "Means to devote all his time to breakin' the long distance no-speech record, does he?" I asks. "I'm sure I don't know what he means to do," says Mr. Robert, sighin'. "Anyway, he seems determined not to go to work for the Corrugated. I did discover one thing, though, Torchy; there's a girl mixed up in the affair. She's thrown him over." "I don't wonder," says I. "Probably he tried to get through a whole evenin' with her on that yes-and-no stuff." No, Mr. Robert says, it wasn't that. Not altogether. Nicky has done something that he's ashamed of, something she'd heard about. He'd renigged on takin' her to a dinner dance up in Boston a month or so back. He'd been on hand all right, was right on the spot while she was waitin' for him; but instead of callin' around with the taxi and the orchids he'd slipped off to another town without sayin' a word. The worst of it was that in this other place was the other woman, someone he'd had an affair with before. A Reno widow, too. "Think of that!" says I, "Nicky the Silent! Say, you can't always tell, can you? What's his alibi?" "That's the puzzling part of it," says Mr. Robert. "He hasn't the ghost of an excuse, although he claims he didn't see the other woman, had almost forgotten she lived there. But why he deserted his dinner partner and went to this place he doesn't explain, except to say that he doesn't know why he did it." "Too fishy," says I. "Unless he can prove he was walkin' in his sleep."