fifty-five-year-old widow with grown sons to make a blinkety blinked
fool of herself."

"He's a charmer, eh?" says I.

"Evidently," says Mr. Ellins. "Behold this inscription here, 'To dear
Inez, My Lady of the Unfettered Soul--from Virgie.' Get the point,
Son? 'To dear Inez'! Bah! Is he color blind, or what ails him? Of
course it's her money he's after, and for the sake of her boys I'm
going to block him. There! You see what I want?"

"Sure!" says I. "You got to have details about Virgie before you can
ditch him. Well, I'll see what I can dig up."

Maybe it strikes you as a chesty bluff for a juvenile party like me to
start with no more clew than that to round up in a few hours what a
high-priced sleuth agency would take a week for. But, say, I didn't
stand guard on the Sunday editor's door two years with my eyes and ears
shut. Course, there's always the city and 'phone directories to start
with. Next you turn to the Who book if you suspect he's ever done any
public stunt. But, say, swallow that Who dope cautious. They let 'em
write their own tickets in that, you know, and you got to make
allowances for the size of the hat-band.

I'd got that far, discovered that Virgie owned up to bein' thirty-five
and a bachelor, that he was born in Schoharie, son of Telemachus J. and
Matilda Smith Bunn, and that he'd once been president of the village
literary club, when I remembers the clippin' files we used to have back
on Newspaper Row. So down I hikes--and who should I stack up against,
driftin' gloomy through the lower lobby, but Whity Meeks, that used to