and have Barbie drive me?"

"I'll take you, Skeeter," Vandeman said. "We're through here. We're for
home to dress, then to the country club--and not leave it again till
morning. That ball out there has got to be made the biggest thing Santa
Ysobel ever saw--regardless. Come on." The crowd swallowed them up.

Making for the Fremont House, I passed Dr. Bowman's stairway, and on
impulse turned, ran up. I found the doctor packing, very snappish, very
sorry for himself. He was leaving next day for a position in the state
hospital for the insane at Sefton. His kind have to blow off to
somebody; I was it, though he must have known I had no sympathy to
offer. The hang-over of last night's drunk made emotional the tone in
which he said,

"After all, a man's wife makes or breaks him. Mine's broken me. I could
have had a fine position at the Mountain View Sanitarium, well paid,
among cultured people, if she'd held up her damned divorce suit a little
longer."

"And as it is, you have to put up with what Cummings can land you with
such pull as he has."

"I'm not complaining of Cummings," sullenly. "He did the best he could
for me, I suppose, on such short notice. But a man of my class is
practically wasted in a place of the sort."

I had learned what I wanted; I carried more ammunition to the interview
before me. I found Dykeman in his room, propped up in bed, wheezing with
an attack of asthma. A sick man is either more merciful than usual, or
more unmerciful. Apparently it took Dykeman the former way; he accepted
me eagerly, and had me call Cummings from the adjoining room. The lawyer
was half into that costume he had brought from San Francisco. He came
quite modern as to the legs and feet, but thoroughly ancient in a shirt
of mail around the arms and chest, and carrying a Roman helmet in his
hand as though it had been an opera hat.

"Trying 'em on?" Dykeman whispered at him.

Cummings nodded with that self-conscious, half-tickled, half-sheepish
air that men display when it comes to costume. His greeting to me was
cool but not surly. What had happened might go as all in the day's work
between detective and lawyer.

"Just seen Bowman," was my first pass at them. "I gather he's not very
well pleased with the position you got him; seems to think it small pay
for a dirty job."

"What's this? What's this?" croaked Dykeman. "You been getting a place
for Bowman, Cummings?"

"Certainly," the lawyer dodged with swift, practic