er. If he _did_ pull any startlin' stunt, I
stood to lose a thousand bucks, not countin' the weddin' gift, to Alex.
They was five hundred more I'd invested right then, makin' fifteen
hundred in all, which I considered was gettin' into money. For all I
knowed, Hector and Alex might be framin' me and they ain't no man
livin' who loves bein' a sucker.

I decided right then and there to shoot another nickel on the thing and
I called up the Ryan Detective Agency. Mike Ryan had been a friend of
me and Hector since we'd been in baseball. I told him the whole layout
and asked for a report on the activities of Hector the followin' day,
if possible.

It was three days before I seen Ryan's report. He give it to me
himself by mouth.

"Say!" he says. "This Hector bird has gone nutty, and I suppose bein'
friends of his, you and me had better have him put away where he can't
do himself no violence."

"What's he doin'?" I asks.

"Well," says Ryan, "I'll give you the dope since he left the ball park
on Monday. The first thing he does is go to the bank and draw out
every nickel he's got. Then he moves from the hotel to Cereal
Crossin', N. J. This burg casts eleven votes for president every four
years and they all work on the same farm. Hector hires a shack away
out in the middle of the woods there and, from then on, boxes and
crates begins to arrive for him from everywheres but Brazil. I met up
with a Secret Service guy who had dropped in to get a line on what
kinda bombs Hector was makin' before pinchin' him, and we went through
this express stuff durin' the night. The first crate we tackled
contained all the glassware in the world of a medical nature. They was
bottles, test tubes, bowls and all the stuff usual found in a practical
anarchist's workshop. After the first peep, the Secret Service guy
wanted to run right over and fit Hector with iron bracelets, but I got
him to hold off long enough to look over the rest of the stuff. We
went through every box and what d'ye think we found in 'em?"

"I wasn't there," I says. "Tell me."

"Well," says Ryan, grinnin', "when all this stuff was assembled, it
would make a first class delicatessen shop and that's all! They was
meats, cheese, olive oil, fish, vegetables, pickles, mustard and about
fifteen other eatables I never seen or heard tell of before in my life!
We busted a lot of it open, lookin' for explosives, but they was all on
the level. Why, that bird's got eno