an to speak without preliminary.

"When you girls reached home after this party last night was Miss Lehar
there?"

"Yes," answered Migwan and Hinpoha and Gladys together. Sahwah was
silent.

Immediately Agent Sanders' eye was upon her. "Was she?" he asked
directly of Sahwah.

Sahwah opened her lips and closed them nervously, unable to frame an
untruth, and equally unable to tell what she knew. She looked helplessly
at Veronica. The room became very still. The others looked at her in
astonishment. Agent Sanders bored her with his little, keen eyes. Sahwah
felt herself turning red and white and her heartbeats thumped against
her eardrums. She sent Veronica another miserable look. Veronica
returned the look steadily, and then she spoke.

"Tell him you saw me coming in the back door after you got home," she
said calmly.

"Is that true?" Agent Sanders asked of Sahwah.

Sahwah nodded. A gasp of astonishment went up from the other three
Winnebagos.

"Tell all the circumstances connected with the incident," Agent Sanders
directed Sahwah.

"There weren't any circumstances connected with it," replied Sahwah
earnestly. "We had just come home and our friend had had bad news and
was going away early in the morning and we were getting her ready and I
went out in the back entry way to get something and just then Veronica
came in the back door."

"You thought she had gone home with a sick headache and was in bed?"

"Yes," replied Sahwah, "but when she came in I decided she had been out
for a walk." This sounded like a perfectly natural explanation to
Sahwah.

"Didn't it strike you strange that she should have gone walking at that
hour?"

"No, it didn't," replied Sahwah eagerly. "She often does it."

"Ah-h!" Agent Sanders merely breathed the syllable, yet it held a world
of meaning. Sahwah felt vaguely apprehensive.

"So she often goes out walking at midnight, does she?" continued the
agent. Sahwah felt that she had made a misstep somewhere, and was
harming Veronica's cause instead of helping it, but the eyes of the
agent seemed to be drawing all her knowledge from her like a magnet
picking up needles.

"I meant," said Sahwah, "that she often has those sick headaches, and
when she does she generally goes out walking to cure them."

"And these headaches generally occur at night?"

"Yes."

"In other words," said Agent Sanders as confidently as if he could see
right inside of her head and knew everything in it, "