gged in the lock.

I took off with a jerk and howl of tires.

There was the sudden shrill of a police whistle but it was stopped after
one brief blast. As I turned the corner, I caught a fast backwards dig
at them. They were filing back into the hotel. I did not believe that
the policeman was part of the conspiracy, but I was willing to bet that
Walton was going to slip the policeman a box of fine cigars as a reward
for having helped them to get rid of a very embarrassing screwball.

IX

I put a lot of miles between me and my recent adventure before I stopped
to take stock. The answer to the mess was still obscure, but the
elimination of Nurse Farrow fell into the pattern very neatly.

Alone, I was no problem. So long as my actions were restricted to
meandering up and down the highways and byways, peering into nooks and
crannies and crying, "Catherine," in a plaintive voice, no one cared.
But when I teamed up with a telepath, they moved in with the efficiency
of a well-run machine and extracted the disturbing element. In fact,
their machinations had been so smooth that I was beginning to believe
that my 'Discoveries' were really an assortment of unimportant facts
shown to me deliberately for some reason of their own.

The only snag in the latter theory was the fact of our accident.
Assuming that I had to get involved in the mess, there were easier ways
to introduce me than by planning a bad crack-up that could have been
fatal, even granting the close proximity of the Harrison tribe to come
to the rescue. The accident had to be an accident in the dictionary
definition of the word itself. Under the circumstances, a planned
accident could only be accepted under an entirely different set of
conditions. For instance, let's assume that Catherine was a Mekstrom and
I was about to disclose the fact. Then she or they could plan such an
accident, knowing that she could walk out of the wreck with her hair
barely mussed, leaving me dead for sure.

But Catherine was not a Mekstrom. I'd been close enough to that satin
skin to know that the body beneath it was soft and yielding.

Yet the facts as they stood did not throw out my theory. It merely had
to be revised. Catherine was no Mekstrom, but if the Harrisons had
detected the faintest traces of an incipient Mekstrom infection, they
could very well have taken her in. I fumed at the idea. I could almost
visualize them pointing out her infection and then informing her b