“She could get away with it,” he gave his opinion; “indoors and if she kept her mouth shut.”
“Exactly,” I said.
“Exactly my eye!” Phyllis Coplin exploded. “Do you two correspondence-school detectives think we wouldn’t know the difference between a man and a woman dressed in man’s clothes? He had a day or two’s growth of hair on his face—real hair, if you know what I mean. Do you think he could have fooled us with false whiskers? This happened, you know; it’s not in a play!”
The others stopped gaping, and heads bobbed up and down.
“Phyllis is right,” Jacob Coplin backed up his offspring; “he was a man—no woman dressed like one.”
His wife, the maid, and the janitor nodded vigorous endorsements.
But I’m a bullheaded sort of bird when comes to going where the evidence leads. I spun to face Blanche Eveleth.
“Can you add anything to the occasion?” I asked her.
She smiled very sweetly at me and shook her head.
“All right, bum,” I said. “You’re pinched. Let’s go.”
Then it seemed she could add something to the occasion. She had something to say, quite a few things to say, and they were all about me. They weren’t nice things. In anger her voice was shrill, and just now she was madder than you’d think anybody could get on short notice. I was sorry for that. This job had run along peacefully and gently so far, hadn’t been marred by any rough stuff, had been almost ladylike in every particular; and I had hoped it would go that way to the end. But the