and I took a chance on there being no one else in it. Then I figured she’d need clothes—she couldn’t have taken any from home without tipping her mitt—and there was an even chance that she hadn’t laid in a stock beforehand. She’s got too many girl friends of the sort that do a lot of shopping to make it safe for her to risk showing herself in stores. Maybe, then, the man would buy what she needed for her. And it turned out that he did, and that he was too lazy to carry away his purchases, or perhaps there was too many of them, and so he had them sent out. That’s the story.”
Quayle nodded again.
“I was damned careless,” he said, and then, jerking a contemptuous thumb toward the girl. “But what can you expect? She’s had a skin full of hop ever since we started. Took all my time and attention keeping her from running wild and gumming the works. Just now was a sample—I told her you were coming up and she goes crazy and tries to add your corpse to