“Why not indeed?” replied Vandam smoothly. “If you’ll tell me where he is, I’ll tell you how he got there.”
After a pause the secretary muttered, rather sulkily, “I suppose you’re right. We’re right up against the very thing we were talking about. It’d be a queer thing if you or I ever came to think there was anything in cursing. But who could have harmed Wynd shut up in here?”
Mr. Alboin, of Oklahoma, had been standing rather astraddle in the middle of the room, his white, hairy halo as well as his round eyes seeming to radiate astonishment. At this point he said, abstractedly, with something of the irrelevant impudence of an enfant terrible:
“You didn’t cotton to him much, did you, Mr. Vandam?”
Mr. Vandam’s long yellow face seemed to grow longer as it grew more sinister, while he smi
