I wouldn’t recommend the rooms and they say the meals——”

“Oh, we weren’t thinking of stopping,” Eve assured her hastily. “It’s just—just an errand.”

From behind a damaged screen door, voices issued as we approached the side door of “Trap’s place.” Entering, we found ourselves in a narrow store. A woman sat behind the counter adding a column of figures on a brown paper bag. In the rear two men were smoking. A hurried glance told me that neither resembled the gentleman we sought.

Eve advanced to the counter and stated our errand.

“I guess likely it’s that Mr. Bangs you want,” the woman said when she had finished. I was aware as she eyed us of the same lively curiosity which had animated the dandelion digger. “He come in last night,” she went on. “I didn’t hear him say nothin’ ’bout no suitcase. Real estate’s his line, he said. He was makin’ inquiries about the old Craven House up Old Beecham way and I seen him start off in that direction this mornin’, though it’s the first I heard the place was for sale and what anybody’d want an old rattletrap like that for——”

This was rather of a facer; after we’d come all this way to find our bird flown. The woman must have seen the disappointment in our faces, for she added, “If you walked up there right away, maybe you could catch him. He ain’t been gone more’n half an hour.”

“Is it—far?” I asked weakly with a hostile glance at Mr. Bangs’ baggage on the floor at my feet.

“Not more’n ten minutes’ walk. You can leave the case here if you want.”

This seemed an inspired suggestion. And so without further delay, we set off in the direction the woman indicated. The road branched off the regular motor highway and climbed casually upward, between uneven stone walls and dusty foliage. “I never expected,” Eve remarked, “to spend the first day of my vacation trailing a barber!”

“Mrs. Trap said he was in the real estate line.”

“I know. But don’t forget the bottles of hair tonic.”

“I’m not likely to, if I have to lug them about the country much more.”

We walked for perhaps ten minutes without appearing to be getting anywhere in particular. But as we neared the brow of the hill, we spied above the trees at a distance back from the road the gray roof of a house. “This must be the place, 

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