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If he does, he tells them where to get to out of that and how quick he wants it done, in language that makes the boldest efforts of the boys from across the tracks seem puny in comparison. The lads divide into two parties. One follows the buggy of the boss canvasman to Vandeman's lots where the stand is made.
I couldn't see anybody that she might mean, except a man who had walked the length of the place talking to the head waiter, and now stood arguing at the corner of what had been Bronson Vandeman's supper table. This man evidently had his attention directed to us, turned, looked, and in the moment of his crossing I saw that it was Cummings.
No telling where I'd find either, but the Fremont House was my best bet. Getting back there through the crowd, I saw Skeet Thornhill in a corner drugstore, waiting at its counter. I was afoot, having been obliged to park my roadster in one of the spaces set apart for this purpose. I noticed Vandeman's car already there.
"Well, of course you know, and I know, that they're scurrilous lies; but just how will you stop them?" I had intended my remark to stand as it was; but Worth filled in the pause after Vandeman's question with, "Jerry's here to get the truth of my father's murder, Bronse." "Murder?" The mere naked word seemed to shock Vandeman. His sort clothe and pad everything even their speech.
He made that little clucking sound with his tongue that people do when they want to offer sympathy, and find the matter hard to put into words. A seller of toy balloons on the corner with a lot of noisy youngsters around him; the ka-lash, ka-lam of a mechanical piano further down the block; and young Mrs. Vandeman's staccato tones saying,
You don't want it, Boyne." "Maybe not," I grunted. "Perhaps I could make as good a guess as you could at what young Mrs. Vandeman's capable of; a dolly face, and behind it the courage of hell." "Boyne," he said, as I left the door free to him, "quit making war on women." "Can't," I grinned and waved him on out. "The detective business would be a total loss without 'em."
There was a light in the rear of the house over there, and a well-trodden path leading from the hedge gap made what I took to be a servants' highway. Vandeman's house proved to be, as nearly as one could see it in the darkness, a sprawling bungalow, with courts, pergolas and terraces bursting out on all sides of it.
I heard the sobbing of the Ford truck; it went by, missing my runningboard by an inch, stopped at Vandeman's gate and Skeet discharged her cargo of clamor to stream across the sidewalk and up toward the bungalow. I saw Barbara, in the midst of the moving figures, suddenly stop, knew she had seen the two over there, and crossed to her, with a cheerful, "He's here all right."
And last, but loudest, repeated time and again, with wonder, with distaste, with rising anger, "The Vandeman's Chinese cook!" For with the ripping away of that black oval, I had looked into the slant, inscrutable eyes of Fong Ling. Hemmed in by the crowd, he could but face me; he did so with a kind of unhuman passivity. And the committee went wild. Their own masks came off on the run.
"Off take his mask off! Do it yourself!" Barbara's voice was clear and steady. I made three big jumps of the space between us and the leading couple. Vandeman's committee-men obstructed me, the excited yip going amongst them. "Vandeman Bronse Vannie Who let this fool in here? Do we throw him out?"
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