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 yesterday, that something was going to happen to him?"

There was nothing for it but another nod at this.

"Where did you get your reason?"

I might as well have told him; he told me that he knew I got it from Jerry. He held the police theory with this variation; I had been having some sort of communication with Jerry through which I had stumbled upon the idea that something was going to happen to Winton Scofield. I had got the notion that it was going to happen through his wife, and so, in my stupid way, I'd driven up to the house deliberately to smash into her car and scare her out of whatever plan she had in her mind.

Fred was emotionally worked up, of course, he believed that I meant well by what I tried to do; he didn't doubt I meant well now. He didn't blame me for having supposed when I found something was planned against his father that Shirley was in it.

"That's what I thought," he told me, when Rowan 'phoned me this morning and got me out of bed to tell me, 'Mr. Fred, your father's shot.'

"The family—Kenyon and I—always fig-