"O. K.!" The queer girl snapped her fingers. "I move that you or Captain Strawn search the men for the weapon, and that I search the Women.... Wait!" she harshly stopped a flurry of feminine protests. "I'll ask you, Dundee, to search me first yourself. I believe the technical term is 'frisking,' isn't it?... Then 'frisk' me.... Here is my handbag. I wore no coat, except this—" and she pointed to the jacket of her tweed suit.
As she strode toward the detective Clive Hammond sprang after her with an oath and a sharp command.
"Shut up, Clive! I'm not married to you yet!" she retorted, but her eyes were gentler than her voice.
His face burning with embarrassment, Dundee went through the traditional gestures of police "frisking"—running his hands rapidly down the girl's tall, sturdy body, slapping her pockets. And his fingers fumbled sadly as he opened her tooled leather handbag.
"Satisfied?" Polly Beale demanded, and at Dundee's miserable nod, the girl faced her friends: "Well, come along, girls!"
"Lord! What a girl!" Dundee muttered to Strawn, as the young Amazon herded Flora Miles, Penny Crain, Karen Marshall, Carolyn Drake, Lois Dunlap and Janet Raymond into the dining room.
Silently, and almost meekly, as if shamed into submission by Polly Beale's example, John Drake, Tracey Miles, Clive Hammond, Judge Marshall, and Dexter Sprague permitted Captain Strawn and Sergeant Turner to search them.
"How about the guest closet and the cars?" Dundee asked of Strawn in a low voice, when the fruitless, unpleasant task was finished.
"Gone over with a fine tooth comb long ago," Strawn assured him gloomily. "And not a hiding place in or outside the house that the boys haven't poked into—including the meadow as far as anyone could throw from the bedroom window."
The women were filing back into the room, some pale, some flushed, but all able to look each other in the eye again.