The bishop tried to peer out through the rounded bars. He hesitated, and then called: "Kindly refrain from yowling like that, Standish. What's all up?"
"Why, we've got him, you know. Murch has got him.
Make him talk now/’ "Got who?"
"Why, Louis Spinelli, demmit! He's down in the village, and Murch has got him under technical arrest."
"Whoosh!" said Hugh Donovan, and turned to stare at Dr. Fell.
CHAPTER VIII
At the Chequers Inn
At this point, the chronicler of Dr. Fell's adventures should, strictly speaking, apologize for introducing that luscious little ginch, Patricia Standish. "Ginch," Hugh Donovan has frequently assured the chronicler, is the word that best describes her; a mysterious term whose definition will presently be made clear. It is pronounced to rhyme with "cinch," for more reasons than one.
This apology should come from the fact that on one point all the leading authorities are agreed: to introduce a heroine (whether or not the tale be fact) is bad. Very bad. As Henry Morgan says, you know what I mean: the gray-eyed, fearless Grace Darling with the cool philosophy, who likes to poke her nose into trouble and use a gun as well as the detective, and who requires the whole book to make up her mind whether she is more than casually interested in the hero.
But in extenuation it must be urged, first, that this is a true story, and second — by the splendid grace of God — Patricia Standish had none of the traits just mentioned. She was not cool-headed or strong-minded. She could no more have accompanied the detectives with a gun than she could have brought down the villain with a flying tackle. Quite to the contrary, she was content to leave that sort of thing to the proper people; to beam up at you as though she were saying, "What a man!" — and you threw out your chest, and felt about nine feet tall, and said, "Ha, ha." Nor, in her case, were there all those persistent attempts to freeze or embarrass the hero until the very last. She tumbled into Hugh Donovan's arms from the start, and stayed there, and a very good thing too.