The lame girl, Irene MacFarlane, had charge of all needle work. At the beginning of the venture Irene had merely been employed by Josie and Elizabeth, giving a few hours a day to the work, but she had proven herself so necessary to the establishment that she had been tendered a full partnership and now every day the brave patient girl wheeled herself to the shop in her invalid’s chair, which she never left; and there she sat mending lace or doing the exquisite embroidery for which the Higgledy Piggledy Shop was famous, or even minding the store when the other partners were out on business. She managed her chair with the ease of an expert bicycle rider, never bumping into furniture or scraping her wheels, but gliding across the floor, weaving her way in and out, with a positive grace of movement.
The Higgledy Piggledy Shop was on the second floor of an old building. In the rear was a small electric elevator, entered from the alley. This had been originally a clumsy dumb-waiter, manipulated by creaking pulleys and ropes, but had been converted to its present state of useful beauty by Danny Dexter, who ever strove to serve his darling Mary Louise and her friends. Irene would enter the small lift from the rear through a door just large enough to admit her chair. The door was locked and Irene alone had the key. One touch of a button would send her to the floor above, where the door would automatically open and then she would glide into the shop. It always seemed to the girls a kind of miraculous vision when Irene would so silently appear.
On the day when Josie was showing Mary Louise the control she had gained over what she had hitherto looked upon as a despised and useless feature—at least useless as far as the detective business was concerned in the matter of disguises, although greatly prized as to its ability to detect tell-tale odors—Irene appeared just in time to get the full benefit of Josie’s last and most astounding face.
It was a sad face and a sinister one, the left nostril lifted and the right one compressed; the mouth drawn down at the corners with the under lip protruding loosely.
Irene greeted the girls gaily but stopped embarrassed.
“I—I—beg your pardon,” she said falteringly. “I thought for a moment you were Miss O’Gorman.”
Mary Louise laughed delightedly and try as she might Josie could not hold her expression but broke down in hopeless giggles.
“There now, I must practice a lot or I’ll never be able to fool a flea,” she declared. “If my risibles get the better of me there is no use in calling myself a detective.”
Irene looked worried, although she, too, was amused.
“What’s the matter with you, honey?” asked Josie.