“Sufferin’ sunfish! You don’t mean it? Then this guy is the very same villain that’s been diggin’ up that garden and that broke into your aunt’s house the other night!”
“Looks like it,” said Michael. “He must have got himself another wig somewhere.”
“And me talkin’ to him face to face!” moaned Hamish. “Just the very man I was lookin’ for! And me falling for that yarn of his that he’d lost all his hair from jungle fever when he was twenty-one and how this restorer had brought it all back in ninety days! Golly, I could go kick myself into the ocean—him and his old hair tonic!”
He took out the cork from the bottle and sniffed it disgustedly. “Uh! Smells like glue and kerosene!”
“Let me smell,” said Hattie May.
The bottle was passed from one to the other and we all made faces in turn. As I handed it back to Hamish, he seized it violently and, rising, with a savage gesture, flung it into the sea. It fell far out in the green water with a plump. “I’m goin’ to get even with that fellow,” he declared dramatically, “if it’s the very last act of my life—even if it takes me ten years!”
“Poor Captain Trout,” Eve murmured, “destined to a hairless old age!”
Hamish glared at her. “I say,” he demanded, “when do we start eatin’?”
Michael bent over the oven. “The potatoes are done,” he announced.
While we ate, we continued to discuss the case of Mr. Bangs. What sort of a man was this? One day appearing as a real estate agent, another as a burglar and a third, as a street peddler! And if he had failed to find what he was after in the old garden, why was he still hanging about? Were the wigs he wore intended merely as an advertisement of his wares or were they worn for disguise?