“No. We’ve an hour to spare before we can do anything, and Denny and me thought we’d take them to him ourselves.” McCarty gazed ceilingward through the wreaths of smoke. “Denny wants a little talk with him.”
“Every day,” Dennis laid down his book at last. “Every day, in every way, my friend Timothy McCarty is getting to be a better and better liar—”
“Denny, what have you got hold of now!” McCarty flushed hotly.
“One of your new lesson books,” the other replied with immense satisfaction. “’Tis by a foreign gentleman with a name like an Australian bushranger’s call—”
“I bought it by mistake, thinking it was about this psycho-stuff too, because I couldn’t understand it!” McCarty slammed the desk drawer upon the embarrassing volume and turned to the inspector, who had risen. “You’re going, sir? It may be a little past noon when I call you up, but you’ll hear from me one way or the other.”
Mutual recriminations of a more or less acrimonious nature took place after the inspector’s departure but they merely cleared the air. Finally McCarty remarked:
“I gave myself away as well as you about breaking into the Parsons house, but that was only after you’d told the inspector I was holding out on him, which I wasn’t, having nothing to hold. As to getting at criminals by way of science I’m not laughing at it, Denny, just because I’m not on to it yet.”
“Nor me!” Dennis agreed. “Only to my mind, science is a lot like spontaneous combustion; if you don’t handle it careful it’ll work up its own heat and break out in a blaze.”
“Like what?” McCarty paused with his hat halfway to his head.
“Spontaneous combustion.” Dennis repeated. “When anything that generates its own heat, like hay in a stable, is shut up too long without air getting to it, it’s liable to take fire by itself. That’s one of the first things ever I learned when I joined the department.”