So I knew all about it, you see. Quite thrillin' if you had a high speed imagination. And you can bet I was some relieved when Mr. Robert blew in and took him off my hands. Must have been an hour later before he comes out and I goes into the private office to find Mr. Robert with his chin on his wishbone and his brow furrowed up.
"Well, I take it the one-syllable champion broke the sad news to you!" says I.
"Yes, he wants to quit," says Mr. Robert.
"Means to devote all his time to breakin' the long distance no-speech record, does he?" I asks.
"I'm sure I don't know what he means to do," says Mr. Robert, sighin'. "Anyway, he seems determined not to go to work for the Corrugated. I did discover one thing, though, Torchy; there's a girl mixed up in the affair. She's thrown him over."
"I don't wonder," says I. "Probably he tried to get through a whole evenin' with her on that yes-and-no stuff."
No, Mr. Robert says, it wasn't that. Not altogether. Nicky has done something that he's ashamed of, something she'd heard about. He'd renigged on takin' her to a dinner dance up in Boston a month or so back. He'd been on hand all right, was right on the spot while she was waitin' for him; but instead of callin' around with the taxi and the orchids he'd slipped off to another town without sayin' a word. The worst of it was that in this other place was the other woman, someone he'd had an affair with before. A Reno widow, too.
"Think of that!" says I, "Nicky the Silent! Say, you can't always tell, can you? What's his alibi?"
"That's the puzzling part of it," says Mr. Robert. "He hasn't the ghost of an excuse, although he claims he didn't see the other woman, had almost forgotten she lived there. But why he deserted his dinner partner and went to this place he doesn't explain, except to say that he doesn't know why he did it."
"Too fishy," says I. "Unless he can prove he was walkin' in his sleep."