"No Mr. Fowler lives here," was the growling reply from the inside.
"Then Mr. W. C. Evans or Mr. Henry Gerard will do!" snapped the operative, throwing his shoulder against the partly opened door. Noble—or Fowler, as he was afterward known—stepped aside as Hal plunged through, and then slammed the door behind him.
"Get him, Anna!" he called, throwing the safety bolt into position.
The next thing that Preston knew, a pair of arms, bare and feminine but strong as iron, had seized him around the waist and he was in imminent danger of being bested by a woman. With a heave and a wriggling twist he broke the hold and turned, just in time to see Fowler snatch a revolver from a desk on the opposite side of the room and raise it into position. Without an instant's hesitation he leaped to one side, dropped his hand into his coat pocket, and fired. Evidently the bullet took effect, for the man across the room dropped his gun, spun clean around and then sank to the floor. As he did so, however, the woman hurled a heavy vase directly at Preston's head and the operative sank unconscious.
"Well, go on!" I snapped, when Quinn paused. "You sound like a serial story—to be continued in our next. What happened then?"
"Nothing—beyond the fact that three policemen broke in some ten seconds after Hal fired, grabbed Mrs. Vaughan or whatever her name was, and kept her from beating Hal to death, as she certainly would have done in another minute. Fowler wasn't badly hurt. In fact, both of them stood trial the next spring—Fowler drawing six years and Anna Vaughan one. Incidentally, they sent 'em back to Leavenworth to do time and, as a great concession, allowed the woman to take two of her white mice with her. I managed to get one of the other four, and, when it died, had it stuffed as a memento of a puzzling case well solved.
"It's a hobby of mine—keeping these relics. That hatchet, for example.... Remind me to tell you about it some time. The mice were responsible for finding one man in fifty million—which is something of a job in itself—but the hatchet figured in an even more exciting affair...."