dle of comfort. Barrow handed him the paper and told him:
“Material witness in the Bronson case. We’ve gone through
him; I suppose you’ll want to take his jackknife. I’ll stop in
bter for my copy or get it in the morning. Any time he asks
for me, day or night, I want to see him.”
The warden pushed a button on his desk, ran his eyes
over the paper, looked at me, and cackled. “By golly, bud, you
should have put on some old clothes. The valley service
here is terrible.”
IT WAS certainly an antique. Apparently it was
a whole wing of the ground floor of the court-
house. The cells faced each other, two rows of them, one on
either side of a long corridor. Mine was two doors from the
far end. My cellmate was a chap in a dark blue suit with a
pointed nose and sharp brown eyes and a thick mop of well-
brushed hair. At the time I was locked in, which was around
6 o’clock, he was sitting on one of the cots brushing the hair.
The dim light from the little barred window, too high to see
out of, made things seem gloomy. We exchanged greetings
and he went on brushing. Pretty soon he asked;
“Got any cards or dice with you?”
“Nope.”
“They didn’t strip you, did they?”
‘They took my knife.”
He put the brush down and nodded. “You can’t kick on
that. Were you working out at the grounds? I’ve never seen
you around before.”
“You wouldn’t. My name is Archie Goodwin, and I’m from
New York and am being squeezed.” I waved a hand and sat
down on the other cot, which was covered with a dirty gray
blanket. “Forget it. Were you working out at the grounds?”
“I was until yesterday afternoon. Spoon-bean. Are you
hungry?”
‘I could eat. But I hesitate to send in an order—”
“Oh, not on the house. No. They feed at 5, and it’s the
usual. But if you’re hungry and happen to have a little
jack …”
“Go ahead.”
He went over to the deor and tapped three times with his
fingernail on one of the iron bars, waited a second, and tapped
twice. In a couple of minutes slow footsteps sounded in the
corridor, and as they got to our apartment my mate said in a
tone restrained but not particularly secretive, “Here, Slim.”
I got up and ambled across. It wasn’t the keeper who had
escorted me in, but a tall skinny object with an Adam’s ap-
ple as big as a goose egg. I got out the Nero Wolfe expense
wallet, extracted a dollar bill, and told him that I required
two ham sandwiches and a chocolate egg malted. He took
it but shook his head and said it wasn’t enough. I told him I
knew that but hadn’t wanted to spoil him, and parted from
another one, and asked him to include 5 evening papers in
the order.
By the time he returned, in a quarter of an hour, my mate
and I were old friends. His name was Basil Graham, and his
firsthand knowledge of geography and county jails was exten-
sive. I spread my lunch out on the cot with a sheet of the
newspaper for a tablecloth, and it wasn’t until the last crumb
had disappeared that he made a proposal which might have
withered the friendship in the bud if I hadn’t been firm. His
preparations were simple but interesting. From under the
blanket of his cot he produced three teaspoons of the five
and dime variety, and a small white bean. Then he came
over and picked up one of my newspapers and asked, “May I?”
I nodded. He put the newspaper on the floor and sat on it,
and in front of him, on the concrete, ranged the three tea-
spoons in a row, bottoms up. He had nifty fingers. Under one
of the spoons he put the bean and then looked up at me like
the friend he was.
“You understand,” he said, “I’m just showing you how it’s
done. It will pass the time. Sometimes the hand is quicker,
sometimes the eye is quicker. It’s not a game of chance, but
a game of skill. Your eye against my hand. Your eye may be
quicker than my hand, and we can only tell by trying. It never
hurts to try. Which spoon is the bean under?”
I told him, and it was. He tried again, his fingers darting,
and again it was. The next time it wasn’t. The next three times
it was, and he began to act flustered and surprised and dis-
pleased with himself.
I shook my liead. “Don’t do it, Basil,” I said regretfully.
“I’m not a wise guy exactly, but I’m a tightwad. If you go on
working up indignation at yourself because my eye is so much
quicker than your hand, you might get so upset you would
actually offer to make a bet on it, and I would have to refuse.
As a matter of fact, you are extremely good, both at manipu-
lating the bean and at getting upset, but the currency you
saw in the wallet is not my own, and even if it was I’m
a tightwad.”
“It don’t hurt to try, does it? I just want to see—”
“No, I don’t lather.”
He cheerfully put the spoons and the bean away, and the
friendship was saved.
It began to get dark in the cell, and after a while the lights
were turned on. Somehow that only made it gloomier, since
there was no light in the cell itself. The only way I could
have read the paper, except for the headlines, which were
screaming murder, would have been to hold it up against the
bars of the door to catch the light from the corridor, so I
gave it up and devoted myself to Basil. He was certainly a
good-natured soul, for he had been nabbed after only one
day’s work at the exposition and expected to be fined 50
samoleons on the morrow, but I suppose if you embrace spoon-
bean as a career you have to be a philosopher to begin with.
The inside of my nose was beginning to smart from the atmo-
sphere. In a cell across the corridor someone started to sing
in a thin tenor, I’m wearing my heart away for you, it cries
out may your love be true, and from further down the line
groans sounded, interrupted by a voice like a file growling,
“Let him sing, let him sing, what the hell, it’s beautiful.”
Basil shrugged. “Just bums,” he said tolerantly.
My wrist watch said 10 minutes to 8 when footsteps stopped
at our address again, a key was turned in the lock, and the
door swung open. A keeper I hadn’t seen before stood in the
gap and said, “Goodwin? You’re wanted.” He stepped aside
to let me out, relocked the door, and let me precede him
down the corridor. “Warden’s office,” he grunted.
Three men were standing in the office: Nero Wolfe, under
self-imposed restraint, Frederick Osgood, scowling, and the
warden, looking disturbed. I told them good evening. Osgood
said, “Come on, OUie, well step outside.” The warden mut-
tered something about the rules, Osgood got impatient and
brusque, and out they went.
Wolfe stood and looked at me with his lips compressed.
“Well?” he demanded. “Where were your wits?”
“Sure,” I said bitterly, “brazen it out. Wits my eye. Finger-
prints on the wallet. I bribed the shed attendant with ten
bucks of Jimmy Pratt’s money, which I’ll explain to you some
day if I don’t rot in this dungeon. But chiefly, a deputy sheriff
says that this morning at the hotel he heard Bronson tell
somebody in New York on the telephone that a man named
Goodwin poked him in the jaw and took a receipt away from
him. Ha ha ha. Did you ever hear anything so droll? Even
so, they don’t think I’m a murderer. They only think I’m
reticent. They’re going to break my will. Of course if I had
taken a receipt from Bronson and if they should find it—”
Wolfe shook his head. “Since you didn’t, they can’t. Which
reminds me …”
His hand went into his pocket and came out again with
my card case in it. I took it and inspected it, saw that it
contained its proper items and nothing else, and put it where
it belonged.
“Thanks. No trouble finding it?”
“None. It was quite simple. I had a talk with Mr. Waddell
after you left and told him of my interview with Mr. Bronson
last evening whatever I thought might be helpful. Then
he went, and I telephoned the courthouse and could learn
nothing. I found myself marooned. Finally I succeeded in
locating Mr. Osgood, and his daughter came for me. She had
been questioned, but not, I imagine, with great severity-