The League of Frightened Men

Are you ready?" Wolfe suddenly and unexpectedly put volume and depth into his voice: "Ye should have killed me – comma – watched the last mean sigh -ff There was complete silence. It lasted ten seconds. Then Chapin's fingers moved and the typewriter clicked, firm and fast. I followed the words on it. It got through the first three, but at the fourth it faltered. It stopped at the second / in killed, stopped completely. There was silence again. You could have heard a feather falling. The sounds that broke it came from Paul Chapin. He moved with no haste but with a good deal of finality.

He pushed back, got himself onto his feet, took his stick, and thumped off. He brushed past me, and Arthur Kommers had to move out of his way. Before he got to the door he stopped and turned. He did 1 not seem especially perturbed, and his | light-colored eyes had nothing new in I them as far as I could see from where I was.

He said, "I would have been glad to help in any authentic test, Mr. Wolfe, but I wouldn^t care to be the victim of a trick.

I was referring, by the way, to intelligence, not to a vulgar and obvious cunning."

He turned. Wolfe murmured, "Archie," and I went out to help him on with his coat and open the door for him.

7

When I got back to the office everybody was talking. Mike Ayers had gone to the table to get a drink, and three or four others had joined him. Dr. Burton stood with his hands dug into his pockets, frowning, listening to Farrell and Pratt.

Wolfe had untwined his fingers and was showing his inner tumult by rubbing his nose with one of them. When I got to his desk Cabot the lawyer was saying to him:

"I have an idea you'll collect your fees, Mr. Wolfe. I begin to understand your repute." ‹I shall make no discount for flummery, sir." Wolfe sighed. "For my part, I have an idea that if I collect my fees I shall have earned them. Your friend Mr. Chapin is a man of quality."

Cabot nodded. "Paul Chapin is a distorted genius."

"All genius is distorted. Including my own. But so for that matter is all life; a mad and futile ferment of substances meant originally to occupy space without disturbing it. But alas, here we are in the I thick of the disturbance, and the only way that has occurred to us to make it tolerable is to join in and raise all the hell our ingenuity may suggest. – How did Paul Chapin acquire his special distortion?

I mean the famous accident. Tell me about it. I understand it was at college, a hazing affair."