“Tell him you saw me coming in the back door after you got home,” she said calmly.

“Is that true?” Agent Sanders asked of Sahwah.

Sahwah nodded.  A gasp of astonishment went up from the other three Winnebagos.

“Tell all the circumstances connected with the incident,” Agent Sanders directed Sahwah.

“There weren’t any circumstances connected with it,” replied Sahwah earnestly.  “We had just come home and our friend had had bad news and was going away early in the morning and we were getting her ready and I went out in the back entry way to get something and just then Veronica came in the back door.”

“You thought she had gone home with a sick headache and was in bed?”

“Yes,” replied Sahwah, “but when she came in I decided she had been out for a walk.”  This sounded like a perfectly natural explanation to Sahwah.

“Didn’t it strike you strange that she should have gone walking at that hour?”

“No, it didn’t,” replied Sahwah eagerly.  “She often does it.”

“Ah-h!” Agent Sanders merely breathed the syllable, yet it held a world of meaning.  Sahwah felt vaguely apprehensive.

“So she often goes out walking at midnight, does she?” continued the agent.  Sahwah felt that she had made a misstep somewhere, and was harming Veronica’s cause instead of helping it, but the eyes of the agent seemed to be drawing all her knowledge from her like a magnet picking up needles.

“I meant,” said Sahwah, “that she often has those sick headaches, and when she does she generally goes out walking to cure them.”

“And these headaches generally occur at night?”

“Yes.”

“In other words,” said Agent Sanders as confidently as if he could see right inside of her head and knew everything in it, “this is not the first time Miss Lehar has gone on a mysterious errand at night—­eh?”

Sahwah started, and then was furious at herself because she knew the agent had noticed it.

He bored his eyes right through her, and remarked sarcastically, “You knew this girl to be an alien, an enemy of your country; you knew she was going off on mysterious errands, and yet you didn’t think there was anything strange about it!”

Then to Sahwah’s relief Agent Sanders fell to making rapid notes in a memorandum book, and ceased addressing her.  He turned abruptly to Veronica.

“Where did you go when you left this house last night?” he asked pointblank.

“Down the street to Carver House, through the yard, down the hill behind it, along the road to the edge of town and back,” replied Veronica readily.

The agent looked thoughtful for a moment.  The straightforwardness of her reply seemed to perplex him a little.

Then he asked, “Whom did you meet down there at the edge of town?”

Veronica did not answer.

“Whom did you meet?” he repeated triumphantly.