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copy somewhere around the office. If so he would send it down by messenger, and if not he would send someone to the morgue for one.
    Mr W. R. Pratt of the Owl Press was strictly business. When I said that Nero Wolfe had been hired to make an investigation by the Joint Committee on Plag-he cut in to say he knew that and what did I want; and when I said that Mr Wolfe wanted a copy of Barrage at Dawn as soon as possible and would be obliged if he would kindly-he cut in again to say that if I would give the address to his secretary she would send it at once by messenger. He asked no questions, but his secretary did. Her first words were, 'Whom do we bill?' That outfit was right on its toes.
    Barrage at Dawn arrived first, which didn't surprise me, with an invoice enclosed which included an item of a dollar, fifty for messenger service. Wolfe had come down from the plant rooms and was looking through the morning's mail. When I handed him the book he made a face at it and dropped it on his desk, but in a couple of minutes he picked it up, frowned at the cover, and opened it. He was well into it when The Moth That Ate Peanuts arrived, and since, as I said, my function is whatever an occasion calls for, I tackled that one, looking for 'aver' or 'not for nothing' or something like 'Barely had the moth swallowed the ten-thousandth peanut when it got a stomach-ache.' Also, of course, semicolons and paragraphing. I was more than halfway through when Wolfe asked for it, and I got up and handed it to him and took Barrage at Dawn.
    A little after one, with lunchtime approaching, Wolfe shut The Moth That Ate Peanuts, tossed it onto his desk, and growled, 'Pfui. Neither one. Confound it.'
    I closed Barrage at Dawn and put it down. 'I can see,' I said, 'that you might cross Simon Jacobs off, but Alice Porter's is a children's book. You wouldn't expect a moth to aver, even if it was a peanut addict. I would hate to give up Alice Porter. She started it and she's repeating.'
    He glared at me. 'No. She didn't write those stories.'
    'If you say so. Why glare at me'I didn't write them. Is this final or are you just sore because he or she was smart enough to wear gloves?'
    'It's final. No one is that smart. Those two are eliminated.'
    'Then that leaves Jane Ogilvy and Kenneth Rennert.'
    'Jane Ogilvy is highly unlikely. The woman who wrote those three pseudo-poems and used the terms and locutions that appear in her testimony at the trial is almost certainly incapable of writing those three stories, including the one that she claimed she had written. Kenneth Rennert is of course a possibility, the only one left of the quartet. But his claim is based on a play outline, not a story, and we don't have it. It might even be that his was an independent operation. Could we get copies of the television scripts he has written?'
    'I don't know. Shall I find out?'
    'Yes, but there is no urgency. According to that report, they were dramatic in form and so contained nothing but dialogue, and would tell us next to nothing. I would like your opinion. Our job now is to find a person, man or woman: the person who in 1955 read The Colour of Passion, by Ellen Sturdevant, wrote a story with the title 'There Is Only Love,' incorporating its characters and plot and action, persuaded Alice Porter to use it as the basis for a claim of plagiarism, putting her name on it, the bait being presumably a share of the proceeds, and at an opportune moment somehow entered the summer home of Ellen Sturdevant and concealed the manuscript in a bureau drawer; who repeated the performance a year later with Hold Fast to All I Give You, by Richard Echols, using another accomplice, Simon Jacobs, changing only the method of establishing the existence and priority of the manuscript, suggested by the convenient circumstance that Jacobs had once sent a story to Echols's agent and had it returned; who in 1957 again repeated the performance with Sacred or Profane, by Mariorie Lippin, using still