FORDNEY IS INCENSED

Old Rachel hummed a plaintive spiritual as she put on her stiff, freshly starched petticoats—no self-respecting colored mammy would wear less than two—slipped on a huge red dress and surveyed her lugubrious self in the mirror. She had misery of de spirit. Well, maybe Miz Morgan would….

Rachel went downstairs.

* * * *

“From the top step I saw Rachel standing in the hall looking furtively about,” said Ronald Morgan. “She must have heard me when I started down because she ran to the telephone and began hollering, ‘Police! Police!’ into the transmitter. I…”

“But you know how excited she gets, Ronald,” wealthy Mrs. Muriel Morgan reminded her nephew. “No one believes, Professor, that Rachel hit me over the head and robbed my safe.”

“But,” said Fordney, “someone who knew the position and combination of the safe did both. And you three were alone.”

“But the house was wide open, Joe,” Muriel Morgan protested. “Anyone could have come in unobserved.”

“Perhaps. But ‘anyone’ wouldn’t have known the safe combination. Did Rachel know it?”

“Why, yes. She’s seen me open it a hundred times.”

As the tearful Rachel ambled across the living room toward them Fordney asked: “Didn’t you hear anything, Muriel?”

“No, I didn’t. I was sitting here in the sun parlor knitting. There was utter silence. Suddenly someone hit me on the back of the head.”

The Professor stared at the thick, pile carpet on the living room and sun-parlor floor, said scathingly: “Ronald is not only guilty of theft but of a subtle and abominable attempt to frame your old servant!”

How did Fordney know that Rachel was innocent? Turn page for solution.