The Lonesome Badger

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Joe Peel was pretty good at crossword puzzles. A three-letter word meaning rodent hardly ever took five minutes of his time, but his mind wasn’t really on the puzzle just now. Otis Beagle was the cause.

Beagle sat on the other side of the double desk, rocking his squeaking swivel chair back and forth. A big man, six three and crowding two ten with both feet on the scales. A fine figure of a man in a beautifully tailored blue pin-stripe suit, the sleeves of which barely revealed a set of simulated ruby cuff links. He wore a white broadcloth shirt and a gorgeous red necktie in which blazed a horseshoe stickpin with diamonds that you could scarcely tell from the genuine. On the little finger of his smooth left hand sparkled a four-carat diamond ring of matching glass.

Everything about Otis Beagle was big and flashy and phony.

He was reading the “Personal” column of the Sunday newspaper. Beagle had been studying the column for the better part of a half hour, so Joe Peel knew that he had reason to worry. Something was percolating in the big fellow’s brain.

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