If Felix was still wearing the hat and carrying the horn because he'd forgotten about them, he now remembered. He came bounding up the stairs and joined the dance. He adjusted the hat, lifted the horn to his lips as though it were a flute, and fell in alongside our fingerprint expert to cavort with him.

Our man stopped dead and glowered at Felix. Felix threw his head back and laughed a laugh that shook the timbers of even that solidly built old house. This was a bull of a man. He was big chested, big-shouldered and heavy-armed. His face was ruddy and heavy and unlined, and when he laughed he showed his teeth, which were big and white and strong and unquestionably home-grown. I don't remember ever seeing teeth that were quite so white and at the same time quite so emphatically not dentures. His hair had receded most of the way to the back of his neck. He had only a fringe of hair and he wore it cropped short. It was almost as white as his teeth. For a man of his mass he was curiously short. He wasn't a dwarf but he was a bit of a comic figure. A man with so big and so staggeringly developed a torso and such long and powerful arms is expected to stand taller than five feet five. For Felix it was a bit of a stretch to make even that measurement. The man was just this side of being a freak.

We waited till he had finished laughing, and that gave us a few moments for taking stock of him. He was dressed in a manner Esquire might suggest for the outdoor man's country weekend. Dark gray sports jacket, lighter gray slacks, pink flannel shirt, black silk necktie. His eyes were clear. He was freshly shaved, and if there had been any alcohol in him we could never have missed detecting some scent of it on the massive gusts of his laughter. Not even a whiff. Eventually he subsided.