Yarns Without Threads 

"Harakht!" shouted Inspector Vaughn. "There's a nut of that name running a nudist colony on Oyster Island across the Cove!"

"Hester?" repeated Vaughn and Isham together. "Who's she?"

"My sister," replied Lincoln in a calmer voice. "She and I were left orphans early in life. I've - well, she goes with me as naturally as my name."

"Where is she? Why haven't we seen her?"

Lincoln said quietly: "She's on the Island."

"Oyster Island?" drawled Ellery. "How interesting. She hasn't become a sun worshipper by any chance, Mr. Lincoln?"

"Why, how did you know?" exclaimed Helene. "Jonah, you haven't -"

"My sister," explained Lincoln with difficulty, "is something of a faddist. Goes in for things like that. This lunatic who calls himself Harakht rented the Island from the Ketchams - old-timers who live on the Island; own it, in fact - and started a cult. Sun cult, and - well, nudism . . ."

Ellery smiled ingratiatingly. "Have either of you by any chance ever visited Oyster Island?"

The Englishman smiled briefly in return. "Blank there, old chap. Nudism is nothing new to us. We had our fill of it in Germany."

- an astonishing apparition burst out of the woods, following the path the runaways had taken.

It was a nude man. A tall, wide, brown and heavily muscled fellow, with a mane of black hair tossing with the wind of his passage. Tarzan, thought Ellery; he was half-prepared to see the trunk of Tarzan's elephantine and improbable comanion appear from the brush behind him. But where was the loin skin? . . . They could make out his curse of disappointmen as he stopped short on the dock, glaring after the departing boat. He stood there for a moment, ropy arms hanging loosely, utterly unconscious of his nakedness.

"Lincoln, he'd come over to git his sister Hester, who'd jest arrived."

"Well, well?"

Old Ketcham waxed eloquent; his eyes sparkled. "Nice figger, that gal. She went and tore off her clothes, durned ef she didn't, right in front o' the two of 'em! She was that mad at her brother fer interferin'. Said he'd sat on 'er an' ruled 'er life since she was a mite, an' she could do what she dum' pleased now. . . . I tell ye, that was somethin'. I was lookin' through the trees. . . ."

"Ketchum, you o' he-bull!" shrieked the feminine voice from the interior of the cabin. "Y'oughta feel 'shamed of yr'self!"