Page:Arthur Stringer--The House of Intrigue.djvu/12

2 power with meekness in his eye. Yet I waited, outwardly calm, for the Chief to continue.

"You're kind of tired out, aren't you, Baddie?" he ventured, in a sort of eager solicitude, as he finally let his eye meet mine. It was that glance of his, more than the question itself, which made the ghost-hound still growling from the door-mat of my soul suddenly lift his nose in the air and kai-yai aloud.

"I don't think I've ever complained," I parried, doing my best to buckle on that armor of impersonality which half a million business girls of America have learned to don, morning by morning, as surely as they don their straight-fronts.

"But what would you say to a little holiday?" the Chief was asking me, with a sort of hang-dog wistfulness that made my heart go down, floor by floor, like a freight elevator, until it bumped against the very bed-rock of desperation,

"Where?" I rather inanely asked, trying to cover up the catch in my breath. For Big Ben Locke had always struck me as a man of iron, as something as solid as a locomotive. In and out of that office he'd always seemed to swing through his cluster of operatives, men and women alike, about the same as the Transcontinental Limited swings through the