Page:Arthur Stringer--The House of Intrigue.djvu/13

Rh clump of track-navvies who step quietly aside to let the big Mogul thunder past.

"Anywhere you say," he explained in his heavy chest-tones. "Long Beach for three or four days, or a run down to Hot Springs!"

"On a case?" I queried. Yet I tried to make it more a prompt cue than a question, in a sort of frantic eagerness to get the big Mogul safely back on the rails.

"No, Baddie," he announced with a deliberation which seemed to translate that announcement into an ultimatum, "just for a holiday!" And hope went out of my heart like light out of a room when a switch is turned. For I knew then what he meant. I knew it beyond a shadow of doubt. And if Big Ben Locke had quietly reached to his desk and taken up an Indian pogamoggan and with it struck me over the head, I don't think I could have been more startled. It was unbelievable. It was unfair. It was unreasonable. It was as absurd as standing there and witnessing a Tottenville coast-gun trying to do a fox-trot.

"I don't—don't understand," I quavered, trying to swallow my bewilderment. For always, in that office, I'd been taught to cover up every warmer impulse of life, to hide my human feelings under a