Page:Arthur Stringer--The House of Intrigue.djvu/91

Rh The man followed me, not a hundred steps behind. Big Ben Locke, I promptly decided, was having me "tailed."

Then I swung about, and calmly sized up my shadower. It gave me a start to see that it was the same weasel- faced little old man who had watched me in the elevator of the Asteroid Theater Building.

I recognized the rusty black. Then I remembered the narrow-set eyes and the pinched old face and the air of shabby and shuffling gentility. Yet, transparent as were his movements as a tailer, there was a note of determination in those same movements, a rat-like furtiveness which made him almost funny. But if Big Ben and his office were sending out that sort of operative to shadow my steps, I decided, they might as well announce it in a sky-sign. A runaway baby from the Mall would have known what was after it, in a chase like that. And when you've chicken-stalled up and down a country you kind of get the habit of watching the rear view in your off moments, the same as a robin does, no matter how thick the angle-worms may be.

Yet I prided myself on knowing all the operatives In Locke's offices, and I felt sure this old man who walked as though he had chalk in his joints wasn't one of them. He couldn't be one of them. So the