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 The operatives’ room was a large inner office fitted up with desks that showed inky evidences of long use, typewriters that rattled loosely, and battered filing cabinets. Two men were getting out reports on their typewriters; a third was searching the pages of a telephone directory, page after page, slowly, as if he had been at it for hours and expected to continue it for hours. Barney sat down in a corner and waited. No call came for him. He imagined the scene between Archibald, Babbing and Mr. Thomas Sullivan, when they should put the swindled swindler under arrest; but he had to take it out in imagining. The operatives came and went as busily as reporters turning in their copy, but no one spoke to him.

And Barney became vaguely aware of one fact about the fife of detectives for which fiction had not prepared him. Like the private soldier in a campaign, the operative of a detective bureau obeys orders without knowing the reason for them and executes commands