Page:O'Higgins--The Adventures of Detective Barney.djvu/21

Rh and a brass cuspidor. There were girls at the desks and the switchboard. The boys were on the settles or at the railing. The girls were busy, indifferent, chatty (among themselves) and very much at home. The boys, of course, were quite otherwise. They might have been suspected of having assumed a common expression of inert and anxious stupidity in order that each might conceal from all the others the required intelligence with which he hoped to win the “job.”

Barney Cook alone betrayed the workings of a mind. He sat erect—stretching his neck—at the end of a settle nearest the gate of the railing, watching the door of an inner room and scrutinizing every one who came out of it. He paid no heed to the girls; he knew that they were merely clerks. But when he saw a rough-looking man appear, with a red handkerchief around his neck, he stared excitedly. Surely the bandana was a disguise! Perhaps the black mustache was false!

Forty-eight hours earlier, in the uniform of