Page:O'Higgins--The Adventures of Detective Barney.djvu/260

 absent-mindedly, being engaged in flicking the ash from his cigar. “What are you going to do with it?”

Barney admired the duplicity of his Chief’s manner the more because he saw through it. “I want to—to kind o’ help him out of a hole. It ’s this way, Chief.” And he began Cooney’s story, confusedly, struggling to avoid the slang to which Babbing objected. As he got further in his narrative, he forgot about the slang, and Babbing listened to him, twinkling. The sunlight, from the window at Babbing’s back, made a luminous obscuring cloud of the tobacco smoke before the detective’s face; and when Babbing snorted and coughed, Barney supposed that it was the smoke that choked him. “So I dopes it out,” said Barney, “that if I could get a hold of a bunch o’ fake money, I could make a kind o’ plant with th’ ol’ guy, an’ have some one go an’ borry a sackful off him—some way so ’s his fam’ly ’d get hep—an’ then they ’d figger he ’d got a bar’l o’ sugar stowed away some’rs—an’ he ’d