Page:O'Higgins--The Adventures of Detective Barney.djvu/281

 While the ferry boat was threading its way across the traffic of the river, he was busy devising stratagems to outwit the gatekeeper. He would pretend that his mother was on the train with his ticket. Or he would come running, as an office boy, with a verbal message to his employer, who was a passenger. Or he would say that he had missed a man in a panama hat and a blue-serge suit, who had his ticket; and had such a man passed the gates?

Considering his clothes, he decided that he had better say he was traveling with his mother, who was a cook, newly hired to work in some country place of which he did not know the name. He was to have met her on the station platform. He had missed her. She had his ticket. He wanted to go and look for her.

That ought to be convincing. He decided to try it. The ferry boat was nosing and bumping its way into its dock at Jersey City when the panama hat came out with a crowd