Page:O'Higgins--The Adventures of Detective Barney.djvu/287

 at midday, in broad sunlight, and barred up in some noisome den of abductors. She would be murdered now—to escape detection—if she had not been murdered already.

Her case had been discussed, that morning, in the operatives’ room of the Babbing Bureau, but Barney had heard only one authoritative remark upon it, and that had been repeated as Babbing’s diagnosis:—“When a girl buys a book and a box of chocolates, she ’s going on a railroad journey. This poison needle talk is all bunk! Did you ever try to give a hypodermic injection? Next thing, these newspaper boys will be running stories of girls being followed on Fifth Avenue and tattooed down the back without knowing it!”

Barney said “Somerville” to the conductor, and gave him five dollars, and did not even count the change. “When a girl buys a book and a box of chocolates, she ’s going on a railroad journey.” He was in a state to find a confirmation of his “hunch” in the fact that he was on a railroad journey himself, and he