Page:O'Higgins--The Adventures of Detective Barney.djvu/310

 that led through a stone foundation-wall into another part of the basement. And it was from this direction that the muffled angry voice seemed to come.

He sneaked to that door as softly as a cat, barefooted on the cement floor. The dog was quiet again. In the doorway he could hear a distinguishable murmur of several voices sounding through the thin floor above and ahead of him. He stood there, grinning to himself in the darkness, at the end of his hunt.

He had them.

It was the man and two women, and he could hear them distinctly when he had picked his way to the farther end of the cellar, across the clutter of lumber and garden tools and packing-cases and discarded furniture—misering the flashes of his lantern for fear some cellar window might betray a sight of him. And the first words that he heard connectedly, gave him the solution of the Baxter mystery.

“But my dear Bessie,” the man was arguing, “if your father got your letter, why should he