Page:O'Higgins--The Adventures of Detective Barney.djvu/52

 “Why!” Cooper said. “I got this last night.”

“May be you did n’ answer it,” Barney suggested. “It ’s a repeat.”

He puzzled over it. “Well,” he said, “I—” His voice faded out in the tone of abstraction. He turned and shuffled across the room to his writing desk, his eyes on the telegram. Unconscious of Barney’s craning watchfulness, he took a small cloth-bound volume from an upper drawer of the little escritoire and turned the printed pages, comparing the words in the message with words in the book. The code book!

“If you want to send an answer,” Barney said boldly, moving down towards him, “I could take it.”

He did not reply. He sat down to the desk and took a pencil and wrote, and consulted the book carefully with his pencil point on the page, and came back again to the message, and returned to find another page in the book. “No, that ’s all right,” he said, finally. He