Harvey J. O'Higgins

“ And having been relieved by another member of Babbing's staff, he was on his way home to his supper, now, with a free mind.
But if you except that he was tired and hungry and expecting a warm meal and a soft bed, he was not looking forward to his homecoming with any eager anticipation. Home, of course, should be the place where a working man may talk of himself and his day inexhaustibly, with the assurance of a sympathetic hearing. It was just this credulous ear of interest that Barney knew he would not find. ”

“ No call came for him. He imagined the scene between Archibald, Babbing and Mr. Thomas Sullivan, when they should put the swindled swindler under arrest; but he had to take it out in imagining. The operatives came and went as busily as reporters turning in their copy, but no one spoke to him.
And Barney became vaguely aware of one fact about the fife of detectives for which fiction had not prepared him. Like the private soldier in a campaign, the operative of a detective bureau obeys orders without knowing the reason for them and executes commands without seeing their results. ”

“ A bright explosion of lightning that burst the sky showed a blanched world of rock and field in gray greens, the woods before him lashed and reeling, the road ankle-deep in a muddy torrent. It was all blotted out instantly in a roar of thunder. When the next stab of lightning cut the darkness, the auto had vanished down the mountain-side and Barney was hidden by the woods. ”

“ The Hudson River was making a moving picture of itself in the frame of the car window, for his benefit—swaying and flickering as it unrolled on a sun-dazzled film—and he and the other passengers might have been sitting in the darkness of orchestra chairs, for all he saw of them.
The man was Walter Babbing. The boy was Barney Cook. They were supposed to be on their way to Philadelphia, to work on a case. And Babbing was waiting to see how long it would take young Barney to remember that the road to Philadelphia did not lead up the west bank of the Hudson River. ”

“ To Barney, watching, it became as bewildering as the smoothly intricate activity of a complicated machine. Babbing dictated letters in a leisurely undertone that was continually intermitted for telephone calls, the arrival of opened telegrams, corroboratory references to filed records, consultations with Archibald, directions to operatives, and above and around and under it all an interested reciprocation of talk with Snider. “Hello? Yes. Where are you? Have you got the goods on him? I see. Who ’s with you? ”

“ A stenographer appeared, with a note book, sat down to face Babbing across the desk, and prepared himself and his fountain pen to take dictation. Archibald, the office manager—a grizzled old man, with the lean mouth of a prelate—brought a list of Babbing’s appointments for the day and discussed them with him, deferentially. An operative, who proved to be “Chal” Snider from Chicago, drifted in as if he were casually interested, and shook hands with “The Chief,” and drew a chair up at one side of the desk, and made himself at home, with his ankle on his knee and his hat on his ankle. ”

“ Those headlines announced, as Barney knew, that the father of Elizabeth Baxter had offered a reward of $5,000 to any one who could discover what had become of her. And Barney had suddenly found himself with what detectives call “a hunch.” He could not have explained it. He could not have defended it. But into his empty brain, on the instant that he had seen the man’s expression, there had come a conviction that this respectable-looking stranger had a guilty knowledge of the Baxter case. Of the dozen innocent explanations of the man’s manner, he could not have combated one. ”

“ When he could endure it no longer, he fled again; but this time, to escape the New York police, he went tramping; and Hudson Street heard no more of him.
Barney’s manner accepted such a father as a natural fact of life, without any emotional embellishment or indignant comment. The woman put down her sewing, and poured him another cup of tea, and eyed him in silent pity. She was a capable-looking young housewife, of a prettily maternal aspect; and Barney’s face and hands needed washing.
The man showed his sympathy by asking: “What do you intend to do? How do you expect to make a living?” ”

“ II At seven o’clock, with a little electric lamp in his pocket, he was climbing the hill road behind Findellen, munching crackers and cheese that he had bought from a grocery store, and keeping an occasional eye on the corrugations of the automobile track, to make sure that it was still with him. The road slanted obliquely up the side of a ridge that was too steep to be cleared for farming, and Barney could see nothing but bushes, trees, and undergrowth. ”

“ He was simply so glamoured by Babbing himself that he could have sat listening to the Chief discourse in a foreign language, and been happy in the sound and the sight of him. And he was so single-minded in his infatuation that he was not aware how Babbing played down to him, and expanded before him, and enjoyed the incense of his boyish idealization of detectives and their work. He knew that Babbing liked him; but he was accustomed to having people like him ”

“ Across the valley, the Catskills shouldered one another to look over the ridge at the farms that had been marching up through the forest, along the river, nearer and nearer, year by year. At the foot of the ridge lay the summer hotel, above Careyville, in a pine grove. The single upper window in its central gable watched Barney like an eye. ”

“ Although the subway is not so expensive as a taxi-cab, it is speedier, in the long run; and Barney was standing near the door of the Antwerp—somewhat blown but cheerfully composed—when Babbing’s car whirred around the corner and drew up to the sidewalk. Barney opened the cab door and took the satchel briskly, with a smile of recognition which the detective ignored. ”

“ He turned on Barney. “Do you understand?”
Barney said he did.
“Well, then—” He came forward—“as a detective, you ’re allowed to do a great many things that would be punished in the private individual. You’re expected to swindle, and steal from, and lie to, and betray the enemies of society in any way you can, in order to defeat them and defend society. It ’s your duty to do it, and do it diligently. If you don’t, you ’re as bad as the criminal. And that ’s the only moral law that binds you, professionally. ”

“ Barney Cook alone betrayed the workings of a mind. He sat erect—stretching his neck—at the end of a settle nearest the gate of the railing, watching the door of an inner room and scrutinizing every one who came out of it. He paid no heed to the girls; he knew that they were merely clerks. But when he saw a rough-looking man appear, with a red handkerchief around his neck, he stared excitedly. Surely the bandana was a disguise! Perhaps the black mustache was false!
Forty-eight hours earlier, in the uniform of a telegraph boy, Barney had been in the public office of the Babbing Detective Bureau ”

“ He began to move forward nervously up the road, with a vague idea that he might find some sort of shelter; but the darkness was so intimidating that after a few hesitating steps he stopped again and waited for the lightning. It showed him the road rising before him in a long uneven slant. He began to hurry, tripping over stones and floundering into ruts and puddles. In the black tumult of the rain, the woods seemed to be rushing past on both sides of him; they halted, when it lightened, cowering; but when the darkness and the thunder leaped on them, they started off again in a panic. ”

“ You overdo it,” Babbing said, without looking up. And his merely professional tone of matter-of-fact advice sobered Barney as suddenly as if he had said: “I understand, of course, that you have found your smile very effective, but it does n’t deceive me. You ’re not so bland a child as you pretend, and I shall not treat you as if you were.” ”

“ And in a room that was quiet and sunny, working with a little complacent pucker of the lips occasionally, or raising his eyebrows and adjusting his spectacles in a pause of doubt, he looked anything but sinister, anything but the traditional “bloodhound” on the trail in a man-hunt. There was something Pickwickian in his small rotundity. The nattiness of his business suit gave him an air of conventional unimportance.
Barney watched him fascinatedly. ”

“ He wiped his hand on his bathrobe before he took the telegram, and he fumbled over it. Barney found himself suddenly cool and confident. He noticed that Cooper’s hands were very thin and very hairy; and he looked at them and then slowly looked Cooper over with a curious feeling of contempt. It was the contempt that accounts for half the daring of spies and detectives. People are so easily deceived, so easily outwitted. Their attention is so easily caught with one hand while the other goes unwatched. Barney was learning his trade. ”

“ Barney shook his head.
Babbing rose. “Well,” he said, walking up and down in a meditative promenade, “we ’d better clear that up. If you ’re going to be a detective, you ’ll have that sort of job turning up every other day. You ’re next thing to a public hangman. And you ’ve got to make up your mind to do your duty whether you like it or not.” ”

“ His admiration of “the Chief” had mounted to hero worship. If this little, elderly, fat man had been a companionable father, an adventurous elder brother, and a rich uncle all in one, Barney could not have looked up to him with a more idolizing eye, with a more possessive trust and absorbed devotion.
He found Babbing talking to a client—a heavy-shouldered, black young man, with a remarkable forehead—whom he introduced as Mr. P. P. Harper. “I think I ’ll put you in his office,” Babbing explained, “as an office boy—from what he has told me of the case. Sit down. ”

“ Barney looked around him and was disappointed. Corcoran’s prediction that the Dart gang would cut his throat if they got “half a chance,” had given him a promise of excitement; and Babbing had endorsed the promise with a further warning in the taxi-cab. “These people,” he had said, “are professional criminals. You can’t get past them with any mistakes, mind you. They ’re dangerous. If they suspect you ’re after them, they ’re deadly. They ’ll kill to get free. You ’ll have to watch out.” Consequently, Barney had entered the room with the feeling that he was about to penetrate a bandit’s lair. ”

“ Not only did Babbing “work up” the deaf and dumb alphabet. He coached Barney on the details of their life in Chicago, the death of his mother there, and the imaginary incidents of his kidnapping, some years before. He took all the New York labels from his own clothes and from Barney’s. He had Corcoran buy some well-thumbed second-hand picture books, and he wrote in them: “To Barney, from his affectionate Papa.” He filled his pockets with fraudulent letters addressed to Adam Cook about his tunneling machine; and he saw that there was nothing suspicious in Barney’s possession. ”

“ Don’t speak to anybody, anywhere. Not even to me. No matter what happens, don’t make any outcry. If we get into a tight place, the fact that you ’re deaf and dumb is all that will save you from serious trouble. Our boys will be watching the house. And watching you on the streets. And if anything happens, let it happen—and keep quiet—and wait—and we ’ll get to you.”
“What ’s going to happen?” Barney asked, thrilled.
“Probably nothing at all,” Babbing said. “We ’re fishing—with you for bait. They may not rise to you. If they do, don’t worry—that ’s all. ”

“ Harper selected one mechanically. “My relations with my brother-in-law are not very cordial. Don’t you smoke yourself?”
Babbing had closed the box. “No,” he said. “That ’s one of the little pleasures that we detectives have to deny ourselves.”
“Why so?”
“For the same reason as circus acrobats. And jugglers. We ’re frequently in places where the trembling of a hand would arouse suspicion. Tobacco affects the control that a man has over his nerves.”
Babbing was putting the box away. He did not appear to notice that Harper’s hand shook as he held a match to his cigar. Barney noticed it. ”

“ His mother had always appeared to slight the girl in his favor, and to give him the place in her esteem to which his masculine superiority entitled him. Imagine the disillusionment of discovering that his mother had been protecting him from Annie—that she had been slighting the girl in order to preserve an appearance of equilibrium in her maternal affection—that she had assumed her partiality for him out of pity for his inferiority to his sister. Imagine the feelings of an anti-suffragist who learns that to Mother Nature the female is the more important sex. ”

“ A ferry boat was waiting in its slip, and the man entered the woman’s saloon while Barney went in among the smokers. He had had enough experience in tailing to know that he ought not to be visible to his subject when he could cover him from ambush; and he walked confidently to the forward end of the boat, to wait there until his man should come out to disembark. He was worried about his railroad ticket. He foresaw that without one he would not be able to pass the gates in the railroad station; and he might not have time to run back to buy a ticket after he had seen what train he ought to take. ”

“ Cook said not a word—not even to Barney. But if Barney had rewritten King Lear, and been crowned with laurel by all the Academies of civilization, he could not have come home to a more proudly devoted household than sat down with him at the table that night to hear him talk about his doings for the day. He saw it in their faces. “Waiter,” he said to Annie, “dish up the best in the house. I don’ care what it costs. I ’ve got my salary raised. ”

“ The lawyer almost invariably gets the case. He betrays his client into the hands of the blackmailers, who proceed to involve the client in a criminal conspiracy to manufacture evidence for the divorce proceedings: and when the divorce has been obtained, the client finds himself—or herself—threatened with exposure, and compelled to pay for silence. They were evidently working towards some such conclusion with your sister.”
Van Amberg straightened up. “They ’ll betray my sister into no such conspiracy.”
“No,” Babbing agreed. “I thought it unlikely. They have an alternative plan, however.” ”