deep
into his daughter for a moment, his inflamed face relaxing neither in
its harshness nor its doubt of her. "But since you are the clever crook
I actually know you to be from your work on Dick Sherwood, and since
Jimmie Carlisle says he has trained you to be a crook, I believe that
everything you've told me is just something you've cleverly invented on
the spur of the moment--just so many lies."

"But--but--"

She broke off before the harsh, accusing doubt of his pale face. For
a fraction of a moment no one spoke. Then the telephone bell began to
ring.

"Dick!" breathed Maggie, and started for the telephone.

"Stay right where you are!" her father ordered. "I'll answer that
telephone myself, and see whether you're lying to me about Dick
Sherwood!... No, we'll do this together. I'll hold the receiver and hear
what he says. You'll do the talking and you'll answer just what I tell
you to, and you'll keep your hand tight over the mouthpiece while I'm
giving you your orders. You two"--to Barney and Old Jimmie, with a
significant movement of Barney's automatic--"you'd better behave while
this telephone business is going on."

The next moment Larry was hearing, or rather witnessing, the strangest
telephone conversation of his experience. Maggie was holding the
transmitter, and Joe had the receiver at his ears, grimly covering the
two men with the automatic. Maggie obediently kept her palm tight over
the mouthpiece during Joe's brief whispered directions, and no one in
the room except Joe, not even Maggie, had the slightest idea of what was
really passing over the wires.

What Larry heard was no more than a dozen most commonplace words in the
world, transformed into the most absorbing words in the language. Joe
ordered Maggie to answer with "hello" in her usual tone, which she did,
and Joe, after a startled expression at the first words that came over
the wire, listened with immobile face for four or five seconds. Then he
nodded imperatively to Maggie and she put her hand over the mouthpiece.

"Ask him how much, and when he wanted it to be paid," he ordered.

"How much, and when does he want it to be paid?" repeated Maggie.

Again Joe listened for several moments; and then ordered as before: "Say
'Yes.'"

"Yes," said Maggie.

Another period of waiting, and Joe ordered: "Say, 'I've got a much
better plan that supersedes the old.'"

"I've got a much better plan that supersedes the old."

There was yet another