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It may have been the boomtown atmosphere I have already mentioned or because at the same time I got my weekly salary; at any event, moved by an unaccountable impulse I took the two checks to a barbershop where, perhaps incongruously, a wellknown firm of Los Angeles stockbrokers had quartered themselves.
The crowd thickened; the fellows came out of the blacksmith shop, while the jokers in the barbershop smote their knees and yelled with merriment. "What's up?" queried Vance, coming up and repeating the universal question. McIlvaine pointed at the poster with his cigar. Vance read the notice, while the crowd waited silently. "What ye think of it?" asked someone impatiently. Vance smoked a moment.
He also noted that the guard's coat was loose, and that the butt of a Magnum revolver was within easy reach of his hand. Knowing how Steve Ames operated, Rick also suspected that other, less visible, methods had been taken to guard the fourth floor, but there was nothing he could see. It was still early in the day and the barbershop in the lobby was not crowded.
There was a good view of the elevators through the barbershop windows. Rick watched people coming and going, and speculated for his own amusement on who they might be, and their business in the building. Speculation was idle, of course. Take Tom Dodd. No one, without inside knowledge, would suspect that he was a federal agent engaged in guarding a hush-hush project on the fourth floor. Or Dr.
I'll work it out with Joe Blake. We could keep watch by day, when possibility of contact is greatest because the barbershop is open. The JANIG team on the mainland can keep watch by night, because if the houseboaters and the barber meet at night it will have to be in the woods. Anywhere in town would be too obvious except for the barbershop."
The boys grinned at his look of astonishment. "What we'd like," Scotty said, "if you care to co-operate, is to have someone take a look at the barbershop. We want to know if the new barber is on the job." Duke sharpened his pencil with loving care, using a penknife. "I won't ask why you can't take a look yourselves," he said finally. "It's pretty obvious." "Not to me," Jerry objected.
It wouldn't, so Jerry still had his ten-dollar bill unchanged. Here was the barbershop. One particular barber usually cut Jerry's hair. Jerry was glad to find that George was not busy. "Thought I gave you a haircut less than a week ago," George greeted him. "Did you come in to get your head shaved? Be cooler, warm weather coming on."
Billfinger stepped to the door to call a carriage, and then the doctor said: "Well, the guide goes with the barbershop, with the billiard-table, with the gasless room, and may be with many another pretty romance of Paris.
Quickly he led the way out of sight of the barbershop windows. Rick looked at him curiously. "See something?" Scotty's forehead wrinkled. "I think so. But it's so unlikely that I'm not sure. Rick, I thought I saw the barber from Washington the one with the massage machine!" Rick's mouth opened in astonishment. "You're kidding!" Scotty shook his head. "I'm not. I said I wasn't sure.
Nor was he disturbed seriously by rumours that his hero was a "come-outer"; that instead of attending church with Miss Alvira he could be heard at the barbershop of a Sabbath morning, agreeing with Milo Barrus that God might have made the world in six days and rested on the seventh; but he couldn't have made the whale swallow Jonah, because it was against reason and nature; and, if you found one part of the Bible wasn't so, how could you tell the rest of it wasn't a lot of grandmother's tales?
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