“Barney a police stool!” Larry repeated in the stupor of his amazement.

“Guess that’s all the news I wanted to hand you, Larry, so I’ll be on my way.  Here’s wishing you luck—­and for God’s sake, don’t let yourself be pinched by us.  So-long.”  And with that Casey slipped out of the hallway.

For a moment Larry stood moveless where Casey had left him.  Then fierce purpose, and a cautious recklessness, surged up and took mastery of him.  It had required what Casey had told him to end his irksome waiting and wavering.  No longer could he remain in his hiding-place, safe himself, trying to save Maggie by slow, indirect endeavor.  The time had now come for very different methods.  The time had come to step forth into the open, taking, of course, no unnecessary risk, and to have it out face to face with his enemies, who were also Maggie’s real enemies, though she counted them her friends—­to save Maggie against her own will, if he could save her in no other way.

And having so decided, Larry walked quickly out of the hallway into the street.

CHAPTER XXVII

On the sidewalk Larry glanced swiftly around him.  Half a block down the street on the front of a drug-store was a blue telephone flag.  A minute later he was inside a telephone booth in the drug-store, asking first for the Hotel Grantham, and then asking the Grantham operator to be connected with Miss Maggie Cameron.

There was a long wait.  While he listened for Maggie’s voice he blazed with terrible fury against Barney Paler.  For Maggie to be connected with a straight crook, that idea had been bad enough.  But for her to be under the influence of the worst crook of all, a stool, a cunning traitor to his own friends—­that was more than could possibly be stood!  In his rage in Maggie’s behalf he forgot for the moment the many evils Barney had done to himself.  He thought of wild, incoherent, vaguely tremendous plans.  First he would get Maggie away from Barney and Old Jimmie—­somehow.  Then he would square accounts with those two—­again by an undefined somehow.

Presently the tired, impersonal voice of the Grantham operator remarked against his ear-drum:  “Miss Cameron don’t answer.”

“Have her paged, please,” he requested.

Larry, of course, could not know that his telephone call was the very one which had rung in Maggie’s room while Barney and Old Jimmie were with her, and which Barney had harshly forbidden her to answer.  Therefore he could not know that any attempt to get Maggie by telephone just then was futile.

When he came out of the booth, the impersonal voice having informed him that Miss Cameron was not in, it was with the intention of calling Maggie up between eight and nine when she probably would have returned from dinner where he judged her now to be.  He knew that Dick Sherwood had no engagement with her, for Dick was to be out at Cedar Crest that evening, so he judged it almost certain Maggie would be at home and alone later on.