Description
Miss Frances Baird, detective
CHAPTER I.
Denneen’s Diamonds
The office-boy thrust his brilliant red head in at the door. " Miss Baird," he said. I looked up from the morning paper as the schoolboy looks up from the book he has been pretending to study while expecting a summons from the master who, a moment before, has detected him in some gross violation of the academic law. "Yes?" I interrogatively replied. "Chief wants yer," snapped the boy, with his accustomed grin, and the crowning glory of his head disappeared. It was as I had expected. Of course the Chief wanted me. I had now been associated with him for two years, and, after the considerable successes — as I believe it fair to call them — of my first twelvemonth in the offices of the Watkins Private Detective Agency — successes, by the way, which I secretly knew to be due rather to good fortune than to any taste or talent on my own part — there had followed a corresponding period of failure which I had, only the day before, brought to an appalling climax by allowing the arrest of Bella Bringhurst, the cleverest woman forger in the country, to be made by our natural rivals, the city officers, after I had been within striking distance of the offender for at least a week. I should be lucky, I reflected, if I were let off with the usual one month’s wages in advance by way of balm for the wound of dismissal. I got up, and, traversing the short private hall, was almost immediately in the presence of John Watkins, Sr., my employer. The elder Mr. Watkins — and this story, at least, has nothing to do with his son — was a tall, slim man with a frame which had not, in the ultimate days of luxury, been allowed to lose the wiriness so needful in the time when its owner was an employee instead of an employer. The shock of iron-gray hair surmounted a high forehead and a pair of kindly blue eyes which seemed l
Product ID: 9781776760008
Sku: 9781776760008
