He referred to the card in his pocket. Using the telephone at the side of the room, he called the number which the mysterious stranger had given him the night before.
“No answer,” he murmured after two minutes had passed. “I hope Barlow is on the job.”
BARLOW was on the job. At that exact time he was watching the phone booth. He heard the ringing of the bell. It ended. Barlow waited a short while; then entered another booth.
Had Barlow been watching the busy refreshment counter across from the phone booth he might have seen one of the white-coated attendants leave his place. Barlow would have suspected nothing in the man’s action, for the attendant passed out of sight behind the partition in back of the counter.
There the attendant dialed a number. Upon receiving a reply, he merely grunted a few unintelligible sounds and hung up the receiver with the air of a man who had obtained a wrong number.
Immediately afterward the attendant was back at the counter, serving a new customer.
The telephone rang in the upstairs room where Doctor Lukens was seated. The physician answered it.
“Barlow?” he said. “Nothing doing there? No one showed up? Thanks. You can drop the job now. It was just an experiment.”
He hung up the receiver.
“A hoax!” was Lukens’s comment. “A hoax — unless Barlow was not discreet and frightened the man away. Yet I can’t understand—”