The Mark of Cain: Nick Carter's Air-line Case

The girl at the switchboard held her breath. The detective waiting in the business office saw her. The girl at the switchboard was Helen Bailey. The waiting detective was Nick Carter.

No man was ever more quick than he to rightly interpret a facial expression. The partition through which he saw her was of glass, or a portion of it, dividing the general manager’s office in the central telephone exchange from the room in which the great switchboards were stationed.

There were other girls, half a score of them, seated in front of the innumerably perforated boards. They were too busy to notice one another. Their eyes were intent upon their work. Their deft hands flew from plug to plug, withdrawing some, inserting others. Their frequent, monotonous calls, the noise of the buzzers and the snapping of the rubber-covered plugs were the only sounds to be heard in that busy room.

“Hello! hello!”

“Number, please.”

“The line is busy.”

They were like machines, those switchboard girls, human, living, palpitating machines, each a connecting link for others in every phase of life, every calling and vocation, from the gilded mansions of exclusive society to the smoke-begrimed dives of the underworld. They are the servants of all, and, in a measure, the confidantes of all.

The girl who had caught Nick Carter’s eye was striking not alone because of her facial expression at that moment, but because of her remarkable grace and beauty. She was about nineteen, a pronounced blonde, with regular features, large, blue eyes, and a sensitive mouth, a pink-and-white complexion, an abundance of wavy, golden hair, crowning a shapely head, finely poised on a graceful, slender, yet well-developed figure, then clad in a navy-blue skirt and a dainty white waist.

It was the expression on her fair face, however, that had riveted the detective’s attention, though he could see her only in part profile.

Nick never had seen a look of more poignant anguish on a human face.

The girl was pitched forward on her high chair, her hand grasping one of the plugs which she had pushed into the switchboard—and now seemed impelled to withdraw.

That would have abruptly ended the conversation between the two persons whom she had brought into communication, and to whose intercourse she was listening.

That she really was listening, listening as one might to the reading of one’s own death warrant, was painfully apparent. Her eyes seemed to be starting from her head, but with the wildly vacant expression of one horrified, one whose mind was elsewhere. Every vestige of color had left her cheeks. Her lips were gray and drawn, her graceful figure as motionless as if every nerve and muscle was as strained and tense as a bowstring.