The Mark of Cain: Nick Carter Stories
9781465670168
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
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.
