It might have been a cough he’d heard, or the clearing of a throat. It might have been imagination carried to his overstrung nerves and tired body on the driving rain and rising wind. Whatever it was, it conveyed a feeling of being watched. His listening brought no recurrence. He shrugged and dismissed it as he opened the door and went in.

Nobody spoke and he heard no breathing. He took two steps forward and found the counter. Muffled sounds of running water and the clatter of dishes drifted in toward him—from a pantry, probably, with a swinging-door entrance in back of the counter.

He followed thirteen stools to the right and found a cigarette machine partly blocking a window. A hinged flap there gave a passage through the counter.

He retraced his steps to where he had started and walked on down to the other end, twelve stools more. There he found a telephone booth.

He went inside and shut the door and sat for a space holding on to his dime. A call to Colonel Yerkes would solve everything—get a police car to pick him up at Nick’s Diner and dispatch an ambulance to the camp for Phil. It would also do something else—tie Duncan Maclain and Yerkes inextricably together. Maclain was supposed to be looking over the department on his own as Barstow’s friend. He wasn’t supposed to know the colonel, and didn’t. The uncanny judgment that had made the captain what he was, told him in every fiber that to call the colonel was wrong.

He put in his dime, dialed the operator, and asked for the Chief, saying he wanted to report an emergency call.

When he hung up he felt certain an ambulance would get to the camp for Phil and that the Red Platte Hotel would send a car for him. He had explained everything to the chief operator. There was always one great light burning steadily through the blackness, the friendliness of all the world to people who couldn’t see.

His dime had even been returned. It would buy a cup of coffee. He put it in his pocket and sat for a space with his forehead wrinkled.

Life was full of patterns to Duncan Maclain and the pattern of the phone booth seemed somehow awry. His hand went over the dial box and paused on top. A double bell was there. That seemed natural enough, although different from the type of dial box he knew in New York. But under the shelf where the telephone sat he found two more boxes fastened to the phone-booth wall. Each of the boxes had bells on top—bells of different shape, designed to give a different sound. It was those boxes that had been cramping him since he first sat down, pressing up against his knee.