Page:The Mystery of Central Park.djvu/124

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THE STRANGER AT THE BAR.

looked dull and tired. How different from the hours when the gas brought beautiful colors into the cut-glass pendants on the chandeliers, and everything seemed awake and alive where now they slept. The bartenders looked dull and uninterested, and a man who stood alone at the bar drank as if he had nothing else to do.

He was a low, heavy-set man, dressed handsomely. He wore a black beard and mustache, and his small, black, bright eyes critically surveyed, across his high nose, the handsome and genial Richard. He set down an empty whiskey glass from which he had just been drinking, and, after taking a swallow of ice water, he remarked, in a voice perfectly void of emotion:

"I beg your pardon, but do you know that you are being 'shadowed'?"

"I knew they were after me some days ago, but I thought they had given me up,"