"Jack Barnes never gets left, you bet." "That was a close call, though," replied the Pullman porter who had given Mr. Barnes a helping hand, in his desperate effort to board the midnight express as it rolled out of Boston. "I wouldn't advise you to jump on moving trains often." "Thank you for your good advice, and for your assistance. Here's a quarter for you. Show me to my section, I am nearly dead, I am so tired."

Early one morning, in the spring of eighteen hundred and seventy-three, two young lawyers were seated in their private office. The firm name, painted in gilt letters upon the glass of the door, was DUDLEY & BLISS. Mortimer Dudley was the senior member, though not over thirty years old. Robert Bliss was two years younger. Mr. Dudley was sorting some papers and deftly tying them into bundles with red tape. Why lawyers will persist in using tape of a sanguine color is an unsolvable mystery to me, unless it may be that they are loath to disturb the many old adages in which the significant couplet...

This new edition features two of Rodrigues Ottolengui's detective novels: his 1893 A Conflict of Interest and 1894 A Modern Wizard. Fans of Sherlock Holmes and other early novels of detection will enjoy these stories of Detective Barnes as he brings his powers of deduction to bear on horrific crimes.

Mr. Mitchel was still at breakfast one morning, when the card of Mr. Barnes was brought to him by his man Williams. "Show Mr. Barnes in here," said he. "I imagine that he must be in a hurry to see me, else he would not call so early."