On the main street of the little town through which this wire ran stood a ramshackle, three-storied wooden hotel. From the top floor of this hotel every wire that went humming like a harp of haste through that avenue of quietness was easily accessible. Any person enlightened and audacious enough to pick it out from among its companions and attach to it a few feet of “No. 12” and a properly graduated relay would find the rest of his task astoundingly easy. As Durkin had pointed out, already knowing what they did, the one great problem lay in getting unsuspected into the third-floor room of that wooden Leeksville hotel.
With a jointed split-bamboo fishing-pole, neatly done up in a parasol cover, and with her complete wire-tapping outfit as neatly packed away in a dress-suit case, Frances Candler ten hours later registered at that ancient and unsavory-looking hostelry. A weary and bedraggled theatrical company, which had just made the late “jump” from Fredericksburg, preceded her, and she made it a point to approach the desk at the heels of a half-a-dozen noisy chorus girls.
There she asked for a top-floor room.
The over-gallant clerk insisted that she should go anywhere but on the top floor. There would be no difference in the cost of the rooms, to her. He would make that, indeed, a personal matter.
“But I prefer the top floor,” she maintained, biting her lip and giving no other sign of her indignation.
The clerk insisted that the climb would be too much for her; and most of the floor, he explained, was given over to the servants.
She began to despair.
“But I sleep lightly—and I must have seclusion!”
The perturbed clerk protested that in Leeksville noises were unknown by day, much less by night. A circle of rotunda idlers now stood behind her, taking in the scene. A flash of inspiration came to her.
“I’ve got to go up to the top, I tell you!” she cried, impatiently. “Can’t you see I’ve got asthma!”