"Then sprint—for your life," cried the girl excitedly. "If you get this message off before twelve o'clock—wait—where are those cable forms? Ah, here!"
And, snatching up one of the yellow blanks, she began to write with feverish haste. "Pontifex, New York. Can you read that?"
"Pontifex? I say, it sounds like a potato bug," chuckled Lionel, peering over her shoulder.
"That's the cable address. Now, the rest of it—no time to put it into the code."
Then she wrote rapidly: "Authorize you to sell for my account 50,000 shares Independent Copper. Act immediately. Gramercy."
"Gramercy?" questioned Fitz-Brown.
"That's Mr. Baxter's code signature. Here! And here's the money." She handed him the cablegram and some gold pieces, then anxiously looked at her watch. "Sixteen minutes. Can you make it?"
"Four to one I can make it, but, Miss Thompson, don't you think we ought to—er—I know you're a deucedly clever girl and all that sort of thing, but I really think——"
"Don't think! Run as you never ran before."
"Right-o! I'm going. Now watch me," and, dropping his precious book on bugs, Lionel Fitz-Brown darted out through the conservatory and a moment later this amiable descendant of the crusaders might have been seen, in gardener's costume, his eyeglass firmly in place, rushing madly along the dusty highway in a manner that would certainly have astonished his exquisite friends in Mayfair.