Jane's nails bit into the palms of her hands as she sprang up, breathlessly listening. The sheriff went on:
"I looks at 'im an' seen he was cold sober, but I knowed the other message come straight, too. So I says: 'Then you're under 'rrest; go back an' set on the cou'thouse steps till I come from the Cunnel's,' I says. 'If you go out thar I won't stay,' he says. 'You will if I asks you, Brent,' I says, 'No, Jess, I'll be damned if I do,' he says. Wall, we argyed, an' he was so pig-headed I thought I'd have to shoot 'im right thar; but arter 'while he says he'll go back an' set, an' then I come on. Now I want to know what kind of fun you fellers is tryin' to git outen me!"
Little did the sheriff, Dale or Jane know that Brent rode back to town like mad, threw himself from his horse and dashed up the stair leading to the telephone office above the drug-store. He fairly bounded in upon Miss Gregget, crying:
"Quick! Give me the Colonel's!"
While she was inserting a plug and turning a crank—for Buckville's central switchboard was many years behind the times—he unceremoniously lifted the operator's head-set from her coiled hair and fitted it upon his own head. Several times she spun the little crank, breathlessly repealing:
"I've just been trying them, but they must have left the receiver off!"
"Wait!" he whispered.
The receiver was still off the hook at Arden, just as Jane had left it dangling, and now he was listening—listening to interrupted portions of a scene being enacted in that far away library, and illogically hoping one of its actors might pass near enough the instrument for him to yell and attract his or her attention. Only an occasional word could he understand, but once a girl's voice very distinctly cried: "Dale, run for it! Out the back way, and I'll help you!—They're almost at the lane!"
A feeling of pleasure swept through the listener as he realized that she was warning the mountaineer—that there was yet a chance! "They," must have meant the sheriff and his darky boy attendant, for it was just about time they should have covered the distance to Arden. But this momentary triumph was succeeded by a heavy, sickening dread as he realized that she must now know the truth; that the horrible disappointment he would have spared her must have fallen—must now be crushing her—since, otherwise, she would not be there warning. Yet, as he leaned forward trying to catch more and not hearing it, he thought how willingly he would change places with the murderer for just those expressions of pleading from her lips!
"Excuse me, Mr. McElroy," Miss Gregget was saying, rather coolly because of his impertinence in mussing her hair, "there are other calls—I'd better take the board!"