Then, with clear-headed precision, he proceeded to business.
Instructing his valet to make careful notations on a tablet to avoid mistakes, he dictated:
“As soon as you are through with that booze-prohibition officer, prepare a message in code for this white-livered rat who sold me this trick (pointing to the urn). Tell him to take back this synthetic ‘Coffee Extract’ he stung me with, and credit its cost on my account. I won’t pay for it. Tell him to send me at once one gallon genuine centuple extract of Mocha coffee, if he has it—and be sure to emphasize the ‘genuine.’ If he hasn’t the Mocha, tell him to get it as soon as possible; and, in the meantime, he shall send me one gill of any genuine (emphasize that ‘genuine’) coffee extract that he has. If he claims that he can’t get the genuine through—as he probably will, for the crook is without doubt trying to ‘bull the market’—tell him that I know positively that he is in with the opium smuggling gang, that I know he can get the genuine coffee through just as they get genuine dope through, if he wants to; and that I will set the federal officers after him, and see to it that he gets life, if he is gay with me. Get the fact into the numskull’s head, if you can, that he is dealing with Algernon Sidney St. Johnstone and not with one of the common people!”
With the dictation completed, Algernon suddenly became conscious of the fact that his system was demanding sustenance after his prolonged fast—in plain words, that he was vulgarly hungry—and so, having no time to partake of a regulation repast in the regulation manner, he pulled a gold case from his pocket, extracted a couple of tablets stamped:
“Equivalent—One Full Meal,” and hastily swallowed them.
Refreshed and invigorated by the nourishment so seriously needed, he proceeded to quick, effective action.
Pressing a button in his desk marked: “P.T.”, an apparently ornamental filigree upon the ceiling dropped and snapped into the form of a suspended package transporter. Pushing a button on the receiver of the transporter numbered: “7826,” a book, stamped with that number, promptly slid into his hand. The book proved to be a Laird and Lee’s “Common School Edition” of “Webster’s New Standard Dictionary” of the copyright date of “1912.” He had chosen this as his and Esmeralda’s private code-book, because he believed that the two copies possessed by them were all that remained in existence.
Slipping the book into his “Lightning Code-decipherer,” he touched the numbered keys of its keyboard in the numerical combination given him by Esmeralda in her message, and the delicate wire arms quickly turned the pages and picked out for him the words: “Parker,” “pass,” “mount,” and “McKinley.” Remembering the “tiger” she had spoken of, he was puzzled for a moment by the manifest absurdity of looking for such an animal in the eternal snows of the Alaskan mountains!—and then he thought of the “Electro-visional” dial.
Turning to a globe contained in a complicated mechanism behind him, he picked two fine needle-points out of a holder, pressed one through its gelatine surface at “Mt. McKinley” and the other into “New York City.” Giving the globe a single revolution, the indicator of the “Lightning Air-line Distance Calculator” promptly registered “3668 miles, 264 feet, 00 inches.” Throwing the clutch of his “Electro-visional” into the “3670 mile” circuit, he picked out, with the aid of his microscope, the faint outline of the twin heads of “Denali and his Wife” barely within the “W.N.W.” sector of the white circle that appeared on the dial. Inserting a needle-point barely beyond and to the left of the higher of the two mountain peaks, he took a delicate copper wire and connected this with “Local.” Throwing the clutch back into “Local,” the faint outline of the mountain disappeared, and a vivid picture of “Parker Pass” replaced it. But, even with his microscope, he could find nothing of his Esmeralda! Finally, in the lower end, he picked out a faint blur of fine lines—flashing, disappearing, and flashing again—and, remembering that she had her “Electric Spark-screen Broadcaster” working at the time of her mishap, he reasoned that the thing was probably operating even yet, and that, therefore, he had at last definitely located his beloved.