“Fine figure I am cutting here,” he thought, “if they have had their little talk before I came.” His arm cramped from holding up the receiver. He tried the other one and devised all kinds of schemes for propping it up. It seemed as though he simply could not hold it any longer.
“Oh what’s the use,” he exclaimed aloud after two hours’ struggle with the thing, “they probably did their talking before I came. Or Dawson may be in town now calling him up over some other line.” But it was his only chance and he hung on.
He shifted the receiver to his left hand for the twentieth time and tried to write up his diary with the other. It worked fairly well. His hand was numb but seemed to have frozen into position. He had become thoroughly absorbed in recording the exciting incidents of the day as accurately and vividly as he could when his ear caught a faint click in the ’phone. He almost stopped breathing. Nothing more followed and he had about concluded that he must have been mistaken when there was another faint click.
There was another long silence while Scott waited in tense expectation. He felt absolutely certain that Dawson and either Jed Clark or Dugan were on the line listening to make sure that the coast was clear.
A quiet voice which he instantly recognized as Dawson’s said casually, “The fire was in the cañon a half mile below the chute was it?”
“Was at half-past ten,” answered another voice in the same tone.
A short period of silence followed by two faint clicks announced that the conversation was over. Scott intended to hang up as carefully as they had, but when he moved his hand it flumped down on the table with a bang as though it did not belong to him. The noise startled him so that he jumped to his feet as though to defend himself. Then he laughed at himself for he realized that it was only his over wrought nerves, that the other parties had both hung up, and that he was alone on a mountain several miles from anywhere.
So the meeting was to be in the cañon a half a mile below the chute at half-past ten. He was so tickled with his own success that he felt like shouting aloud. He knew exactly how a detective must feel when an indefinite clew leads him straight to the mark. But he also knew that there was a hard job ahead of him that night and a long day coming to-morrow, so he suppressed his desire to celebrate and fried some bacon instead.
CHAPTER XIII
THE SECRET CONFERENCE