“Your retort is both kind and clever. I thank you. I shall have to borrow one of your clerks or office-boys between nine-forty and ten a. m., to whom I may give my orders to bring to this office, and also ask you to recommend to me some young man who is intelligent but honest, wide awake but deaf to the ticker.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I shall need a young man who can watch certain developments and at the crucial moment will hasten to me without stopping on the way to take advantage in the stock-market of what he has learned while working for me.”
“I shall let you have one of my own clerks. He'll do as he is told.”
“That is not always to be taken as praise—but I thank you. There will be some telegrams come for me. Will you kindly see that they are held? Good morning!” And he left the room.
An hour later cablegrams and telegrams by the dozen began to come in for Robison, care Richards & Tuttle. But Robison did not return to the office until after the close of the stock-market.
“Any messages?” he asked Richards.
“Not over a hundred!” answered the broker, smilingly. He felt less suspicious after the telegrams began to arrive; they were tools he understood.
“I used the Triple Three,” explained Robison, opening telegram after telegram; the cables he seemed to leave for the last. The telegrams were, as Richards later ascertained, from San Francisco, Seattle, Tacoma, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Vancouver, and other points west of the Rockies. Each contained but one word, but always the word ended in “less,” such, for example, as Headless, Toothless, Tailless, Nerveless. All were signed in the same way, to wit: Three-Three-Three.
“No Beaver! I'm just as glad,” Robison mused aloud and took up the cablegrams. They were from London, Paris, Berlin, Frankfort, and Amsterdam. They were in code, but he seemed to have the key by heart. The very last one made him thoughtful.