Passing the Western Union central office, he stopped to send Ormsby a second telegram, reporting progress and asking him to be present in person at the dénouement to put the facts on the wire at the earliest possible instant of time. "Everything depends upon this," he added, when he had made the message otherwise emphatic. "If we miss the morning papers, we are done."
While he was pocketing his change at the receiving clerk's pigeon-hole, a cab rattled up with a horse at a gallop, and Stephen Hawk sprang out. Kent saw him through the plate-glass front and turned quickly to the public writing-desk, hoping to be overlooked. He was. For once in a way the ex-district attorney was too nearly rattled to be fully alert to his surroundings. There were others at the standing desk; and Hawk wrote his message, after two or three false starts, almost at Kent's elbow.
Kent heard the chink of coin and the low-spoken urgings for haste at the receiving clerk's window; but he forbore to move until the cab had rattled away. Then he gathered up the spoiled blanks left behind by Hawk and smoothed them out. Two of them bore nothing but the date line, made illegible, it would seem, by the writer's haste and nervousness. But at the third attempt Hawk had got as far as the address: "To All Trans-Western agents on Western Division."
Kent stepped quickly to the receiver's window. The only expedient he could think of was open to reproach, but it was no time to be over-scrupulous.
"Pardon me," he began, "but didn't the gentleman who was just here forget to sign his message?"
The little hook caught its minnow. The receiving clerk was folding Hawk's message to place it in the leather carrier of the pneumatic tube, but he opened and examined it.
"No," he said; "it's signed all right: 'J.B. Halkett, G.S.'"
"Ah!" said Kent. "That's a little odd. Mr. Halkett is out of town, and this gentleman, Mr. Hawk, is not in his department. I believe I should investigate a little before sending that, if I were you."
Having thus sown the small seed of suspicion, which, by the by, fell on barren soil, Kent lost no time in calling up M'Tosh over the nearest telephone.
"Do our agents on the Western Division handle Western Union business?" he asked.