In answer to the call a door opened beyond the chimney-jamb, and immediately the gentle twig-tapping sounds resolved themselves into the clickings of a pair of telegraph relays and the chatter of a typewriter. A good-looking young fellow, with his coat off, entered the library, carefully closing the door behind him.
"Want to send something, senator?" he asked, whipping a note-book from his hip-pocket.
"No, not just this minute. Anything new coming over the wires?"
"Nothing startling. Steuchfield reports from Ophir that we swing the miners' vote almost to a man unless something unforeseen breaks loose. Hetchy gives us a good word from Twin Buttes; and Griggs, up in the Carnadines, wires from Alkire that he has just completed an auto canvass of the High Line district. The ranchmen up that way have had a pretty bad scare. There was a threat made that the price of water was going to be raised. But they're all right now."
The boss nodded approvingly. Then: "How about those microphone notes?"
"Crowell is writing them off," was the reply. "He'll have them in half an hour or so."
The senator drew out his watch, a huge thick-crystalled time-piece dating back to the range-riding period.
"As matters have turned out, I shall be going to the city before long," he said. "If the notes are not ready before I leave, you can order out the speed-car and send them in by Gallagher any time before six o'clock. Don't slip up on that, Fred; tell Gallagher to deliver the notes to me, in person, at the Inter-Mountain. What's become of Professor Anners?"
"He's staying over at Haworth's ranch, just to be near the fossil bone-field. They've made another plesio-something find, and Haworth telephones that the professor couldn't be dragged away with a derrick until those bones are safely out of the ground and boxed for shipment."
The professor's host smiled indulgently, saying: "It's just as well, I reckon. The professor's about as blind as a bat when it comes to seeing anything this side of a million years ago, but if he were here he might wonder why we've set up a telegraph-office—wonder, and talk about it."