“That fool operator,” he declared, “left me standing in the corridor below while he took one of the maids up to the ’steenth floor, and I ran all the way up the stairs! I’ll get him good sometime!”
“Did you bring the telegrams?” asked the millionaire with a smile.
“Say, look here!” Ben exclaimed dropping into a chair beside the table. “I’d like to know what’s coming off!”
Mr. Havens and his companions regarded the boy critically for a moment and then the millionaire asked:
“What’s broke loose now?”
“Well,” Ben went on, “I went out to the field and the man there said he’d get the telegrams in a minute. I stood around looking over the Louise and Bertha, and asking questions about what Sam said when he went away on the Ann, until I got tired of waiting, then I chased up to where this fellow stood and he said he’d go right off and get the messages.”
“Why didn’t you hand him one?” laughed Glenn.
“I wanted to,” Ben answered. “If I’d had him down in the old seventeenth ward in the little old city of New York, I’d have set the bunch on him. Well, after a while, he poked away to the little shelter-tent the men put up to sleep in last night and rustled around among the straw and blankets and came back and said he couldn’t find the messages.”
The millionaire and the manager exchanged significant glances.
“He told me,” Ben went on, “that the telegrams had been receipted for and hidden under a blanket, to be delivered early in the morning. Said he guessed some one must have stolen them, or mislaid them, but didn’t seem to think the matter very important.”