"How's your rich widow?"
Corkey has not failed to plume himself on his aristocratic and familiar acquaintance. His associates are themselves flattered. Corkey is to take the telegraph editor to call on Mrs. Lockwin. The night editor is jealously regarded as too smooth with the ladies. He will be left to his own devices.
"How's your rich widow?" is repeated. But Corkey cannot hear. He is reading a telegram that astonishes, electrifies and confuses him.
"COLLINGWOOD, 14.--After wading ten miles along shore found yawl Africa sunk in three feet water, filled with sand and hundreds stone. Can take you to spot. What reward? What shall we do?"
Corkey seizes the dispatch, puts on his coat, and rides downstairs. On the street he finds it is midnight. He looks for a carriage. He sets his watch by a jeweler's chronometer, over which a feeble gas flame burns all night.
He changes his mind and rides back upstairs. He enters the telegraph operators' room, where five men are at work receiving special intelligence.
"Get Collingwood, boys."
"That drops off at Detroit. Collingwood's a day job."
The instrument is clicking. The operator takes each word as the laborious Corkey, with short pencil, presses it into the buff-colored paper.
CHICAGO, 14.--Let it be! Will be at Collingwood to-morrow. CORKEY.