“Can’t be did,” declared the conductor. “It’s ten miles to Mesquite City, and ten more to the Mission Junction. I’m afraid you won’t be able to hook this car on to No. 117. They are due there in thirty minutes.”
James Worthington Steele was a good railroad man; so he did not rave. He knew just how bad most of their rolling-stock was. But he must at least get a message through; so the conductor ran a wire from the Lake Louise, tapped the telegraph, and let James Worthington Steele send his own messages.
Be it known that James Worthington Steele had at one time been a dispatcher on this same road; so it was no trouble for him to handle his correspondence via wire, through the medium of his own private telegraph instrument, which had long since been part of the Lake Louise’s equipment.
After proving an alibi for not being able to attend the important meeting, which he managed to postpone, he went back to his game of pinochle. Not that he wanted to play; but his wife did.
The instrument clacked merrily away, and excited the interest of Alicia, who was becoming more bored each moment. On the polished mahogany table was a code book, containing the station calls, codes, etc., and on the fly-leaf was printed the Morse code of telegraphy.
Alicia glanced over it, and the code, with its dots and dashes, attracted her. She scanned the pages for San Rego. The station call was SR. Looking back at the code, she found the two letters. She had seen her father use it many times; so what could be easier?
She sat down, opened the key and began laboriously to tap out the SR signal. Several times she repeated it, before closing the key. The sounder rattled, as the operator at San Rego answered his call. Alicia had no idea what he was saying, but she had an idea of what she was going to say. Her ennui was all gone now.
Back in the hot little depot at San Rego, old Bill Thompson, the father of Sadie, squinted at the sounder of his instrument, a scowl on his face, as it began slowly ticking out a message.
“H-e-l-p,h-e-l-p,h-e-l-p.”
The dots, dashes and spaces were not the work of a telegrapher. The agent cut open his key and wanted to know who in the blankety-blank was using that instrument.