Hunnicott knew when he was definitely at the string’s end; and when he was out of the judge’s room and the Court House, he made a dash for his office, dry-lipped and panting.  Ten minutes sufficed for the writing of a telegram to Kent, and he was half-way down to the station with it when it occurred to him that it would never do to trust the incendiary thing to the wires in plain English.  There was a little-used cipher code in his desk provided for just such emergencies, and back he went to labor sweating over the task of securing secrecy at the expense of the precious minutes of time.  Wherefore, it was about four o’clock when he handed the telegram to the station operator, and adjured him by all that was good and great not to delay its sending.

It was just here he made his first and only slip, since he did not stay to see the thing done.  It chanced that the regular day operator was off on leave of absence, and his substitute, a young man from the train-despatcher’s office, was a person who considered the company wires an exclusive appanage of the train service department.  At the moment of Hunnicott’s assault he was taking an order for Number 17; and observing that the lawyer’s cipher “rush” covered four closely written pages, he hung it upon the sending hook with a malediction on the legal department for burdening the wires with its mail correspondence, and so forgot it.

It was nine o’clock when the night operator came on duty; and being a careful man, he not only looked first to his sending hook, but was thoughtful enough to run over the accumulation of messages waiting to be transmitted, to the end that he might give precedence to the most important.  And when he came to Hunnicott’s cipher with the thrice-underlined “RUSH” written across its face, and had marked the hour of its handing in, he had the good sense to hang up the entire wire business of the railroad until the thing was safely out of his office.

It was half-past nine when the all-important cipher got itself written out in the headquarters office at the capital; and for two anxious hours the receiving operator tried by all means in his power to find the general counsel—­tried and failed.  For, to make the chain of mishaps complete in all its links, Kent and Loring were spending the evening at Miss Portia Van Brock’s, having been bidden to meet a man they were both willing to cultivate—­Oliver Marston, the lieutenant-governor.  And for this cause it wanted but five minutes of midnight when Kent burst into Loring’s bedroom on the third floor of the Clarendon, catastrophic news in hand.

“For heaven’s sake, read that!” he gasped; and Loring sat on the edge of the bed to do it.

“So! they’ve sprung their mine at last:  this is what Senator Duvall was trying to sell us,” he said quietly, when he had mastered the purport of Hunnicott’s war news.

Kent had caught his second wind in the moment of respite, and was settling into the collar in a way to strain the working harness to the breaking point.