XXVIII

THE GOSSIPING WIRES

After his son had left him, the Honorable Senator Sage-Brush remained standing before the library fire until he heard the machine-gun exhausts of the small roadster distance-diminishing down the driveway avenue.  Then he stepped aside and pressed the bell-push ordinarily used to summon the old negro footman.

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.”

The young man in his shirt-sleeves was turning to go.  “I’ll hustle Crowell on those notes,” he promised:  but as he was reaching for the door-knob the senator stopped him.

“Hold on a minute, Fred; how is that contrivance of ours at the mouth of Shonoho working?”

“It’s working all right.  Canby is on watch there now, and he says he can see everything that passes on both roads.”