Something occurred to Doctor Burkmayer, however, as he was just
handing the slip to the attendant.

"Stop; give me that again, a minute," he said; and tearing it in
two, he wrote another, and then another.

"Send this on at once, and the second in an hour," he said; as if
they might have been prescriptions to be administered. "They may
both be delivered together after all," he continued to himself, as
he turned away. "But it is all I can do. When a weight is let drop,
it has got to fall. You can't ease it up much with a string measured
out for all the way down!"

The young woman operator at the little telegraph station at Dorbury
Upper Village heard the call-click as she unlocked the room and came
in after her half-hour supper time. She set the wires and responded,
and laid the paper slip under the wonderful pins.

"Tick-tick-tick; tick-tick; tick-tick-tick-tick," and so on. The
girl's face looked startled, as she spelled the signs along. She
answered back when it was ended; then wrote out the message rapidly
upon a blank, folded, directed it, and went to the open street door.

"Sim! Here--quick!" she called to a youth opposite, in a
stable-yard.

"This has got to go down to the Argenter Place. And mind how you
give it. It's bad news."