“We’ve got to find out which way that report goes—whether it’s good or bad. I’ll be here in New York, waiting to get your cipher message over a Postal-Union wire. Whichever way it goes, I’ll govern myself accordingly, jump into the market with every penny I have, and do precisely what three hundred highly respectable brokers have been doing for the last two months. The only thing that makes me hot is that I haven’t a few thousand, instead of a paltry few hundred, to fling into it!” Her instructions were brief, but explicit. While he waited in New York, ready to act on word from her, she was to hurry to Washington, and from Washington go on to the somnolent little Virginia town of Leeksville. This town, Durkin had already made sure, lay on the route of the Department of Agriculture’s New Orleans wire. On the main street of the little town through which this wire ran stood a ramshackle, three-storied wooden hotel. From the top floor of this hotel every wire that went humming like a harp of haste through that avenue of quietness was easily accessible. Any person enlightened and audacious enough to pick it out from among its companions and attach to it a few feet of “No. 12” and a properly graduated relay would find the rest of his task astoundingly easy. As Durkin had pointed out, already knowing what they did, the one great problem lay in getting unsuspected into the third-floor room of that wooden Leeksville hotel. With a jointed split-bamboo fishing-pole, neatly done up in a parasol cover, and with her complete wire-tapping outfit as neatly packed away in a dress-suit case, Frances Candler ten hours later registered at that ancient and unsavory-looking hostelry. A weary and bedraggled theatrical company, which had just made the late “jump” from Fredericksburg, preceded her, and she made it a point to approach the desk at the heels of a half-a-dozen noisy chorus girls. There she asked for a top-floor room. The over-gallant clerk insisted that she should go anywhere but on the top floor. There would be no difference in the cost of the rooms, to her. He would make that, indeed, a personal matter. “But I prefer the top floor,” she maintained, biting her lip and giving no other sign of her indignation. The clerk insisted that the climb would be too much for her; and most of the floor, he explained, was given over to the servants. She began to despair. “But I sleep lightly—and I _must_ have seclusion!” The perturbed clerk protested that in Leeksville noises were unknown by day, much less by night. A circle of rotunda idlers now stood behind her, taking in the scene. A flash of inspiration came to her. “I’ve _got_ to go up to the top, I tell you!” she cried, impatiently. “Can’t you see I’ve got asthma!” And the angry asthmatic woman in the heavy veil was finally surrendered to the loneliness and discomfort of her southwest corner room on the barren and carpetless third floor.