It took him a second or two to realize what had happened. Then from between his swollen lips a fierce, wild cry of desperate appeal rang out. It rose shrilly, piercingly, ended in a choke. He tried to cry again, but the smoke rushed into his lungs and turned the shout into a gruesome groan. That smoke was pouring into the room in clouds now. The single tongue of flame had bred a score, casting a lurid light over the place, and driving black despair into the half-conscious brain of the hopeless victim. CHAPTER XV. THE WAY OUT Bob Bainbridge came down to Lancaster that same evening. He had made arrangements with Tweedy to be there at a certain hour to receive the wire his partner planned to send regarding a loan necessary to cover that second note. Arriving in town about a quarter to Bob went straight to the telegraph office. The operator, a dapper youth of almost tender years, promptly handed him an envelope. “Came in just in time, Mr. Bainbridge,” he announced. “We close at six, you know.” Bob nodded absently without speaking, and departed at once for the hotel he usually patronized. There would be plenty of time in the morning to send his partner an answer, and he was anxious to have a chance to think the matter over quietly. Reaching the hotel, he registered, and went at once to the room assigned him. Here he opened the message, and read it through with a perfectly blank expression: Have cover removed on tank house. Can’t use other timber. “Well, I’ll be hanged!” Bainbridge exclaimed aloud. “What the deuce does that mean? ‘Have cover removed on tank house. Can’t use other timber.’ Blamed if I think it means anything. Sounds like gibberish to me.” Puzzled, and decidedly ill-tempered, he sat down and scanned the message closely. He could not believe it had been sent him as a joke. Tweedy was not the sort to perpetrate that kind of a pleasantry, especially at present. But what else could it be? For twenty minutes or more he sat staring at the sheet before he made a curious discovery. The telegram was not addressed to him at all, but to one William Kollock. “The genial Bill,” he muttered, his eyes sparkling with a new interest. “Jove! The plot thickens!” A glance at the envelope showed his own name written plainly thereon. Evidently the boy had carelessly transposed the messages, giving Bainbridge the one intended for the tool of his bitterest enemy. To Bob the annoyance of realizing that, in all probability, Kollock was in possession of Tweedy’s wire about the loan was swallowed up in the interest of those ten words before him.