"I know it," Larrabee said. "Keep doing it."
The telegraph office was a lean-to on the back of the headquarters building, a room hardly bigger than a box stall, with a stove the size of a hatbox and, on a shelf along the wall, the instruments: a relay in a mahogany case, a sounder on its brass frame, a key, and the jars of the battery underneath, blue vitriol going green in the glass. The line came in through a porcelain insulator in one wall and went out through the other toward Fort Ellis, so that every word that passed between Keogh and Ellis clicked through this room on the way. The sounder was silent when Larrabee came in. The man at the table jumped as though it had spoken.
Sergeant Ferdinand Kessel of the Signal Corps was a narrow, pale, clever young man from Cincinnati with ink-stained fingers and a reputation as the best whist player in Montana Territory, which may have been true; he was certainly the luckiest.
"Line's down, sir," Kessel said, before Larrabee could speak. "Since about twenty minutes to four. Keogh side. Just after I got that order through. I was lucky to get the whole of it, sir, she was going weak toward the end and then she went out altogether."
"Where's the break?"
"Couldn't say, sir. Could be anywhere between here and the Yellowstone. Ice on the wire, likely, or a pole down. Or the Sioux." He smiled a little. "They cut the wire for the copper sometimes, sir. Make bracelets."
"Not this year they don't," Larrabee said. "Let me see your received book."
Kessel's smile went somewhere. Then, after a pause long enough that Larrabee heard the stove tick, he reached into a pigeonhole and took out a long narrow book bound in marbled boards and opened it on the table.
The entries for the day were in Kessel's round, legible hand, each with its number and time and office call. From Keogh, No. 1, 8:10 a.m., weather. From Keogh, No. 2, 9:45, a personal message to the post trader about a shipment of canned oysters. From Ellis, through, two messages for Keogh. From Keogh, No. 3, 11:20, a routine telegram from the district adjutant about the return of a deserter. Then nothing from Keogh until, at 3:04 p.m., No. 4, the order that was now in Philo Gaskell's coat, copied out here in full in the same round hand.