CHAPTER XXXI

LIONEL TO THE RESCUE

Without losing an instant Betty flew to the telephone.

"Hello! Hello!" she called impatiently, but there was no response. She worked the lever, shook the receiver, tapped her foot, and winked her long eyelashes rapidly, all to no avail. The instrument seemed dead, there was no familiar buzzing of the wires and it presently occurred to her that this was no ordinary delay of a heedless operator; there was something wrong with the telephone itself.

"Oh, dear!" she cried. "What shall I do?" And, hurrying to the conservatory window, she looked out despairingly among the palms and lilies. Then her face lighted as she saw Lionel coming slowly across the lawn. In one hand he carried his inevitable watering pot and in the other he held an open book that he seemed to be studying.

"Mr. Fitz-Brown! Come here--please--quick," she called.

"Right-o!" answered the amateur gardener and blissful lover, and leaving his watering pot, but clinging to his book, Lionel presently joined the young lady in the library.

"I say, I'm awfully pleased you called me," he beamed. "You know you're an awfully intelligent girl, Miss Thompson, and all that sort of thing and--do you happen to know anything about--er--bugs?"

"Bugs?" gasped Betty.

"Isn't that what you Americans call them? We call the little beggars beetles. This is an American book, 'Brown's Compendium of Familiar Bugs.' Rather good, that? They are familiar. Er, what?"

"Please, Mr. Fitz-Brown," she protested, but there was no stopping him.

"Potato bugs and spinach bugs and cauliflower bugs," he rattled on. "I say, do you know how to tell a spinach bug, Miss Thompson?"

"No, but----"

"Ah, I was sure you wouldn't," continued the delighted agriculturist. "Spinach bugs have red backs and green whiskers. Say it over to yourself--red backs and green whiskers."

"My dear Mr. Fitz-Brown, I really can't----"

"Oh, yes, you can," insisted Lionel. "It's perfectly easy except cauliflower bugs. Let me see! Cauliflower bugs," he paused to consult the book.

"You must put the book away and help me. I've got to send a cablegram. There isn't a minute to lose."

The gardener's face clouded with visions of charges at a shilling a word. "A cablegram! By Jove! I'll see, but----" he began to search through his pockets.

"It isn't that," said Betty. "I have the money. It's to get it there in time. The cable office is a mile away and we've only twenty minutes. I tried to telephone it, but the thing doesn't work. I'm afraid Anton has tampered with the wires."

"Oh, I say!"

"And, knowing what I do of Anton, I daren't send him with the car. Oh, it's maddening!"

"I can drive a car, Miss Thompson, if that's all you want."

"Really? Oh, splendid! Just a second while I write the cablegram."

She started for the desk, but stopped midway with a look of despair.

"It's no use! I had forgotten. Mr. Robert Baxter is out with the car; there's nothing to be done." She sank hopelessly into a chair.

Lionel Fitz-Brown stroked his mustache, adjusted his eyeglass and then, with a flutter of the ancestral spirit, rose to the situation.

"But, my dear Miss Thompson," he drawled, "if we have twenty minutes, I don't mind telling you that I can do my mile in ten."

Betty sprang to her feet. "You can?"

The gardener screwed up his eyeglass and nodded. "Sprinting is one of the things I do rather well."

"Then sprint--for your life," cried the girl excitedly. "If you get this message off before twelve o'clock--wait--where are those cable forms? Ah, here!"

And, snatching up one of the yellow blanks, she began to write with feverish haste. "Pontifex, New York. Can you read that?"

"Pontifex? I say, it sounds like a potato bug," chuckled Lionel, peering over her shoulder.

"That's the cable address. Now, the rest of it--no time to put it into the code."

Then she wrote rapidly: "Authorize you to sell for my account 50,000 shares Independent Copper. Act immediately. Gramercy."

"Gramercy?" questioned Fitz-Brown.

"That's Mr. Baxter's code signature. Here! And here's the money." She handed him the cablegram and some gold pieces, then anxiously looked at her watch. "Sixteen minutes. Can you make it?"

"Four to one I can make it, but, Miss Thompson, don't you think we ought to--er--I know you're a deucedly clever girl and all that sort of thing, but I really think----"

"Don't think! Run as you never ran before."

"Right-o! I'm going. Now watch me," and, dropping his precious book on bugs, Lionel Fitz-Brown darted out through the conservatory and a moment later this amiable descendant of the crusaders might have been seen, in gardener's costume, his eyeglass firmly in place, rushing madly along the dusty highway in a manner that would certainly have astonished his exquisite friends in Mayfair.