about four o'clock
Hunnicott knew when he was definitely at the string 's end ; and when he was out of the judge 's room and the Court House , he made a dash for his office , dry-lipped and panting . Ten minutes sufficed for the writing of a telegram to Kent , and he was half-way down to the station with it when it occurred to him that it would never do to trust the incendiary thing to the wires in plain English . There was a little-used cipher code in his desk provided for just such emergencies , and back he went to labor sweating over the task of securing secrecy at the expense of the precious minutes of time . Wherefore , it was about four o'clock when he handed the telegram to the station operator , and adjured him by all that was good and great not to delay its sending . It was just here he made his first and only slip , since he did not stay to see the thing done . It chanced that the regular day operator was off on leave of absence , and his substitute , a young man from the train-despatcher 's office , was a person who considered the company wires an exclusive appanage of the train service department . At the moment of Hunnicott 's assault he was taking an order for Number 17 ; and observing that the lawyer 's cipher `` rush '' covered four closely written pages , he hung it upon the sending hook with a malediction on the legal department for burdening the wires with its mail correspondence , and so forgot it .