nine
o'clock
That is , he killed himself . He got permission to go home over Sunday and retired to an upper back room in our house , very unostentatiously . He had already written to his operator chum , who had attended college just long enough to take away his respect for death , the integrity of the telegraph service and practically everything else . The result was that at nine o'clock that evening a messenger boy rang our bell and handed in a telegram . It was brief and terrible . Wilbur Hogboom had been submerged in the Weeping Water River while trying to abduct a catfish from his happy home and had only just been hauled out entirely extinct . It was an awful shock to us .