Any passion so neutral and negative as jealousy soon burned itself out in an actively positive brain like Durkin's. And it left, as so often had happened with him, manifold gray ash-heaps of regret for past misdeeds. It also brought with it the customary revulsion of feeling, and a prowling hunger for some amendatory activity. Yet with that hunger came a new and disturbing sense of fear. He was realizing, almost too late, the predicament into which he and Frank had stumbled, the danger into which he had passively permitted his wife to drift.
It was not until after two hours of fierce and troubled thought, however, that Durkin left the Bartholdi, and taking a hansom, drove down that man-crowded crevasse where lower Broadway flaunted its Semitic signboards to the world, directly to the Criminal Courts building in Centre street.
Once there, he made his way to the office of the district-attorney. As he thoughtfully waited for admission into that democratized court of last appeal there passed through his mind the dangers and the chances that lay before him. The situation had its menaces, both obvious and unforeseen, but the more he thought it over the more he realized that the emergency called for action, at once decisive and immediate. He had already bungled and hesitated and misjudged. Blind feeling had warped his judgment. Until then he had blocked out his path of action only crudely; there had been little time for the weighing of consequences and the anticipation of contingencies. He had acted quickly and blindly. He had both succeeded and been defeated.
Still again the actual peril hanging over his wife came home to him. In the dust and tumult of battle, and in the black depths of the jealous vapors that had so blinded and sickened him, he had for the moment forgotten just what she meant to him, just how handicapped and helpless he stood without her.
If the thought of their separation touched him, because of more emotional reasons, it was already too early in his mood of reaction to admit it to his own shamefaced inner self. Yet he felt, now, that through it all she was true gold. It was only when the tie stood most strained and tortured that the sense of its actual strength came home to him.
As these thoughts and feelings swept disjointedly through his busy head word was sent out to him that he might see the district-attorney.
The office he stepped into was curtain-draped and carpeted, and hung with framed portraits, and strewn with heavy and comfortable-looking leather arm-chairs. Durkin had expected it to look like an iron-grilled precinct police-station, and he was a little startled by the sense of luxury and well-being pervading the place.
Tilted momentarily back in a leather chair, behind a high-backed hardwood desk, the visitor caught a glimpse of one of those nervously alert, youngish-old figures which always seemed to him so typically American.
The man behind the high-backed desk paused in his task of checking a list of typewritten names, and motioned Durkin to a seat. The visitor could see that he was with an official who would countenance no profligate waste of time. So he plunged straight into the heart of his subject.
"This office is at present carrying on a campaign against Richard Penfield, the poolroom operator and gambler."
The district-attorney put down his paper.
"This office is carrying on a campaign against every lawbreaker brought to its attention," he corrected, succinctly. Then he caught up another type-written sheet. "How much have you lost?" he asked over his shoulder.
"I'm not a gambler," retorted Durkin as crisply. His earlier timidity had faded away, and more and more he felt the relish of this adventure with the powers that were opposing him.
"I suppose not—but how much were your losses?"
"I've lost nothing!" Durkin was growing impatient of this curtly condescending tone. It was the ponderosity of officialdom, he felt, grown playful, in the face of a passing triviality.
The district-attorney turned over the card which had been brought in to him, with a deprecating uplift of the eyebrows.
"Most of the people who come here to talk about Penfield and his friends come to tell me how much they've lost." He leaned back, and sent a little cloud of cigarette smoke ceilingward. "And, of course, it's part of this office's duty to keep a fool and his money together—as long as possible. What is it I can do for you?"
"I want your help to get a woman out of Penfield's new downtown house!"
"What woman?"
"She is—well, she is a very near friend of mine! She's being held a prisoner there!"
"By the police?"
"No, by certain of Penfield's men."
"What men?"
"MacNutt, the wire tapper, is one of them!"
"And you would like us to get after MacNutt?"
"Yes, I would!"
"On the charge of wire tapping?"
"That should be one of them!"
"Then I can only refer you to the decision of the Court of Appeals in the McCord case, and the Appellate Division's reversal of the 'green-goods' conviction of 1900! In other words, sir, there is no law under which a wire tapper can be prosecuted."
"But it's not a conviction I want, as much as the woman. I want to saveher."
"Is she a respectable woman?"
Durkin felt that his look was answer enough.
"Is she a frequenter of poolrooms?"
Durkin hesitated, this time, and weighed his answer.
"I don't think so."
"She's not a frequenter?"
"No!"
"Some rather nice women are, you know, at times!"
"She may have been, once, I suppose, but I know not recently."
"Ah! I see! And what do you want us to do?"
"I want your help to get her out of there, today, before any harm comes to her."
"What sort of harm?"
Durkin found it hard to put his fears and feelings into satisfactory words. He was on dangerous seas, but he made his way doggedly on, between the Charybdis of reticence and the Scylla of plain-spoken suggestion.
"I see—in other words, you want the police to raid Penfield's downtown gambling establishment before two o'clock this afternoon, and release from that establishment a young lady who drove there, and probably not for the first time, in an open cab in the open daylight, because certain ties which you do not care to explain bind you to the young lady in question?"
The brief and brusque finality of tone in the other man warned Durkin that he had made no headway, and he caught up the other's half-mocking and tacit challenge.
"For which, I think, this office will be adequately repaid, by being brought into touch with information which will help out its previous action against Penfield!"
"Who will give us this?"
Durkin looked at his cross-examiner, nettled and impatient.
"I could!"
"But will you?"
"Yes, on the condition I have implied!"
"In other words, you stand ready to bribe us into a doubtful and hazardous movement against the strongest gambler in all New York, on the expectation of an adequate bribe! This office, sir, accepts no bribes!"
"I would not call it bribery!"
"Then how would you describe it?"
"Oh, I might be tempted to call it—well, coöperation!"
Some tinge of scorn in his words nettled the officer of the law.
"It all amounts to the same thing, I presume. Now, let me tell you something. Even though you came to me today with a drayful of crooked faro layouts and doctored-up roulette wheels from Penfield's house, it would be practically impossible, at this peculiar juncture of municipal administration, to take in my men and carry out a raid over Captain Kuttrell's head!"
"Ah, I see! You regard Penfield as immune!"
"Penfield isnotimmune!" said the public prosecutor. The oldish-young face was very flushed and angry by this time. "Don't misunderstand me. As a recognized and respected citizen, you always have the right to call on the officers of the law, to secure protection and punishment of crime. But this must be sought through the natural and legitimate channels."
"What do you mean by that?"
"I mean go to the police."
"But to lay a charge with the police would be impracticable, in this case."
"Why would it?"
"Simply because it wouldn't get at Penfield, and it would only lead to—to embarrassing publicity!"
"Exactly so! And you may be sure, young man, that Penfield is quite aware of that fact. To be candid, it is just such things as this that allow him to be operating today. If you start the wheels, you must stand the racket!"
"Then you allow a notorious gambler to break every law of the land and say you can give me no help whatever in balking what amounts to a criminal abduction?"
The swivel-chair creaked peremptorily, as the public prosecutor turned sharply back to his desk.
"You'd better try the police!" he bit out impatiently.
Durkin strode to the door. He was halfway through it, when he was called sharply back.
"Don't carry away the impression, young man, that we're not fighting this man Penfield as hard as we can!"
"It looks like it!" mocked the man in the doorway.
"One moment—we have been after this man Penfield, and his kind, and we're still after them. But we don't pretend to accomplish miracles. This city is made up of mere human beings, and human beings still have the failing of breaking out, morally, now in one place, now in another. We can compress and segregate those infectious blots, but until you can show us the open sore we can't put on the salve. If you are convinced you are the object of some criminal activity, and are willing to hold nothing back, I can detail two plain-clothes men from my own office to go with you and help you out."
Durkin laughed, a little recklessly, a little scoffingly. Two plain-clothes men to capture a steel-bound fortress!
"Don't trouble them. They might make Penfield mad—they might get themselves talked about—and there's no use, you know, making a mess of one's mayoralty chances!"
And he was through the door indignantly, and as indignantly out, before the district-attorney could so much as flick the ash off his cigarette-end.
But after doing so, he touched an electric button, and it was at once answered by an athletic-looking clerk with all the earmarks of the collegian about him.
"Tell Barney to follow that man who just went out. Tell him to keep him under his eye, closely, and report to me tonight! Hurry these papers back to the Fire Commissioner. Then get that window up, and let the Mott Street Merchants' Protective Association in!"
Durkin, in the meantime, hurried uptown in his hansom, consumed with a feeling of resentment, torn by a fury of blind revolt against all organized society, against all law and authority and order. Still once more it seemed that some dark coalition of forces silently confronted and combated him at every turn. The consciousness that he must now fight, not only alone, but in the face of this unjust coalition brought with it a desperate and almost intoxicating sense of audacity. If the law itself was against him, he would take fate into his own hands, and go to his own ends, in his own way. If the machinery of justice ground so loosely and so blindly, there remained no reason why he himself, however recklessly he went his way, should not in the end disregard its engines and evade its ever-impending cogs.
He would show them! He would teach them that red-tape and officialism could only blunder blindly on at the heels of his elusive and lightfooted wariness. If they were bound to hold him down and delegitimatize him and keep him a pariah and a revolter against order, he would show them what he, alone, could do in his own behalf.
And as he drove hurriedly through the crowded city streets, still lashing himself into a fury of resentment against organized society; he formulated his plan of action, and mentally took up, point by point, each new move and what it might mean. As he pictured, in his mind, each anticipated phase of the struggle he felt come over him, for the second time, a sort of blind and irrational fury, the fury of a rat in a corner, fighting for its life and the life of its mate.
"And here's where we two hang out!" It was MacNutt who spoke.
Frances Durkin was neither protesting nor struggling when he drew up in front of what she knew to be Penfield's lower gambling club. It stood in that half-squalidly residential and half-heartedly commercial district, lying south of Washington Square, a little to the west of Broadway's great artery of traffic. A decorous and unbetraying door, bearing only the modest sign, "The Neptune Club," and a narrow stairway leading to an equally decorous and uncompromising hall, gave no hint, to the uninitiated, of what the great gloomy walls of the building might hold.
But on one side of the narrow door she could make out an incongruously ornate and showy cigarstore; on the other, an equally unlooked-for woman's hair-dressing and manicuring parlor.
In the one, indeed, you might sedately purchase a perfecto, and take your peaceful departure, never dreaming of how closely you had skirted the walls of the busiest poolroom south of all Twenty-third street. In the other you might have your hair quietly shampooed and Marcelled and dressed, and return to your waiting automobile, utterly oblivious of the fact that within thirty feet of you fortunes were being still staked and lost and won and again swept away at one turn of a wheel, or one stroke of a chalk on a red-lined blackboard.
It was through the hair-dressing parlor that MacNutt led the dazed and unprotesting Frank, pinning her to his side by the great arm that was, seemingly, so carelessly linked through hers. He gave a curt nod to the capped and aproned attendant, who touched a button on her desk, without so much as a word of challenge or inquiry. The machine-like precision with which each advance was watched and guarded, disheartened the imprisoned woman.
"I'm boss here for a while, and I'm goin' to clean out the building, so that you can have this little picnic all to your lonely!" remarked MacNutt, as he pushed her on.
A door to the rear of the second parlor swung open, and as she was led through it she noticed that it was sheathed with heavy steel plating. Still another door, which opened as promptly to MacNutt's signal, was armored with steel, and it was not until this door had closed behind them that her guardian released the cruel grip on her arm. Then he chuckled a little, gutturally, deep in his pendent and flaccid throat.
"We're up to date, you see, doin' business in a regular armor-clad office!"
Frank looked about her, with widening eyes. MacNutt laughed again, at the sense of surprise which he read on her face.
It was obviously a poolroom, but it was unlike anything she had ever before seen. It was heavily carpeted, and, for a place of its character, richly furnished. The walls were windowless, the light being shed down from twelve heavily ornamented electroliers, each containing a cluster of thirty lamps. These walls, which were upholstered with green burlap, bordered at the bottom with a rich frieze of lacquered and embossedpapier-mâché, were divided into panels, and dotted here and there with little canvases and etchings. On the east end of the room hung one especially large canvas, crowned with a green-shaded row of electric lamps.
MacNutt, with a chuckle of pride, touched a button near the door, and the huge canvas and Bouguereau-looking group of bathing women painted upon it disappeared from view, disclosing to Frank's startled eyes a bulletin blackboard, such as is used in almost every poolroom, for the chalking up of entries and the announcement of jockeys and weights and odds.
MacNutt pressed a second button, and the twelve electric fans of burnished brass hummed and sang and droned, and filled the room with a stir of air.
"A little diff'rent, my dear, from the way they did business when you and me were pikers, up in the West Forties, eh?"
Frank remained silent, as the bathing women, with a methodic click of the mechanism, once more dropped down through the slit in the picture frame, and hid the red-lined bulletin board from view.
"Gamblers, like us, always were weak on art," gibed MacNutt. "There's Dick Penfield, spendin' a hundred thousand a year on pictures an' vases an' rugs, and Sam Brucklin makin' his Saratoga joint more like a second Salon than a first-class bucket-shop, and Larry Wintefield, who knows more about a genuine Daghestan than you or me knows about a Morse sounder, and Al MacAdam, who can't buy chinaware fast enough! As for me, I must say I have a weakness for a first-class nood!" The woman beside him shuddered. "That's all right—but I guess a heap o' these painters would be quittin' the profession if it wasn't for folks of our callin'!"
Frank's roving but unresponding eyes were taking in the huge mahogany table, in the centre of the room, the empty, high-backed chairs clustered around it, the countless small round tables, covered with green cloth, which flanked the walls, and the familiar Penfield symbol, of three interlaced crescents, which she saw stamped or embossed on everything.
He went to one of the five cherry-wood desks which were strewn about the room, and still again touched a button.
"Blondie," he said to the capped and aproned attendant who answered the call from the hair-dressing parlors, "I want you to meet this lady friend of mine! Miss Frances Candler, this is Miss Blondie Bonnell, late of Wintefield's Saratoga Sanitarium for sick purses, and still later of MacAdam's Mott Street branch! Now, Blondie, like a good girl, run along and get the lady something to drink!"
This proffered refreshment the outraged lady in question silently refused, staring tight-lipped at the walls about her. But MacNutt, on this score, made ample amends, for having gulped down one ominously generous glass of the fiery liquid, he poured another, and still another, into the cavern of his pendulous throat, with repeated grateful smacks of the thick and purplish lips.
"Now, I'm goin' to show you round a bit, just to make it plain to you, before business begins for the day. I want you to see that you're not shut up in any quarter-inch cedar bandbox!"
He took her familiarly by the arm and led her to a door which, like the others, was covered with a plating of steel, and heavily locked and barred.
"Necessity, you see, is still the mother of invention," he said, as his finger played on the electric signal and released the obstructing door. "If we're goin' to do poolroom work, nowadays, we've got to do it big and comprehensive, same as Morgan or Rockefeller would do their line o' business. You've got to lay out the stage, nowadays, to carry on the show, or something'll swallow you up. Why, when we worked our last wire-tapping scheme with a hobo from St. Louis, who was rotten with money, we escorted him, on two hours' notice, into as neat a lookin' Postal-Union branch office as you'd care to see, with half a dozen fake keys a-goin' and twenty actors and supers helpin' to carry off the act.That'sthe up-to-date way o' doin' it! That's how a man like Penfield makes this kind o' graftin' respectable and aboveboard and just about as honest as bein' down in the Cotton Exchange!"
He was leading her down a narrow hallway, four feet wide, with unbroken walls on either side of them. At the end of this still another armored door led into a medium-sized room, as bald and uninviting as a dentist's waiting-room. Here he led her to two horizontal slits in the wall and told her to look down.
She did so, and found herself peering below, out into the well-stocked cigar-store, with a clear view of the entrance.
"That's the conning-tower of this here little floating fortress," chuckled MacNutt, at her shoulder. "This place you're in is steel-lined, and it would take three hours o' chisel and sledge work for anybody, from Eggers up to Braugham himself, to get inside, even though he did find us out, and even though he did escape the sulphuric bottles between the bricks. Each one o' these little slits is in line with a nice gilded cigar sign on the shop side of the wall. So no one down there, you see, knows who's eyin' them.Wedon't need any lookout, hangin' round the street-front and tippin' us off. Our man down below sizes up everyone who comes into that shop. If he's all right, the button's touched, and the white light flashes, and he gets through. If he's not, the cigar clerk rings another button, just under his counter, and we know what to do. If it's a case o' raid, our lookout flashes the red light through each o' the four rooms, with one push of the button, and then our second man throws back the switch and puts out every light in the buildin'. Then with another button push, the locks of every door are thrown shut, and they're four inches thick, most of them, and of good oak and steel. If the electricity should give out, here, you see, are the hand bolts, which can be run out at any time. Then we've got a little mercerized steel office, which you won't see, where our cashier and our sheet-writers work!"
Frank said nothing, but her still roving eyes took in each detail, bit by bit, as she warned and schooled herself to note and remember each door and room and passage.
"And now, in case you may be lookin' for it without my help, I'm goin' to take you down and show you the way out. We go through this little passage, and then we take up this steel trapdoor. It's heavy, you see! Then we go down this nice little grill-work iron ladder—don't pull back, I've got you!—and then we open this next very fine steel door—so; and here we are in what you'd call the safety-deposit vaults. It's a mighty handsome-lookin' safe, all laid in Portland cement, as you can see, but we're not goin' to tarry lookin' into that just now."
He was already feeling his way ahead of her, and she was still desperately struggling to impress each detail on her distracted mind.
"You see, if we want to get out, we go through this hall, and follow this little passageway, one end openin' up right under the sidewalk, in the refractin' glass manhole. Leading to the back, here, is a second passage, all barred, the same as the others. So, if our front is shut off, and they're hot on our trail, we shut everything after us as we go, and then open this neat little steel trapdoor, and find ourselves smellin' fresh air and five lines full of washin' from that Dago tenement just above us!"
"And why are you showing me all this?" demanded Frank.
He looked at her out of his pale-green furtive eyes, and locked the door with a vindictive snap of the bolts.
"I'll tell you why, my gay young welcher, for we may as well understand one another, from the start. Now that Penfield's shut up his Newport place and is coolin' his heels up in Montreal for a few months, I'm runnin' this nickel-plated ranch myself. And I've got a few old scores to wipe out—some old scores between that enterprisin' husband o' yours an' myself!"
"What has he ever done to you? Why, should you want to punishhim?" argued Frank, helplessly.
"I'm not goin' to punish him!" declared MacNutt, with a little laugh. "That's just where the damned fine poetic justice of the thing comes in.He's goin' to punish himself!"
Frances Durkin looked at the jeering man before her, studiously, belligerently.
"What do you mean by saying he'll punish himself?" she demanded.
She seemed like a woman who had just awakened. Her earlier comatose expression had altogether passed away. There was life, now, in every line of her body.
"I mean that Durkin's got his quarter of a million in securities, all right, all right, but, by God, I've gotyou! And I mean that he's goin' to, that he'sgotto, make a choice between them and you. So we'll just wait and find out which he loves best, his beau or his dough!" And he laughed harshly at the feeble witticism, as he added, in his guttural undertone: "And I guess we get the worth of our money, whichever way it goes!"
Frank's impression was that he was half drunk, that he was mumbling vaguely of revenges which grew up and died in their utterance. Her look of open scorn stung him into a sudden tremor of anger.
"Oh, don't think I'm spoutin' wind! If Durkin's the man you think he is, and I hope he is,he'll be tryin' to nose his way into this place before midnight tonight!"
"And he will," cried Frank, exultantly, "and with the whole precinct police force behind him!"
"He daren't!" retorted MacNutt. "He daren't get within a hundred yards of the Central Office, and he daren't show his nose inside a precinct station-house! And that's not all, either. There's no captain on this side of New York who's goin' to buck against the whole Tammany machine an' poke into this Penfield business. If that young man with the butterfly necktie over on Centre street thinks he can keep us movin', he's got to do a heap less talkin' and a heap more convictin' before he can putourlights out! That air is good enough for politics—but it's never goin' to break this here Penfield combination! Oh, no, Jimmie Durkin knows how the land lays. He's one o' your bold and brainy kind, who likes to shut himself up in a garret for a week, and make maps of what he's goin' to do, an' how he's goin' to do it, and then trip off by his lonely and do his huntin' in the dark! And he's goin' to try to get in here, before midnight, tonight, and what's more,he's goin' to find it uncommonly easy to do!"
"You mean you'll entice him and trap him here?"
"No, I won't lay a finger on him. You'll do the enticin', and he'll do the trappin'! I won't even be round to see—till afterward!"
"What do you mean by that?"
"I mean we're holdin' open house tonight," mocked MacNutt, "and that Durkin will maybe drop in!"
"And then what will it be?"
"Come this way, my beauty, and I'll show you. First thing, though, just notice this fact. We're not goin' to make it too hard and discouragin' for Durkin. This trap-door will be left unlocked. Also, that front manhole will be left kind of temptingly open, with a few chunks o' loose coal lyin' round it, so that even a Mercer street roundsman couldn't help fallin' into it! Oh, yes, he'll find it easy enough!"
Frank followed him without a word, as he made his way through the low and narrow steel-lined tunnel leading to the vault-room.
"Now, my dear, I guess this is the only way he'll be able to get at you, unless he comes in a flyin' machine, and the first place he'll nose through will be this room. So, bein' old at the business, he's sure to try a crack at our safe. At least, he'll go gropin' around for a while. Not an invitin'-lookin' piece o' furniture, I grant you, but that's neither here nor there. It's not the safe that'll be detainin' Durkin, or any other housebreaker who tries to get gay on these premises. If you look hard, maybe you'll be able to see what's a damned sight more interestin'!"
Frank looked, but she saw nothing beyond the great vault and the burnished copper guard-rail that surrounded it, like the fender about a marine engine.
"You don't notice anything strikin'?" he interrogated wickedly.
She did not.
He emitted a guttural little growl of a laugh, and stepped over to a half-hidden switchboard, high up on the wall. He threw the lever out and down, and the kiss of the meeting metals sounded in a short and malevolent spit of greenish light.
"Are you on?" taunted MacNutt.
Frank's slowly comprehending eyes were riveted on the burnished copper railing, on which, only a moment before, her careless fingers had rested. There was no sign, no alteration in the shining surface of that polished metal. But she knew that a change, terrible and malignant, had taken place. It was no longer a mild and innocent guard-rail. It was now an instrument of destruction, an unbuoyed channel of death. She stood staring at it, with fixed and horrified eyes, until it wavered before her, a glimmering and meandering rivulet of refracted light.
"Are you on?" reiterated the watching man.
The wave of pallor that swept over her face seemed to change her eyes from violet to black, although, for a moment, their gaze remained as veiled and abstracted as a sleep-walker's. Then a movement from her companion lashed and restored her to lucidity of thought. For, from where it leaned against the wall, MacNutt had caught up a heavy door-sheathing of pressed steel. It was painted a Burgundy red, to match the upholstery of the upper room where it had once done service, and on the higher of the two panels was embossed the Penfield triple crescent.
This great sheet of painted steel MacNutt held above his head, as a hesitating waiter might hold a gigantic tray. Then he stepped toward the shimmering guard-rail, and stood in front of it.
"Now, this luxurious-lookin' rear-admiral's rail-fence is at present connected with a tapped power circuit, or a light circuit, I don't know which. All I know is that it's carryin' about a twenty-eight-hundred alternatin' current. And just to show that it's good and ready to eat up anything that tries monkeyin' round it, watch this!"
He raised the Burgundy-red door-sheathing vertically above his head, and stepping quickly back, let it descend, so that as it fell it would strike the metal of the sunken vault-top and the copper guardrail as well.
The very sound of that blow, as it descended, was swallowed up in the sudden, blinding, lightning-like flash, in the hiss and roar of the pale-green flame, as the sheet of steel, tortured into sudden incandescence, bridged and writhed and twisted, warping and collapsing like a leaf of writing-paper on the coals of an open fire. A sickening smell of burning paint, mingling with the subtler gaseous odors of the corroding metal, filled the little dungeon.
"Don't! That's enough!" gasped the woman, groping back toward the support of the wall.
MacNutt shut off the current, and kicked the charred door-sheathing, already fading from incandescence into ashen ruin, with his foot. The smell of burning leather filled the room, and he laughed a little, turning on the woman a face crowned with a look of Belial-like triumph, with dark and sunken circles about the vindictive, deep-set eyes.
Once, in an evening paper, she had pored over the picture of an electrocution at Sing Sing, a haunting and horrible scene, with the dangling wires reaching down to the prisoner, strapped and bound in his chair, the applied sponges at the base of the spine, the buckled thongs about the helpless ankles, the grim and waiting gaol officials, the boyish-looking reporters, with watches in their hands, the bald and ugly chamber, and in the background the dim figure of Retributive Justice, with uplifted arm, where an implacable finger was about to touch the fatal button. Time and time again that vision had brought terror to her midnight dreams, and had left her weak and panting, catching at her startled husband with feverish and passionate hands and holding him and drawing him close to her, as though that momentary guardianship could protect him from some far and undefined danger.
"Oh, Mack," she burst out hysterically, over-wrought by the scene before her, "for the love of God, don't make him die this way! Give him a fighting chance! Give him a show! Do what you like withme, but don't blot him out, like a dog, without a word of warning!"
"It's not my doin'!" broke in her tormentor.
"It's inhuman—it's fiendish!" she went on. "I can't stand the thought of it!"
MacNutt laughed his mirthless laugh once more.
"Oh, I guess you'll stand it!"
"But I can't!" she moaned.
"Oh, yes; you'll stand it, and you'll see it, too! You'll be right here, where you can take the whole show in, this time! It won't be a case o' foolin' the old man, like it was last time!"
"I will be here?" she gasped.
"You'll be right on the spot—and you'll see the whole performance!"
She drew her hands down, shudderingly, over her averted face, as though to shut something even from her imagination.
"And do you know what'll be the end of it all?" MacNutt went on, in his frenzied mockery. "It'll all end in a little paragraph or two in theMorning Journal, to the effect that some unknown safecracksman or other accidentally came in contact with a live wire, and was shocked to death in the very act of breaking into a pious and unoffendin' cigar-store vault! And you'll be the only one who'll know anything different, and I guess you won't do much squealin' about it!"
She wheeled, as though about to spring on him.
"I will! I will, although I wither between gaol walls for it—although I die for it! I'm no weak and foolish woman! I've known life bald to the bone; I've fought and schemed and plotted and twisted all my days almost, and I can die doing it! And if you kill this man, if you murder him—for it is murder!—if you bring this dog's death on him, I will make you pay for it, in one way or another—I'll make you mourn it, David MacNutt, as you've made me mourn the first day I ever saw your face!"
She was in a blind and unreasoning passion of vituperative malevolence by this time, her face drawn and withered with fear, her eyes luminous, in the dungeon-like half-lights, with the inner fire of her hate.
"Keep cool, my dear, keep cool!" mocked MacNutt, without a trace of trepidation at all her vague threats. "Durkin's not dead yet!"
She caught madly at the slender thread of hope which swung from his mockery.
"No! No, he'snotdead yet, and he'll die hard! He's no fool—you've found that out in the past! He will give you a fight before he goes, in some way, for he's fought you and beaten you from the first—and he'll beat you again—I know he'll beat you again!"
Her voice broke and merged into a paroxysm of sobbing, and MacNutt looked at her bent and shaken figure with meditative coldness.
"He may have beaten me, once, long ago—but he'll never do it again. He won't even go out fightin'! He'll go with his head hangin' and his nose down, like a sneak! And you'll see him go, for you'll be tied there, with a gag in your pretty red mouth, and you'll neither move nor speak. And there'll be no light, unless he gets so reckless as to strike a match. But when the light does come, my dear, it'll be a flash o' blue flame, with a smell o' something burnin'!"
The woman covered her face with her hands, and swayed back and forth where she stood.
Then MacNutt held back his guttural laugh, suddenly, for she had fallen forward on her face, in a dead faint.
It was at least four o'clock in the afternoon—as the janitor of the building later reported to the police—when a Postal-Union lineman, carrying a well-worn case of tools, made his way up through the halls and stairways of one of those many Italian apartment houses just south of Washington Square and west of Broadway.
This lineman worked on the roof, apparently, for some twenty minutes. Then he came down again, chatted for a while with the janitor in the basement, and giving him a cigar, borrowed an eight-foot step-ladder, for the purpose of scaling some twelve feet of brick wall, where the adjoining office building towered its additional story above the apartment-house roof.
If the janitor had been less averse to mounting his five flights of stairway, or less indifferent as to the nature of the work which took the busy telegraph official up to his roof, he might, that afternoon, have witnessed both a delicate and an interesting electrical operation.
For once up on the second roof, and sure that he was under no immediate observation, the lineman in question carefully unpacked his bag of tools. His first efforts were directed toward the steel transom which covered the trapdoor opening out on the roof. This, he discovered with a grunt of disappointment, resisted even his short, curved steel lever, pointed at one end, like a gigantic tack-drawer. Restoring this lever to the bottom of his leather tool-bag, he made his way to the southeast corner of the building, where a tangle of insulated wires, issuing from the roof beneath his feet, merged into one compact cable, which, in turn, entered and was protected by a heavy lead pipe, leading, obviously, to the street below, and thence to the cable galleries of Broadway itself.
It took him but a minute or two to cut away a section of this protecting pipe. In doing so, he exposed to view the many wires making up an astonishingly substantial cable, for so meager an office building. He then turned back to his tool-case and lifted therefrom, first a Bunnell sounder, and then a Wheatstone bridge, of the post-office pattern, a coil of KK wire, a pair of lineman's pliers, and a handful or two of other tools. Still remaining in the bottom of his bag might have been found two small rubber bags filled with nitroglycerine, a cake of yellow soap, a brace and bit, a half-dozen diamond-pointed drills, a box of timers, and a coil fuse, three tempered-steel chisels, a tiny sperm-oil lantern and the steel "jimmy" which had already been tested against the obdurate transom.
Then, skilfully relaxing the metallic cable strands, he as carefully graduated his current and attached his sounder, first to one wire and then to another. Each time that the little Bunnell sounder was galvanized into articulate life he bent his ear and listened to the busy cluttering of the dots and dashes, as the reports of races, as the weights and names of jockeys, and lists of entries and statements of odds and conditions went speeding into the busy keys of the big poolroom below, where men and women waited with white and straining faces, and sorrowed and rejoiced as the ever-fluctuant goddess of chance brought them ill luck or success.
But Durkin paid little attention to these flying messages winging cityward from race-tracks so many miles away. What he was in search of was the private wire leading from Penfield's own office, whereon instructions and information were secretly hurried about the city to his dozen and one fellow-operators. It was from this wire that Durkin hoped, without "bleeding" the circuit, to catch some thread of fact which might make the task before him more lucid and direct.
He worked for an hour, connecting and disconnecting, testing and listening and testing still again, before the right wire fell under his thumb. Then he listened intently, with a little start, for he knew he was reading an operator whose bluff, heavy, staccato "send" was as familiar to his long-practiced ear as a well-known face would be to his watching eyes.
It was MacNutt himself who was "sending." His first intercepted message was an order, to some confederate unknown, to have a carriage call for him at eight. That, Durkin told himself, was worth knowing. His second despatch was a warning to a certain "Al" Mackenzie not to fail to meet Penfield in Albany, Sunday, at midnight. The third message was brief, and seemed to be an answer to a question which had escaped the interloper.
"Yes, got her here, and here she stays. Things will happen tonight."
"Ah!" ejaculated Durkin, as he wiped his moist forehead, while the running dots and dashes resolved themselves into the two intelligible sentences.
Then he looked about him, at the leaden sky, at the roofs and walls and windows of the crowded and careless city, as asabreurabout to enter the arena might look about him on life for perhaps the last time.
"Yes," he said, with a meditative stare at the transom before him, "thingswillhappen tonight."
It was a thick and heavy night, with a drizzle of fine rain blanketing the city. Every now and then a lonely carriage spluttered along the oily and pool-strewn pavement of the cross-street. Every now and then, too, the rush and clang of the Broadway cars echoed down the canyon of rain-swept silence.
Durkin waited until the lights of the cigar-store went out. Then he once more circled the block, keeping to the shadows. As he passed the darkened cigar-store for the second time his foot, as though by accident, came sharply in contact with the refracting-prismed manhole cover which had sounded so hopefully hollow to his previous tread. As he had half-suspected, it was loose.
He stooped quickly, to turn up his trousers. As he did so three exploring fingers worked their way under the ledge of the unsecured circle of iron and glass.
It came away without resistance. He looked about him cautiously, without straightening up; then by its shoulder-strap he carefully lowered his leather tool-bag into the passage below, and as guardedly let himself down after it.
He waited and listened for a minute or two, before replacing the cover above him. From the river, in the distance, he could hear the booming and tooting of the steam craft through the fog. A hurrying car rumbled and echoed past on the Broadway tracks. Two drunken wanderers went singing westward in the drizzling rain. Then everything was silence again.
Durkin replaced the covering, noiselessly, and feeling to right and left with his outstretched hands, crept inward through the narrow tunnel in which he found himself. His fingers came in touch with the chilly surface of a steel-faced door. It sounded heavy and unyielding to his tentative tap, and his left hand was already reaching back for the tool-bag which hung by its strap over his shoulder when his questioning right hand, pushing forward, discovered that the door was unlocked, and swung easily outward without resistance.
He felt and fondled the heavy bolts, thoughtfully, puzzled why it should be so, until he remembered seeing the half-dozen pieces of anthracite lying about the manhole on the sidewalk above. That, he told himself, possibly explained it. Some careless wagon-driver, delivering his load, had left the place unlocked.
But before he crept into the wider and higher passage before him he paused to take out the revolver which he carried in his hip pocket, to unlimber it, and carefully feel over the chambered cylinder, to make sure every cartridge-head stood there, in place. This done, he replaced it, not at his hip, but loose and free, in the righthand pocket of his coat. Then he once more began feeling his way along the smooth cement floor. He was enveloped in a darkness as absolute as though he had been shrouded in black velvet—even the glimmer of the refracted street lamps did not penetrate further than the doorway of the first tunnel. There was a smell of dampness in the air, as of mouldy plaster. It was the smell of underground places. Durkin hated it.
He had to feel his way about the entire circle of that second narrow chamber before he came to where the inner doorway stood. It, too, was unlocked, and for the first time some sense of betrayal, some intimidation of being trapped, some latent suspicion of artfully concealed duplicity, flashed through his questioning mind.
He listened, and was greeted by nothing but silence.
Then he swung the door softly and slowly open. As he did so he leaped back, and to one side, with his right hand in his coat pocket. For there suddenly smote on his ears the sharp clang and tinkle of metal.
He stood there, crouched, for a waiting minute, and then he laughed aloud, for he knew it was only the sound of some piece of falling iron, striking on the cement. To make sure of it, he groped about the floor, and stumbled on the little bar of steel that had fallen. Yet why it had been there, leaning against the door, he could not comprehend. Was it there by accident? Or had it been meant as a signal? It showed him one thing, however; its echoing fall had demonstrated to him that the room he had entered was both higher and larger than the one he had left. It might be nothing more than a furnace-room, yet he told himself that he must be on his guard, that from now on his perils began.
Then he wondered why he should feel this premonitory sense, and in what lay the dividing line, and where lay the difference.
Yet as he stood there, with his back against the wall, he felt something dormant and deep-seated stirring within him. It was not a sense of danger; it arose from no outward and tangible manifestations. But somewhere, and persistently, at the root of his being, he heard that subliminal and submerged voice which could be neither silenced nor understood.
He took three groping paces forward, as if to put distance between himself and this foundationless emotion which some part of him seemed struggling to defy. But for the second time he stood stockstill, weighed down by the feeling of some presence, oppressed by the sense of something vaguely hanging over him. He felt, as Frank had once said, how like a half-articulate key, at the end of an impoverished circuit, consciousness really was; how the spirit so often, in this only half-intelligible life of theirs, flutters feebly with hints and suggestions to which it could never give open and unequivocal utterance. Even language, and language the most artful and finished, was, after all, merely a sort of clumsy Morse—its unwieldy dots and dashes left many a mood of the soul unknown and inarticulate.
As he stood there, in doubt, questioning himself and that vague but disturbing something which stood before him, he decided to put a summary end to the matter. Fumbling in his pocket, and disregarding any risk which the movement might entail, he caught up a match and struck it.
As he shaded the flame and threw it before him, his straining eyes caught only the glimmer of burnished metal—a guard-rail of some description—and the dark and ponderous mass of what seemed a deposit vault.
The match burned down, and dropped from his upthrust fingers. He decided to grope to the rail, and feel along the metal until he reached some point of greater safety. He extended his fingers before him, as a blind man might, and took one shuffling step forward.
Then a thought came to him, with the suddenness and the shock of an electric current, as a radiating tingle of nerves, followed by a strangely sickening sense of hollowness about the chest, swept through his body.Could it be Frank herself in danger, and wanting him?
More than once, in the past, he had felt that mysterious medium, more fluid and unfathomable than electricity itself, carry its vague but vital message in to him. He had felt that call of Soul to Soul, across space, along channels less tangible than Hertzian waves themselves, yet bearing its broken message, which later events had authenticated and still later cross-questioning had doubly verified.
He had felt, at such moments, that there were ghostly and phantasmal wires connecting mind with mind; that across these telepathic wires one anxious spirit could in some way hold dim converse with the other; that the Soul itself had its elusive "wireless," and forever carried and gave out and received its countless messages—if only the fellow-Soul had learned to await the signal and disentangle the dark and runic Code. Yes, he told himself, as he stood there, thoughtfully, as though bound to the spot by some Power not himself,—yes, consciousness was like that little glass tube which electricians called a coherer, and all his vague impressions and mental-gropings were those disorderly, minute fragments of nickel and silver which only leaped into continuity and order under the shock and impact of those fleet and foreign electric waves, which floated from some sister consciousness aching with its undelivered messages. And the woman who had so often called to him across space and silence, in the past, was now sounding the mystic key across those ghostly wires. But what the messages was, or from what quarter it came, he could not tell.
He stood there tortured and puzzled, torn by fear, thrilled and stirred through every fiber of his anxious body. This was followed by a sense of terror, sub-conscious and wordless and irrational, the kind of terror that comes to a child in unknown places, in the dead of some unknown night.
"For the love of God, what is it?" his dry lips demanded, speaking aloud into the emptiness about him.
He waited, almost as if expecting some answering voice, as distinct and tangible as his own. But nothing broke the black silence that blanketed him in from the rest of all the world and all its living things. The sweat of agony came out on his face; his body hung forward, relaxed and expectant.
"What is it you want to say?" he repeated, in a hoarse and muffled scream, no longer able to endure that silent and nameless Something which surrounded him. "What is it you want to say?"