CHAPTER XI
In the paling afternoon, with a pearl-mist of fine rain thinly shrouding the city, Frances Candler waited for Durkin impatiently, with her watch open before her. As the frail steel hand, implacable as fate, sank away toward the half-hour mark, her own spirits sank with it. It was not often Durkin was late. Another ten minutes would make him forever too late. She debated within herself whether or not she should risk her own voice over the wire to Ottenheimer’s office, while there was yet time, or wait it out to the last. Then she remembered, to her sudden horror, that the transmitter still stood in its perfectly-adjusted and normal condition, that there could be no muffling, incompetent mechanism to disguise the tones of her voice.
She was still beating despairingly through a tangle of dubious possibilities when the reassuring two-three ring of the door-bell sounded out, through the quiet of the lonely twilight, with startling clearness. A minute later Durkin came panting into the room. He was clean-shaven, immaculate, and most painfully out-of-breath.
“Is there time?” he gasped, putting down a heavy suit-case and peeling off his coat as he spoke.
“It’s twenty-one minutes after five. If Phipps is punctual, that gives you only four minutes.”
By this time Durkin had the suit-case open. In another half-minute he had the casing off the transmitter. Then a deft turn or two with his screw-driver, a tentative touch or two on the electrode, and in another half minute the casing was restored, and he was gently tapping on the diaphragm of the transmitter, with the receiver at his ear, testing the sound.
“Just a minute, now, till I cool down, and get my breath! I had endless trouble getting my drill apparatus—at one time I thought I’d have to take a dentist’s tooth-driller, or some such thing. But I got what I wanted—that’s what kept me. Anything new?”
He turned with the receiver still at his ear, and for the first time looked at her closely. Her face seemed pale, and a little weary-looking, against her black street-gown; the shadowy wistfulness about her eyes seemed more marked than ever.
“Yes,” she was laughing back at him, however, “something most prodigious has happened. I have an order for one dozen cotillion-favors, to be done in velvet and crimson satin, and delivered next Saturday afternoon!”
Durkin himself laughed shortly, and faced the telephone once more, asking her how time was.
“You haven’t a second to lose!”
His own face was a little paler than usual as he stood before the transmitter, while Frances, with her watch in her hand, went on saying that, if Phipps was punctual, he would be out and away in one minute’s time.
Durkin took a last look around, said under his breath, “Well, here goes!” and placed the receiver to his ear.
For a moment the woman, watching him, with half-parted lips, was haunted by the sudden impression that she had lived through the scene before, that each move and sound were in some way second-hand to her inner consciousness, older than time itself, a blurred and dateless photograph on the plates of memory.
“Hello! Hello! Is that you, Phipps?” she heard him say, and his voice sounded thin and far-away. There was a pause—it seemed an endless pause—and he repeated the query, louder.
“This is Ottenheimer. Yes, something wrong with the ’phone. Don’t cable Teetzel—I say don’t cable Teetzel, about those canary diamonds, until you see me. Yes, Teetzel. Did you get that? Well,—er—what the devil’s our safe combination? Yes, yes, Ottenheimer!”
“Slower—slower, Jim!” groaned the girl, behind him.
“Combination’s slipped my mind, Phipps. Yes; after dinner; want to run down and look over the books. Louder, please; I can’t hear. Yes, that’s better. To the right three times, to seventy-four—back thirty—on eighty-two—back one hundred and eight—and on seven. Yes. It’s the second last figure slipped me. Better close up now. Better close up, I say. All right,—good-bye!”
The last minute vibration ebbed out of the transmitter’s tingling diaphragm; but still neither the listening man nor woman moved. They waited, tense, expectant, tossed between doubt and hope, knowing only too well that the questioning tinkle of a little polished, nickel bell would sound the signal of their absolute and irreparable defeat.
Second by second, a minute dragged itself away. Then another, and another, and still no call came from Ottenheimer’s office, for Central. The woman moved a little restlessly. The man sighed deeply. Then he slowly put down the receiver, and mopped his moist face and forehead.
“I think he’s safe,” half-whispered Durkin, with his eyes still on the transmitter.
“He may suspect any moment though—when he’s had time to think it over, especially.”
“I rather doubt it. Our voices were nothing but broken squeaks. But if he does ring up Central, we’ll have to risk it and jump in and claim a wire’s crossed somewhere.”
Then he repeated the strange formula: “To the right three times, to seventy-four—back thirty—on eighty-two—back one hundred and eight—and on seven. Can you get it down, Frank?”
She nodded, as she wrote it in pencil, on a slip of paper. This he placed in his waistcoat pocket, and mopped his face once more, laughing—perhaps a little hysterically, as he watched the ’phone and felt the passing minutes drip relievingly, like the softest of balm, on his strained nerves.
“And now what?” asked Frances, sharing his relief, as he went to the window, and breathed the fresh air that blew in through the low-ceilinged little studio.
“Now,” said Durkin, jubilantly, “now we begin our real work!” He opened his suit-case and handed her a heavy, cylindrical, steel implement. Into one end of this odd-looking tool he slipped and clamped a slender, polished little shaft of grooved steel.
“That’s what nearly lost me everything,” he continued, carefully unpacking, as he spoke, a condenser, a tangent galvanometer, a pair of lineman’s-gloves, a Warner pocket battery-gauge, a pair of electrician’s scissors and pliers, two or three coils of wire, a half-a-dozen pony glass insulators, and a handful or two of smaller tools.
“Here, you see, is what I set up business with,” he soliloquized, as he studied the litter they made on the floor. He looked up quickly, as she drew her little table out from the wall and lifted the transmitter up on the empty electric-fan shelf. “Er—before I forget it,” he said, absently, his eyes still on his widely strewn apparatus, “have you got everything you want away from here?”
She had; though she hated to leave her show-case, she said. Some day she might like to take up fancy sewing again. “But before we do another thing,” she insisted, “we ought to have dinner. Breakfast, this morning, was our last meal, I know!”
And to his utter astonishment, Durkin remembered that he was famished.
It was a hurried and humble little meal they ate together in the failing light,—a meal of sandwiches washed down with bottled milk. Their thoughts as they ate, however, were on other things, grappling with impending problems, wondering when and under what circumstances their next meal would be eaten, almost glorying in the very uncertainty of their future, tingling with the consciousness of the trial they were to undergo, of the hazard they essayed. Then Durkin, as he smoked, laid out his final plan of action, point by premeditated point.
CHAPTER XII
At twenty minutes to eleven, slipping off his shoes, Durkin climbed cautiously through the transom opening out on the roof. Creeping as carefully from chimney tier to chimney tier, he found himself face to face with a roof-fence of sharpened iron rods. He counted down this fence to the eighteenth rod, then carefully lifted on it. The lead that sealed it in the lower cross-piece, and into the stone beneath that again, had been strangely fused away, and the loosened rod slid up through the top horizontal bar very much like a miniature portcullis. Squeezing through this narrow opening, he carefully replaced the rod behind him. With a flattened piece of steel, once used for a furnace poker, and looking very much like a gigantic tack-drawer, he slowly and gently forced the bolt that held shut the transom on the Ottenheimer building. This he replaced, after passing through, paying out with him as he went, two coils of rubber-coated wire, in appearance not unlike a large size of incandescent lamp cord.
From the photographer’s studio in which he found himself, nothing but a draw-bolt kept him from an outside hallway. Making sure that the building was deserted, and everything safe, he worked his way slowly down, like a diver, stair by stair, to the basement. Here he made a careful study of the little tunnel of electric wires at the back of the lower hall, probing, testing, measuring, and finally, with cool deliberation, “bridging” the necessary portion of the burglar-alarm connection, which he knew to be operated on a closed circuit. This circuit he diverted as a miner diverts a troublesome stream. Then, holding before him his little two-candle incandescent lamp, scarcely bigger than his thumb nail, he groped toward the iron covered door that divided one-half of the building from the other.
Here he directed his thin shaft of light into the crack between the heavy door and its studding, and his squinting eyes made out the iron lock-bar that held him out. From his vest pocket, where they stood in a row like glimmering pencils, he took out one of the slim steel drills, adjusted it noiselessly in the drill-flange, and snapped shut his switch. There was the quick spit of a blue spark, and of a sudden, the inanimate thing of steel throbbed and sang and quivered with mysterious life. As he glanced down at it, in its fierce revolutions, he realized that once more he had for an accomplice that old-time silent, and ever-ready assistant which for years had been a well-tested and faithful friend. The mere companionship with so familiar a force brought back to him his waning confidence.
He forced the whirling drill through the door-crack and in against the bar. It ate through the soft iron as though it had been a bar of cheese. Eight carefully placed perforations, side by side, had severed the end of the lockshaft. He shut off the current, confidently, and swung open the heavy door. The falling piece of iron made a little tinkle of sound on the cement flooring, then all was silence again. He had at least, he told himself, captured the enemy’s outposts.
Cautiously he felt his way across the warm cellar, up the steps, and at last faced his one definite barrier, the door of solid steel, abutted by even more solid masonry. The builders of that door had done their best to make it forbidding to men of his turn of mind, Durkin ruminated, as he felt and sounded and tested despondently over its taciturn painted surface.
He studied the hinges carefully, through his tiny lamp. They were impregnable. As he had surmised, his only way was to cut out, inch by inch, the three heavy steel shafts, or bolt-bars, which slipped and fitted into steel casings also, apparently, embedded in solid masonry.
Adjusting his drill, he closed the switch once more, and, bracing the instrument’s head against his breast-bone, watched the slender, humming, spinning shaft bite and grind and burrow its way into the slowly yielding bar. From a little pocket-can, every minute or two, he squirted kerosene in on the drill-tip. The pungent smell of the scorching oil, as it spread on the heated steel, rose almost suffocatingly to his nostrils in the furnace-heated warmth of the cellar and for weeks afterwards remained an indistinct and odious memory to him.
When his first hole was bored, and his little drill raced wildly through into space, like the screw of a liner on the crest of a wave, he started a second, close beside the first; then a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, slowly honeycombing the thick steel with his minute excavations. Sometimes a drill would snap off short, and he would have to draw a fresh one from his stock. Sometimes it did not bite sharply, and he tried another. And still he stood drilling, directing the power of his silent, insidious, untiring accomplice, whose spirit crooned and burned and sighed itself out through the wire at his feet.
As he worked, he lost all track of time; after he had started what he knew to be the last hole, he stopped and looked at his watch, as casually as he had done often enough after a night of operating the key in a despatcher’s office. To his horror, he saw that it had stopped, stunned with a natural enough electrolytic paralysis. It might not yet be twelve, or it might be four in the morning; time, from the moment he had taken off his shoes in Frances Candler’s little back room, had been annihilated to him. He wondered, in sudden alarm, if she were still maintaining her patrol outside, up and down the block. He wondered, too, as he drove the little drill home for the last time, and cautiously pried open the great, heavy door, if she had sent any signal in from the street front, and he had missed it. He even wondered, quakingly, if daylight would not overtake them at their work—when his startled eyes, chancing to fall on a nearby clock-dial, saw that the hour was only twenty-five minutes to twelve.
Step by step he crept back to the inner offices, followed by the murmurous ticking of a dozen noisy clocks, declaiming his presence. From the door in front of where the safe stood, gloomy, ominous, impregnable-looking, he lifted a seemingly innocent rubber mat. As he thought, it had been attached to a burglar-alarm apparatus. Dropping on one knee, he repeated his formula, number by number, each time listening for the telltale click of the falling ward. Then, turning the nickel lock-knob, he heard the many-barred lock chuck back into place.
The next moment the ponderous doors were open, and Durkin’s little thumb-nail electric lamp was exploring the tiers of inner compartments.
He still carried his drill with him; and, once he had found the private drawer he wanted, the softer iron of the inner fittings offered little resistance to a brutally impatient one-eighth bit. After two minutes of feverish work, he was able to insert the point of his furnace poker into the drawer, and firmly but gently pry it open.
The next moment his blackened and oily fingers were rummaging carelessly through a fortune or two of unset stones—through little trays of different tinted diamonds, through crowded little cases of Ceylon pearls and Uralian emeralds. At last, in a smaller compartment, marked “I. Ottenheimer,” he found a gun-metal case sealed up in an envelope. The case itself, however, was securely locked. Durkin hesitated for one half second; then he forced the lid open with his steel screw-driver.
One look was enough. It held the Blue Pear.
He stooped and carefully brushed up the steel cuttings under his shoeless feet. As carefully he closed the inner drawers of the safe. His hand was on the nickel lock-knob once more, to swing the ponderous outer doors shut, when a sound fell on his ears, a sound that made his very blood chill and tingle and chill again through all his tense body.
It was Frank’s voice, outside the same building in which he stood, not a hundred feet away from him, her voice shrilly screaming for help.
His first mad impulse was to rush out to her, blindly. A second precautionary flash of thought kept him rooted to the spot, where he stood listening. He could hear confused, sharp voices, and the scuffling of feet. He heard the quick scream again; then guttural, angry protests. Some subliminal prompting told Durkin that that scream was not one of terror, but of warning.
Snapping out his incandescent lamp, he stole cautiously forward through the row of partitioned, heavily-carpeted little offices, and, without showing himself, peered toward the shop-front. As he did so, a second involuntary thrill of apprehension sped up and down his backbone. The street-door itself was open. Already half way in through that door was a dark, stoutly-built man. He stood struggling in the arms of a determined young woman. That woman, Durkin could see, was Frances Candler. And all the while that she was clinging to him and holding him she was crying lustily for help.
The next moment Durkin made out the man. It was Ottenheimer, himself. For some unknown reason, he hastily surmised, the diamond merchant had intended to drop into his own office. But why, he still asked, was Frank taking such risks?
Durkin did not try to work the thing out in its minute details. Like a flash, he darted back to the open safe. He swung the big doors to, locked them, caught up his drill, and the loose strands of wire, and then backed quickly out through the steel door, securing it with a deft twist or two of a piece of his number twelve. The outer cellar door he as quickly closed after him.
Then he flew upstairs, two steps at a time, rebolted the photographers’ hall door, replaced the transom as he swung up through it, and as hurriedly refitted the loose iron bar in the roof-fencing.
Three minutes later, a well-dressed gentleman, wearing a black hat and carrying a large leather suit-case, stopped, with a not unnatural curiosity, on his way up Fifth Avenue, to inquire the meaning of an excited little crowd that clustered about two policemen and a woman in the doorway of Ottenheimer & Company.
He drew up, casually enough, and listened while a short, stout, and very indignant man spluttered and gesticulated and angrily demanded how any one should dare to stop him from going into his own store. He was the owner of the place—there was his own watchman to identify him,—and somebody would be “broke” for this tomfoolery, he declared, with a shake of the fist toward the silent sergeant beside him.
The young woman, who chanced to be veiled, explained in her well-modulated, rich contralto voice that the hour had seemed so unusual, the store had looked so dark inside, even the burglar-alarm, she stubbornly insisted, had rung so loudly, that, naturally, it had made her suspicious. She was sorry if it was a mistake. But now the officers were there; they could attend to it—if some one would kindly call a taxi for her.
The sergeant between her and Ottenheimer agreed with her, and stepping out and stopping an empty motor-cab on its way up the Avenue, turned back to the still enraged owner of the store and solicitously advised him to go home and cool down.
“You hold that woman!” demanded Ottenheimer, husky with rage. “You hold that woman, until I examine these premises!”
The young woman, obviously, and also quite naturally, objected to being held. There was a moment of puzzled silence, and then a murmur of disapproval from the crowd, for about the carefully gloved girl in the black street-gown and plumed hat clung that nameless touch of birth and bearing which marked her as a person who would be more at home in a limousine than in a wind-swept doorway.
“The lady, of course, will wait!” quietly but deliberately suggested the black-hatted man with the suit-case, looking casually in over the circling crowd of heads.
The sergeant turned, sharply, glaring out his sudden irritability.
“Now, who asked you to butt in on this?” he demanded, as he impatiently elbowed the pressing crowd further out into a wider circle.
“I merely suggested that the lady wait,” repeated the man in the black hat, as unperturbed as before.
“Of course, officer, I shall wait, willingly,” said the girl, hurriedly, in her equally confident, low-noted rich contralto. She drew her skirts about her, femininely, merely asking that the shop-owner might make his search as quickly as possible.
Ottenheimer and the doubtful-minded sergeant disappeared into the gloom of the midnight store. As the whole floor flowered into sudden electric luminousness, Durkin thanked his stars that he had had sense enough to leave the lighting wires intact.
“Everything’s all right; you may go, miss,” said the sergeant, two minutes later. “I guess old Isaac’s had an early nightmare!” And the dispersing crowd laughed sympathetically.
The woman stepped into the motor-cab, and turned toward Broadway.
Safely round the corner, she picked up the waiting Durkin.
“That was a close one—but we win!” he murmured jubilantly.
“You’ve got it?”
“I’ve got it,” he exulted.
The woman at his side, for some vague reason, could not share in his joy. Intuitively, in that moment of exhaustion, she felt that their triumph, at the most, was a mere conspiracy of indifference on the part of a timeless and relentless destiny. And in the darkness of the carriage she put her ineffectual arms about Durkin, passionately, as though such momentary guardianship might shield him for all time to come.
She shook her abstractedness from her, with a long and fluttering sigh.
“Jim,” she asked him, unexpectedly, “how much money have you?”
He told her, as nearly as he could. “It’s hanged little, you see!” he added, not understanding the new anxiety that was eating at her heart,—“but I’ve been thinking of a plan!”
“Oh, what now?” she asked miserably, out of her weariness.
She knew, well enough, the necessity of keeping up, of maintaining both activity and appearances. She knew that wrong-doing such as theirs, when without even its mockery of respectability and its ironical touch of dignity, was loathsome to both the eye and the soul. But she found that there were moods and times, occurring now more and more frequently, when she dreaded each return to that subterranean and fear-haunted world. She dreaded it now, not so much for herself, as for Durkin; and as he briefly told her of his plan, this feeling grew stronger within her.
“Then if it must be done,” she cried, “letmedo the worst part of it!”
He looked at her, puzzled, not comprehending the source of her passionate cry, blindly wondering if her over-adventurous life was not getting a deeper and deeper hold on her. But her next question put him to shame.
“Jim, if I help you in this, if I do all that has to be done, will you promise me that you will make it bring you closer to your work on your amplifier, and your transmitting camera? Can’t you promise to get back to that decent work once more?”
“I’ll promise, if you’ll make me one promise in return,” said Durkin, after a moment of silent thought.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Will you let me hold over this Singford stone, for a few weeks?”
“But why?” she asked, aghast.
“To oil the curtain that has to go up on our next act!” he answered, grimly. “I mean a few hundred, now, would make things so simple again.”
“No,” she protested fiercely, “it must not, it shall not, be done. The Blue Pear must go back to London tomorrow!”
“It will mean some hard work for us both, then.”
“I can’t help that, Jim. We’ll have to face it together. But this stone is a thing we can’t trifle with, or equivocate over. I should hate myself, I should even hateyou, if I thought it wasn’t to go back to London, by express, tomorrow morning!”
“Then back it goes!” said the man at her side. He could see, even in the dim light of the taxi, the rebellious and wounded look that had crept into her face.
“Whatever it brought me, I couldn’t endure your hate!” he said, taking her hand in his.
CHAPTER XIII
As a result of her midnight conference with Durkin, Frances Candler learned many things. One of these was the fact that the life into which she had flung herself was proving a captor that already threatened to extort a cruelly impossible ransom. Another was the discovery that Durkin stood even deeper than she did in those conspiratorial quicksands from which she tore one limb only to be engulfed by another. For all along, she saw, he had been a quiet observantintrigant, conspiring against a new field of activity toward which she had not even thought to glance.
For after that hurried midnight talk she knew that the Secretary of Agriculture, at Washington, from time to time received sealed mail reports from the South as to the condition of the cotton crop. She also learned that there had been a series of startling and disastrous “leaks” from these confidential government reports, and that a private wire now connected the office of the Department with Savannah and New Orleans. Durkin had already ascertained that over this wire, on the last day, or the last “market” day, of each month, until the leakage had been stopped, would pass those despatches and figures on which the Department of Agriculture would verify and base its monthly report of the cotton outlook.
“That system is going to be kept up,” Durkin had explained to her, “until the Secretary finds out who is stealing the figures and doing the manipulating on them in the New York Cotton Exchange. At any rate, I know he’s going to keep this wire in use until the decent brokers stop bombarding him and the Census Bureau with their telegrams about collusion and fraud. But here’s the point that interests us. If this present wire report turns out to be favorable, the feverish way the market stands now, it means, of course that there’s going to be a pretty serious break in Cotton Exchange trading. But, on the other hand, if this short-cut official report carries the news of a shortage, it’s as plain as day that Curry and all the other New York bears will have a lever to pry up the price of cotton with, high as it stands already.”
“And what is it we want to know?” she had asked.
“We’ve got to find out which way that report goes—whether it’s good or bad. I’ll be here in New York, waiting to get your cipher message over a Postal-Union wire. Whichever way it goes, I’ll govern myself accordingly, jump into the market with every penny I have, and do precisely what three hundred highly respectable brokers have been doing for the last two months. The only thing that makes me hot is that I haven’t a few thousand, instead of a paltry few hundred, to fling into it!”
Her instructions were brief, but explicit. While he waited in New York, ready to act on word from her, she was to hurry to Washington, and from Washington go on to the somnolent little Virginia town of Leeksville. This town, Durkin had already made sure, lay on the route of the Department of Agriculture’s New Orleans wire.
On the main street of the little town through which this wire ran stood a ramshackle, three-storied wooden hotel. From the top floor of this hotel every wire that went humming like a harp of haste through that avenue of quietness was easily accessible. Any person enlightened and audacious enough to pick it out from among its companions and attach to it a few feet of “No. 12” and a properly graduated relay would find the rest of his task astoundingly easy. As Durkin had pointed out, already knowing what they did, the one great problem lay in getting unsuspected into the third-floor room of that wooden Leeksville hotel.
With a jointed split-bamboo fishing-pole, neatly done up in a parasol cover, and with her complete wire-tapping outfit as neatly packed away in a dress-suit case, Frances Candler ten hours later registered at that ancient and unsavory-looking hostelry. A weary and bedraggled theatrical company, which had just made the late “jump” from Fredericksburg, preceded her, and she made it a point to approach the desk at the heels of a half-a-dozen noisy chorus girls.
There she asked for a top-floor room.
The over-gallant clerk insisted that she should go anywhere but on the top floor. There would be no difference in the cost of the rooms, to her. He would make that, indeed, a personal matter.
“But I prefer the top floor,” she maintained, biting her lip and giving no other sign of her indignation.
The clerk insisted that the climb would be too much for her; and most of the floor, he explained, was given over to the servants.
She began to despair.
“But I sleep lightly—and Imusthave seclusion!”
The perturbed clerk protested that in Leeksville noises were unknown by day, much less by night. A circle of rotunda idlers now stood behind her, taking in the scene. A flash of inspiration came to her.
“I’vegotto go up to the top, I tell you!” she cried, impatiently. “Can’t you see I’ve got asthma!”
And the angry asthmatic woman in the heavy veil was finally surrendered to the loneliness and discomfort of her southwest corner room on the barren and carpetless third floor.
There she quietly unpacked her suit-case, jointed her pole of split bamboo, attached and graduated her relay, and fingered noiselessly through the tangle of wires beneath her window for that one and essential thread of metal along which was to flash the departmental cotton reports, between New Orleans and Washington.
There, hour after hour, she sat and waited and watched; and it was late in the next morning that, white and worn-out, she detached the unobserved wire, hurried off her brief despatch in cipher, ordered breakfast up to her room, and even before undressing fell into a long and restless slumber.
That day, in her narrow little corn-husk bed, she dreamed that she and Durkin had tunnelled under the Potomac River and had carried away the last ounce of gold from the United States Treasury. How many millions they had taken it was beyond them even to count. But she knew they were escaping in submarines and were being breathlessly pursued by the entire North Atlantic fleet. And her one great fear, during all that agonized and endless pursuit, seemed not that she was destined either to final capture, or to final suffocation, but that, in some way, she might become separated from Durkin.
CHAPTER XIV
Durkin waited, with the receiver at his ear. Once more the signal-bell shrilled and cluttered its curtly hurried warning. A vague yet nasal and half-impatient voice murmured brokenly out of somewhere to some one: “You’re connected now—go ahead.”
Then came a grating rasp and drone, a metallic click or two, and out of the stillness there floated in to his waiting ear the space-filtered music of an anxious “Hello”—flute-like, mellow, far-away.
It seemed to him there, under the stress of his passing mood, that an incorporeal presence had whispered the word to him. Suddenly, for the first time in his life, the miracle of it all came home to him, the mystery and magic of that tenuous instrument, which could guide, and treasure, and carry in to him through the night the very tone and timbre of that one familiar voice, flashing it so many miles through star-hung forest and hill and valley, threading it on through sleeping towns and turbulent cities, winging it through wind and water unerringly home to his waiting ear.
“Hello!” the anxious contralto was asking again.
“Hello?” cried Durkin, pent in the little bald speaking-closet, yet his face illuminated with a wonderful new alertness. “Hello! Is that you, Frank?”
A ripple of relieved laughter ebbed out of the wire.
“Oh, Jim,” sounded the far-away voice in his ear, sighingly. “It seems so good!”
“Where are you?”
“In Washington, at the Arlington office.”
He chuckled a little, as though the accomplishment of the miracle, the annihilation of so many miles of space, was a matter of his own personal triumph.
“Here we’re talking together through three hundred miles of midnight!” he boasted to her.
“Yes, I know; but I wish it wasn’t so far! Did you recognize my voice there?”
“I’d know that voice in—in Hell!” he answered, with a sudden grim but inadequate earnestness. He had hoped to say something fitting and fine, but, as always seemed to happen to him in such moments, his imagination foundered in the turbulence of his emotions.
“You may have to some day, my poor Orpheus!” she was laughing back at him.
But the allusion was lost on Durkin, and he cut in with a curt, “What’s happened?”
“I want to come home!” It must have been a good night for ’phoning, he felt, as he heard those five cogent words, and an inconsequential little glow suffused him. Not an ohm of their soft wistfulness, not a coulomb of their quiet significance, had leaked away through all their hundreds of miles of midnight travel. It almost seemed that he could feel the intimate warmth of her arms across the million-peopled cities that separated them; and he projected himself, in fancy, to the heart of the far-off turbulence where she stood. There, it seemed to him, she radiated warmth and color and meaning to the barren wastes of life, a glowing and living ember in all the dead ashes of unconcern. And again it flashed through him, as the wistful cadence of her voice died down on the wire, that she was all that he had in life, and that with her, thereafter, he must rise or sink.
“I want to come home,” she was repeating dolefully.
“You’vegotto come, and come quick!”
“What was that?”
“I say, risk it and come,” he called back to her. “Something has happened!”
“Something happened? Not bad news, is it?”
“No—but it will open your eyes, when you hear it!”
“Everything at my end has been done, you know.”
“You mean it came out all right?”
“Not quite all right, but I think it will do. Is it safe for me to tell you something?”
“Yes, anything in reason, I guess.”
“Curry’s men in New Orleans are working against him!”
“Let me add something to that. Green and his men are trying to break Curry, and Curry all the time is laying a mine under every blessed one of them!” and Durkin gave vent to a triumphant chuckle, deep down in his throat.
“Where did you find this out?” the unperturbed and far-away contralto was demanding.
“You could never guess.”
“Talk faster, or this telephoning will break us!” she warned him.
“Oh, I don’t care—it’s worth the money.”
“Hello—Hello! Oh, all right. Go on!”
“Youheard about the fire in the Terminal Room of the Postal-Union? No—well, some dago with a torch got a little too careless in a P. U. conduit, and set fire to a cable-splicer’s pot of paraffin down on lower Broadway, not much more than a hundred yards from Wall Street itself. Then the flames caught on the burlap and the insulating grease and stuff round the cables—can you hear me? There was the dickens to pay, and in about ten minutes they looked more like a cart-load of old excelsior than the business wires of a few thousand offices!”
“Yes, go on!”
“Well, it stopped nine thousand telephones, and put over two hundred stock-tickers out of business, and cut off nearly five hundred of the Postal-Union wires, and left all lower New York without even fire-alarm service. That’s saying nothing of the out-of-town wires, and the long distance service,—did you get all that?”
“Perfectly.”
“Well, there’s a lot more to tell, but it will keep—say till Thursday night. You may be able to imagine just what it is, from what I’ve told you; but listen: I think I can open your eyes, when you get here!” he repeated, slowly and significantly.
“All right—even a Great Western wire might have ears, you know!” she warned him.
“Quite so, but how about your Savannah information? There’s nothing new?”
“Nothing. But you saw the newspaper stories?”
“The Herald yesterday said the Secretary of Agriculture had demanded from the Savannah Cotton Exchange the name of a wire-house that bulletined a government crop report thirty minutes ahead of the official release.”
“Yes, that’s Dunlap & Company. They are frantic. They still declare there was no leak, and are fighting it out with the department here at Washington. In the meantime, luckily for us, they are, of course, sending out press-statements saying it was all a coincidence between their firm’s private crop-estimate and the actual government report. I couldn’t give you much of a margin of time to work on.”
“That thirty minutes just gave me time to get in on the up-town quotations. I missed the lower office, of course.”
“Hadn’t we better hold this over?”
“Yes; I rather forgot—it’ll wait until you get here.”
“Then Thursday night, at eight, say, at the Grenoble!”
“No, no; make it nine forty-five—I don’t get away until then.”
“What would the Grenoble people say?”
“That’s so—you had better go to the Ralston. It’s free and easy. Yes, the Ralston,” he repeated. “The Ralston, at nine forty-five, Thursday. Good-bye!”
A moment later he could hear the frantic signal-bell again.
“Hello! Hello! What is it?”
“Hello, New York! Not through yet,” said the tired and nasal voice of the operator.
“You forgot something!” It was the contralto voice this time, reproachful and wounded. Durkin laughed a little as he leaned closer to the mouth-piece of his transmitter.
“Good-bye, dearest!” he said.
“Good-bye, my beloved own!” answered the wire, across its hundreds of miles of star-strewn midnight.
Durkin hung up his receiver with a sigh, and stopped at the office to pay his bill. All that was worth knowing and having, all that life held, seemed withdrawn and engulfed in space. He felt grimly alone in a city out of which all reality had ebbed. It seemed to him that somewhere a half-heard lilt of music had suddenly come to a stop.
A spirit of restless loneliness took possession of him, as he stepped out into the crowded solitudes of Broadway. His thoughts ran back to the day that he had first met Frances Candler, when, half unwillingly joining forces with MacNutt, he had followed that most adroit of wire-tappers to his up-town house. He remembered his astonishment as the door swung back to MacNutt’s secret ring, and Frank stood there in the doorway, looking half timidly out at them, with her hand still on the knob. How far away it seemed; and yet, as the world went, it could be counted in months. He had thought her a mere girl at first, and he recalled how he imagined there had been a mistake in the house number, as he saw the well-groomed figure in black, with its wealth of waving chestnut hair, and the brooding violet eyes with their wordless look of childish weariness. It was only later that he had taken note of the ever betraying fulness of throat and breast, and the touch of mature womanhood in the shadows about the wistful eyes. He remembered, point by point, the slow English voice, with its full-voweled softness of tone, as she answered MacNutt’s quick questions, the warm mouth and its suggestion of impulsiveness, the girlishly winning smile with which she had welcomed him as her partner in that house of underground operating and unlooked-for adventure, the quick and nervous movements of the muscular body that always carried with it a sense of steely strength half-sheathed in softness.
Bit by bit he recalled their tasks and their perils together.
What touched him most, as he paced the odorous, lamp-hung valley of the Rialto, was the memory of this wistful woman’s sporadic yet passionate efforts to lead him back to honesty. Each effort, he knew, had been futile, though for her sake alone he had made not a few unthought of struggles to be decent and open and aboveboard in at least the smaller things of life.
But the inebriation of great hazards was in his veins. They had taken great chances together; and thereafter, he felt, it could be only great chances that would move and stir and hold them. Now he would never be content, he knew, to lounge about the quiet little inns of life, with the memory of those vast adventures of the open in his heart and the thirst for those vast hazards in his veins.
As he turned, in Longacre Square, to look back at that turbulent valley of lights below him, he remembered, incongruously enough, that the midnight Tenderloin was the most thoroughly policed of all portions of the city—the most guarded of all districts in the world. And what a name for it, he thought—the Tenderloin, the tenderest and most delectable, the juiciest and the most sustaining district in all New York, for the lawless egotist, whether his self-seeking took the form of pleasure or whether it took the form of profit!
A momentary feeling of repugnance at what was unlovely in life crept over him, but he solaced himself with the thought that, after all, it was the goodness in bad people and the badness in good people that held the mottled fabric together in its tight-meshed union of contradictions.
Then his spirit of loneliness returned to him, and his thoughts went back to Frances Candler once more. He wondered why it was that her casual woman’s touch seemed even to dignify and concentrate open crime itself. He felt that he was unable, now, to move and act without her. And as he thought of what she had grown to mean to him, of the sustaining sense of coolness and rest which she brought with her, he remembered his first restless night in New York, when he had been unable to sleep, because of the heat in his stifling little bedroom, and had walked the breathless, unknown streets, until suddenly on his face he had felt a cool touch of wind, and the old-time balm of grass and trees and green things had struck into his startled nostrils. It was Central Park that he had stumbled on, he learned later; and he crept into it and fell placidly asleep on one of the shadowy benches.
His memory, as he turned to take a last look down the light-hung cañon of the Rialto, was of the evening that he and his desk-mate, Eddie Crawford, had first driven down that luminous highway, in a taxi, and the lights and the movement and the stir of it had gone to his bewildered young head. For he had leaned out over those titanic tides and exclaimed, with vague and foolish fierceness: “My God, Eddie, some day I’m going to get a grip on this town!”