CHAPTER XXII
For all the rest of that day Frances Candler hated herself, hated Durkin for the mean and despicable paths into which he and his plottings had forced her, hated her sordid and humiliating conquest of the gambler Bryan and his secret.
But most of all she hated what she saw was happening within herself, the insidious and yet implacable hardening and narrowing of all her nature, the accumulating of demeaning and corroding memories, the ripening of a more and more morose self-contempt into a vague yet sullen malevolence of thought and wish.
She told herself, forlornly, that she still would not let her better nature die without a struggle, for all that she had done, and for all that she had been through. What crushed and disheartened her was the conviction that this struggle once more, in the end, would prove a futile one. She was not bad, though, not all bad, like women she had known! She had always aspired and turned toward what was right and good—her spirit cried out desolately. It was not that she had gained anything through all her wrong-doing. From the first, she felt, she had been the tool in some stronger hand; she had been only the leaf on the winds of some darker destiny. At first it had been to live, and nothing more. Now it was to love—only some day to love as she had always hoped to do; not at once to win the crown, but some day to hope to be able to win that crown. For this she was surrendering her womanhood, her integrity of soul, even the last shred of her tattered self-respect.
She would not die in a day, she told herself again, desperately. She would not surrender everything without a struggle. What remained of her scattered legions of honor, she passionately promised herself, would still be gathered together and fostered and guarded.
Above all things, she felt, she needed companionship. Durkin meant much to her—meant far too much to her, for time and time again he had only too easily shattered her card-house of good resolutions. She had blindly submerged herself for him and his efforts. It was not that she stopped to blame or reprove him; her feeling was more one of pity, of sorrow for the unstable and unreconciled nature in the fell clutch of circumstance. Yes, he meant more to her than she dare tell herself. But there were moods and moments when he proved inadequate, and to allow that sad truth to go unrecognized was more than blindness. If only she had, or could have, the friendship of a woman,—that was her oft-recurring thought,—the companionship of one warm nature quick to understand the gropings and aspirations of another. With such a friend, she vaguely felt, things might not yet be so ill with her.
But she knew of none. There was no one, she realized, to whom she could look for help. And she tried to console herself with the bitter unction of the claim that with her the world had always been doggedly unkind and cruel, that with an Æschylean pertinacity, morbidly interpreted as peculiar to her case, fate, or destiny, or the vague forces for which those words stood, had hounded and frustrated her at every turn.
This maddening feeling of self-hate and contempt stayed with her all that day. It made stiflingly hideous and sinister, to her brooding eyes, the over-furnished woman’s pool-room which had once been Penfield’s own, where she counted out her money and placed her bet on the Duke of Kendall. The broken-spirited and hard-faced women who waited about the operator’s wicket, the barrenness and malignity of their lives, the vainly muffled squalidness of that office of envenomed Chance, the abortive lust for gold without labor, the empty and hungry eyes that waited and watched the figure-covered blackboard, the wolf-like ears that pricked up at the report of some belated prey in the distance—it all filled Frances with a new and disheartening hatred of herself and the life into which she had drifted.
“Oh, God!” she prayed silently, yet passionately, while the little sounder in the operator’s stall clicked and sang; “Oh, God, may it turn out that this shall be the last!”
Listlessly she read the messages, as the report for the fifth Aqueduct event of the afternoon began to flash in and the announcer cried out, “They’re off!” Dreamily she interpreted the snatches of information as they came in over the wire: “Scotch Heather leads, with White-Legs second!” “Scotch Heather still leading at the quarter, and Heart’s Desire pressing White-Legs close.” “Heart’s Desire leads at the half, with the Duke of Kendall second.” “White-Legs, the Duke of Kendall, and Heart’s Desire bunched at the turn.” “Duke of Kendall holds the rail, with Heart’s Desire and White-Legs locked for second place.” Then, for a minute or two, silence took possession of the little brass sounder. Then thrilled out the news: “The Duke of Kendall wins!”
Frances quietly waited, amid the hubbub and crowding and commotion, until the wire report had been duly verified and the full returns posted.
Then, when the little window of the paying clerk slid open for the making of settlements, she deposited her ticket, and quietly asked to have it in hundreds.
Her slip read for two hundred dollars on the Duke of Kendall at odds of fifty to one.
“I guess this shop shuts up mighty soon, on this kind of runnin’,” said the paying clerk sourly, after consulting with his chief, and flinging her money through his little wicket at her. She counted it methodically, amid the gasps and little envious murmurs of the women at her elbow, and then hurried from the room.
“Well, you ought to be happier-looking!” snarled a painted woman with solitaire diamond earrings, as Frances hurried down the half-lighted stairway to the street.
There the woman who ought to be happy signaled moodily for a taxi-cab, and drove straight to Durkin’s apartments.
She flung the pile of bills at him, in a heap before his astonished eyes.
“There it is,” she said, with shaking hands and quivering lips, flashing at him a look in which he could see hatred, contempt, self-disgust and infinite unhappiness.
“There it is!” she called out to him, shrilly. “There it is—all you wanted, at last, and Ihope it will make you happy!”
She tore the veil she had dragged from her head between her two distraught hands and flung it from her, and then fell in the other’s arms and wept on his shoulder like a tired child, convulsively, bitterly, hopelessly.
CHAPTER XXIII
“Helen can not possibly sail tomorrow.”
This was the cipher message which flashed from Samuel Curry to his New Orleans partner, giving him hurried warning that the final movement in their cotton coup had been again postponed for at least another twenty-four hours. Frances Candler, keeping watch on the up-town wires, had caught the first inkling of this relieving news. After a passionate hour of talk and pleading from Durkin, and after twelve long hours of unbroken sleep, much of her spirit of rebelliousness had passed away, and she had unwillingly and listlessly taken up the threads of what seemed to her a sadly tangled duty once more.
But with the advent of Curry’s climactic message her old, more intimate interest in the game gradually awoke. By daylight she had sent word down to Durkin, who, about that time, was having quite trouble enough of his own.
For his underground guerrilla work, as it was called, had its risks in even the remoter parts of the city. But here, in the Wall Street district, by day the most carefully guarded area of all New York, just as by night the Tenderloin is the most watched—here, with hundreds hourly passing to and fro and Central Office men buzzing back and forth, Durkin knew there were unusual perils, and need for unusual care.
Yet early that morning, under the very eyes of a patrolman, he had casually and hummingly entered the Postal-Union conduit, by way of the manhole not sixty yards from Broadway itself. In his hands he carried his instruments and a bag of tools, and he nodded with businesslike geniality as the patrolman stepped over toward him.
“Got a guard to stand over this manhole?” demanded the officer.
“Nope!” said Durkin. “Three minutes down here ought to do me!”
“You people are gettin’ too dam’ careless about these things,” rebuked the officer. “It’smegets the blame, o’ course, when a horse sticks his foot in there!”
“Oh, cover the hole, then!” retorted Durkin genially, as he let himself down.
Once safely in the covered gloom of the conduit, he turned on his light and studied a hurriedly made chart of the subway wire-disposition. The leased Curry wires, he very well knew, were already in active service; and the task before him was not unlike the difficult and dangerous operation of a surgeon. Having located and cut open his cables, and in so doing exposed the busy arteries of most of Wall Street’s brokerage business, he carefully adjusted his rheostat, throwing the resistant coils into circuit one by one as he turned the graduated pointer. It was essential that he should remain on a higher resistance than the circuit into which he was cutting; in other words, he must not bleed his patient too much, for either a heavy leakage or an accidental short-circuiting, he knew, would lead to suspicion and an examination, if not a prompt “throwing it into the quad,” or the reversal to the protection of some distant and indirect wire.
When his current had been nicely adjusted and his sensitive little polarized relay had broken into a fit of busy and animated chattering, he turned his attention to the unused and rusted end of gas-pipe which careless workmen, months, or even years, before, had hurriedly capped and left protruding a good quarter-inch into the conduit. On this cap he adjusted a pair of pocket pipe-tongs. It took all his weight to start the rusted pipe-head, but once loosened, it was only a minute’s work to unscrew the bit of metal and expose the waiting ends of the wires which he had already worked through from the basement end of the pipe. He then proceeded with great deliberation and caution to make his final connections, taking infinite care to cover his footsteps as he went, concealing his wire where possible, and leaving, wherever available, no slightest trace of interference.
When everything was completed, it was nothing more than an incision made by a skilled and artful surgeon, a surgeon who had as artfully dressed the wound, and had left only a slender drainage tube to show how deep the cutting had been.
Durkin then repacked his tools in his spacious double-handled club bag of black sea-lion, put out his light, emerged whistling and dirt-soiled from his manhole, and having rounded the block, slipped into his basement printing-office and changed his clothes.
What most impressed and amazed Durkin, when once his quadruplex had been adjusted and pressed into service, was the absolute precision and thoroughness with which the Curry line of action had been prearranged. It was as diffusedly spectacular as some great international campaign. This Machiavellian operator’s private wires were humming with messages, deputies throughout the country were standing at his beck and call, emissaries and underlings were waiting to snatch up the crumbs which fell from his overloaded board, his corps of clerks were toiling away as feverishly as ever, Chicago and St. Louis and Memphis and New Orleans were being thrown into a fever of excitement and foreboding, fortunes were being wrested away in Liverpool, the Lancaster mills were shutting down, and still cotton was going up, up, point by point; timid clerks and messenger boys and widows, even, were pouring their pennies and dollars into the narrowing trench which separated them from twenty cent cotton and fortune.
Yet only two men knew and understood just how this Napoleon of commerce was to abandon and leave to its own blind fate this great, uncomprehending, maddened army of followers. Speculators who had made their first money in following at his heels were putting not only their winnings, but all their original capital, and often that of others, on the “long” side of the great bull movement, waiting, always waiting, for that ever alluring Fata Morgana of twenty cent cotton. Even warier spirits, suburban toilers, sober-minded mechanics, humble store-traders, who had long regarded ’Change as a very Golgotha of extortion and disaster, had been tainted with the mysterious psychologic infection, which had raced from city to town and from town to hamlet. Men bowed before a new faith and a new creed, and that faith and creed lay compactly in three pregnant words: Twenty Cent Cotton.
Yet this magnetic and spectacular bull leader, Durkin felt, was infinitely wiser and craftier than any of those he led. Curry, at heart, knew and saw the utter hopelessness of his cause; he realized that he was only toying and trifling with a great current that in the end, when its moment came, would sweep him and his followers away like so many chips. He faced and foresaw this calamity, and out of the calamity which no touch of romanticism in his nature veiled to his eyes, he quietly prepared to reap his harvest.
As these thoughts ran through Durkin’s busy mind, some vague idea of the power which reposed in his own knowledge of how great the current was to become, and just what turn it was to take, once more awakened in him. He had none of that romantic taint, he prided himself, which somewhere or at some time invariably confused the judgment of the gambler and the habitual criminal—for they, after all, he often felt, were in one way essentially poets in spirit, though dreamers grown sour through stagnation. Yet he could see, in the present case, how gigantic his opportunities were. Properly equipped, with a very meagre sum, millions lay before him, inevitably. But the stain of illegitimacy clung to his methods, and as it was, his returns at best could be only a paltry few thousands—fifty or sixty or even a hundred thousand at most. With Curry it would be millions.
Durkin remembered his frugal train-despatching days at the barren little wooden station at Komoka Junction, where forty dollars a month had seemed a fortune to him. He lighted a Carolina Perfecto, and inhaled it slowly and deliberately, demanding to know why he ought not to be satisfied with himself. In those earlier days he used to eat his dinner out of a tin pail, carried each morning from his bald and squalid boarding-house. Today, he remembered, he was to take luncheon with Frances at the Casa Napoleon, with its exquisite Franco-Spanish cookery, its tubbed palms, and its general air of exotic well-being.
His luncheon with Frances, however, was not what he had looked for. He met her in front of the West Ninth Street restaurant as she was stepping out of her taxi-cab. She seemed unusually pale and worried, though an honestly happy smile flitted across her lightly veiled face as she caught sight of him.
In a moment again her manner changed.
“We are being watched,” she said, in a low voice.
“Watched! By whom?”
Their eyes met and he could see the alarm that had taken possession of her.
“By MacNutt!”
Durkin grew a little paler as he looked down at her.
“He has shadowed us for two days,” she went on in her tense, low, quick tones. “He followed me out of our own building, and I got away from him only by leaving my taxi and slipping through a department store.”
“Did he speak to you?”
“No, not a word. I don’t even think he dreams I have seen him. But it is hard to say how much he has found out. Oh, Jim, he’s slow and sly and cunning, and he won’t strike until the last minute. But when he does, he will try to—to smash us both!”
“I’ll kill that man as sure as I’m standing on this curbstone, if he ever butts in on this game of ours! This isn’t pool-room piking we’re at now, Frank—this is big and dangerous business!”
He had remembered the cigar-light in the dark passageway, and the mysterious disappearance, then later the taxi-cab that had strangely followed his own.
“No, no, Jim; you mustn’t say that!” she was murmuring to him, with a little shiver. “I’m afraid of him!”
“Well,I’mnot,” said Durkin, and he swore softly and wickedly, as he repeated his threat. “What doeshewant to come into our lives for, now? He’s over and done with, long ago!”
“We are never over and done with anything we have been,” she almost sobbed, half tragically.
Durkin looked at her, a little impatient, and also a little puzzled.
“Frank, what is this man MacNutt to you?”
She was silent.
“What has he ever been to you, then?”
“He is a cruel and cunning and bitterly vindictive man,” she said, evading the question. “And if he determined to crush a person, he would do it, although it took him twenty years.”
“Then I certainlywillkill him!” declared Durkin, shaken with a sudden unreasoning sweep of white passion.
It was not until he had half finished his luncheon that his steadiness of nerve came back to him. Here he had been shadowing the shadower, step by step and move by move, and all along, even in those moments when he had taken such delight in covertly and unsuspectingly watching his quarry, a second shadow had been secretly and cunningly stalking his own steps!
“It will be a fight to the finish, whatever happens!” he declared belligerently, still harping on the string of his new unhappiness.
CHAPTER XXIV
Durkin, bending restlessly over his relay, and dreamily cogitating on the newly discovered fact that Morse was a language as harmonious and mysterious and subtly expressive as music itself, sat up with a sudden galvanic jerk of the body.
“Helen sails at one tomorrow!” thrilled and warbled and sang the little machine of dots and dashes; and the listening operator knew that his time had come. He caught up the wires that ran through the gas-pipe to the conduit, and bracing himself against the basement wall, pulled with all his strength. They parted suddenly, somewhere near the cables, and sent him sprawling noisily over the floor.
He hurriedly picked himself up, flung every tool and instrument that remained in the dingy basement into his capacious club bag, and carefully coiled and wrapped every foot of telltale wire. As little evidence as possible, he decided, should remain behind him.
Five minutes later he stepped into Robinson & Little’s brokerage offices. It was, in fact, just as the senior member of the firm was slipping off his light covert-cloth overcoat and making ready for a feverish day’s business.
Ezra Robinson stared a little hard when Durkin told him that he had thirteen thousand dollars to throw into “short” cotton that morning, and asked on what margin he would be able to do business.
“Well,” answered the broker, with his curt laugh, “it’s only on the buying side that we’re demanding five dollars a balethismorning!”
He looked at Durkin sharply. “You’re on the wrong side of the market, young man!” he warned him.
“Perhaps,” said Durkin easily. “But I’m superstitious!”
The man of business eyed him almost impatiently.
Durkin laughed good-naturedly.
“I mean I had a sort of Joseph’s dream that cotton was going to break down to sixteen today!”
“Well, you can’t afford to work on dreams. Cotton goes up to nineteen today, and stays there. Candidly, I’d advise you to keep off the bear side—for a month or two, anyway!”
But Durkin was not open to dissuasion.
“When May drops down to sixteen or so I’ll be ready to let the ‘shorts’ start to cover!” he argued mildly, as he placed his money, gave his instructions, and carried away his all-important little slip of paper.
Then he hurried out, and dodged and twisted and ran through those crowded and sunless cañons of business where only a narrow strip of earth’s high-arching sky showed overhead. As he turned from William Street into Hanover Square, through the second tier of half-opened plate glass windows he could already hear the dull roar of the Cotton Pit. The grim day’s business, he knew, was already under way.
Four policemen guarded the elevators leading to the spectator’s gallery. The place was crowded to the doors; no more were to be admitted. Durkin, however, pushed resolutely through the staggering mass, and elbowed and twisted his way slowly up the stairs. Here again another row of guards confronted him. A man at his side was excitedly explaining that the Weather Bureau had just issued flood warnings, for danger line stages in the lower Black Warrior of Alabama and the Chattahoochee of Georgia. Andthatought to hold the “bears” back, the man declared, as Durkin elbowed his way in to the guards.
“No use, mister, we can’t let you in,” said a perspiring officer.
He stood with his back to the closed door. At each entrance a fellow-officer stood in the same position. The receipts at Bombay, for the half-week, cried still another excited follower of the market, were only thirty-eight thousands bales.
“Hey, stand back there! Let ’em out! Here’s a woman fainted!” came the cry from within, and the doors were swung wide to allow the woman to be carried through.
Durkin wedged a five-dollar bill down between the guarding policeman’s fingers.
“There’s your chance. For God’s sake, get me in!”
The doors were already being closed, and the din within again shut off from the listening crowd in the hallway.
“Here, stand back! Gentleman’s got a ticket!” and without further ado the big officer cannonaded him into the midst of the gallery mob.
Once there, Durkin edged round by the wall, squeezed himself unceremoniously out, until, at last, he came to the brass railing guarding the edge of the spectator’s gallery. Then he took a deep breath, and gazed down at the sea of commotion that boiled and eddied at his feet.
It was one mad tumult of contending forces, a maelstrom of opposing currents. Seldom was there a lull in that hundred-throated delirium, where, on raised steps about a little circular brass railing, men shouted and danced and flung up their hands and raced back and forth through a swarming beehive of cotton-hunger. Some were hatless, some had thrown coats and vests open, some white as paper, and some red and perspiring; some were snowing handfuls of torn-up pad sheets over their comrades, some were penciling madly in call-books, some were feverishly handing slips to agile youths dodging in and out through the seething mass. Every now and then a loud-noted signal-bell sounded from one end of the hall, calling a messenger boy for despatches.
In the momentary little lulls of that human tempest Durkin could catch the familiar pithy staccato of telegraph keys cluttering and pulsating with their hurried orders and news. He could see the operators, where they sat, apathetically pounding the brass, as unmoved as the youth at the light-crowned, red-lined blackboard, who caught up the different slips handed to him and methodically chalked down the calls under the various months.
Then the tumult began afresh once more, and through it all Durkin could hear the deep, bass, bull-like chest-notes of one trader rising loud above all the others, answered from time to time by the clear, high, penetratingly insistent and challenging soprano of another.
Curry once more had cotton on the upward move. It was rumored that the ginners’ report was to be a sensational one. Despatches from Southern points had shown advancing prices for spot cotton. A weak point had been found in the Government report. All unpicked cotton on the flooding Black Warrior bottoms would never reach a gin. The mills, it had been whispered about, were still buying freely, eagerly; yet already purchasers were having more difficulty in getting the commodity than when, weeks before, it had stood two hundred points lower. And still the sea of faces fought and howled and seethed, but still the price of cotton went up.
Durkin searched more carefully through that writhing mass of frenzied speculators for a glimpse of Curry himself.
He caught sight of him, at last, standing cool and collected and rosy-faced, a few paces in front of the New Orleans blackboard, at the edge of the little sea of frantic men that fought and surged and battled at his side. Spot cotton had already soared to 17.55. The wires were reporting it at eighteen cents in New Orleans. Hurry orders from Liverpool were increasing the tension.
Durkin took a second and closer look at the great bull leader. He made note of the large emerald flashing in his purple cravat, of the gaily dotted white waistcoat, in the armholes of which were jauntily caught the careless thumbs, of the black derby hat tilted a trifle down over the careless, rosy face. This was the man who was so lavishly giving away houses and jewels and automobiles. This was the man on whom men and women in all walks of life, in every state and territory of the Union, were pinning their faith for established twenty cent cotton and the balm of affluence that it would bring them! This was the man at whose whisper a hundred thousand spindles had ceased to revolve, and at whose nod, in cotton towns half a world away, a thousand families either labored or were idle, had food or went hungry.
A momentary lull came in the storm, a nervous spasm of uncertainty. It seemed only a sheer caprice, but in sixty seconds the overstrained price had fallen away again twenty points. Curry, stroking his small mustache, stepped in closer to the circular brass railing of the Pit, and said a quiet word or two to his head-broker. His rosy face was expressionless, and he pulled languidly at his little mustache once more. But his motion had started the upward tendency again. Both May and July cotton bounded up, point by point, capriciously, unreasonably, inexorably, as though at the wafting of a magician’s wand.
When the excitement seemed at its highest, when the shrill-noted chorus of sellers and buyers was shrieking its loudest, Samuel Curry went out to eat his luncheon. This was at once noticed and commented on,—for dozens of eyes, both eager and haggard, watched the leader’s every move and expression.
The change that swept over the Pit was magical. The tumult subsided. The shouting men about the brass railing stopped to take breath. The sallow-faced young man who chalked prices up on the Pit-edge blackboard rested his tired fingers. Brokers sat about on little camp-stools. For the first time Durkin could catch the sound of the sustained note of the telegraph keys clicking busily away. The sunlight fell across the paper-littered floor. The crowd in the gallery grew less. The operators were joking and chatting. A messenger boy had fallen asleep on his bench. The army was waiting for the return of its leader.
Curry re-entered the Pit quietly, with a toothpick in one corner of his mouth. He stood there for a moment or two, his thumbs in his waistcoat armholes, rocking comfortably back and forth on his heels, enigmatically and indolently watching the floor which his reappearance had first reanimated and then thrown into sudden confusion.
Durkin, in turn, watched the leader closely, breathlessly, waiting for the beginning of the end. He saw Curry suddenly throw away his toothpick and signal to a bent and pale-haired floor broker, who shot over to his leader’s side, exchanged a whispered word or two with him, and then shot back to the brass railing. There he flung his hands up in the air, with fingers outthrust, and yelled like a madman:
“Buy July fifty-one! Buy July fifty-two! Buy July fifty-three—four—five! Buy July fifty-six!”
That single-throated challenge was like a match to waiting ordnance.
With arms still extended and gaunt fingers outstretched he kept it up, for one moment. Then the explosion came. Already, it seemed he had imparted his madness to the men who screamed and fought and gesticulated about him.
“Buy July sixty-three! Buy July sixty-four! Buy July sixty-five—sixty-seven—sixty-eight!”
The frenzy in the Pit increased. Up, up went July cotton to seventy, to seventy-one, even to seventy-two. In thirty years and over no such price had ever been known. Eighty-five million dollars’ worth of cotton bales, on paper, were deliriously exchanging hands. But, all things must reach their end. The bow had been bent to the uttermost. The tide had flooded into its highest point.
A sudden change came over Curry. He flung up his two hands, and brought them smartly together over his jauntily tilted black derby. This done, he elbowed and pushed his way hurriedly to the ring-side. The market hung on his next breath.
“Sell twenty thousand May at sixty!”
A silence; like that which intervenes between the lightning flash and the thunder-clap, fell in the Pit.
The leader was unloading. It was rumored that five thousand bales more than the whole crop had been sold. The bubble had been overblown. There was still time to be on the safe side. And like people fighting in a fire-panic, they tore and trampled one another down, and blocked the way to their own deliverance, through the very frenzy of their passion to escape.
But the downward trend had already begun.
Everybody attempted to unload. Outside orders to follow the movement promptly poured in. What before had been unrest was soon panic, and then pandemonium. Men and youths bending over office tickers, women at quiet home telephones, plungers and “occasionals” watching bulletin-boards, miles and miles away—all took up the startled cry.
Wire-houses promptly heard of the unloading movement, of the abdication of the bull king, and a mad stream of selling orders added to the rout of the day.
Curry had started the current; he let it take its course. Through its own great volume, he knew, it could easily carry all opposition down with it. He even ostentatiously drew on his tan-colored gloves, and took up his overcoat, as he announced, laughingly, that he was out of the market, and that he was off to Florida for a holiday.
Then a second panic—frenzied, irrational, desperate, self-destroying panic—took hold of that leaderless mob, trampling out their last hope with their own feverish feet. Curry had liquidated his entire holdings! He was going South for the winter! He was carrying out his old threat to take the bears by the neck! He had caught the pool on the eve of betraying him!
They had warned him that he would find no mercy if he did not draw in with his manipulations. He had found treachery used against him, and as he had promised, he was giving them a dose of their own medicine.
July, in the mad rush, dropped fifty points, then a ruinous one hundred more, then wilted and withered down another fifty, until it stood 173 points below its highest quotation mark. The rout was absolute and complete.
Seeing, of a sudden, that the market might even go utterly to pieces, without hope of redemption, the old-time bull leader, now with a pallor on his plump face, leaped into the Pit, and tried to hold the runaway forces within bounds.
But his voice was lost in the din and tumult. He was a mere cork on the grim tide of disaster. Even his own frantic efforts were in vain. Thecouphad been effected. The day had been won and lost!
Durkin did not wait for the gong to sound. He hurried round to Robinson & Little’s offices, racing past disheveled men as excited as himself.
Neither member of the distraught firm of Robinson & Little was to be seen. But a senior clerk, with a pale face and a wilted collar, quickly and nonchalantly counted Durkin out his money, after verifying the slip, and speaking a brief word or two with his master over the telephone.
When his brokerage commission had been deducted, Durkin was still able to claim as his own some forty-eight thousand dollars.
It had been a game, for once, worth the candle.
He walked out into the afternoon sunlight, pausing a moment at the doorway to drink in the clear wintry air of the open street. After all, it was worth while to be alive in such a world, with all its stir, with all its—
His line of thought was suddenly disrupted. A tingle of apprehension, minute but immediate, was speeding up and down his backbone.
“That’s your man,” a voice had said from the shadow of the doorway.
Durkin took the two stones steps as one, and, without turning, hurried on. His eyes were half-closed as he went, counting his own quick footfalls and wondering how many of them might safely be taken to mean escape.
He walked blindly, with no sense of direction, each moment demanding of himself if it meant defeat or freedom.
At the twentieth step he felt a hand catch at the slack in his coat sleeve. He jerked a startled and indignant arm forward, but the clutch was one of steel.
“I guess we want you, Jimmie Durkin,” said a grim but genial and altogether commonplace voice to him over his averted shoulder.
Then Durkin turned. It was Doogan’s plain-clothes man, O’Reilly. Beside him stood a second plain-clothes man showing a corner of his Detective Bureau badge.
“Well?” said Durkin, vacuously.
The men drew in closer, sandwiching him compactly between them. It was a commonplace enough movement, but it made suddenly and keenly tangible to his mind the fact that he had lost his freedom.
“For God’s sake, boys, whatever it is, don’t make a scene here!” cried the prisoner, passionately. “I’ll go easy enough, but don’t make a show of me.”
“Come on, then, quick!” said the Central Office plain-clothes man, wheeling him about, and heading for the Old Slip Station.
“Quick as you like,” laughed Durkin, very easily but very warily, as he calculated the time and distance between him and the sergeant’s desk, and told himself a second time admonitively that he was indeed under arrest.
CHAPTER XXV
Durkin, with an officer at either elbow, tried to think far ahead and to think fast. Yet try as he might, his desperate mind could find no crevice in the blind wall of his predicament. Nothing, at any rate, was to be lost by talking.
“What’s this for, boys, anyhow?” he asked them, with sadly forced amiability.
“Different things,” said Doogan’s man O’Reilly, noncommittally.
“But who made the charge—who laid the complaint, I mean?”
“’Tis an old friend of yours!” chuckled O’Reilly, thinking of other things.
Durkin looked at the man studiously. “Not Robinson?”
“And who’s Robinson?—better try another guess!”
“Nor the Postal-Union people?”
“And what have you been doin’ tothem?” retorted the officer, as he gnawed at the corner of his tobacco plug and tucked it away in his vest pocket again.
“They tried to soak me once, without cause,” lamented Durkin, indignantly. But his hopes had risen. After all, he felt, it might be only some old, unhappy far-off thing.
“Who the devil was it, then?”
“Twas MacNutt!” said O’Reilly, watching him. “MacNutt’s turned nice and good. He’s a stool-pigeon now!”
“MacNutt!” echoed Durkin, and as before, a great rage burned through him at the sound of the name.
Hope withered out of him, but he gave no sign. He wondered what, or just how much, MacNutt dare reveal, even though he did stand in with the Central Office.
It was dark a minute or two for him, as his mind still leaped and groped at the old blind wall. Then suddenly into the depths of his despair swayed and stretched a single slender thread of hope.
It was Custom House Charley’s saloon so artfully disguised as a soda-bar. There the second waiter was Eddie Crawford—the same Eddie Crawford who had worked with him on the Aqueduct pool-room plot, and had been discharged with him from the Postal-Union.
It seemed eons and eons ago, that poor little ill-fated plot with Eddie Crawford!
Eddie had struggled forlornly on as an inspector of saloon stock-tickers, had presided over a lunch counter, and had even polished rails and wiped glasses. But now he mixed drinks and dispensed bootlegger’s gin for Custom House Charley.
If Eddie was there—
“Look here, you two,” cried Durkin decisively, coming to a full stop to gain time. “I’ve struck it heavy and honest this time, and, as you people put it, I’ve got the goods on me. I can make it worth five thousand in spot cash to each of you, just to let this thing drop while you’ve still got the chance!”
The Central Office man looked at O’Reilly. Durkin saw the look, and understood it. One of them, at any rate, if it came to a pinch, could be bought off. But O’Reilly was different. “Look here, you two,” said Durkin, showing the fringe of his neatly banded packet of notes.
The Central Office man whistled under his breath. But O’Reilly seemed obdurate.
“Double that, young man, and then double it again, and maybe I’ll talk to you,” Doogan’s detective said easily, as he started on again with his prisoner.
“And if Idid?” demanded Durkin.
“Talk’s cheap, young fellow! You know what they’re doing to us boys, nowadays, for neglect of duty? Well, I’ve got to get up against more than talk before I run that risk!”
“By heaven—I can do it, and Iwill!” said Durkin.
O’Reilly wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The prisoner could feel the two officers interrogating each other silently behind his back.
“Step in here, then, before you’re spotted with me,” said Durkin. “Come in, just as though we were three friends buying a soda, and shoot me, straight off, if I make a move to break away!”
“Oh, you’ll not break away!” said the man with the steel grip, confidently, still keeping his great handful of loose coat-sleeve. But he stepped inside, none the less.
Durkin’s heart beat almost normally once more. There stood Eddie Crawford, leisurely peeling a lemon, with his lips pursed up in a whistle. One hungry curb-broker was taking a hurried and belated free lunch from the cheese-and-cracker end of the counter.
Durkin stared at his old friend, with a blank and forbidding face. Then he drooped one eyelid momentarily. It was only the insignificant little twitch of a minor muscle, and yet the thought occurred to him how marvellous it was, that one little quiver of an eyelid could retranslate a situation, could waken strange fires in one’s blood, and countless thoughts in one’s head.
“What will you have, gentlemen?” he asked, easily, briskly.
“Scotch highball!” said the officer on his right.
“Give me a gin rickey,” said the officer on his left.
“A silver fizz,” said Durkin, between them.
That, he knew, would take a little longer to mix. Then there came a moment of silence.
Durkin’s long, thin fingers were drumming anxiously and restlessly on the polished wood.
The busy waiter, with a nervous little up-jerk of the head, gave these restlessly tapping fingers a passing glance. Something about them carried him back many months, to his operating-desk at the Postal-Union. He listened again. Then he bent down over his glass, for he was mixing the silver fizz first.
It was the telegrapher’s double “i” that he had heard repeated and repeated by those carelessly tapping fingers, and then a further phrase that he knew meant “attention!”
Yet he worked away, impassive, unmoved, while with his slender little sugar-spoon he signalled back his answer, on the rim of his mixing-glass.
“Get a move on, boss,” said O’Reilly, impatiently.
“Sure,” said the waiter, abstractedly, quite unruffled, for his ear was a little out of practice, and he wanted to make sure just what those finger-nails tapping on the mahogany meant.
And this is what he read:
“Five—hundred—dollars—spot—cash—for—a—knock—out—to—each—of— these—two!”
“Too—expensive!” answered the sugar-spoon on the tumbler, as it stirred the mixture. “I—would—have—to—migrate.”
“Then—make—it—a—thousand,” answered the mahogany. “I’m pinched.”
“Done,” said the spoon, as the silver fizz was put down on the bar. Then came the gin rickey and the highball.
“They’ll—get—it—strong!” drummed the idle bartender on a faucet of his soda-fountain.
A moment later the three glasses that stood before Durkin and his guardians were taken up in three waiting hands.
“Well, here’s to you,” cried the prisoner, as he gulped down his drink—for that melodramatic little silence had weighed on his nerves a bit. Then he wiped his mouth, slowly and thoughtfully, and waited.
“But here’s a table in the corner,” he said at last, meaningly. “Suppose I count out that race money that’s coming to you two?”
O’Reilly nodded, the other said “Sure!” and the three men moved over to the table, and sat down.
Durkin had never seen chloral hydrate take effect, and Eddie Crawford realized that his friend was foolishly preparing to kill time.
“Here, boss, don’t you go to sleep in here,” called out Eddie, for already the Central Office man was showing signs of bodily distress.
Even the gaunt and threadbare-looking curb-broker was gazing with wondering eyes at the two lolling figures. Then, having satisfied both his hunger and his curiosity, the frugal luncher hurried away.
The hand of steel dropped from Durkin’s coat-sleeve.
“I’m—I’m queer!” murmured O’Reilly, brokenly, as he sagged back in his chair.
Durkin was watching the whitening faces, the quivering eyelids, the slowly stiffening limbs.
“My God, Eddie, you haven’t killed them?” he cried, as he turned to hand over his fee.
Eddie laughed unconcernedly.
“They’ll be dead enough, till we get out of this, anyway!” he said, already taking off his apron and drawing down a window-curtain in front of the table in the corner.
“What’s that for?” demanded Durkin, nervously, as the bartender dodged round to the telephone booth.
“Why, I’ve got to ’phone over t’ the boss t’ get back here and ’tend t’ his business. You don’t supposeIcan afford t’ stay in this town now, with a sucker like O’Reilly after me!”
“But what can they do?” demanded Durkin, as he looked down at the collapsed figures. “Even when they come back?”
“Oh, they daren’t do much bleating, and go and peach right out, seeing they were in after graft and we could show ’em up for neglect o’ duty, all right, all right! But they’d just hound me, on the side, and keep after me, and make life kind o’ miserable. Besides that, I always wanted to see St. Louis, anyway!”
The swing doors opened as he spoke, and Custom House Charley himself hurried in.
“I’ve got to climb out for a few minutes, Chink, with a friend o’ mine here,” said his assistant, as he pulled on his coat.
He turned back at the swing door.
“You’d better put those two jags out before they get messin’ things up,” he suggested easily, as he held the door for Durkin.
A moment later the two men were out in the street, swallowed up in the afternoon crowds swarming to ferries and Elevated stations, as free as the stenographers and clerks at their elbows.
Durkin wondered, as he hurried on with a glance at the passing faces, if they, too, had their underground trials and triumphs. He wondered if they, too, had explored some portion of that secret network of excitement and daring which ran like turgid sewers under the asphalted tranquillity of the open city.
There was neither sign nor token, in the faces of the citied throng that brushed past him, to show that any of life’s more tumultuous emotions and movements had touched their lives. It was only as he passed a newsboy with his armful of flaring headlines, and a uniformed officer, suggestive of the motley harvest of a morning police court, that once more he fully realized how life still held its tumult and romance, though it was the order of modern existence that such things should be hidden and subterranean. It was only now and then, Durkin told himself, through some sudden little explosion in the press, or through the steaming manhole of the city magistrate’s court, that these turgid and often undreamed of sewers showed themselves. . . . After all, he maintained to himself, life had not so greatly altered.