a











PHANTOM WIRES








-- - - -
arº r + ºn w ----
“She turned with a start, though her loss of self-possession lasted
but a moment.” Frontispiece. See p. 99.


*HANTOM \, ,
A Novel
B Y
ARTHUR S ; RINC, R
.* ºthor of “The Wire Ta; ; ;s,” Tº loºm ºf iºs' y' is
ILLY STP...? - ?) ºr
ARTHUR WILLIAM 1 ER. WN
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND CCMPANY
1907


PHANTOM WIRES
-
A Novel
BY
ARTHUR STRINGER
Author of “The Wire Tappers,” “The Loom of Destiny,” etc.
ILLUSTRATED BY
ARTHUR WILLIAM BROWN
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1907


- - 2–o
All 3 sº, H++
& ºs
MAY 21 1914
Copyright, 1906,
By ARTHUR STRINGER.
Copyright, 1907,
By LITTLE, BRown, AND CoMPANY.,
All Rights Reserved.
Published, March, 1907.
3Printers
S. J. PARKhill & Co., Boston, U. S. A.


I
It's the bad that's in the best of us
Leaves the saint so like the rest of us:
It's the good in the darkest curst of us
Redeems and saves the worst of us.
II
It’s the muddle of hope and madness,
It's the tangle of good and badness,
It's the lunacy linked with sanity,
Makes up and mocks Humanity!





CHAFTER
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
VII.
VIII.
IX.
X.
XI.
XII.
XIII.
XIV.
XV.
XVI.
XVII.
XVIII.
XIX
XX.
XXI.
XXII.
XXIII.
XXIV.
XXV.
XXVI.
XXVII.
XXVIII.
XXIX.
XXX.
CONTENTS
THE END OF THE TETHER . . .
THE Azure CoAST . . . . .
THE SHADownNG PAST . . . .
THE WIDENING ROAD . . . .
THE GREAT DIVIDE . . . . .
THE Wom AN SPEAKs . . . .
OUR FRIEND THE ENEMY . . .
“ForeignERs ARE Fools” . .
THE LARK IN THE RUINs . . .
THE TIGHTENING Coil .
THE INToxication of WAR . .
THE Doorway of SURPRISE . .
“THE Folly of GRANDEUR " . .
Awaken ING VoICEs . . . . .
WIRELEss Messages .
BROKEN INSULATION . . . .
THE TANGLED SKEIN . . . .
THE SEVERED KNot . . . . .
THE ULTIMATE OUTcast . . .
THE SPIDER AND THE FLY. . .
THE PIT of DESPAIR . . . .
THE ENTERING WEDGE . . . .
THE WAKING CIRCUIT . . . .
THE GHosts of THought . . .
THE RULING PAssion . . . .
THE CRowN of IRON . . . .
THE STRAIts of CHANCE . . .
THE HUMAN ELEMENT . .
THE LAST DITCH - - -
ONE YEAR LATER—AN EPILOGUE
d
ge
:
44
44
44
&
…
44
4.
44
44
º
44
44
II5
I23
I37
I52
160
178
I9I
20I
2Io
219
223
230
249
256
262
274
287





LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
“SHE TURNED witH A starT, THOUGH
HER LOSS OF SELF-POSSESSION
LASTED BUT A MOMENT." . . . . Frontispiece
“FRANCES DURKIN KNEW IT was
PoBLOFF" . . . . . . . . . Page 78
“‘THEN why ARE YOU UNKIND TO ME?’
SHE ASKED, MORE CALMLY Now” . “ 165
“‘STOP THAT 1' cried DURKIN, SHARPly,
As HE SAw THE MovemENT" . . “ 275





PHANTOM WIRES
CHAPTER I
THE END OF THE TETHER
Durkin folded the printed pages of the news-
paper with no outward sign of excitement. Then
he took out his money, quietly, and counted it, with
meditative and pursed-up lips. t
His eyes fell on a paltry handful of silver, with
the dulled gold of one worn napoleon showing from
its midst. He remembered, suddenly, that it was
the third time he had counted that ever-lightening
handful since partaking of his frugal coffee and
rolls that morning. So he dropped the coins back
into his pocket, dolefully, one by one, and took the
deep breath of a man schooling himself to face the
unfaceable.
Then he looked about the room, almost vacu-
ously, as though the old-fashioned wooden bed
and the faded curtains and the blank walls might
hold some oracular answer to the riddle that lay
before him. Then he went to the open window,
and looked out, almost as vacuously, over the un-
broken blue distance of the Mediterranean, tremb-
I I


PHANTOM WIRES
ling into soft ribbons of silver where the wind
rippled its surface, yellowing into a fluid gold to-
wards the path of the lowering sun, deepening,
again, into a brooding turquoise along the flat
rim of the sea to the southward where the twin
tranquilities of sky and water met.
It was the same unaltering Mediterranean, the
same expanse of eternal sapphire that he had
watched from the same Riviera window, day in and
day out, with the same vague but unceasing terror
of life and the same forlorn sense of helplessness be-
fore currents of destiny that week by week seemed
to grow too strong for him. He turned away
from the soft, exotic loveliness of the sea and sky
before him, with a little gesture of impatience.
The movement was strangely like that of a fever-
ish invalid turning from the ache of an opened
shutter.
Durkin took up the newspaper once more, and
unfolded it with listlessly febrile fingers. It was
the Paris edition of “The Herald,” four days old.
Still again, and quite mechanically now, he read
the familiar advertisement. It was the same mes-
sage, word for word, that had first caught his eye
as he had sipped his coffee in the little palm-grown
garden of the Hotel Bristol, in Gibraltar, nearly
three weeks before. “Presence of James L. Dur-
kin, electrical expert, essential at office of Stephens
& Streeter, patent solicitors, etc., Empire Build-
2


THE END OF THE TETHER
ing, New York City, before contracts can be cul-
minated. Urgent.”
Only, at the first reading of those pregnant
words, all the even and hopeless monotony, all the
dull and barren plane of life had suddenly erupted
into one towering and consuming passion for ac-
tivity, for return to his old world with its gentle
anaesthesia of ever-widening plans and its obliter-
ating and absolving years of honest labor.
He would never forget that moment, no matter
into what ways or moods life might lead him. The
rhythmic pound and beat of a company of British
infantry, swarthy and strange-looking in their
neutral-tinted khaki, marched briskly by on the
hard stone road, momentarily filling the garden
quietnesses with a tumult of noise. A bugle had
sounded from one of the fortified galleries high
above him, had sounded clearly out across the hud-
dled little town at the foot of the Rock, challeng-
ing, uncompromising, thrillingly penetrating, as the
paper had fluttered and shaken in his fingers. He
had accepted it, in that first moment of unreasoning
emotionalism, as an auspicious omen, as the call of
his own higher life across the engulfing abysses of
the past. He had forgotten, for the time being,
just where and what he was.
But that grim truth had been forced on him, bit-
terly, bafflingly, after he had climbed the narrow,
streets of that town which always seemed to him
3


PHANTOM WIRES
honest sunlight, and yet his feet were to remain
fettered in that underworld gloom he had grown to
hate. He must still stay an unwilling prisoner
in this garden of studied indolence, this playground
of invalids and gamblers; he must still dawdle idly
about these glittering, stagnating squares, fringing
a crowd of meaningless foreigners, skulking half-
fed and poorly housed about this opulent show-
place of the world that set its appeasing theatricali-
ties into motion only at the touch of ready gold.
Durkin remembered, at that moment, that he
was woefully hungry. He also remembered, more
gratefully, that the young Chicagoan, the lonely
and loquacious youth he had met the day before in
the café of the “Terrasse,” had asked him to take
dinner with him, to view the splendor of “Ciro’s ”
and a keeper of the vestiaire in scarlet breeches and
silk stockings. Afterwards they were to go to
the little bon-bon play-house up by the more pre-
tentious bon-bon Casino. . He was to watch the
antics of a band of actors toying with some mimic
fate, flippantly, to the sound of music, when his own
destiny swung trembling on the last silken thread
of tortured suspense! Yet it was better than mop-
ing alone, he told himself. He hated loneliness.
And until the last few weeks he had scarcely known
the meaning of the word ' There had always been
that other hand for which to reach, that other shoul-
der on which to lean' And suddenly, at the sting
6


CHAPTER II
THE AZURE COAST
As Durkin and the young Chicagoan once more
stepped out of the brilliantly lighted theatre, into
the balmy night air, a seductive mingling of per-
fumes and music and murmuring voices blew in
their hot faces, like a cooling wave. Durkin was
wondering, a little wearily, just when he could be
alone again.
A group of gay and laughing women, with their
aphrodisiac rustle of silk and flutter of lace, floated
carelessly past.
“Who are they?” asked the youth.
Durkin half-envied him his illusions and his in-
genuousness of outlook; he was treading a veri-
table amphitheatre of orderly disordered passions
with the gentle objective stare of a child looking
for bright-colored flowers on a battleground. Dur-
kin wondered if, after all, it was not the result of
his mere quest of color, of his studying art in
Paris for a year or two.
“I wonder who and what they are?” imperson-
ally reiterated the younger man, as his gaze still
followed the passing group to where it drifted and
8


THE AZURE COAST
scattered through the lamp-strewn garden, like a
cluster of golden butterflies.
“Those are the slaves who sand the arena!” re-
torted Durkin, studying the softly waving palms,
and leaving the other a little in doubt as to the
meaning of his figure.
The younger man sighed; he was beginning to
feel, doubtless, from what different standpoints they
oked out on life.
“Oh, well, you can say what you like, but this
is the centre of the world, to my way of thinking!”
“The centre of — putrescence!” ejaculated Dur-
kin. The younger man began to laugh, with con-
ciliatory good-nature, as he glanced appreciatively
back at the sweetmeat stateliness of the Casino
front. But into the older man's mind crept the
impression that they were merely passing, in going
from crowded theatre to open garden and street,
from one playhouse to another. It all seemed to
him, indeed, nothing more than a transition of
theatricalities. For that outer play-world which
lay along Monaco's three short miles of marble
stairway and villa and hillside garden appeared to
him, in his mood of settled dejection, as artificial
and unnatural and unrelated as the life which he
had just seen pictured across the footlights of the
over-pretty and meringue-like little theatre.
“Well, Monte Carlo's good enough for me, all
right, all right!” persisted the young Chicagoan,
9


PHANTOM WIRES
as they made their way down the lamp-hung Prome-
nade. And he laughed with a sort of luxurious
contentment, holding out his cigarette-case as he
did so.
The older man, catching a light from the prof-
fered match, said nothing in reply. Something in
the other's betrayingly boyish laugh grated on his
nerves, though he paused, punctiliously, beside his
chance-found companion, while together they gazed
down at the twinkling lights of the bay, where the
soft and violet Mediterranean lay under a soft and
violet sky, and the boatlamps were languidly sway-
ing dots of white and red, and the Promontory
stood outlined in electric globes, like a woman's
breast threaded with pearls, the young art-student
expressed it, and the perennial, ever-cloying per-
fumes floated up from square and thicket and
garden.
There was an eternal menace about it, Durkin
concluded. There was something subversive and
undermining and unnerving in its very atmosphere.
It gave him the impression of being always under
glass. It made him ache for the sting and bite of
a New England north-easter. It screened and
shut off the actualities and perpetuities of life as
completely as the drop and wings of a playhouse
might. Its sense of casual and careless calm, too,
seemed to him only the rest of a spinning top. Its
unrelated continuities of appeal, its incessant co-
IO


THE AZURE COAST
quetries of attire, its panoramic beauty of mountain
and cape and sea-front, its parade of corporeal and
egotistic pleasures, its primordial and undisguised
appeal to the carnival spirit, its frank, exotic fes-
tivity, its volatile and almost too vital atmosphere,
and, above all, its glowing and over-odorous gar-
dens and flowerbeds, its overcrowded and grimly
Dionysian Promenade, its murmurous and alluring
restaurants on steep little boulevards — it was all
a blind, Durkin argued with himself, to drape and
smother the cynical misery of the place. Under-
neath all its flaunting and waving softnesses life ran
grim and hard — as grim and hard as the solid
rock that lay so close beneath its jonquils and violets
and its masking verdure of mimosa and orange
and palm.
He hated it, he told himself in his tragic and
newborn austerity of spirit, as any right-minded
and clean-living man should hate paper roses or
painted faces. Every foot of it, that night, seemed
a muffled and mediate insult to intelligence. The
too open and illicit invitation of its confectionery-
like halls, the insipidly emphatic pretentiousness of
the Casino itself — Durkin could never quite de-
cide whether it reminded him of a hurriedly finished
exposition building or of a child's birthday cake duly
iced and bedecked — the tinsel glory, the hackneyed
magnificence, of its legitimatized and ever-orderly
gaming dens, the eternal claws of greed beneath
II


PHANTOM WIRES
doughty and indignant Englishwomen; bejeweled
beys and pashas brushing elbows with unperturbed
New England school-teachers astray from Cook's;
monocled thieves and gamblers and princelings,
jaded tourists and skulking parasites — and always
the disillusioned and waiting women.
“That play got on your nerves, didn't it?” Sud-
denly asked the lazy, half-careless voice at his side.
Durkin and the young Chicagoan were in the
musky-smelling Promenade by this time, and up
past the stands at the sea-front the breath of the
Mediterranean blew in their faces, fresh, salty,
virile.
“This whole place gets on my nerves!” said
Durkin testily. Yes, he told himself, he was sick
of it, sick of the monotony, of the idleness, of the
sullen malevolence of it all. It was gay only to
the eyes; and to him it would never seem gay again.
“Oh, that comes of not speaking the language,
you know !” maintained the other stoutly, and,
at the same time, comprehensively.
He was still very young, Durkin remembered.
He had toyed with art for two winters in Paris,
so scene by scene he had been able to translate the
little drama that had appeared so farcical and
Frenchy to his older countryman in exile.
Durkin's lip curled a little.
“No — it comes of knowing life!” he answered,
with a touch of impatience. He felt the gulf that
*
I4


PHANTOM WIRES
“If it doesn't hit too hard l’’ qualified the older
111211.
“For instance,” maintained the young Chicago-
an, once more proffering his cigarette-case to Dur-
kin, “for instance, take that big Mercedes touring-
car with the canopy top, coming down through the
crowd there. You'll agree, at first sight, that such
things mean good-bye to the mounted knight, to
chivalry, and all that romantic old horseman busi-
ness.”
“I suppose so.”
“But, don't you see, the horse and armor was
only a frame, an accidental setting, for the ro-
mance itself! It's up to date and practical and
Sordid and commonplace, you'd say, that puffing
thing with a gasoline engine hidden away in its
bowels. It's what we call machinery. But, sup-
posing, now, instead of holding Monsieur le Duc
Somebody, or Milord So-and-So, or Signor Comte
Somebody-Else, with his wife or his mistress — I
say, supposing it held — well, my young sister
Alice, whom I left so sedately contented at
Brighton' Supposing it held my young sister, run-
ning away with an Indian rajah!”
“And you would call that romance?”
“Exactly!” -
Durkin turned and looked at the approaching
Car.
“While, as a matter of fact,” he continued, with
y
I6


THE AZURE COAST
his exasperatingly smooth smile, “it seems to be
holding a very much overdressed young lady, pre-
sumably from the Folies-Bergère or the Olympia.”
The younger man, looking back from his place be-
side him, turned to listen, confronted by the sudden
excited comments of a middle-aged woman, ob-
viously Parisian, on the arm of a lean and solemn
man with dyed and waxed mustachios.
“You’re quite wrong,” cried the young Chicago-
an, excitedly. “It’s young Lady Boxspur — the
new English beauty. See, they're crowding out to
get a glimpse of her!”
“Who’s Lady Boxspur?” asked Durkin, hang-
ing stolidly back. He had seen quite enough of
Riviera beauty on parade.
“She's simply ripping. I got a glimpse of her
this afternoon in front of the Terrasse, after she'd
first motored over from Nice with old Szapary!”
He lowered his voice, more confidentially. “This
Frenchman here has just been telling his wife that
she's the loveliest woman on the Riviera today.
Come on!”
Durkin stood indifferently, under the white glare
of the electric lamp, watching the younger man
push through to the centre of the roadway. The
slowly-moving touring-car, hemmed in by the
languid midnight movement of the street, came to
a full stop almost before where he stood. It shud-
dered and panted there, leviathan-like, and Durkin
2 17


PHANTOM WIRES
saw the sea breeze sway back the canopy drapery.
He followed the direction of the excited young
Chicagoan's gaze, smilingly, now, and with a
singularly disengaged mind.
He saw the woman's clear profile outlined against
the floating purple curtain, the quiet and shadowy
eyes of violet, the glint of the chestnut hair that
showed through the back-thrust folds of the white
silk automobile veil swathing the small head, and
the nervous, bird-like movement of the head it-
self.
He did not move; there was no involuntary,
galvanic reaction; no sudden gasp and flame of
wonder. He simply held his cigarette still poised
in his fingers, half-way to his lips, with the minutest
relaxing of the smile that still hovered about them,
while a dull and ashen grayness crept into his face,
second by waiting second.
It was not until his eyes met hers that he took
three wavering and undecided steps toward her.
With a silent movement — more of warning
than of fright, he afterward told himself — she
pressed her gloved fingers to her lips. What her
intent eyes meant to say to him, in that wordless,
telepathic message, Durkin could not guess; all
thought was beyond him. But in a moment or two
the roadway cleared, the car shook and plunged
forward, the floating curtains fluttered and trailed
behind.
18


THE AZURE COAST
Durkin turned blindly, and pushed and ran and
dodged through the languidly amazed promenaders,
following after that sudden and bewildering vision,
as after his last hope in life. But the fine, white,
limestone Riviera dust from the fading car's tire-
heels, and the burnt gases from its engines, were
all the road held for him, as it undulated off into
hillside quietnesses.
He heard the young Chicagoan calling after him,
breathless and anxious. But he ran on until he
came to a side street, shadowed with garden walls
and villas and greenery. Slipping into this, he im-
mured himself in the midnight silences, to be alone
with the contending forces that tore at him.
If his companion was right, and such things as
this made up Romance, then, after all, the drama
of life had lost none of its bewilderment. For the
woman he had seen between the floating purple
curtains was his own wife.
I9


CHAPTER III
THE SHADOWING PAST
Durkin's first tangible feeling was a passion to
lose and submerge himself in the muffling midnight
silences, the silences of those outwardly quiet
gardens at heart so old in sin and pain.
He felt the necessity for some sudden and sweep-
ing readjustment, and his cry for solitude was like
that of the child wounded in spirit, or that of the
wild animal sorely hurt in body. Before he could
face life again, he felt, he had to build up about him
the sustaining fabric of some new and factitious
faith.
But as intelligence slowly emerged from the
mist and chaos of utter bewilderment, as reason
crept haltingly back to her seat, his first blind and
indeterminate rage fell away from him. His first
black and blinding clouds of suspicion slowly sub-
sided before practical and orderly question and
cross-question. Thought adjusted itself to its new
environment. Painfully, yet cautiously, he directed
his ceaseless artillery of interrogation toward the
outer and darker walls of uncertainty still so
blankly confronting him.
2O


THE SHADOWING PAST
It was not that he had been consumed by any
direct sense of loss, of deprivation. It was not that
he had feared open and immediate treachery. If a
rage had burned through him, at the sudden and
startling sight of his own wife thus secretly mas-
querading in an unknown rôle, it was far from be-
ing a rage or mere jealousy and distrust.
They had, in other days, each passed through
questionable and perilous experiences. Both to-
gether and alone they had adventured unwillingly
along many of the more dubious channels of life.
They had surrendered to temptation; they had
sown and reaped and suffered, and become weary
of it. They had struggled slowly yet stoically up
towards respectability; they had fought for fair-
dealing; they had entered a compact to stand by
each other through that long and bitter effort to be
tardily honest and autumnally aboveboard.
What now so disturbed and disheartened him
was the sudden sense of something impending, the
vague apprehension of some momentous and far-
reaching intrigue which he could not even fore-
shadow. And it was framing itself into being at a
time when he had most prayed for their untram-
melled freedom, when he had most looked for their
ultimate emancipation from the claws of that too
usurious past.
But, above all, what had brought about the sud-
den change? Why had no inkling of it crept to his
2I


PHANTOM WIRES
ears? Why was she, the passionate pleader for
the decencies of life whom he had last watched so
patiently and heroically imparting the mastery of
the pianoforte to seven little English children in a
squalid Paris pension, now lapsing back into the
old and fiercely abjured avenue of irresponsibility?
Why had she weakened and surrendered, when he
himself, the oldtime weakling of the two, had clung
so desperately to the narrow path of rectitude?
And what was the meaning and the direction of it
all? And what would it lead to? But why, above
all, had she kept silent, and given him no warning?
Durkin looked up and listened to the soft rustling
of the palm branches. The bray of a distant band
saddened him with an unfathomable sense of home-
sickness. Through an air that seemed heavy with
languid tropicality, and the waiting richness of life,
he caught the belated glimmer of lights and the
throb and murmur of string music. It carried in to
him what seemed the essential and alluring note of
all the existence he had once known and lived. Yet
day by day he had fought back that sirenic call.
It had not always been an open victory — the
weight of all the past lay too heavily upon him for
that — but for her sake he had at least vacillated
and hesitated and temporized, waiting and looking
for that final strength which would come with her
first wistful note of warning, or with her belated re-
turn to his side.
22


THE SHADOWING PAST
Yet here was Opportunity lying close and thick
about him; here Chance had laid the board for its
most tempting game. In that way, as the young
Chicagoan had said, they stood in the centre of the
world. But he had turned away from those cluster-
ing temptations, he had left unbroken his veneer
of honorable life, for her sake — while she her-
self had surrendered, unmistakably, irrevocably,
whatever strange form the surrender might even
at that moment be taking.
All he could do, now, was to wait until morning.
There would surely be some message, some hint,
some key to the mystery. While everything re-
mained so maddeningly enigmatic, he raked through
the tangled past in search of some casual seed of
explanation for that still undeciphered present.
He recalled, period by period, and scene by scene,
his kaleidoscopic past career, his first fatal blunder
as a Grand Trunk telegraph operator, when one slip
of the wrist brought a gravel train head-on into an
Odd Fellows' Excursion special, his summary dis-
missal from the railroad, and his unhappy flight to
New York, his passionate struggle to work his way
up once more, his hunger for money and even a
few weeks of leisure, that his long dreamed of
photo-telegraphy apparatus might be perfected and
duly patented, his consequent fall from grace in the
Postal-Union offices, through holding up a trivial
racing-return or two until he and his outside con-
23


PHANTOM WIRES
federate had been able to make their illicit wagers,
then his official ostracism, and his wandering street-
cat life, when, at last, the humbling and compelling
pinch of poverty had turned him to “overhead
guerrilla " work and the dangers and vicissitudes
of a poolroom key-operator. He recalled his
chance meeting with MacNutt, the wire-tapper, and
their partnership of privateer forces in that strange
campaign against Penfield, the alert and opulent
poolroom king, who had seemed always able to
defy the efforts and offices of a combative and
equally alert district-attorney.
Most vividly and minutely of all, he reviewed his
first meeting with Frances Candler, and the be-
wilderment that had filled him when he discovered
her to be an intimate and yet a reluctant associate
with MacNutt in his work — a bewilderment which
lasted until he himself grew to realize how easy
was the downward trend when once the first false
step had been made.
He brought back to mind their strange adventures
and perils and escapes together, day by day and
week by week, their early interest that had ripened
into affection, their innate hatred of that under-
ground life, which eventually flowered into open re-
volt and flight, their impetuous marriage, their pre-
cipitate journey from the shores of America.
Then came to him what seemed the bitterest
memories of all. It was the thought of that first
24


THE SHADOWING PAST
too fragile happiness which slowly but implacably
merged into discontent, still hidden and tacit, but
none the less evident. That interregnum of peace
had been a Tantalus-like taste of a draught which
he all along knew was to be denied him. Yet,
point by point, he recalled their first quiet and hope-
ful weeks in England, when their old ways of life
seemed as far away as the America they had left
behind, when they still had unbounded faith in them-
selves and in the future. Just how or where fell
the first corroding touch he could never tell. But
in each of them there had grown up a secret un-
rest — it was, he knew, the hounds of habit
whimpering from their kennels. “No one was ever
reformed,” he had once confided to Frances, “by
simply being turned out to grass!” So it was then
that they had tried to drug their first rising doubts
with the tumult of incessant travel and change. His
wife had lured him to secluded places, she had
struggled to interest him in a language or two, she
had planned quixotic courses of reading — as
though a man such as he might be remolded by a
few months of modern authors! — and carried him
off to centres of gaiety — as though the beat of
Hungarian bands and outlandish dances could
drive that inmost fever out of his blood!
He endured Aix-les-Bains and its rheumatics,
with their bridge-whist and late dinners and in-
congruous dissipations, for a fortnight. Then they
25


PHANTOM WIRES
fled to the huddled little hotels and pensions of the
narrow and dark wooded valley of Karlsbad, under
skies which Frank declared to be bluer than the
blue of forget-me-nots, where, amid Brahmins
from India and royalty from Austria and audacious
young duchesses from Paris and students from
Petersburg and Berlin, and undecipherable strangers
from all the remotest corners of the globe, it seemed
to Durkin they were at last alone. He confided
this feeling to his wife, one tranquil morning after
they had drunk their Sprudel from long-handled
cups, at the spring where the comely, rubber-gar-
mented native girls caught and doled out the biting
hot spray of the geyser. They were seated at the
remoter end of the glass-covered Promenade, and a
band was playing. Something in the music, for
once, had saddened and dispirited Frank.
“Alone?” she had retorted. “Who is ever
alone?”
“Well, our wires are down, for a little while,
anyway!” laughed Durkin, as he sipped the hot
salt water from the china cup. It reminded him,
he had said, of all his past sins in epitome. Frank
sighed wearily, and did not speak for a minute or
tWO.
“But, after all,” she said at last, in a meditative
calmness of voice, “there are always some sort of
ghostly wires connecting us with one another, hold-
ing us in touch with what we have been and done,
26


PHANTOM WIRES
on the outskirts of Fez by Moorish fanatics who
had believed it to be the invention of the Evil One.
It was at Gibraltar, too, that his first mocking
hopes for some renewal of life had come to him,
along with the vague hint that his transmitting
camera had at last been recognized, and perhaps
even marketed. But escape from that little sea-
port had been as difficult as escape from gaol. He
had finally effected a hazardous and ever-memora-
ble migration from Algeciras to Cimiez, but only
by acting as chauffeur for a help-abandoned, gout-
ridden, and irritable-minded ex-ambassador to Per-
sia, together with a scrupulously inattentive trained
nurse, who, apparently, preferred diamonds to a
uniform, and smuggled incredible quantities of
hand-made lace under the tonneau seat-cushions.
And then he had found himself at Monte Carlo, still
waiting for word from Paris, fighting against a
grim new temptation which, vampire-like, had
grown stronger and stronger as its victim daily had
grown weaker and weaker.
For along the sea-front, one indolent and golden
afternoon, he had learned that an American yacht
in the harbor was sending ashore for a practical
electrician, since a defective generator had left its
cabins of glimmering white and gold in sudden
darkness. Durkin, after a brief talk with the sec-
ond officer, had been taken aboard the tender and
hurried out to where the lightless steamer rocked
30


THE WIDENING ROAD
f
and swung at her anchor chain in the intense tur-
quoise bay. He had hoped, at first, that he was
approaching his ship of deliverance, that luck was
favoring the luckless and at last the means of his
escape were at hand. So he asked, with outward
unconcern, just what the yacht's course was. They
were bound for Messina, the second officer had re-
plied, and from there they went on to Corfu for a
couple of weeks, and then on to Ragusa.
He went on board and looked over the armature
core. It was of the slotted drum type, he at once
perceived, built up of laminations of soft steel
painted to break up eddy currents, and as he tested
the soft amber mica insulation about the commu-
tators of hard-rolled copper, he knew that the de-
fective generator could be repaired in three-quarters
of an hour. But certain scraps of talk that came
to his ears amid the clink of glasses, from one of
the shadowy saloons, had stung into vague activity
his old, irrepressible hunger for the companionship
of his own kind, his own race.
It was uncommonly pleasant, he had told him-
self as he had caught the first drone of the lowered,
confidential voices, to hear the old home talk, and
even broken snatches of old home interests. As he
explored the ship and minutely examined automatic
circuit-breaker and switchboard and fuse, he even
made it a point to see that his explorations took him
into the pantry-like cabin next to the saloon from
3I


PHANTOM WIRES
which these droning voices drifted. As he gave
apparently studious and unbroken attention to a
stretch of defective wiring, he was in fact making
casual mental note of the familiar tones of the dis-
tant voices, listening impersonally and dreamily to
each question and answer and suggestion that
passed between that quietly talking group. One of
the talkers, he soon found, was a Supreme Court
judge on his vacation, equable and deliberative in
his occasional query or view or criticism; another
was apparently a secret agent from the office of the
New York district-attorney, still another two were
either Scotland Yard men or members of some con-
tinental detective bureau — this Durkin assumed
from their broad-voweled English voices and their
seemingly intimate knowledge of European criminal
procedure. The fifth man he could in no way place.
But it was this man who interrupted the others,
and, apparently taking a slip of paper from some
inside pocket or some well-closed wallet, read aloud
a list which, he first explained, had been secured
from some undesignated safe on the night of a cer-
tain raid.
“Three hundred and twenty shares of National
Bank of Commerce,” read the voice methodically,
the reader checking off each item, obviously, as he
went along. “One certificate of forty-seven shares
of United States Steel Preferred; two certificates
of one hundred shares each of Erie Railroad First
32


THE WIDENING ROAD
Preferred; eighteen personal cheques, with names
and amounts and banks attached; seven I. O. U.’s,
with amounts and dates and initials.”
“Probably worthless, from our point of view!”
interposed a voice.
The dreaminess suddenly went out of Durkin's
eyes, as he listened.
“Postal-Union Telegraph bonds, valued at $102,-
345,” went on the reading voice, and again the in-
terrupting critic remarked: “Which, you see, we
may regard as very significant, since it both ob-
viously and inferably demonstrates that the tele-
graph company and the poolrooms are compelled
to stand together!”
Durkin followed the list, with inclined head and
uplifted hands, forgetting even his simulation of
work, until the end was reached.
“In all, you see, one quarter of a million dollars
in negotiable securities, if we are to rely on this
memorandum, which, as I stated before, ought to be
authentic, for it was taken from the Penfield safe
the night of the first raid.”
Durkin started, as though the circuit with which
his fingers absently toyed had suddenly become a
live wire. -
“Penfield !” The word sent a little thrill
through his body. Penfield — the very name was
a challenging trumpet to him. But again he bent
and listened to the drone of the nearby voices.
3 33


PHANTOM WIRES
“And Keenan, you say, is in Genoa’ ” asked one
of the Englishmen. -
“If he's not there now he will be during the
week,” answered the American.
“You’re sure of that?”
“All I know is that our Milan man secured
duplicates of his cables. Three of them were in
cipher, but he was able to make reasonably sure
of the Genoa trip!”
“It would be rather hard to get at him, there!”
“But if he strikes north, as you say, and goes
first to Liverpool, and gets home by the back door,
as it were, by taking a steamer to Quebec or Mon-
treal 52
“That's a mere blind!”
“But why say that?”
“Because he's too wise to strike British territory,
before he unloads. It's not a mere matter of stop-
ping the transfer of this stock, or whether or not all
of it is negotiable. What we want is tangible and
incriminating evidence. The signatures of those
cheques are 35
That was the last word that came to Durkin's
ears, for at that moment a steward, with a tray of
glasses, hurried into the pantry. His suspicious
eye saw nothing beyond a busy electrician re-
placing a switchboard. But before the intruding
steward had departed the second officer was
at Durkin's elbow, overlooking his labors, and
34


THE WIDENING ROAD
no further word or hint came to the ears of the
listener.
But he had heard enough. The flame had been
applied to the dry acreage of his too arid and idle
existence. He had remained passive too long. It
was change that brought chance. And even though
that change meant descent, it would, after all, be
only the momentary dip that preceded the upward
flight again. And as he gazed thoughtfully land-
ward, where Monte Carlo lay vivid and glowing
under the sheltering Alpes-Maritimes, like a golden
lizard sunning itself on a shelf of gray rock, he felt
within him a more kindly and comprehensive feel-
ing for that flower-strewn arena of vast hazards.
It was, after all, the great chances of life that made
existence endurable. Its only anodyne lay in effort
and feverish struggle. And his chance for work
had come!
Half an hour later he was rowed ashore, with a
good Havana cigar between his teeth and three good
English sovereigns in his pocket. As he made his
way up to his hotel he could feel some inner part
of him still struggling and shrinking back from
the enticing avenue of activity which his new
knowledge was opening up before him.
He smiled, now, a little grimly, as he sat under
the rustling palms and thought of those old, un-
necessary scruples. He had been holding himself
to a compact which no longer existed. And, all
35


PHANTOM WIRES
along, he had been regarding himself as the weak-
ling, the vacillator, when it was he who had held
out the longest! He had even, in those earlier hesi-
tating moments, consolingly recalled to his mind
how Monsieur Blanc's modestly denominated
Société Anonyme des Bains de Mer et Cercle des
Btrangers made it a point to proffer a railway ticket
to any impending wreck, such as himself, who might
drift like a stain across its roads of merriment, or
leave a telltale blot upon one of its perennially
beautiful and ever-odorous flower-beds. But now,
as he reviewed those past weeks of hesitation and
inward struggle, a sense of relapse crept over him.
As he recalled the picture of the clear-cut profile
between the floating purple curtains, a vague in-
difference as to the final outcome of things took
possession of him.
He almost exulted in the meaning of the strange
meeting, which, one hour before, had seemed to
bring the universe crashing down about his head.
Then, as his plans and thoughts took more definite
shape, his earlier recklessness merged into an al-
most pleasurable sense of relief and release, of free-
dom after confinement. He felt incongruously
grateful for the lash that had awakened him to
even illicit activity; life, under the passion for ac-
complishment, under the zest for risk and responsi-
bility, seemed to take on its older and deeper mean-
ing once more. It was, he told himself, as if the
36


THE WIDENING ROAD
foreign tongue which he had so wearily heard on
every side of him, for so long, had suddenly trans-
lated itself into intelligibility, or as if the text be-
neath the pictures in those ubiquitous illustrated
papers from Paris, which he had studied so blankly
and so blindly, had suddenly become as plain as
his own English to him.
But his moment of exaltation, his mood of care-
less emancipation, was a brief one. He was no
longer alone in life. His bitterness of heart had
blinded him to obligations. He had not yet
fathomed the mystery of Frank's appearance. He
had not yet even made sure of her relapse. Above
all, he had not put forth a hand to help her in what
might be an inexplicable extremity. The morning
could still bring some word from her. He himself
would spend the day in search of her. He would
have to proceed guardedly, but he would leave no
stone unturned. It was not, he told himself, that
he was giving fate one last chance to treat more
kindly with him. It was, rather, that all his nat-
ural being wanted and reached out for this woman
who had first taught him the meaning and purpose
of life. . . . His mind went back, suddenly, to
one afternoon, months before, at Abbazia, when
they had come up from sea-bathing in the Adriatic.
He had leaned down over her, to help her up the
Angiolina bath steps, wet and slippery with sea-
water. The mingled gold and chestnut of her thick
37


pHANTOM WIRES
hair was dank and sodden with brine, the wistful
face that she turned up to him was pinched and
colorless and blue about the lips. She seemed, of a
sudden, as she leaned heavily on his arm, a presag-
ing apparition out of the dim future, an adumbra-
tion of her own body grown frail and old, looking
up to him for help, calling forlornly to him for sol-
ace. And in that impressionable moment his heart
had gone out to her, in a burst of pity that seemed
deeper and stronger than love itself.
38


CHAPTER V
THE GREAT DIVIDE
Durkin waited until, muffled and far away, the
throb and drone of an orchestra floated up to him.
This was followed, scatteringly, by the bells of the
different tables d'hôte. They, too, sounded thin
and remote, drifting up through the soft, warm
air that had always seemed so exotic to him, so
redolent of foreign-odored flowers, so burdened with
alien-smelling tobacco smoke, of unfamiliar sea
scents incongruously shot through with even the
fumes of an unknown and indescribable cookery.
While that genial shrill and tinkle of many bells
meant refreshment and most gregarious frivolity for
the chattering, loitering, laughing and ever-spec-
tacular groups so far below him — and how he
hated their outlandish gibberish and their arrogant
European aloofness! — it meant for him hard work,
and hard work of a somewhat perilous and stimu-
lating nature.
For, as the last of the demurely noisy groups
made their way through the deepening twilight to
the different hotels and cafés that already spangled
the hillsides with scattering clusters of light, Dur-
39


THE GREAT DIVIDE
took a small cold-chisel from still another pocket,
and having cut away the putty at the base of the
semicircle, smote the face of the glass one sharp
little tap.
It cracked neatly, along the line of the circling
diamond-scratch, so that, with the help of a suction
cap made from the back of a kid glove, he was able
to draw out the loosened segment of glass. Then
he waited and listened still again. As he thrust in
through the little opening a cautiously exploring
hand the casual act seemed to take on the dignity
of a long-considered ritual. It was a ceremonial
moment to him, he felt, for it marked his transit,
across some narrow moral divide, from lonely ascent
to lonely decline.
The impression stayed with him only a second.
He turned back to his work, with a reckless little up-
thrust of each resolute shoulder. His searching
fingers found the old-fashioned window lever, of
hammered brass, and on this he pressed down and
back, quietly. A moment later the sash swung
slowly out, and he was inside the room, closing the
shutters and then the window after him.
He stood there, in the dark quietness, for what
must have been a full minute. Then he took from
his pocket a box of wax matches. He had pur-
chased them for the purpose, from the frugal old
woman who month by month and season by season
carried on her quiet trade at the foot of the Casino
4I


PHANTOM WIRES
steps, catching, as it were, the tiny drippings from
the flaring tapers in that Temple of Gold. And day
after day, one turn of the roulette wheel took and
gave more money than all her years of frugal trade
might amass!
Taking one of the vestas, he struck a light, and
holding it above his head, carefully examined the
room, from side to side. Then he tiptoed to a door,
which stood ajar. This, he saw by a second match,
was a sleeping-room; and the two rooms, obviously,
made up the suite. A door, securely locked, opened
from the sleeping-room into the outer hallway.
The door which opened from the larger room was
likewise locked, but to make assurance doubly sure
Durkin slid a second inside bolt, for already his
quick eye had caught the gleam of its polished brass,
just below the door-knob of the ordinary mortised
lock. Then, groping his way to the little switch-
board, he touched a button, and the room was
flooded with light. He first looked about, care-
fully but quickly, and then glanced at his watch.
He had at least two hours in which to do his work.
Any time after that Pobloff might return. And
by midnight at least the Prince's valet would be
back from Nice, to begin packing his master's boxes.
He slipped into the bedroom, and took from the
bed a blanket and comforter. These he draped
above the hall door, to muffle any chance sound.
Then he turned to the northeast corner of the room,
42


PHANTOM WIRES
means — and Durkin wondered if in that fact alone
lay the reason why a certain young Belgian ad-
venturess had followed him from Tangier to Al-
geciras, and from Algeciras to Gibraltar, and from
Gibraltar still on to the Riviera. She had, at any
rate, not followed a scentless quarry. He was not
the mere curled and perfumed impostor so common
to that little principality of shams. Even the gar-
rulous young Chicagoan, from whom Durkin had
secured his first Casino tickets, was able to vouch
for the fact that Pobloff was a true boyard. He
was also something or other in the imperial diplo-
matic service — just what it was Durkin could not
at the moment remember.
But he nursed his own personal convictions as
to the moral stability of this true boyard. He had
quietly witnessed, at Algeciras, the Prince's adroit
card “riffling ” in the sun-parlors of The Reina
Cristina, when the gouty ex-ambassador to Persia
had parted company with many cumbersome dol-
lars. Durkin's only course, in that time of adver-
sity and humility, had been one of silence. But
he had inwardly and adventurously resolved, if ever
Fate should bring him and the Prince together un-
der circumstances more untrammelled, he would not
let pass a chance to balance up that ledger of
princely venality. For here indeed was an adver-
sary, Durkin very well knew, who was worthy of
any man's steel.
44


THE GREAT DIVIDE
that, too, her maid — and who is ever anybody on
the Riviera without a maid?—had been reluctantly
and woefully discharged. At the Trente et Qua-
rante table, as well, Durkin had watched the last
thousand-franc note of the Princess wither away.
“And this, my dear, will mean another three months
with my sweet old palsied Duc de la Houspignolle,”
she had laughingly yet bitterly exclaimed, in excel-
lent English, to the impassive young Oxford man
who was then dogging her heels. She was a wit,
and she had a beautiful hand, even though she was
no better than the rest of Monte Carlo, ruminated
the safe-breaker easily, as he squinted, under the
flare of a match, at the ward indentations in his
wax-covered key-flange.
His thoughts went back, as he worked, to the
timely yet unexpected scene at the stair-head, two
hours before. There he had helped a slim young
femme de chambre support the Princess to her room,
that royal lady having done her best to drown her
ill fortune in absinthe and American high-balls —
which, he knew, was ever an impossible combination.
She had collapsed at the head of the stairs, and as
he had helped lift her he had first caught sight of
the solitaire diamond on the limp and slender finger.
This reactionary mood, in the face of the earlier
more tragical hours of that day of wearing anxieties,
was almost one of facetiousness. He seemed to
revel in the memory of what, in time, he knew,
47


PHANTOM WIRES
would be humiliating to him. It was a puny little
diamond ring, of but three or four carats' weight,
he mused, and yet with it had come the actual, if
not the moral, turn in the tide of all his restless
activities. It marked the moment when life seemed
to fall back to its older and darker areas; it was
the first diminutive milestone on his new road of
adventure. But he would return the ring, of that
he stoutly reassured himself, for he still nursed
his ironic sense of justice in the smaller things.
Yes, he would return the ring, he repeated, with
his ever-recurring inapposite scrupulosity, for the
young Princess was a lady of fortune under an
unlucky star, like himself.
Durkin smiled a little, over his wax-covered key,
as he still filed and fitted and listened. Then he
gave vent to an almost inaudible “Ah!” for the
bit of the key made the complete circuit, at last, and
the wards of the lock clicked back into place.
He swung open the heavy iron door, cautiously,
listened for a moment, and then struck another
match.
That Pobloff might have the bank-notes with
him was a contingency; that he would carry about
with him two thousand napoleons was an absurdity.
And Durkin knew the money had not been de-
posited — to ascertain that had been part of his
day's work. The Prince, of course, was a prodi-
gal and free-handed gentleman — how much of his
48


THE GREAT DIVIDE
winnings had already leaked through his careless
fingers it was impossible to surmise. Durkin even
resented the thought of that extravagance — as
though it were a personal and obvious injustice to
himself. If it was all the fruit of blind chance, if
it came thus unearned and accidental, why should
he not have his share of it? Already Monte Carlo
had taught him the mad necessity for money. But
now, of all times, it was necessary for him. One-
half, one-quarter, of the sum which this careless-
eyed Slavic aristocrat had carried so jauntily away
from the Trente et Quarante table would endow
him with the means to come into his own once
more. It was essential that he secure his sinews
of war, even before he could continue his search
for Frank, or rescue her from the dangers that be-
set her, if she still wished for rescue. If he re-
gretted the underground and underhand steps
through which that money could alone come into
his possession, he consoled his still protesting con-
science with the claim that it was, after all, only a
battle of wit against disinterested wit. For, self-
delusively, he was beginning once more to regard
all organized society and its ways as a mere in-
quisitorial process which the adventurous could
ignore and the keen-witted could circumvent.
Warfare, such as his, must be a law unto itself!
Then he gave all his attention to the work be-
fore him, as he lifted from the safe, first a small
4 49


THE GREAT DIVIDE
collected second thoughts, indeed, it was woefully
light. But the knot defied his efforts. He took
out a second match, and was on the point of strik-
ing it.
Instead of doing so, he stood suddenly erect, and
then backed noiselessly into the remotest corner of
the room. For a key had been thrust into the lock
of the anteroom door, and already the handle was
being slowly turned back.
Durkin's breath quickened and shortened, and
his hand swung back to his hip pocket. Then he
waited, with his revolver in his hand.
He counted and weighed his chances, quickly,
one by one, as he stood there, in the black silence.
He caught the diffused glimmer of the reflected
light from the outer room as the door opened and
closed, sharply. But the momentary half-light did
not give him a glimpse of who or what was before
him, for in a second all was blackness again. His
first uneasy thought was that it was a very artful
move. He and that Other were alone there, in
the utter darkness. Neither, now, would have the
advantage. He had been a fool to leave one of
the doors without its double lock, of some sort.
He had once been told that it was always through
the more trivial contingency that the criminal was
ultimately trapped.
He strained his ears, and listened. He could
hear nothing. Yet he was positive that he could
5.I


PHANTOM WIRES
feel some approaching presence. It may have been
a minute vibration of flooring; it may have been
through the operation of some occult sixth sense.
But he was sure of that mysterious Other, coming
closer and closer to him.
Suddenly something seemed to stir and move in
the darkness. He crouched, with every nerve and
muscle ready, and a moment later he would have
relieved the tension with some sort of cry, had he
not realized that it was the wooden Swiss clock
above the cabinet, beginning to strike the hour.
The sound came to an end, and Durkin was as-
suring himself that it could now be neither Pobloff
nor the valet, when a second sound sent a tingle of
apprehension through his frame.
It was the blue spurt of a match that suddenly
cut the blackness before him. The fool — he was
striking a light!
Durkin crouched lower, and watched the flame
as it grew on the darkness. The direct glare of it
made him blink a little, but he swung his revolver
barrel just above it, and a little to the right. He
was more confident now, and quite collected.
However it all turned out, it could not be much
worse than starving to death, unknown and alone
in some public square of Monaco.
As the tiny luminous circle flowered into wider
flame the match was held higher. Durkin could
see the rose-like glow between the phalanges of the
52


THE GREAT DIVIDE
fingers shielding the light. Then, of a sudden, a
face grew out of the blackness, a white face shad-
owed by a plumed hat. It was a woman's face.
Durkin lowered his revolver, slowly, inch by
inch.
It was his wife who stood there in the darkness,
not six paces away from him.
“You!” he gasped involuntarily, incredibly.
Sheer wonder survived his instinctive recoil. It
was the bolt, striking twice in the same spot.
The two white faces looked at each other, gaped
at each other, insanely. He could see her breath
come and go, shortly, and the deathly pallor of her
face, and the relaxed lower jaw that had fallen a lit-
tle away from the drooping upper lip. But she
neither moved nor spoke. The match burned to
her finger-ends, and fell to the floor. Darkness
enveloped them again.
“You!” he repeatedly vacuously. The black-
ness and the silence seemed to blanket and smother
him, like something tangible to the touch. He took
three steps toward where she still stood motion-
less, and in an agonized whisper cried out to her:
“My God, Frank, what is it?”
53


* CHAPTER VI
THE WOMAN SPEAKS
“Ssssh!” said the woman under her breath, as
she clutched Durkin's arm.
He shook her hand off, impatiently, although the
act seemed at cross-purposes with his own will.
“But you — here!” he still gasped.
“Oh, Jim l’” she half-moaned, inadequately.
Yet an aura of calmness seemed to surround her.
So great was his own excitement that the words
burst from him of their own will, apparently, and
sounded like the utterance of a voice not his own.
“What's it mean! How'd you get here?”
He could hear her shuddering, indrawn sigh.
“What, in the name of heaven, do you want
in here? Why don't you speak?”
There was a moment of unbroken silence. For
the first time it seemed to come home to him that
this woman who confronted him was his own wife,
in the flesh and blood.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded at
last.
He responded, even in his mood of hot antag-
54.


THE WOMAN SPEAKS
onism, to some note of ever-sustained appeal about
her. Even through the black gloom that blanketed
and blinded him some phantasmal and sub-conscious
medium, like the imaginary circuit of a multiplex
telegraph system, seemed to carry to his mind
Some secondary message, some thought that she
herself had not uttered. She, too, was suffering,
but she had not shown it, for such was her way, he
remembered. A wave of sympathy obliterated his
resentment. He caught her in his arms, hungrily,
and kissed her abandonedly. He noticed that her
skin was cold and moist.
“Oh, Jim,” she murmured again, weakly.
“It's so long, isn't it?”
Then she added, with a little catch of the breath,
as though even that momentary embrace were a
joy too costly to be countenanced, “Turn on the
lights, quick!”
“I can't,” he told her. “I’ve cut the wires.”
He felt at her blindly, through the muffling black-
ness. She was shaking a little now, on his arm.
It bewildered him to think how his hunger for her
could still obliterate all consciousness of time and
place.
“Why didn't you write?” she pleaded pitifully.
“I did write — a dozen times. Then I tele-
graphed l’”
“Not a word came!” she cried.
“Then I wrote twice to London!”
55


PHANTOM WIRES
“And those never came. Oh, everything was
against me!” she moaned.
“But how did you get here?” he still de-
manded.
She did not answer his question. Instead, she
asked him: “Where did you send the Paris let-
ters?”
“To II bis avenue Beaucourt.”
She groaned a little, impatiently.
“That was foolish — I wrote you that I was
leaving there — that I had to go!”
“Not a line reached me!”
He heard her little gasp of despair before she
spoke.
“I was put out of there,” she went on, hur-
riedly and evenly, yet with a vibrata of passion in
her crowded utterance. “There wasn't a penny
left — the pupils I had gave up their lessons.
What they had heard or found out I don't know.
Then I got a tiny room in the rue de Sèvres. I
sold my last thing, then our wedding ring, even,
to get it.”
“And then what?”
“I still waited — I thought you would know,
or find out, and that in some way or other I should
still hear from you. I would have gone to the
police, or advertised, but I knew it wouldn't be
safe.”
Once more the embittering consciousness of some
56


THE WOMAN SPEAKS
dark coalition of forces against them swept over
him. Fate, at every step, had frustrated them.
“I advertised twice, in the Herald?”
“Where would I see the Herald P”
“But you must have known I was trying to find
you — that I was doing everything possible!”
“I knew nothing,” she answered, in her poig-
nantly emotionless voice. And the thought swept
through Durkin that something within her had
withered and died during those last grim weeks
of suffering.
“But here — how did you get here — and what's
this Lady Boxspur business?” he still insisted.
“Yes, yes,” she almost moaned, “if you’ll only
wait I’ll tell you. But is it safe to stay here?
Have you thought where we are?”
“Yes; it's safe, quite safe, for an hour yet.”
“Why didn't you send me money, or help me?”
she asked, in her dead and unhappy monotone.
“I did, eighty francs, all I had. I hadn't a
penny left. I didn't know the damned language.
I prowled about like a cat in a strange garret, but
I tried everything, from the American consul at
Nice to a Herald correspondent at San Remo.
Then I got word of a consumptive young writer
from New York, at Mentone — but he died the
day I was to meet him. Then I heard of the new
Marconi station up the coast, and worked at wire-
less for two weeks, and made twenty dollars, before
57


PHANTOM WIRES
they sacked me for not being able to send a message
out to a Messina fruit-steamer, in Italian. Then I
chanced on the job of doctoring up a generator on
an American yacht down here in the bay.”
“Yes, yes — I know how hard it is!”
“But listen! When I was on board at work I
overheard a Supreme Court judge and a special
agent from the Central Office in New York and
two English detectives talking over the loss of cer-
tain securities. And those securities belong to
Richard Penfield !”
He knew that she had started, at the sound of
that name.
“Penfield!” she gasped. “What of him?”
“When the district-attorney's men raided Pen-
field's New York gambling club, one of Penfield's
new men got away with all his papers. They had
been withdrawn from the Fifth Avenue Safe De-
posit Company, for they were mostly cheques and
negotiable securities, worth about two hundred and
fifty thousand dollars. But beyond all their face
value, they constituted prima facie evidence against
the gambler.”
“But what's all this to us, now?”
“They were smuggled to New Jersey. There
the Jersey City chief of police took action, and this
agent of Penfield's carried the documents across
the North River and up to Stamford. From there
he got back to New York again, by night, where
58


THE WOMAN SPEAKS
he met a second agent, who had secured passage on
the Slavonia for Naples. The first man is Mac-
Nutt.”
“MacNutt!” ejaculated the listening woman.
“Yes, MacNutt! He compromised with Pen-
field and swung in with him when the district-at-
torney started pounding at them both. The second
man is a lawyer named Keenan, who was disbarred
for conspiracy in the Brayton divorce case. Kee-
nan and his papers are due at Genoa on Friday.
I found some of this out on board the yacht. I
thought it over — and it was the only way open
for me. I couldn't stand out against it all, any
longer. I thought I could make the plunge, with-
out your ever knowing it — and perhaps get
enough to keep you out of any more messes like
this 1 °
“You had given me up?” she cried, reprovingly.
“No — no — no — I'd only given up waiting for
chances to find you. My God, don't you suppose
I knew you needed me!”
“It would have been too late!” she said, in her
dead voice. “It’s too late, already!”
“Then you don't care?” he demanded, almost
brokenly.
“I’ll never complain, or whine, again!” she an-
swered with dreary listlessness.
“Then why are you in this room?”
“I mean that I’ve given up myself. I’m in it,
59


PHANTOM WIRES
now, as deep as you! I couldn't fight it back any
longer — it had to come!”
“But why, and how ! Why don't you explain?”
He could feel her groping away from him in the
darkness.
“Wait,” she whispered.
“But why should I wait?” he demanded.
“Listen! That second room door is still un-
locked, and there's danger enough here, without in-
viting it.”
He groped after her into the bedroom. He could
hear the gentle scrape of the key and the muffled
sound of the lock as she turned it, followed by the
cautious slide of the brass bolt, lower on the door.
He waited for her, standing at the foot of the bed.
He could hear her sigh of weariness as she sat
down on the edge of the disordered mattress.
Then, remembering that he had cut the wires of
only the larger room, he felt his way to the button
at the head of the bed. He snapped the current
open and instantly the blinding white light flooded
the chamber.
“Is it safe here, any longer?” she asked rest-
lessly, pausing a moment to accustom her eyes to
the light, and then gazing up at him with an im-
personal studiousness of stare that seemed to wall
and bar her off from him. Still again he was op-
pressed by some sense of alienation, of looming
tragedy between them. She, too, must have known
6o


THE WOMAN SPEAKS
some shadow of that feeling, for he saw the look of
troubled concern, of unspoken pity, that crept over
her face; and he turned away brusquely.
She spoke his name, quietly; and his gaze coasted .
round to her again. She watched him with wide"
and hungry eyes.
Her breast heaved, at his silence, but all she said
was: “Is it safe, Jim?”
“Yes, it's perfectly safe. So tell me what you
have to say. It doesn't mean any greater risk.
We would only have to come back again — for
I’ve work to do in this room yet!”
The return of the light seemed to give a new cast
of practicality to his thoughts.
“What sort of work?” his wife was asking him.
“Seventeen hundred napoleons in gold to find,”
he answered grimly.
“Oh, it's not that, not that!” she said, starting
up. “It’s the papers, the Gibraltar papers!”
“Papers?” he repeated wonderingly.
“Yes, the imperial specifications. Pobloff's a
paid agent in the French secret service. They say
he was the man who secured Kitchener's Afghan-
istan frontier plans, and in some way or other had
a good deal to do with the Curzon resignation.”
“Ah, I thought there was something behind our
boyard!”
“A year ago last March he was arrested in Ja-
maica, by the British authorities, for securing secret
6I


THE WOMAN SPEAKS
English hotels. I would have taken anything, even
a servant's work, I believe.”
He cursed himself to think that it was through
him that she had come to such things.
“But I was lucky,” she went on, hurriedly.
“One afternoon I stumbled on a weeping lady's
maid, on the verge of hysterics, who found enough
confidence in me, in time, to tell me that her mis-
tress had gone mad in her room and was clawing
down the wallpaper and talking about killing her-
self. It was true enough, in a way, I soon found
out, for it was an English noblewoman who had
fought with her husband two weeks before in Lon-
don, and had run away to Paris. What she had
dipped into, and gone through, and suffered, I could
only guess; but I know this: that that afternoon
she had drunk half a pint of raw alcohol when the
frightened maid had locked her in the bath-room.
So I pushed in and took charge. First I wired to
the woman's husband, Lord Boxspur, who sent me
money, at once, and an order to bring her home as
quietly as possible. He met us at Calais. It was a
terrible ordeal for me, all through, for she tried to
jump overboard, in the Channel, and was so insane,
so hopelessly insane, that a week after we reached
London she was committed to some sort of private
asylum.”
“And then?” asked Durkin.
“Then Böxspur thought that possibly I knew
63


PHANTOM WIRES
too much for his personal comfort. I rather think
he looked on me as dangerous. He put me off and
put me off, until I was glad to snatch at a position
in a next-of-kin agency. But in a fortnight or two
I was even more glad to leave it. Then I went back
to Lord Boxspur, who this time sent me helter-
skelter back to Paris, to bribe a blackmailing news-
paper woman from giving the details of his wife's
misfortunes to the Continental correspondent of a
London weekly. But even when that was done,
and I had been duly paid for my work, I was only
secure for a few weeks, at the outside. All along
I kept writing for you, frantically. So, when
things began to get hopeless again, I went to the
British Embassy. I had to lie, terribly, I'm afraid,
before I could get an audience, first with an under
secretary, and then with the ambassador himself.
He said that he regretted he could do nothing for
me, at least, officially. He looked at my clothes,
and laughed a little, and said that of course, in
cases of absolute destitution he sometimes felt com-
pelled to come to the help of his fellow-countrymen.
I told him that I knew the world, and was willing
to undertake work of any sort. He answered that
such cases were usually looked after at the consul-
ate, and advised me to go there. But I didn't give
him up, at once. I told him I was resourceful, and
experienced, and might undertake even minor of
ficial tasks for him, until I had heard from my hus-
64


THE WOMAN SPEAKS
band. Then he hesitated a little, and asked me if I
knew the Continent well, and if I was averse to
traveling alone. Then he called somebody up on
his telephone, and in a few minutes came out and
shook his head doubtfully, and advised me to apply
at the consulate. Instead of that, I went not to
the English, but to the American consul first. He
told me that in five weeks a sea-captain friend of
his was sailing from Havre to New York, and that
it might not be impossible to have me carried
along.”
“That's what they always say!”
“It was the best he could do. Then I went to
the British consul. He spoke about references,
which left me blank; and tried to pump me, which
left me frightened. But he could do nothing, he
told me, except in the way of a personal donation,
and that, he assumed, was out of the question. So
I went back to the Embassy once more. I don't
know why, but this time, for some reason or other,
the ambassador believed in me. He gave me a
week's trial as a sort of second deputy private sec-
retary, indexing three-year-old correspondence and
copying Roumanian agricultural reports. Then he
put me on ordinance-report work. Then some-
thing happened — I can't go into details now — to
arouse my suspicions. I rummaged through the
storage closet in my temporary office and looped
his telephone wire with twenty feet of number
5 65


PHANTOM WIRES
“And a Mercedes touring car as well! But, oh,
Jim, surely you and I don't need to go back to all
that sort of thing, at this stage of the game,” she
retorted wearily. She felt wounded, weighed down
with a perverse sense of injury at his treatment, of
injustice at his coldness, even in the face of the in-
congruous circumstances under which they had met.
But she went on speaking, resolutely, as though
to purge her soul, for all time, of explanation and
eXC11Se.
“That next-of-kin agency was a dingy little
office up two dingy stairs in Chancery Lane. For
a few days their work seemed bearable enough,
though it hurt me to see that all their income was
being squeezed out of miserably poor people —
always the miserably poor, the submerged souls with
romantic dreams of impending good fortune, which,
of course, always just escaped them. That, I could
endure. But when I found that the agency was
branching out, and was actually trying to present
me for inspection as a titled heiress, in sore need
of a secret and immediate marriage, I revolted, at
once. Then they calmly proposed that I embark
for America, as some sort of bogus countess — and
while they were still talking and debating over
what mild and strictly limited extravagances they
would stand for, and just what expenses they would
allow, I bolted But their scheming and plotting
had given me the hint, for I knew, if the worst
68


OUR FRIEND THE ENEMY
came to the worst, I would not be altogether un-
der the thumb of Lord Boxspur. So when I came
South from Paris I simply assumed the title — it
simplified so many things. It both gave me oppor-
tunities and protected me. If, to gain my ends and
to reconnoitre my territory, I became the occasional
guest — remember, Jim, the most discreet and
guarded guest! — of Count Anton Szapary — who
carried a hundred thousand crowns away from
the Vienna Jockey Club a month or two ago — you
must simply try to make the end justify the means.
I was still trying to get in touch with you. One
of his automobiles was always politely placed at
my disposal. It was a chance, well, scarcely to be
missed. For, you see, it was my intention to meet
His Highness, the Prince Ignace Slevenski Pobloff,
under slightly different circumstances than would
prevail if he and his valet should quietly step
through that door at the present moment!”
She laughed, a little bitterly, with a reckless
shrug of the shoulders. Durkin, nettled by the
sound of tragedy in her voice, did not like the sound
of that laugh. Then, as he looked at her more crit-
ically, he saw that she was white and worn and
tired. But it was the words over which she
had laughed which sent him abruptly hurrying
into the next room with a lighted match, to read
the hour from the little Swiss clock above the
cabinet.
69


PHANTOM WIRES
“If we're after anything here we've got to get
it!” he said, with conscious roughness. “It’s later
than I thought.”
“Very well,” she answered, quietly enough.
Then she turned to him, as he waited with his
hand on the bedroom light-button, before switching
it off.
“You need never be afraid that I will bother you
with any more of my hesitations, and scruples, and
half-timid qualms, as I once did. All that is over
and done with. I feel, now, that we're both in
this sort of work from necessity, and not by acci-
dent. It has gripped and engulfed us, now, for
good.”
He raised a hand to stop her, stung to the quick
by the misery and bitterness of her voice, still ask-
ing himself if it was not only the bitter cry of love
for some neglectful love's reply. But she swept
on, abandonedly.
“There's no use quibbling and fighting against
it. We’ve got to keep at it, and wring out of it
what we can, and always go back to it, and bend to
it, and still keep at it, to the bitter end l’”
“Frank, you mustn't say this!” he cried.
“But it's truth, pure truth. We're only going
to live once. If we can't be happy without doing
the things we ought not to do — then we'll simply
have to be criminals. But I want my share of the
joy of living — I want my happiness! I want you!
70


PHANTOM WIRES
himself, as she, in turn, must do what she could for
herself — if they came to the end of their rope.
A minute later they were bending together over
the contents of the dismantled safe. He was strik-
ing matches. By this time they were both on their
knees.
“You run through these papers, while I see what
can be done with the despatch box,” he whispered
to her. Then he put the little package of vestas
between them, so they might work by their own
light. From time to time the soft spurt of the
lighting match broke the silence, as Frank hur-
riedly ran her eye over the different packets, and
as hurriedly flung them back into the safe.
It was a relief to Durkin to think that he at
least had someone beside him who could read
French. Busy as he was, he incongruously re-
called to his mind how he once used to study the
little printed announcements in his hotel rooms,
wondering, ruefully, if the delphic text meant that
lights and fires were extra, and if baths must be
paid for, and vainly trying to discover what his
last basket of wood might cost.
Yes, he told himself, he was a hunter out of his
domain. He would always feel intimidated and
insecure in this land of aliens and unknowns. He
even sympathetically wondered who it was that had
said: “Foreigners are fools!” Then a sudden,
irrational, inconsequential sense of gratitude took
72


OUR FRIEND THE ENEMY
possession of him, as he felt and heard the woman
at work so close beside him. There was a feeling
of companionship about it that made the double risk
worth while.
“There's nothing here!” Frank was saying, un-
der her breath.
“Then it must be the box!” he told her.
Durkin knew it was already too late to file and
fit a skeleton key. His first impulse was to bury
the box under a muffling pile of bedding and send
a bullet or two through the lock. But his wan-
dering eye caught sight of a Morocco sheath-knife
above them on the wall, and a moment later he had
the point of it under the steel-bound lid, and as he
pried it flew open with a snap.
He waited, listening, and lighting matches, while
Frank went through the papers, with nervous and
agile fingers, mumbling the inscriptions as she hur-
riedly read and cast them away from her.
“I thought sol” she said at last, crisply.
The packet held half a dozen blueprints, together
with some twelve or fourteen sheets of plans and
specifications, on tinted “flimsy.” Durkin noticed
they were drawn up in red and black ink, and that
at the bottom of each document were paragraphs
of finely-penned, scholarly-looking writing. One
glance was enough for them both.
Frank refolded them and caught them together
with a rubber band. Then she thrust them into the
73


PHANTOM WIRES
bosom of her dress. Both rose to their feet, for
both were filled with the selfsame sudden passion to
get into the open once more.
“That must go back, now!” whispered Frank,
for Durkin was stooping down again, over the
leather bag that held the napoleons.
“Thank heaven,” he answered gratefully, “it’s
not that!”
“Not yet!” she whispered back, bitterly, as she
heard the chink and rattle of metal in the darkness.
But some day it might be.
Then she heard another sound, which caused her
to catch quickly at Durkin's arm. It was the sound
of a key turning in the lock, followed by an impa-
tient little French oath, and the weight of a man's
body against the resisting door. Then the oath was
repeated, and a second key was turned, this time
in the nearer door.
“It's Pobloff!” she whispered.
She had felt the almost galvanic, precautionary re-
sponse of Durkin's body; now she could hear his
whispered ejaculation as he clutched at her and
thrust her back.
“You must get away, quick, whatever happens,”
he said hurriedly. There was a second tremor and
rattle of the door; it might come in at any moment.
“Don’t think of me,” she whispered. “It’s
you!”
“But, my God, how’ll you get out of this?” he
74


OUR FRIEND THE ENEMY
demanded, in a quick whisper. He was trying to
force her back into the little anteroom.
“No, no; don't!” she answered him. “I can
manage it — more easily than you!”
“But how?”
He was still crowding and elbowing her back,
as though mere retreat meant more assured safety.
“No, no!'” she expostulated, under her breath.
“I can shift for myself. It's you — you must get
away!”
She was forcing the packet from her bosom into
his hands.
“Take care of these, quick! Now here's the
window ready. Oh, Jim, get away while you’ve
got the chance!”
“I can't do it!” he protested.
“You must, I tell you. I wouldn't lie to you!
On my honor, I promise you I'll come out of this
room, unharmed and free! But quick, or we'll both
lose!”
Even in that moment of peril the thought that
she was still ready to face this much for him filled
his shaken body with a glow that was more keenly
exhilarating than wine itself. There was no time
for words or demonstration: the action carried its
own eloquence.
He was already halfway through the opened win-
dow, but he turned back.
“Do you care, then?” he panted,
75


PHANTOM WIRES
He could hear the quick catch of her breath.
“Good or bad, I love you, Jim! You know
that! Now, hurry, oh, hurry!”
He caught her hand in his — that was all there
was time for — while with his free hand Durkin
thrust the packet down into his pocket.
“If it turns out wrong — I mean if anything
should happen to me, go straight to the Embassy
with them, in Rome. Good-bye!”
“Ah, then you do expect danger!” he retorted,
already back at the window again.
“No — no!” she whispered, resolutely, barring
his ingress. “Hurry! Good-bye!”
“Good-bye,” he whispered, as he slipped down
on his hands and knees and crawled along the bal-
cony, like a cat, through the darkness.
Then the woman closed the window, and waited.


CHAPTER VIII
“For EIGNERS ARE FOOLs”
Frances Durkin, as she turned back into the dark-
ness of the room, desperately schooled herself to
calmness. She warned herself that, above all, she
must remain clear-headed and collected, and act
coolly and decisively, when the moment for action
arrived.
But as the seconds slipped by, and the silence re-
mained unbroken, a shred of forlorn hope came
back to her. Each moment meant more assured
safety to her husband — he, at least, was getting
away unscathed and unsuspected. And that left
her almost satisfied.
She still waited and listened. Perhaps, after all,
the Prince had taken his departure. Perhaps he
had gone back to the portier's office, for explana-
tions. Perhaps it had not even been Pobloff —
merely a drunken stranger, mistaken in his room
number, or servants with a message or with linen.
She groped softly across the room, until she came
to the door. She found it draped and covered with
a heavy blanket. Holding this back, she slipped
under it, and peered through the keyhole into the
77


PHANTOM WIRES
illuminated hallway. There seemed to be nobody
outside.
“It is a rule of the game, I believe, never to
shoot the rabbit until it is on the run!”
The words, spoken in excellent English, and
barbed with a touch of angry cynicism, smote on her
startled ears like an Alpine thunderclap.
She emerged from under the blanket, slowly, ig-
nominiously, ashamed of even her Peeping-Tom
abandonment of dignity. -
As she did so she saw herself being looked at
with keen but placid eyes. The owner of the eyes
in one hand held a lighted bedroom lamp. In his
other hand he held a flat, short-barreled pocket re-
volver, of burnished gun-metal, and she could see
the lamplight glimmer along its side as it menaced
her.
She did not gasp — nor did she shrink away, for
with her the situation was not so novel as her an-
tagonist might have imagined. Indeed, as she
gazed back at him, motionless, she saw the look of
increasing wonder which crept, almost involun-
tarily, over his white, lean, Slavic-looking face.
Frances Durkin knew it was Pobloff. He was
tall, exceptionally tall, and she noticed that he car-
ried off his faultlessness of attire with that stiff but
tranquil hauteur which seems to come only with a
military training. The forehead was high and
white and prominent, with oddly marked depres-
78


a-rºun- º -
- -
º º
“Frances Durkin knew it was Pobloff.” Page 78.





PHANTOM WIRES
fresh discovery, as step by step he covered the course
of the completed invasion. She followed his gaze,
which now rested on the rifled safe.
A little oath, in Russian, suddenly escaped his
lips.
Then he turned and strode into the anteroom, and
she could hear him making fast and locking the
outer hall door. Then he withdrew the key, and
came back to her.
“I must still regard you, of course, as my guest,”
he said slowly, with his easy menace.
“You Europeans always give us lessons in the
older virtues' " she retorted, as mockingly as be-
fore, in her soft contralto.
He looked at her, for a moment, in puzzled won-
der. Then he held the lamp closer to her face.
He nursed no illusions about women. Frances
Durkin knew that for years now he had made them
his tools and his accomplices, never his dictators
and masters. But as he looked into the pale face,
with the shadowy, almost luminous violet eyes, and
the soft droop of the full red lips, and the still
girlish tenderness of line about the brow and chin,
and then at the betraying fulness of throat and
bosom, the mockery died out of his smile.
It was supplanted by a look more ominously pur-
poseful, more grimly determined.
“What, madam, did you come here for?” he de-
manded.
8o


PHANTOM WIRES
She had a sense of destiny shaping itself before
her, while she stood a helpless and disinterested spec-
tator of the vague but implacable transformation
which, in the end, must in one way or the other so
vitally concern her.
“I have nothing,” she answered simply.
He waved her protest aside.
“Madam, have you thought, or do you now
know, what the cost of this will be to you?”
He was towering over her now. She was won-
dering whether or not there was a ghost of a chance
for her to snatch at his pistol.
“I can pay only what I owe,” she maintained
evasively.
He looked at her, and then at the locked door.
His face took on a sudden and crafty change. The
rage and anger ebbed out of him. He placed the
lamp on the dressing-table of polished rosewood.
Then his lean, white fingers meditatively adjusted
his tie, and even more meditatively stroked at the
narrow black imperial, before he spoke again.
“What greater crown may one hope for, in any
activity of life, than a beautiful woman?” he asked
quietly.
There was a moment of unbroken silence.
For the first time a touch of fear came to her
shadowy eyes, and they were veiled by a momentary
look of furtiveness.
“What do you mean?”
82


“FOREIGNERS ARE FOOLS ’’
“I mean, madam, simply that you will now re-
main with me!”
“That is absurd l’”
She noticed, for the first time, that he had put
away his revolver.
“It is not absurd; it is essential. Permit me.
In my native country we have a secret order which
I need not name. If the secrets of this order came
to be known by an individual not already a mem-
ber, one of two things happened. He either became
a member of the order, or he became a man who
— who could impart no information!”
“And that means 2 ”
“It means, practically, that from this hour you
are, either willing or unwilling, a partner in my
activities, as you now are in my possession of cer-
tain papers. Pardon me. The penalty may seem
heavy, but the case, you will understand, is excep-
tional. Also, the nature of your visit, and the thor-
oughness of your preparations”— he swept the dis-
mantled room with his grim but mocking glance —
“have already convinced me that the partnership
will not be an impossible one.”
“But I repeat, this is theatrical, and absurd.
You cannot possibly keep me a - a prisoner here,
forever!”
He looked at her, and suddenly she shrank back
from his glance, white to the lips.
“You will not be a prisoner!”
83


PHANTOM WIRES
“I am quite aware of that!”
“You will not be a prisoner, for then you would
not be a partner. The coalition between us must
be as silent as it is essential. But first, permit me!”
She still shrank back from his touch, consumed
with a new and unlooked-for fear of him. And all
the while she was telling herself that she must re-
main calm, and make no mistake. -
The remembrance came to her, as she stood there,
of how she had once thought it possible to approach
him in a more indirect and adroit fashion, as the
wayward and life-loving Lady Boxspur. She shud-
dered a little, as she recalled that foolish mistake,
and pictured the perils into which it might have led
her. She could detect more clearly now the odor
of brandy on his quickening breath. His face,
death-like in its pallor, flashed before and above her
like a semaphoric sign of imminent danger. Ac-
tion of some sort, however obvious, was necessary.
“I want a drink,” she gasped, with a movement
toward the cabinet.
He turned and caught up the heavy glass brandy-
decanter, emitting a nervous and irresponsible laugh.
In one hand he held the decanter, in the other
the half-filled tumbler. That, at least, implied an
appreciable space of time before those hands could
be freed. In that, she felt, lay her hope.
Quicker than thought she darted to the door over
which still swung the shrouding blanket. She knew
84.


“FOREIGNERS ARE FOOLS’’
the key had already been turned in the lock, from
the outside; the only thing between her and the
freedom of the open hall was one small bolt shaft.
But before she could open the door Pobloff, with
a little grunt of startled rage, was upon her. She
fought and scratched like a cat. The blanket tum-
bled down and curtained them, the plumed hat fell
from the woman's disheveled head, a chair was
overturned. But he was too strong and too quick
for her. With one lithe arm he pinioned her two
hands close down to her sides, crushing the very
breath out of her body. With his other he beat off
the muffling blanket, and dragged her away from
the door. Then he shook her, passionately, and
held her off from him, and glared at her.
One year earlier in her career she knew she would
surely have fainted from terror and exhaustion.
Even as it was, she seemed about to school herself
for some relieving and final surrender to the in-
evitable, only, her vacantly staring eyes, looking
past him, by accident caught sight of a little move-
ment which brought her drooping courage into life
again.
For she had seen the window-shutter slowly
widen, and then a cautious hand appear on the ledge.
She watched the shutter swing in, further and fur-
ther, and then the stealthy figure, with its padded
feet, emerge out of the darkness into the half-
lighted room. She could even see the pallor of the
85


PHANTOM WIRES
intruder's face, and his quick movement of warn-
ing that reminded her of the part she must play.
“I give up!” she gasped, in simulated surrender,
falling and drooping with all her weight in Pob-
loff's arms.
He caught her and held her, bewildered, triumph-
ant.
“You mean it?” he cried, searching her face.
“Yes, I mean it!” she murmured. Then she
shuddered a little, involuntarily, for she had seen
Durkin catch up one of his shoes, hammer-like,
where it protruded from the side pocket of his coat
— and she knew only too well how he would make
use of it.
As Pobloff bent over her, unwarned, unsuspect-
ing, almost wondering for what she was waiting
with such confidently closed eyes, Durkin crossed the
carpeted floor. It was then that the woman flung
up her own arms and encircled the stooping Rus-
sian in a fierce and passionate grasp. He laughed
a little, deep in his throat. She told herself that
she was at least imprisoning his hands.
Durkin's blow caught the bending figure just at
the base of the skull, behind the ear. The impact
whipped the head back, and sent the relaxing body
forward and down. It struck the floor, and lay
there, huddled, face down. The woman scrambled
to her feet, breathing hard.
“Close the shutters!” said Durkin quickly.
86


“FOREIGNERS ARE FOOLS"
Then he turned the unconscious man over on his
back. Then he caught up a couple of towels and
securely tied, first the inert wrists and then the feet.
Quickly knotting a third towel, he wedged and
drilled a sharp knuckle joint into the flesh of the
colorless cheek, between the upper and lower in-
cisors. When the jaw had opened he thrust the
knot into the gaping mouth, securely tying the ends
of the towel at the back of the neck.
“Have you everything?” whispered Frank, who
had once more pinned on the plumed hat, and was
already listening at the panel of the hall door.
There was no time to be lost in talk.
“Yes, I think so.”
“Your baggage?”
“My baggage will have to be left, but, God
knows, there's little enough of it!”
He wiped his forehead, and looked down at the
bound figure, already showing signs of returning
consciousness. They heard laughter, and the sound
of footsteps passing down the hall without.
Durkin stood beside his wife, and they listened
together behind the closed door.
“Not for a minute — not yet,” he whispered.
Then he looked at her curiously.
“I wonder if you know just what a close call
that was l’”
“Yes, I know,” she said, with her ear against
the panel.
87


PHANTOM WIRES
He peered back at the figure, and took a deep
breath.
“And this is only an intermission — this is only
an overture, to what we may have to face! Now's
our chance. For the love of heaven, let's get out
of here. We've got hard work ahead of us, at
Genoa — and we've got only till Friday to get
there!”
He did not notice her look, her momentary look
of mingled reproof and weariness and disdain.
“Now, quick!” she merely said, as she flung the
door open and stepped out into the hall. Luckily,
it was empty, from end to end.
Durkin, with assumed nonchalance, walked
quietly away. She waited to turn the key in the
door, and withdrew it from the lock. Then she
followed her husband down the corridor, and a
minute or two later rejoined him in the fragrant
and balmy midnight air of Monaco.
88


CHAPTER IX
THE LARK IN THE RUINS
It was not until Frances Durkin and her husband
were installed in an empty first-class compartment,
twining and curling and speeding on their way to
Genoa, that even a comparative sense of safety came
to them. It was Durkin's suggestion that it might
not be amiss for them to give the impression of be-
ing a newly-married couple, on their honeymoon
journey; and, to this end, he had half-filled the
compartment with daffodils and jonquils, with car-
nations and violets and roses, purchased with one
turn of the hand from a midnight flower-vender,
on his way down from the hills for any early morn-
ing traffic that might offer.
So as they sped toward the Italian frontier, in the
white and mellow Mediterranean moonlight, thread-
ing their way between the tranquil violet sea bejew-
eled with guardian lights and the steep and silent
slopes of the huddled mountains, they lounged back
on their hired train-pillows, self-immured, and un-
perturbed, and quietly contented with themselves
and their surroundings. At least, so it seemed to
the eyes of each scrutinizing guard and official, who,
89


THE LARK IN THE RUINS
on their cushions with assumed unconcern, cooing
and chattering hand in hand among their flowers,
while a volley of quick and angry questions, in Ital-
ian, was flung in at them from the opened compart-
ment door. To this they paid not the slightest at-
tention, for several moments. Frank turned to her
interrogators, smiled at them gently and imperson-
ally, and then shook her head impatiently, with an
outthrust of the hands which was meant to convey
to them that each and every word they uttered was
quite incomprehensible to her.
The capostagione, who, by this time, had pushed
into their compartment, was heatedly demanding
either their passports or their tickets.
Frank, who had buried her face raptly in her arm-
ful of jonquils, looked up at him with gentle ex-
asperation. -
“We are English,” she said blankly. “Eng-
lish ! We can’t understand l’” And she returned
to her flowers and her husband once more.
The two uniformed intruders conferred for a
moment, while the conduttore, on the platform out-
side, naturally enough expostulated over the delay
of the train.
“These fools — these aren't the two! ” Frank
heard the capostazione declare, in Italian, under his
breath, as they swung down on the station plat-
form. Then the shrill little thin-noted engine-
whistle sounded, the wheels began to turn, and
9I


PHANTOM WIRES
they were once more speeding through the white
moonlight, deeper and deeper into Italy.
“I wonder,” said Frank, after a long silence,
“how often we shall be able to do this sort of thing?
I wonder how long luck — mere luck, will be
with us?”
“Is it luck?” asked her husband. She was still
leaning back on his shoulder, with her hand clasp-
ing his. Accompanying her consciousness of es-
cape came a new lightness of spirit. There seemed
to come over her, too, a new sense of gratitude for
the nearness of this sentient and mysterious life, of
this living and breathing man, that could both com-
mand and satisfy some even more mysterious emo-
tional hunger in her own heart.
“Yes,” she answered, as she laughed a little, al-
most contentedly; “we’re like the glass snake. We
seem to break off at the point where we're caught,
and escape, and go on again as before. I was only
wondering how many times a glass snake can leave
its tail in its enemy's teeth, and still grow another
one !”
And although she laughed again Durkin knew
how thinly that covering of facetiousness spread
over her actual sobriety of character. It was like a
Solitary drop of oil on quiet water — there was not
much of it, but what there was must always be on
the surface.
In fact, her mood changed even as he looked
92


THE LARK IN THE RUINS
down at her, troubled by the shadow of utter weari-
ness that rested on her colorless face.
“What would we do, Jim,” she asked, after a
second long and unbroken silence, “what would we
do if this thing ever brought us face to face with
MacNutt again?”
“But why should we cross that bridge before we
come to it?” was Durkin's answer.
She seemed unable, however, to bar back from
her mind some disturbing and unwelcome vision
of that meeting. She felt, in a way, that she pos-
sessed one faculty which the rapid and impetuous
nature of her husband could not claim. It was al-
most a weakness in him, she told herself, the sub-
sidiary indiscretion of a fecund and grimly resource-
ful mind. Like a river in flood, it had its strange
and incongruous back currents, born of its very one-
ness of too hurrying purpose. It considered too
deeply the imminent and not the remoter and seem-
ingly more trivial contingency.
“But can't you see, Jim, that the further we
follow this up the closer and closer it's bringing us
to MacNutt?”
“MacNutt is ancient history to us now! We're
over and done with him, for all time!”
“You are wrong there, Jim. You misjudge the
situation, and you misjudge the man. That is one
fact we have to face, one hard fact; MacNutt is not
over and done with us?”
93


PHANTOM WIRES
“But haven't you made a sort of myth of him?
Isn't he only a fable to us now? And haven't we
got real facts to face?”
“Ah,” she said protestingly, “there is just the
trouble. You always refuse to look this fact in the
face | *
“Well, what are the facts?” he asked conciliat-
ingly, coercing his attention, and demanding of
himself what allowance he must make for that mor-
bid perversion of view which came of a too fatigued
body and mind.
“The facts are these,” she began, with a solem-
nity of tone that startled him into keener attentive-
ness. “You found me in MacNutt's office when
he was planning and plotting and preparing for the
biggest wire-tapping coup in all his career. You
were dragged into that plot against your will, al-
most, just as I had been. But MacNutt gave us
our parts, and we worked together there. Then —
then you made love to me — don't deny it, Jim, for,
after all, it was the happiest part of all my life! —
and we both saw how wrong we were, and we both
wanted to fight for our freedom. So I followed
you when you revolted against MacNutt and his
leadership.”
“No, Frank, it was you who led — if it hadn't
been for you there would never have been any re-
volt!” he broke in.
“We fought together, then, tooth and nail, and
94


THE LARK IN THE RUINS
in the end we surrendered everything but our own
liberty — just to start over with free hands. But
it wasn't our mere escape to freedom that maddened
MacNutt; it was the thought that we had beaten
him at his own game, that we had stalked him while
he was so busy stalking Penfield. Then he trapped
us, for a moment, and it was sheer good luck that
he didn't kill me that afternoon in his dismantled
operating-room, before Doogan and his men at-
tacked the house. But, as you know, he kept after
us, and he cornered you again, and you would have
killed him, in turn, if I hadn't saved you from the
sin of it, and the disgrace of it. Then we thought
we were safe, just because the world was big and
wide; because we had made our escape to Europe
we thought that we were out of his circuit, that we
were beyond his key-call — but here we are being
led and dragged back to him, through Keenan. But
now, just because there is still an ocean between us,
you begin to believe that he has given up every
thought of getting even l’”
“Well, isn't it about time he did? We've beaten
him twice, at his own game, and I see no reason
why we shouldn't do it again!”
“But how often can we be the glass snake? I
mean, how many times can we afford to leave some-
thing behind, and break away, and hope to grow
whole and sound again? And when will MacNutt
get us where we can't break away? I tell you, Jim,
95


PHANTOM WIRES
you don't know this man as I know him! You
haven't understood yet what a cruelly designing and
artful and vindictive and long-waiting enemy he can
be. You haven't seen him break and crush people,
as I once did. It's the memory of that makes me
so afraid of him l’’
“There's just the trouble, Frank,” cried Durkin.
“The man has terrified and intimidated you, until
you think he is the only enemy you have. I don't
deny he isn't dangerous, but so is Pobloff, and so is
Doogan, for that matter, and this man Keenan as
well l’’
“But they would never crush and smash you, as
MacNutt will, if the chance comes!” she persisted
passionately. “You don't see and understand it,
because you are so close to it and so deep in it.
It's like traveling along this little Riviera railway.
It's so crooked and tunneled and close under the
mountains that even though we went up and down
it, for a year, from Nice to Nervi, we could never
say that we had seen the Riviera!”
Durkin looked out at the terraced hills, at the un-
dulating fields and the heaped masses of blue moun-
tains under the white Italian moonlight, and did not
speak for several seconds.
He had always carried, while with her, the vague
but sustained sense of being shielded. Until then
her hand had always seemed to guard him, imper-
sonally, as the hand of a busy seeker guards and
96


THE LARK IN THE RUINS
shelters a candle. Now, for some mysterious rea-
son, he felt her brooding guardianship to be some-
thing less passive, to be something more immediate
and personal. He knew — and he knew it with a
full appreciation of the irony that lurked in the sit-
uation — that her very timorousness was now en-
dowing him with a new and reckless courage. So
he took her hand, gratefully, before he spoke again.
“Well, whatever happens, we are now in this,
not from choice, as you said before, but from neces-
sity. If it has dangers, Frank, we must face them.”
“It is nothing but danger!”
“Then we must grin and bear it. But as I said,
I see no reason why we should cross our bridges be-
fore we come to them. And we'll soon have a
bridge to cross, and a hard one.”
“What bridge?”
“I mean Keenan, and everything that will hap-
pen in Genoal"


CHAPTER X
THE TIGHTENING COIL
Henry Keenan, of New York, had leisurely fin-
ished his cigar, and had as leisurely glanced through
all the three-day-old London papers. He had even
puzzled, for another half-hour, over the pages of a
Tribuna. Then, after gazing in an idle and list-
less manner about the empty and uninviting hotel
reading-room, he decided that it was time for him to
go up to his room. He made his leisurely way to
the lift, ascended to the fourth floor, stepped out,
and drew his room-key from his pocket, as he
walked down the hall, in the same idle and listless
111a1111er.
As he turned the corner the listlessness went
from his face, and a change came in his languid
yet ever-restless and covert eyes.
For a young woman was standing before his
door, trying to fit a key to the lock. This, he de-
cided as he paused three paces from her and studied
her back, she was doing quite openly, with no slight-
est sense of secrecy. She wore a plumed hat, and
a dark cloth tailor-made suit that was unmistakably
English. She still struggled with the key, uncon-
scious of his presence. His tread on the thick car-
98


THE TIGHTENING COIL
pet had been light; he had intended to catch her, be-
yond equivocation, in the act. But now something
about the lines of her stooping figure caused Henry
Keenan to remove his hat, respectfully, before speak-
ing to her.
“Could I assist you, madam?” he asked, close
to her side by this time.
She turned, with a start, though her loss of self-
possession lasted but a moment. But as she turned
her startled eyes to him Keenan's last doubt as to
whether or not it was a mere mistake withered away
from his mind. He knew, from the hot flush that
mounted to her cheeks and from the mellow con-
tralto of her carefully modulated English voice, that
she belonged to that vaguely denominated yet
rigidly delimited type that would always be called a
woman of breeding.
“If you please,”
from the door.
He bent over the key which she had left still in
the lock.
As he did so he glanced at the number which
the key, protruding from the lock, bore stamped
on its flat brass bow. The number was Thirty-
seven, while the number which stood before his
eyes on the door was Forty-one.
Under ordinary circumstances the apparent acci-
dent would never have given him a second thought.
But all that day he had been oppressed by a sense of
she said shortly, stepping back
• * */
99


PHANTOM WIRES
hidden yet continual espionage. This feeling had
followed him from the moment he had landed in
Genoa. He had tried to argue it down, inwardly
protesting that such must be merely the obsession of
all fugitives. And now, even to find an unknown
and innocent-appearing young woman trying to
force an entrance into his room aroused all his latent
cautiousness. Yet a moment later he felt ashamed
of his suspicions.
“Why, this is room Forty-one,” she cried, over
his shoulder. He withdrew the key and looked at
it with a show of surprise.
“And your key, I see, is Thirty-seven,” he ex-
plained.
She was laughing now, a little, through her con-
fusion. It was a very pleasant laugh, he thought.
She looked a frank and companionable woman, with
her love for the merriment of life touched with a
sort of autumnal and wistful sobriety that in no
way estranged it from a sense of youth. But, above
all, she was a beautiful woman, thought the listless
and lonely man. He looked at her again. It was
his suspicion of being spied upon, he felt, that had
first blinded him to the charm of her appearance.
“It was the second turn in the corridor that
threw me out,” she explained. He found himself
walking with her to her door.
She had thought to find some touch of the Bow-
eryite about him, some outcropping of the half-
IOO


THE TIGHTENING COIL
submerged bunco-steerer. Instead of that, both his
look and his tone carried some tinge of quiet yet
dominant gentility, reminding her, as she had so
often been taught before, that the criminal is not a
type in himself, that only fanciful and far-stretched
generalizations could detach him as a species, or im-
mure and mark him off from the rest of his kind.
She glanced at him still again, at the seemingly
melancholic and contemplative face, that strangely
reminded her of Dürer's portrait of himself. As
she did so there was carried to her memory, and
imprinted on it, the picture of a wistful and lonely
man, his countenance touched, for all its open Irish
smile, with some wordless sorrow, some pensive iso-
lation of soul, lean and gaunt with some undefined
hunger, a little furtive and covert with some half-
concealed restlessness.
“Aren't you an American?” he was asking, al-
most hopefully, it seemed to her.
“Oh, no,” she answered, with her sober, slow
smile. “I’m an Englishwoman!”
He shook his head, whimsically.
“Indeed, I'm sorry for that!” said the Celt.
She joined in his laugh.
“But I’ve lived abroad so much!” she added.
“Then you must know Italy pretty well, I sup-
pose?”
“Oh, yes; I’ve traveled here, winter after win-
ter.”
IOI


PHANTOM WIRES
She picked out a card from her pocket-book, on
which was inscribed, in Spencerian definiteness of
black and white, “Miss Barbara Allen.” It had
been the card of Lady Boxspur's eminently re-
spectable maid — and Frances Durkin had saved it
for just such a contingency.
He read the name, slowly, and then placed the
card in his vest pocket. If he noticed her smile,
he gave no sign of it.
“And you like Genoa 2 I mean, is there any-
thing to like in this place?” he asked companion-
ably. “I’ll be hanged if I’ve seen anything but a
few million mementoes of Christopher Columbus!”
“There's the Palazzo Bianco, and the Palazzo
Rosso, and, of course, there's the Campo Santo!”
“But who cares for graveyards?”
“All Europe is a graveyard, of its past!” she
answered lightly. “That was what I thought you
Americans always came to see!”
He laughed a little, in turn, and she both liked
him better for it and found it easier to go on. She
felt, from his silences, that no great span of his life
had been spent in talking with women. And she
was glad of it.
“I like the Riggi,” she added pregnantly.
“The Riggi — what's that, please?”
“That's the restaurant up on the hill.” She hesi-
tated and turned back, before unlocking her door.
“It's charming!”
IO2


THE TIGHTENING COIL
He was on the point, she knew, of making the
plunge and asking if they might not see the Riggi
together, when something in her glance, some pre-
cautionary chilliness of look, checked him. For
she had seen that even now things might advance too
hurriedly. It would be wiser, and in the long run
it would pay, she warned herself, to draw in — for
as she still lingered and chatted with him she more
and more felt that she was face to face with a re-
sourceful and strong-willed opponent. She noticed,
through all the outward Celtic gentleness, the grim
and passionate mouth, the keenness of the shifty
yet penetrating hazel-gray eyes, the touch of almost
bull-dog tenaciousness about the loose-jointed, high-
shouldered figure, and, above all, the audacity of
the careless Irish-American smile. That smile, she
felt, trailed like a flippant and fluttering tail to the
kite of his racial solemnity and stubbornness of pur-
pose, enabling it to rise higher even while seeming
to weigh it down.
“And you always travel alone?” he finally asked,
shaking off the last of his reserve.
“Oh, I’m a bit of a globe-trotter — that's what
you'd call me on your side of the ocean, isn’t it?
You see, I go about Southern Europe picking up
things for a London art firm l’”
“And where do you go next?”
“Oh, perhaps to Milan, perhaps to Naples; it
may even be to Rome, or it might turn out to be
IO3


º
CHAPTER XI
THE INTOXICATION OF WAR
It was two days later, and they had been days
of blank suspense for him, that Durkin made his
way to Frank's room, unobserved. His first reso-
lution had been to wait for a clearer coast, but his
anxiety overcame him, and he could hold off no
longer.
As he opened the door and stepped noiselessly in-
side he caught sight of her by the window, her face
ruminative and in repose. It looked, for the mo-
ment, unhappy and tired and hard. She seemed to
stand before him with a mask off, a designing and
disillusioned woman, no longer in love with the
game of life. Or it was, he imagined, as she would
look ten years later, when her age had begun to
tell on her, and her still buoyant freshness was gone.
It was the same feeling that had come to him on the
Angiolina steps, at Abbazia. He even wondered if
in the stress of the life they were now following
she would lose the last of her good looks, if even
her ever-resilient temperament would deaden and
harden, and no longer rise supreme to the exacting
moment. Or could it be that she was acting a part
IO5


PHANTOM WIRES
for him? that all this fine bravado was an attitude,
a rôle, a pretense, taken on for his sake? Could it
be — and the sudden thought stung him to the quick
— that she was deliberately and consciously degrad-
ing herself to what she knew was a lower plane of
thought and life, that the bond of their older com-
panionship might still remain unsevered?
But, as her startled eyes caught sight of him, a
welcoming light came into her relaxed face. With
her first spoken word some earlier touch of morose-
ness seemed to slip away from her. If it required an
effort to shake herself together, she gave no out-
ward sign of it. She had promised that there
should be no complaining and no hesitations from
her; and Durkin knew she would adhere to that
promise, to the bitter end.
She went to him, and clung to him, a little hun-
grily. There seemed something passionate in her
very denial of passion. For when he lifted her droop-
ing head, with all its wealth of chestnut shot
through with paler gold, and gazed at her upturned
face between his two hands, with a little cry of en-
dearment, she shut her mouth hard, on a sób.
“You’re back — and safe?” he asked.
She forced a smile.
“Yes, back safe and sound !”
“But tired, I know?”
“Yes — a little. But —”
She broke off, and he could see that she was
Ioé


THE INTOXICATION OF WAR
rising from her momentary luxury of relaxation
as a fugitive rises after a minute's breathing-spell.
“Well?” he asked anxiously.
“Pobloff has found us!” she said, in her quiet
contralto.
“He’s here, you mean?”
“He’s in Genoa. I caught sight of him in a
cab, hurrying from the French Consulate to the
Cafè Jazelli. I slipped into a silversmith's shop, as
he raced past, and escaped him.” *
“And then what?”
“Then several things happened. But first, tell
me this: did you get a chance to look over Keenan's
room?” *
“I was bolted inside twenty minutes after you
and he had left the hotel. His trunk was even un-
locked; I looked through everything!”
“Which, of course, was charming work!” she
interpolated, with not ungentle scorn.
He shrugged his shoulders deprecatively. “Not
quite as charming as dining with your new friend!”
“I almost like him l’’ admitted the woman
frankly, femininely rejoicing at the note of jealousy
in the other's voice.
“And no worse than some of the work we’ve
done, or may soon have to do!”
Then he went on, with rising passion: “And I’ll
tell you this, Frank whatever we do, and whatever
we have to go through, we’ve got to get those se-
107 tº


PHANTOM WIRES
curities out of Keenan! We've got to have them,
now ! We've got to pound at it, and dog him, and
fight him, and outwit him, until we either win or
lose and go under! It's a big game, and it has
big risks, but we're in it too deep, now, to talk
about drawing back, or to complain about the dirty
work it leads to !”
“I wasn't complaining,” she reproved, in her
dead voice. “I only spoke a bald truth. But you
don't tell me what you've found.”
“I got nothing — absolutely nothing; not one
shred of information even. There's nothing in the
room. It stands to reason, then, as I told you from
the first, that he is carrying the papers about with
him l’” -
“That will make it harder,” she murmured mo-
notonously. “And you're sure your telegram has
sent the Scotland Yard men to Como P”
“It must have, or we'd be running into them.
The New Yorker is a Pinkerton man.”
He started pacing back and forth in front of
her, frowning with mingled irritation and impa-
tience.
“Then what about Pobloff?” he suddenly asked.
“Five minutes after we had stepped out of the
hotel he met us, face to face. With Keenan, I had
no chance of getting away. So I simply faced it
out. Then Pobloff shadowed us to the Riggi,
watched us all through luncheon, and followed
IO3


THE INTOXICATION OF WAR
us down to the city again. And here's the strange
part of it all. Keenan saw that we were being
shadowed, from the first, and I could see him fret-
ting and chafing under it, for he imagines that it's
all because of what he's carrying with him.
So, on the other hand, Pobloff has concluded
Keenan and I are fellow-conspirators, for he let
me go to the lift alone, just to keep his eye on
Keenan, who told me he had business at the steam-
ship agency.”
“But why should we be afraid of Pobloff,
then P’’ -
“It’s a choice of two evils, I should venture to
say. But that's not all. As soon as I was free
from each of them, and had left them there, carry-
ing out that silent and ridiculous advance and re-
treat between them, I had to think both hard and
fast. I decided that the best thing for me to do
would be to slip down to Rome, at once, and make
my visit to the Embassy.” -
“Yes, I found your note, telling me that.”
“When I saw that I was being followed at the
station I bought a ticket for Busalla, as a blind, and
went in one door of my compartment and then out
the other. My wagon lit was standing on the
next track. I didn't change from the one train to
the other until the train for Rome started to move.
Then I slipped out, and jumped for the moving
platform, and was bundled into my right carriage
Io9


PHANTOM WIRES
by a guard, who thought I was trying to commit
an Anna Karenina suicide — until I gave him ten
francs. Whether I got away unnoticed or not I
can't say for sure. But Pobloff will have resources
here that we know nothing of. From now on, you
may be sure, he will have Keenan watched by one
of his agents, night and day!”
“Then, good heavens, we've got to step in and
save Keenan from Pobloff l’’
“It amounts to that,” admitted Frank. “Yet,
in some way, if we could only manage it, the two
of them ought to fight our battle out for us, be-
tween themselves!”
“That's true — but did you get to Rome?”
“Yes, without trouble.”
“And you got the money?”
“Only half of it. They hedged, and said the
other half could not be paid until Pobloff's arrest.
Jim, we must be on our guard against that man.”
“Pobloff doesn't count!” ejaculated Durkin im-
patiently. “It’s Keenan we have to have our fight
with — he's the man, the offender, we want! —
that means only two hundred and fifty pounds!”
“But that is money honestly made!”
“And so will this be money honestly made. The
one was legalized by the government authority; the
other, in the end, will be recognized as — well, as
detectional and punitive expediency. That's why
I say Pobloff doesn't count!”
I IO


THE INTOXICATION OF WAR
“But Pobloff does count,” persisted Frank.
“He’s a vindictive and resourceful man, and he has
a score against us to wipe out. Besides all that,
he's a master of intrigue, and he has the entire
secret service of France behind him, and he knows
underground Europe as well as any spy on the
Continent. He will keep at us, I tell you, until he
thinks he is even!”
“Then let him — if he wants to,” scoffed Dur-
kin. “My work is with Keenan. If Pobloff tries
interfering with us, the best thing we can do is to
get the British Foreign Office after him. They
ought to be big enough for him!”
“It’s not a matter of bigness. He won't fight
that way. He would never fight in the open. He
knows his chances, and the country, and just where
to turn, and just how far to go — and where to
hide, if he has to !”
“That's true enough, I suppose. But oh, if I
only had him in New York, I'd fight him to a finish,
and never edge away from him and keep on the
run this way!” -
“Of course; but, as you say, is it worth while?
After all, he's only an accident in the whole affair
now, though a disagreeable one. And, what's
more, Pobloff will never follow us out of Europe.
This is his stamping ground. He had misfortune
in America, and he's afraid of it. As I said before,
Pobloff and Keenan are the acid and the alkali that
III


PHANTOM WIRES
ought to make the neutral salts. I mean, instead
of trying to save them from each other, we ought
to fling them together, in some way. Let Pobloff
do the hunting for us — then let us hunt Pobloff l’’
“But Keenan is wary, and shrewd, and far-see-
ing. How is he to be caught, even by a Pobloff?”
“That only time and Pobloff can tell. It will
never be by brigandage— Keenan will never go far
enough afield to give him a chance for that. But
I feel it in my bones — I feel that there is danger
impending, for us all.”
Durkin turned and looked at her, wondering if
her woman's intuition was to penetrate deeper into
the unknown than his own careful analysis.
“What danger?” he asked.
“Impending dangers cease to be dangers when
they can be defined. It's nothing more than a
feeling. But the strangest part of the whole situa-
tion is the fact that not one of us, from any corner
of the triangle, dares turn to the police for one
jot of protection. None of us can run crying to
the arms of constituted authority when we get
hurt!”
A consciousness of their lonely detachment from
their kind, of their isolation, crept through Durkin's
mind. He felt momentarily depressed by a sense
of friendlessness. It was like reverting to pri-
mordial conditions, wherein it was ordained that
each life, alone and unassisted, should protect and
II2


PHANTOM WIRES
volted momentarily against the ignominy of the
movement. But she caught him by the arm and
thrust him determinedly in, closing the door on him.
Then she hurriedly let her wealth of chestnut hair
tumble about her shoulders. Then she answered
the knock, with the loosened strands of chestnut in
one abashed hand. -
It was Keenan himself who stood in the hall be-
fore her.
II4


CHAPTER XII
THE DOORWAY OF SURPRISE
“May I speak to you a moment?” asked
Keenan, taking a step nearer to her as he spoke.
She seemed able, even under his quiet composure,
to detect some note of alarm.
“Will you come in?” she asked, holding the
door wide for him.
“If you don't mind the intrusion.”
She had closed the door, and stood facing him,
interrogatively.
“What I am going to ask you, Miss Allen, is
something unusual. But this past week has shown
me that you are an unusual woman.” He hesi-
tated, in doubt as to how to proceed.
“In America,” she said, laughing a little, to
widen his avenue of approach, “you would call me
emancipated, wouldn't you?”
He bowed and laughed a little in return.
“But let me explain,” he went on. “I am in
what you might call a dilemma. For some reason
or other certain persons here are watching and fol-
lowing me, night and day. In America — which,
thank God, is a land of law and order — this sort
cf thing wouldn't disturb me. But here "— he
II5


PHANTOM WIRES
*:
gave a little shrug —“well, you know what they
say about Italy!”
“Then I wasn't mistaken!” she cried, with a
well-rung note of alarm.
He looked at her, narrowly.
“Ah, I suspected you’d have an inkling! But
what I have here makes the case exceptional —
and, perhaps, a little dangerous!”
He drew from his pocket a yellow-tinted manila
envelope, of “legal" size. Frank's quick glance
told her that it was by no means empty.
“It may sound theatrical, and you may laugh
at me, but will you take possession of these papers
for me, for a few days? No, let me explain first.
They are important, I confess, for, although value-
less commercially, they contain personal and private
letters that are worth a good deal to me!”
“But this means a great responsibility,” de-
murred Frank.
“Yes; but no danger — at least to you, since you
are in no way under suspicion. You said that in
five days you would probably be in Naples. Sup-
posing that I arrange to meet you at, say, the Hô-
tel de Londres there, and then repay you for your
trouble.”
“But it's so unusual; so almost absurd,” still
demurred the acting woman. The eavesdropper
from the closet felt that it was an instance of dia-
mond cutting diamond. How hard and polished
II6


THE DOORWAY OF SURPRISE
and finished, he thought, actor and actress con-
fronted each other.
“Will you take the risk?” the man was asking.
She looked from him to the packet and then
back to him again.
“Yes, if you insist — if it is really helping you
out!” she replied, with still simulated bewilder-
ment.
He thanked her with something more than his
professional, placid crispness, and put the packet in
her outstretched hand.
“Is that all?”
“Yes, everything.”
“In Naples, in five days?”
“Yes; the Hôtel de Londres. And now I must
leave you.”
He startled her by taking her hand and wringing
it. She was still looking down at the packet as he
withdrew, and the door closed behind him.
She listened for a moment, and then turned the
key in the lock. Durkin, stepping from his place
of concealment, confronted her. They stood gaz-
ing at each other in blank astonishment.
Frank's first impulse was to tear open the en-
velope. But on second thoughts she flew to her
alcohol tea-lamp and lighted the flame. It was only
a minute or two before a jet of steam came from the
tiny kettle spout. Over this she shifted and held the
gummed envelope-flap, until the mucilage softened
II 7


PHANTOM WIRES
and dissolved. Then, holding her breath, she
peeled back the flap, and from the envelope drew
three soiled but carefully folded copies of the Lon-
don Daily Chronicle. The envelope held nothing
In Ore.
A little cry of disappointment escaped Durkin,
while Frank turned the papers over in her fingers,
in speechless amazement. The very audacity of
the man swept her off her feet.
It was both a warning and a challenge, grim
with its suggestiveness, eloquent with careless de-
fiance. That was her first thought.
“The fool — he's making fun of you!” said
Durkin, with a second passionate oath.
Frank was slowly refolding the papers, and re-
placing them in the envelope.
“I don't believe that's it,” she said, meditatively.
“I believe he is trying me — making this a test!”
She carefully moistened the gum and resealed the
envelope, so that it bore no trace of having revealed
its contents. She stood gazing at her husband with
studious and unseeing eyes.
“If he comes back I'll know that I am right,”
she cried, with sudden conviction. “If he finds that
I am still here, and that his packet is still intact
and safe, he'll do what he wants to do. And that
is, he'll trust me with the whole of his securities!”
She quenched the alcohol flame and replaced the
lamp in its case.
II8


THE DOORWAY OF SURPRISE
“If he comes back,” mocked Durkin. “Do you
know what you and I ought to be doing, at this mo-
ment? We ought to be following that man every
step he takes.”
“But where?” She shook her head, slowly, in
dissent.
“That's for us to find out. But can't you feel
that he's left us in the lurch, that we're shut up
here, while he's giving us the laugh and getting
away?”
“Jim, listen to me. During this past week I’ve
seen more of Keenan than you have.”
“Yes, a vast sight more!” he interjected, heat-
edly.
“And I feel sure,” she went on evenly, “that he
is more frightened and worried than he pretends to
be. He is, after all, only a tricky and ferrety Irish
lawyer, who is afraid of every power outside his
own little circuit of experience. He's afraid of
Italy. I suppose he has nightmares about brigan-
taggio, even He's afraid of foreigners — afraid
of this sort of conspiracy of silence that seems sur-
rounding him. He's even afraid to take his pre-
cious documents and put them in a safe-deposit
vault in any one of the regularly established insti-
tutions here in Genoa. There are plenty of them,
but he isn’t big and bold enough to do his business
that way. He's been a fugitive so long his only
way of warfare now is flight. And besides, he can
II9


THE DOORWAY OF SURPRISE
cantly, retreating before his steady and scornful
gaze.
“Simply, madam, that you and I seem seldom
able to anticipate each other's calls!”
She made a pretense of going to the electric sig-
nal.
“It is quite useless,” explained the Russian quiet-
ly. “The wires are disconnected.”
He took out his watch and glanced at it. “In-
deed, as a demonstration that others enjoy privi-
leges which you sometimes exert, in two minutes
every light in this room will be cut off!”
The woman was panting a little by this time, for
her thoughts were of Durkin and his danger, as
much as of herself. She struggled desperately to
regain her self-possession, for there was no mistak-
ing the quiet but grim determination written on the
Russian's pallid face. And she knew he was not
alone in whatever plot he had laid.
She would have spoken, only the sudden flood of
blackness that submerged her startled her into si-
lence. The lights had gone out.
She demanded of herself quickly, what should be
her first move.
While she stood in momentary suspense, a knock
sounded still once more on her door.
“Come in,” she called out quickly, loudly, now
alert and alive to every movement.
It was Keenan who stepped in from the half-
I2I


PHANTOM WIRES
lighted hall. He would have paused, in involun-
tary amazement, at the utter darkness that greeted
him, only footsteps approaching and passing com-
pelled him to act quickly.
He stepped inside and closed and locked the door.
She had not been mistaken. He had come back.
I22


CHAPTER XIII
“THE Folly of GRANDEUR"
There flashed through Fances Durkin's mind, in
the momentary silence that fell over that strange
company, the consciousness that the triangle was
completed; that there, in one room, through a for-
tutiousness that seemed to her more factitious than
actual, stood the three contending and opposing
forces. The thought came and went like a flash,
for it was not a time for meditation, but for hur-
ried and desperate action. The sense of something
vast and ominous seemed to hang over the dark-
ness, where, for a second or two, the silence of ab-
solute surprise reigned.
The last-comer, too, seemed to feel this sense of
something impending, for a moment later his voice
rang out, clear and unhesitating, with a touch of
challenge in it.
“Miss Allen, are you here? And is anything
wrong?”
“Stand where you are!” the voice of the woman
answered, through the darkness, firm and clear.
“Yes. I am here. But there is another person in
I23


PHANTOM WIRES
this room. He is a man who means harm, I believe,
to both of us!”
“Ah!” said the voice near the door.
The woman was speaking again, her voice high
and nervous, from the continued suspense of that
darkness and silence combined, a dual mystery from
which any bolt might strike.
“Above all things,” she warned him, “you must
watch that door!” -
Her straining ears heard a quiet click-click; she
had learned of old the meaning of that pregnant
sound. It was the trigger of a revolver being
cocked.
“All right — I’m ready,” said the man at the
door, grimly. Then he laughed, perhaps a little
uneasily. “But why are we all in darkness this
way?”
“The wires have been cut — that is a part of his
plan l’”
Keenan took a step into the room and addressed
the black emptiness before him.
“Will the gentleman speak up and explain?”
No answer came out of the darkness. Frank
knew, by this time, that Keenan would make no
move to desert her.
“Have you a lamp, or a light of any kind, Miss
Allen?” was the next curt, businesslike question.
“Oh, be careful, sir!” she warned him, now in
blind and unreasoning terror.
I24


“THE FOLLY OF GRANDEUR ''
“Have you a light?” repeated Keenan authori-
tatively.
“I have only an alcohol lamp; it gives scarcely
any light — it is for boiling a teapot!”
“Then light it, please!”
“Oh, I dare not!” she cried, for now she was pos-
sessed of the unreasoning fear that one step in any
direction would bring her in contact with death
itself.
“Light it, please!” commanded Keenan. “Noth-
ing will happen. I have in my hand here,
where I stand, a thirty-eight calibre revolver, loaded
and cocked. If there is one movement from the
gentleman you speak of, I will empty it into him!”
Both Keenan and Frank started, and peered
through the blackness. For a careless and half-de-
risive, half-contemptuous laugh sounded through
the room. Pobloff, obviously, had never moved
from where he stood.
Frank slowly groped to the wall of her room,
and felt with blind and exploring hands until she
came to her bureau. Then sounded the clink of
nickel as the lamp was withdrawn from its case
and the dry rattle of German safety-matches. Then
the listeners heard the quick scrape and flash of the
match against the side of the little paper box, and
the puff of the wavering blue flame as the match-
end came in contact with the alcohol.
After all, it was good to have a light! Incon-
I25


PHANTOM WIRES
gruously it flashed through her mind, as wayward
thoughts and ideas would at such moments, how re-
lieved primitive man amid his primitive night
must have been at the blessed gift of the first fire.
The wavering blue flame widened and height-
ened. In a moment the inky room was pallidly
suffused with its trembling half-light. Outside,
through the night, sounded muffled street noises,
and the boom and hiss and spurt of fireworks.
The two peering faces turned slowly, until their
range of vision had swept the entire room. Then
they paused, for motionless against the west wall,
between the closet door and the corner, stood Pob-
loff. His arms were folded, and he was laughing
a little.
Frank drew nearer Keenan, instinctively, won-
dering what the next movement would be.
It was Pobloff's voice that first broke the silence.
“This woman lies,” he said, in his suavely scoff-
ing baritone. “This woman 33
“Why don't you say something — why don't
you do something!” cried Frank, hysterically, turn-
ing to Keenan.
“Ring the bell!” commanded Keenan.
“It's useless — the wires are cut,” she panted.
She could see that, above and beyond all his crafti-
ness, his latent Irish fighting-blood was aroused.
“Then, by God, I’ll put him out myself. If
there's any fight between him and me’”— he turned
I26


“THE FOLLY OF GRANDEUR ''
on Pobloff – “we won't drag a woman into it!”
The tall, gaunt Russian against the wall was no
longer laughing.
“Pardon me,” he said, advancing a step. “This
woman has in her possession a packet of papers —
of personal and private papers, which concern
neither you nor her!”
“But what if it does concern me?” demanded
Keenan.
“The gentleman is talking nonsense,” said Pob-
loff, unperturbed. Yet he leaned forward and
studied him more closely, through the half-light,
studied him as the deliberating terrier might study
the captured rat that had dared to bite back at him.
“This woman, I repeat, has certain papers about
her | ?”
“And what of that?” cried Keenan blindly.
Frank saw, to her joy, that he was misled.
“Simply this: that if the lady I speak of hands
those papers to me, here, the matter is closed, for
all time!”
“And if she doesn’t?”
“Then she will do so later!”
A grunt of sheer rage broke from Keenan's lips.
But he checked it, suddenly, and wheeled on the
WOrnan.
“Give him the package,” he ordered. She hesi-
tated, for at the moment the thought of Keenan's
trust had passed from her mind.
127


PHANTOM WIRES
“Do as I say,” he repeated curtly.
Frank, remembering, drew the yellow manila en-
velope from her bosom, and with out-stretched arm
handed it to Pobloff.
The Russian took it in silence. Then with a
few quick strides he advanced to the alcohol lamp.
As he did so both Keenan and Frank noticed for
the first time the blunt little gun-metal revolver he
held in his right hand.
“Again you will pardon me,” said Pobloff, with
his ever-scoffing courtliness. “A mere glance will
be necessary, to make sure that we are not — mis-
taken!”
He tore open the envelope with one long fore-
finger, and stooped to draw forth the contents.
It was then that Keenan sprang at him. Frank
at the moment, was marveling at the unbroken con-
tinuity of evidence linking her with her uncompre-
hending opponent.
The sudden leap and cry of Keenan sent a tingle
of apprehension up and down her body. She asked
herself, vaguely, if all the rest of her life was to be
made up of this brawling and fighting in unlighted
chambers of horror; if, now that they were in the
more turgid currents for which they had longed,
there were to come no moments of peace amid all
their tumult and struggling. -
Then she drew in her breath with a little gasp,
for she saw Pobloff, with a quick writhe of his thin
I28


“THE FOLLY OF GRANDEUR ''
body, free his imprisoned right arm, and strike with
the metal butt of his revolver.
He struck twice, three times, and the sound of the
metal on the unprotected head was sickening to the
listening woman. She staggered to the closet door
as the man fell to the floor, stunned.
“Jim " Oh, Jim, quick! — he's killing him! — I
tell you he's killing him!”
Durkin said “’Ssssh!” under his breath, and
waited.
For in the dim half-light they could see that the
Russian had ripped open Keenan's coat and vest,
and from a double-buttoned pocket on the inside of
the inner garment was drawing out a yellow manila
envelope, the fellow to that which had already been
thrust into his hands. It was then that Durkin
sprang forward.
Pobloff saw him advance. He had only time to
reverse his hold on the little gun-metal revolver and
fire two shots.
The first shot went wide, tearing deep into the
plastered wall. The second cut through the flap
of his assailant's coat-pocket, just over the left hip,
scattering little flecks of woollen cloth about. But
there was no time for a third shot.
It seemed brutal to Frank, but she allowed her-
self time for neither thought nor scruples. All she
remembered was that it was necessary — though
once again she asked herself if all her life, from that
9 I29


PHANTOM WIRES
day on, was to be made up of brawling and fight-
ing.
For Durkin had brought down on the half-turned
head the up-poised bedroom chair with all his force.
Pobloff, with a little inarticulate cry that was almost
a grunt, buckled and pitched forward.
“That settles you!” the stooping man said,
heartlessly, as he watched him relax and half roll
on his side.
Frank watched him, too, but with no sense of
triumph or success, with no emotion but slowly
awakening disgust, against which she found it use-
less to struggle. She watched him with a sense of
detachment and aloofness, as if looking down on
him from a great height, while he tore upon the
manila envelope and gave vent to a little cry of
satisfaction. They at last possessed the Penfield
securities. Then she went over and replenished
the waning flame in the alcohol lamp.
“We’ve got to get away from here now,” said
Durkin quickly. “And the sooner the better!”
She looked about her, a little helplessly. Then
she glanced at Keenan. “See, he's coming tol’”
“Are you ready?” Durkin demanded sharply.
“Yes,” she answered, in her dead and resigned
voice, as she took up her hat and coat. “But where
are we going?” -
“I’ll tell you on the way down. Only you must
get what you want, and hurry!”
y
I 30


PHANTOM WIRES
by pocket, and she knew he would have shot them
if he could.
“There's nothing here!” said a voice in French.
Frank, listening so close to them, could hear the
three men breathe and pant.
“Then the woman has it!” answered the other
voice, likewise in French.
“Shut up! She'll get on!” And Frank could
hear them tear and haul at Durkin as they dragged
him down the hall — just where, she could not
distinguish.
She ran over to Keenan and shook him roughly.
He looked at her a little stupidly, but did not seem
able to respond to her entreaties.
“Quick!” she whispered, “ or it will be too
late!”
She flung her pitcher of water in his face and
over his head, and poured brandy from her little
leather-covered pocket-flask down his throat.
That seemed to revive him, for he sat up on the
carpeted floor, mumblingly, and glowered at her.
Then he remembered; and as she bathed his bruised
head with a wet towel he caught at her hand fool-
ishly.
“Have we lost them?” he asked huskily, child-
ishly.
“No, they are here! See, intact, and safe. But
you must take them back. Neither of us can go
through that hall with them!”
I32


“THE FOLLY OF GRANDEUR ''
“Why not?”
“We’re watched — we're prisoners here!”
“Then what'll we do?” he asked weakly, for he
was not yet himself.
“You must take them, and get out of this room.
There is only one way!”
“What is it?”
“You see this rope. It's meant for a fire-escape.
You must let yourself down by it. You'll find your-
self in a court, filled with empty barrels. That
leads into a bake-shop — you can see the oven lights
and smell the bread. Give the man ten lira, and
he's sure to let you pass. Can you do it? Do you
understand?”
“Yes,” he said, still a little bewildered. “But
where will I meet you?”
She pondered a moment.
“In Trieste, a week from tomorrow. But can
you manage the rope?”
He laughed a little. “I ought to ! I’ve been
through a poolroom raid or two, over home!”
“In Trieste then, a week from morrow !”
She handed him her brandy-flask.
“You may need it,” she explained. He was on
his feet by this time, struggling to pull himself to-
gether.
“But you can't face that alone,” he remonstrated,
with a thumb-jerk toward the hall. “I won't see
you touched by those damned rats!”
I33


PHANTOM WIRES
“’Ssssh l’” she warned him. “They can't do any-
thing to me now, except search me for those
papers!”
“But even that!”
“I’ll wait until I see you're safely down, then I'll
run for the stairs. They've shut off all the lights
outside, in this wing, but if they in any way attempt
to ill-treat me, before I get to the main corridor, I'll
scream for help!”
“But even to search you’—began Keenan again.
“Yes, I know !” she answered evenly. “It’s not
pleasant. But I’ll face it’— she turned her eyes
full upon him — “for you!”
They listened for a moment together at the
opened window. The red lights were still burning
here and there about the city in the streets below,
and the carnival-like cries and noises still filled the
air. -
And she watched him anxiously as he and his
packet of documents went down the dangling hemp
rope, reached the stone paving of the little court,
and disappeared in the square of light framed by
the bake-shop window.
Then she turned back into the room, startled
by a weak and wavering groan from Pobloff. She
went to him, and tried to lift him up on the bed,
but he was too heavy for her overtaxed strength. .
She wondered, as she slipped a pillow under his
head, why she should be afraid of him in that coma-
I34


“THE FOLLY OF GRANDEUR ''
tose and helpless state — why even his white arid
passive face looked so vindictive and sinister in the
dim light of the room.
But as he moved a little she started back, and
caught up what things she could fling into her Glad-
stone bag, and put out the light, and groped her way
across the room once more.
Then she flung open the door and stepped out
into the hall, with a feeling that her heart was in
her mouth, choking her.
She ceased running as she came to the bend in
the hall, for she heard the sound of voices, and the
light grew stronger. She would have dodged back,
but it was too late.
Then she saw that it was Durkin, beside three
jabbering and gesticulating Guardie di Pubblica
Sicurezza.
“Oh, there you are!” said his equable and tran-
quil voice, as he removed his hat.
She did not speak, accepting silence as safer.
“I brought these gentlemen, for someone told
me there was a drunken Englishman in the halls,
annoying you, and I was afraid we might miss our
train ”
She looked at the gendarmes and then on to the
excited servants at their heels, in bewilderment.
She was to escape, then, in safetyl
“Explain to these gentlemen just what it was,”
she heard the warningly suave voice of her husband
I35


PHANTOM WIRES
saying to her, “while I hurry down and order the
carriage!”
She was nervous and excited and incoherent, yet
as they followed at her side down the broad marble
staircase she made them understand dimly that
their protection was now unnecessary. No, she had
not been insulted; not directly. But she had been
affronted. It was nothing — only the shock of see-
ing a drunken quarrel; it had alarmed and upset
her. She paused, caught at the balustrade, then
wavered a little; and three solicitous arms in dark
cloth and metal buttons were thrust out to support
her. She thanked them, in her soft contralto, grate-
fully. The drive through the open air, she assured
them, would restore her completely.
But all the while she was thinking how need-
lessly and blindly and foolishly she had surrendered
and lost a fortune. Her path of escape had been an
open one. - -
“Won't they find out, and everything be known,
before we can get to the station?” she asked, as the
fresh night air fanned her throbbing face and brow.
“Of course they will!” said Durkin. “But we're
not going to the station. We're going to the water-
front, and from there out to our steamer!”
“For where?” she asked. *-
“I scarcely know — but anywhere away from
Genoa | *
I36


PHANTOM WIRES
and dancing, and caught sight of the three great
white shafts of light that fingered so inquisitively
and restlessly along the shipping and the city front
and the widening bay, as three great gloomy Italian
men-of-war played and swung their electric search-
lights across the night.
Then came a brief and passionate scene with a
harbor ferryman, who scorned the idea of taking
his boat out in such a sea, who eloquently waved
his arms and told of accidents and deaths and dis-
asters already befallen the bay that night, who flung
down his cap and danced on it, in an ecstasy of
passionate argumentation. She had a memory of
Durkin almost as excited as the dancing harbor ora-
tor himself, raging up and down the quay with a
handful of Italian paper money between his fingers,
until the boatman relented. Then came a memory
of tossing up and down in a black and windy sea,
of creeping under a great shadow stippled with yel-
low lights, of grating and pounding against a ship's
ladder, of an officer in rubber boots running down
to her assistance, of more blinking lights, and then
of the quiet and grateful privacy of her own cabin,
smelling of white-lead paint and disinfectants.
She slept that night, long and heavily, and it was
not until the next morning when the sun was high
and they were well down the coast, that she learned
they were on board the British coasting steamer
Laminian, of the Gallaway & Papyani Line. They
I38


AWAKENING VOICES
were to skirt the entire coast of Italy, stopping at
Naples and then at Bari, and then make their way
up the Adriatic to Trieste. These stops, Durkin
had found, would be brief, and the danger would
be small, for the Laminian was primarily known as
a freighter, carrying out blue-stone and salt fish, and
on her return cruise picking up miscellaneous car-
goes of fruit. So her passenger list, which in-
cluded, outside of Frank and Durkin, only a con-
sumptive Welsh school-teacher and a broken-down
clergyman from Birmingham, who kept always to
his cabin, was in danger of no over-close scrutiny,
either from the Neapolitan Guardie Municipali on
the one hand, or from any private agents of Keenan
and Penfield on the other.
Even one short day of unbroken idleness, indeed,
seemed to make life over for both Frank and Dur-
kin. Steeping themselves in that comfortable sense
of security, they drew natural and easy breath once
more. They knew it was but a momentary truce,
an interregnum of indolence; but it was all they
asked for. They could no longer nurse any illu-
sions as to the trend of their way or the endlessness
of their quest. They must now always keep mov-
ing. They might alter the manner of their pro-
gression, they might change their stroke, but the
continuity of effort on their part could no more be
broken than could that of a swimmer at sea. They
must keep on, or go down.
I39


PHANTOM WIRES
So, in the meantime, they plucked the day, with
a touch of wistfulness born of their very distrust of
the morrow.
The glimmering sapphire seas were almost mo-
tionless, the days and nights were without wind,
and the equable, balmy air was like that of an
American mid-summer, so that all of the day and
much of the night they spent on deck, where the
Welsh schoolmaster eyed them covertly, as a honey-
moon couple engulfed in the selfish contentment of
their own great happiness. It reminded Frank of
earlier and older days, for, with the dropping away
of his professional preoccupations, Durkin seemed
to relapse into some more intimate and personal re-
lationship with her. It was the first time since their
flight from America, she felt, that his affection had
borne out the promise of its earlier ardor. And it
taught her two things. One was that her woman's
natural hunger for love was not so dead as she had
at times imagined. The other was that Durkin,
during the last months, had drifted much further
away from her than she had dreamed. It stung
her into a passionate and remorseful self-promise
to keep closer to him, to make herself always es-
sential to him, to turn and bend as he might bend
and turn, but always to be with him. It would
lead her downward and still further downward, she
told herself. But she caught solace from some blind
belief that all women, through some vague opera-
I4O


AWAKENING VOICES
tion of their affectional powers, could invade the
darkest mires of life, if only it were done for love,
and carry away no stain. In fact, what would be
a blemish in time would almost prove a thing of
joy and pride. And in the meantime she was glad
enough to be as happy as she was, and to be near
Durkin. It was not the happiness she had once
looked for, but it sufficed.
They caught sight of a corner of Corsica, and on
the following night could see the glow of the iron-
smelting fires on Elba, and the twinkle of the island
shore-lights. From the bridge, too, through one
of the officers' glasses, Frank could see, far inland
across the Pontine Marshes, the gilded dome of St.
Peter's, glimmering in the pellucid morning sun-
light.
She called Durkin, and pointed it out to him.
“See, it's Rome!” she cried, with strangely min-
gled feelings. “It’s St. Peter's l’”
“I wish it was the Statue of Liberty and New
York,” he said, moodily.
She realized, then, that he was not quite so happy
as he had pretended to be. And she herself, from
that hour forward, shared in his secret unrest. For
as time slipped away and her eye followed the
heightening line of the Apennines, she knew that
tranquil Tyrrhenian Sea would not long be left to
her.
It was evening when they rounded the terraced
I4I


PHANTOM WIRES
vineyards of Ischia. A low red moon shone above
the belching pinnacle of Vesuvius. Frank and Dur-
kin leaned over the rail together, as they drifted
slowly up the bay, the most beautiful bay in all the
world, with its twilight sounds of shipping, its rattle
of anchor chains, its far-off cries and echoes, and its
watery, pungent Southern odors.
They watched the ship's officer put ashore to
obtain pratique, and the yellow flag come down, and
heard the signal-bells of the engine-room, as the
officer returned, with a great cigar in one corner
of his bearded mouth.
There was nothing amiss. There were neither
Carabinieri nor Guardie di Pubblica Sicurezza to
come on board with papers and cross-questions.
Before the break of day their discharged cargo
would be in the lighters and they would be steaming
southward for the Straits of Messina.
That night, on the deserted deck, at anchor be-
tween the city and the sea, they watched the glim-
mering lights of Naples, rising tier after tier from
the Immacolatella Nuova and its ship lamps to the
Palazzo di Capodimonte and its near-by Osserva-
torio. And when the lights of the city thinned
out and the crowning haze of gold melted from its
hillsides, with the advancing night, Frank and Dur-
kin sat back in their steamer-chairs and looked up
at the stars, talking of Home, and of the future.
Yet the beauty of that balmy and tranquil night
I42


AWAKENING VOICES
seemed to bring little peace of mind to Durkin.
There were reasons, of late, when moments of
meditation were not always moments of content-
ment to him. His wife had noticed that ever-in-
creasing trouble of soul, and although she said
nothing of it, she had watched him narrowly and
not altogether despondently. For she knew that
whatever the tumult or contest that might be tak-
ing place within the high-walled arena of his own
Ego, it was a clash of forces of which she must
remain merely a spectator. So she went below,
leaving him in that hour of passive yet troubled
thought, to stare up at the tranquil southern stars,
as he meditated on life, and the meaning of life, and
what lay beyond it all. She knew men and the
world too well to look for any sudden and sweep-
ing reorganization of Durkin's disturbed and rest-
less mind. But she nursed the secret hope that out
of that spiritual ferment would come some ulti-
mate clearness of vision.
It was late when he called her up on deck again,
ostensibly to catch a glimpse of Vesuvius breaking
and bursting into flame, above Barra and Portici.
She knew, however, that slumbering and subter-
ranean fires other than Vesuvius had erupted into
light and life. She could see it by the new misery
on his moonlit face, as she sat beside him. Yet
she sat there in silence; there was so little that she
could say.
I43


AWAKENING VOICES
“I couldn't do that!” she protested, catching at
his hands.
“But I can see it with my own eyes, whether
you want to or not. It can't be helped. It's be-
ginning to frighten me, this very willingness of
yours to do the things we oughtn't to. Why, I'd
be happier, even, if you did them under protest!”
“But what is the difference, if I still do them?”
“It would show me that you weren't as bad as I
am — that you hadn't altogether given up.”
“I couldn't altogether give up, and live!” she
cried, with sudden passion.
“But you told me as much, that night in Monte
Carlo P ‘’
“I didn't mean it. I was tired out that night;
I was embittered, and insane, if you like! I want
to be good! No woman wants sin and wrongdo-
ing! But, O Jim, can't you see, it's you, you, I
want, before everything else!”
He smote the palms of his hands together, in
a little gesture of impotent misery.
“That's just it — you tried to make me save
myself for my own sake, and it couldn't be done.
It was a failure. And now you're trying to make
me save myself for your sake —”
“It’s not your salvation I want — it's you!”
“But it's only through being honest that I can
hold and keep you; can't you see that? If I can’t
trust myself, I can’t possibly trust you!”
Io I45


AWAKENING VOICES
a feeling that it may hurt you, sometime, almost
beyond forgiveness!”
“I’ll try to understand!” she murmured. And
again silence fell over them.
“I'm afraid of making promises,” he said, half
whimsically, half weakly, after many minutes of
thought.
“I don't want you to promise — only try!” she
pleaded, swept by a wave of gratitude that seemed
to fling her more intimately than ever before into
her husband's arms. Yet it was a wave, and noth-
ing more. For it receded as it came, leaving her, a
moment later, chilled and apprehensive before their
over-troubled future. With a little muffled cry of
emotion, almost animal-like in its inarticulate in-
tensity, she turned to her husband, and strained
him in her arms, in her human and unhappy and
unsatisfied arms. -
“Oh, love me!” she pleaded, brokenly. “Love
me! Love me — for I need it!”
They seemed strangely nearer to each other, after
that night, and the peacefulness of their cruise to
Bari remained uninterrupted. And once clear of
that port Durkin's nervousness somewhat lightened,
for he had figured out that they would be able to
connect with one of the Cunard liners at Trieste.
From there, if only they escaped attention and de-
tection in the harbor, they would be turning home-
ward in two days.
I47


AWAKENING VOICES º
But Durkin, at her side, through the driving
spray and rain, pointed out to her the huge rolling
bulk and the red funnels of the Cunarder.
“Thank heaven!” he said, with a sigh of re-
lief, “we’ll be in time to catch her!”
The Laminian dropped anchor to the windward
of the liner, and as dusk settled down over the har-
bor Frank took a wordless pleasure in studying the
shadowy hulk which was to carry her back to Amer-
ica, to her old life and her old associations. But
she was wondering how she should tell him of the
loss of the Penfield securities. It was true that the
very crimes that should have bound them together
were keeping them apart!
Suddenly she ran to the companionway and called
down to her husband.
“Look!” she said, under her breath, as he came
to the rail, “they're talking with their wireless!”
She pointed to the masthead of the Cunarder,
where, through the twilight, she could “spell” the
spark, signal by signal and letter by letter, as the
current broke from the head of the installation
wires to the hollow metal mast, from which ran
the taut-strung wires connecting, in turn, with the
operating office just aft and above the engine-rooms.
“Listen,” she said, for in the lull of the wind
they could hear the short, crisp spit of the spark as
it spelt out its mysterious messages.
Durkin caught her arm, and listened, intently,
I49


PHANTOM WIRES
watching the little appearing and disappearing green
spark, spelling off the words with narrowing eyes.
“They're talking with the station up on the
mainland. Do you hear what it is? Can't you
make it out?”
It was, of course, the Continental, and not the
Morse, code, and it was not quite the same as stoop-
ing over and listening to the crisp, incisive pulsa-
tions of a “sounder.” But Frank heard and saw
and pieced together enough of the message to clutch,
in turn, at Durkin's arm, and wait with quickened
breath for the answering spark-play.
“No — such — persons — on — board — send—
fuller — description.”
There was a silence of a minute or two, and then
the mysterious Hertzian voice lisped out once more.
“Description — not — forwarded — by — Em-
bassy — man — and — wife — are wanted —
for robbery — at — Monte — Carlo — also – at
— Genoa — name — Durgin — or — Durkin.”
The listening man and woman looked at each
other, and still waited.
“Oh, this is luck!” said the listener, fervently,
as he drew a deep breath. “This is luck!”
“Listen, they're answering again!” cried Frank.
“Why — not — confer — with — Trieste — au-
thorities — will — you — please — telephone —
our — agents — to — send — out — tender — to
take — off — Admiral — Stuart.”
I5O


AWAKENING VOICES
Then came the silence again.
“Yes,” sounded the minute electric tongue from
the mountain-top, so many miles away. “Good –
night!”
“Good — night!” replied the articulate mass of
heaving steel, swinging at her anchor chains.
I5I


CHAPTER XV
WIRELESS MESSAGES
“What are we to do?” asked Frances Durkin,
turning from the masthead to her husband's studi-
ous face.
“We’ve got to jump at our chance, and get on
board the Slavonia over there!”
“In the face of those messages?”
“It's the messages that simplify things for us.
All we now have to do is to get on board in such a
manner that the ship's officers will have no suspi-
cions. They mustn't dream of linking us with
the runaway couple who are being looked for.
That means that we must not, in the first place,
appear together, and, in the second, of course, that
we must travel and appear as utter strangers!”
“But supposing Keenan himself is on board that
steamer?” parried Frank.
“It is obvious that he isn't, for then it would
be quite unnecessary to send out any such messages
by wireless.”
“But supposing it's Pobloff?”
“Didn't you say that Pobloff would never fol-
low us out of Europe?”
I52


WIRELESS MESSAGES
“But even if it's Keenan?” she persisted.
“Then you must remember that you are Miss
Allen, at your old trade of picking up little art
relics for wealthy families in England and America.
You will have yourself rowed directly over to the
Slavonia's landing ladder — you can see it there,
not two hundred feet away — and go on board
and secure a stateroom from the purser. The clear-
ing papers can be attended to later. I’ll have the
Laminian dingey take me ashore, somewhere down
near Barcola, if it can possibly be done in this
wind. Then I'll come out to the Slavonia later,
having, you see, just arrived on the train from
Venicel ”
She shook her head doubtfully. An inapposite
and irrational dread of seeing him return to the
dangers of land took possession of her. She knew
it would be impossible for her to put this untimely
feeling into words, so that he would see and un-
derstand it; and, such being the case, she argued
with him stubbornly to alter his plan, and to allow
her to be the one to go ashore, while he went im-
mediately to the liner.
He consented to this at last, a little reluctantly,
but the thought that he was safely installed in his
cabin, as she made her way shoreward through the
dusk, in the pitching and dripping little dingey, con-
Soled her for the sense of loneliness and desertion
which her position brought to her. The wind had
I53


PHANTOM WIRES
increased, by this time, and the rain was coming
down in slanting and stinging sheets. But her
spirit did not fail her.
From the water-front, deserted and rain-swept,
she called a passing street carriage, and drove to
the Hotel Bristol. There she sent the driver to ask
if any luggage had arrived from Venice for Miss
Allen. None had arrived, and Miss Allen, natu-
rally, appeared in great perturbation before the sym-
pathetic but helpless hotel manager. She next in-
quired if it was possible to ascertain when the
Cunard steamer sailed.
“The Slavonia, madam, leaves the harbor at day-
break!”
“At daybreak! Then I must go on board to-
night, at once!”
“I fear it is impossible, madam. The bora is
blowing, as you see, and the harbor is empty l’”
“But I must get on board!” she cried, and this
time her dismay and despair were not mere dis-
simulation.
The landlord shrugged his shoulders, while
Frank, calling out a peremptory order, in Italian,
to her driver, left him at the curb looking after her
through the driving rain, in bewilderment.
She went first to the steamship offices. They
were closed. Then she sought out the Cunard ten-
der — it was lightless and deserted. Then she hur-
ried to the water-front, driving up and down along
I54


WIRELESS MESSAGES
that lonely stretch of deserted quays, back and forth,
coaxing, wheedling, trying to bribe indifferent and
placid-eyed boatmen to row her out to her steamer.
It was useless. It could not be done. It was not
worth while to risk either their boats or their lives,
even in the face of the fifty, one hundred, two hun-
dred lira which she flaunted in their unperturbed
faces.
Grating and rocking against the quayside, above
the heads of the group about her, she caught sight
of a white-painted steam launch, with a high-stand-
ing bow, and on it a uniformed officer, smoking in
the rain.
She approached him without hesitation. Could
he, in any way, carry her out to her steamer? She
pointed to where the lights of the Slavonia shone
and glimmered through the gray darkness. They
looked indescribably warm and homelike to her
peering eyes.
The officer looked her up and down in stolid
Austrian amazement, trying to catch a glimpse of
her face through her wet and flattened traveling
veil. Could he take her out to her steamer? No;
he was afraid not. Yes, it was true he had steam
up, and that his crew were aboard, but this was
the official patrol of the Captain of the Port — it
was not to carry passengers — it was solely for the
imperial service of the Austrian Government.
She pleaded with him, weeping. He was sorry,
I55


PHANTOM WIRES
but the Captain of the Port would permit no such
irregularity.
“Where is the Captain of the Port, then?” she
demanded.
The officer puffed his cigar slowly, and looked
her up and down once more. He was in his office
in the Administration Building — but the officer's
shrug and smile told her that it was, in his eyes,
no easy thing to secure admission to the Captain
of the Port. The very phrase, “the Captain of the
Port,” that had been bandied back and forth for the
last few minutes, became odious to her; it seemed
to designate the title of some august and super-
natural and tyrannous power who held her life and
death in his hands.
She turned on her heel and drove at once to the
Administration Building. Here, at the entrance,
she was confronted by a uniformed sentry, who,
after questioning her, passed her on to still another
uniformed personage, who called an orderly, and
sent that somewhat bewildered messenger and his
charge to the anteroom of the Captain of the Port's
private secretary. Frank had a sense of hurrying
down long and jail-like corridors, of ascending
stairs and passing sentries, of questionings and con-
Sultations, of at last being ushered into a softly-
lighted, softly-carpeted room, where a white-
bearded, benignant-browed official sat in a swivel-
chair before a high walnut desk.
I56


WIRELESS MESSAGES
-
He shook his head mournfully as he listened to
her story. But she did not give up. She even
amazed him a little by the sheer impetuosity of her
speech.
“Is there much at stake, signorina?” he asked, at
last, as she paused for breath.
“A man's soul is at stake!” was the answering
cry that rang through the quiet room.
The Captain of the Port smiled a little cynically,
scarcely understanding.
Yet something almost fatherly about his sad and
wistful face steeled her to still further persistence,
and she afterward remembered, always a little
shamefaced, that she had wept and clung to his arm
and wept still again, before she melted and bent
him from his official determination. She saw,
through blurred and misty eyes, his hand go out
and touch an electric button at his side. She saw
him write three lines on a sheet of paper, an at-
tendant appear, and heard an order briefly and suc-
cinctly given. She had gained her end.
The Captain of the Port rose as she turned to
go from the room.
“Good night, and also good-bye, signorina!” he
said quietly, with his stately, old-world bow.
She paused at the door, wordlessly demeaned,
momentarily ashamed of herself. She felt, in some
way, how miserable and low and self-seeking she
stood beneath him, how high and firm he stood
I57


PHANTOM WIRES
above her, with his calm and disinterested kindli-
116SS.
She turned back to him once more.
“Good-bye,” she said inadequately, in her tearful
and tremulous contralto. “Good-bye, and thank
you, again and again!”
He bowed from where he stood in the center of
his quiet and sheltered office, seeming, to her, a
strangely old-time and courtly figure, a proud yet
unpretentious student of life at peace with his own
soul. The years would come and go, the years that
would so age and wear and torture her, but he
would reign on in that quiet office unchanged, con-
tented, still at peace with himself and all his world.
“Good-bye,” she said for the third time, from the
doorway.
Then she hurried down to her waiting carriage
and raced for the quay. There she took an al-
most malicious delight in the bustle and perturba-
tion to which her return gave sudden rise. The
sleepy and sullen crew were stirred out, signals were
clanged, ropes were cast off; and down in her little
narrow cabin, securely shut off from the driving
spray, she could feel and hear the boat lurch and
pound through the waves. Then came shrill calls
of the whistle above, the sound of gruff voices, the
rasp and Scrape of heaving woodwork against wood-
work, the grind of the ladder against the boat-
fenders, the cry of the officer telling her to hurry.
158


WIRELESS MESSAGES.
She walked up the Slavonia's ladder steadily, de-
murely, for under the lights of the promenade deck
she could see the clustering, inquisitive heads, where
a dozen crowding passengers tried to ascertain just
who could be coming aboard with such ceremony.
Leaning over the rail, with a cigar in his mouth,
she caught sight of her husband. As she passed
him, at the head of the ladder, he spoke one short
sentence to her, under his breath.
It was a commonplace enough little sentence, but
as the purport of it filtered through her tired mind
it stung her into both a new wariness of attitude
and thought and a new gratefulness of heart.
For as she passed him, without one betraying
emotion or one glance aside, he had whispered to
her, under his breath:
“Keenan is here, on board. Be careful!”
I59


BROKEN INSULATION
wº
“Oh, in that case,” he answered, “you'll find me
very glum and uncongenial. You'll probably be
only too glad to leave me alone!”
She nodded her head in meditative assent. Her
problem was a difficult one.
“Jim,” she said suddenly, “why should we play
this waiting and retreating game during the next
two weeks? Here we have Keenan on board, with
nothing to interfere with our operations. Why
can’t we work a little harder to win his confi-
dence?”
“We?” asked the other.
“Well, why couldn't I? All along, during those
days in Genoa, I had the feeling that he would
have believed in me, if some little outside accident
had only confirmed his faith in me. We can't tell,
of course, just what he found out after that Pobloff
affair, or just how he interpreted it, or whether he
is as much in the dark as ever. If that is the case,
we may stand just where we were before with
Keenan | *
“But I thought you wanted to get away from
this sort of thing?”
“I do — when the time comes,” she evaded, tor-
tured by the thought that she had withheld any-
thing from him. “I do — but are we to let Kee-
nan go, when we have him so close to us?”
“Then go ahead and both capture and captivate
him!'” said Durkin, with a voice that was gruff only
II I6I


PHANTOM WIRES
because it was indifferent. Still again he was op-
pressed by the feeling that she was passing beyond
his power.
“But see, Jim — I’m getting so old and ugly!”
And again she laughed, with her own show of in-
difference, though her husband knew, by the wist-
fulness of her face, that she was struggling to hold
back some deeper and stronger current of feeling.
So he thrust his hands deep in his pockets, and re-
fused to meet her eyes for a second time.
“I don't see why we should be afraid of either
Palermo or Gibraltar,” Durkin went on at last,
with a half-impatient business-is-business glance
about him. “Keenan is alone in this. He has no
agents over here, that we know of, and he daren't
put anything in the hands of the authorities. He's
a runaway, a fugitive with the district-attorney's
office after him, and he has to move just as quietly
as we do. Mark my words, where he will make
his first move, and do anything he's going to do,
will be in New York | *
“Then why can't I prepare the ground for the
New York situation, whatever it may be?” she de-
manded.
“You mean by standing pat with Keenan P”
“Precisely.”
“Then how will you begin?”
“By sending him a note at once, telling him how
I slipped away from Genoa to Venice, and asking
162


BROKEN INSULATION
him the meaning of the Pobloff attack — in other
words, by appearing so actively suspicious of him
that he'll forget to be suspicious of me.”
“And what do you imagine he will answer?”
“I think he will send me back word to say abso-
lutely nothing about the Genoa episode — he may
even claim that it's quite beyond his comprehension.
That will give us a chance to meet more naturally,
and then we can talk things over more minutely,
at our leisure.”
Durkin wheeled on her, half-angrily. Through
all their career, he had remained strangely un-
schooled to any such concession as this. It was an
affront to his dormant and masculine spirit of
guardianship; it seemed a blow in the teeth of his
nurturing instinct, an overriding of his perogatives
of a man and a husband.
“While you’re making love to him on the bridge-
deck, on moonlight nights!” he flung back at her,
bitterly.
“Do you think I could?” she murmured, with
a ghost of a sigh.
Durkin emitted a little impatient oath.
“Don’t swear, Jim' " she reproved him.
The vague prescience that some day he should
lose her, that in some time yet to be she should
pass beyond his reach and control, still again filtered
through his consciousness, like a dark and corroding
seepage. He caught her by the arm roughly, and
I63


- -
“‘Then why are you unkind to me?’ she asked, more calmly
now.” Puge 165.





BROKEN INSULATION
the power to shake and bewilder and leave him so
wordlessly unhappy. It was the ever-recurring in-
congruity, the repeated syncretism, which made him
vaguely afraid of himself and of the future. Then,
as he looked down into her face once more, and
studied the shadowy violet eyes, and the low brow,
and the short-lipped mobile mouth so laden with
impulse, and the soft line of the chin and throat so
eloquent of weakness and yielding, a second and
stronger wave of feeling surged through him.
“I love you, Frank; I tell you I do love you!” he
cried, with a voice that did not seem his own. And
as she lay back in his arms, weak and surrendering,
with the heavy lashes closed over the shadowy eyes,
he stooped and kissed her on her red, melancholy
mouth.
Yet as he did so the act seemed to take on the
touch of something solemn and valedictory, though
he fought back the impression with his still reiter-
ated cry of “I love you!”
“Then why are you unkind to me?” she asked,
more calmly now.
“Oh, can't you see I want you — all of you?” he
cried.
“Then why do you leave me where so much must
be given to other things, to hateful things?” she
asked, with her mild and melancholy eyes still on
his face.
“God knows, I’ve wanted you out of it, often
I65


PHANTOM WIRES
enough!” he avowed, desolately. And she made
no effort to alleviate his suffering.
“Then why not take me out of it, and keep me
out of it?” she demanded, with a cold directness
that brought him wheeling about on her.
He suddenly caught her by the shoulders, and
held her away from him, at arms' length. She
thought, at first, that it was a gesture of repudia-
tion; but she soon saw her mistake. “I swear to
God,” he was saying to her, with a grim tremor of
determination in his voice as he spoke, “I swear
to God, once we are out of this affair, it will be the
last !”
“It will be the last!” repeated the woman, brood-
ingly, but her words were not so much a declaration
as a prayer.
I66


PHANTOM WIRES
She had erred a little, she felt, in her estimate of
Keenan's character; yet she had not been mistaken
in the course of action which he was to pursue.
For, from the beginning, after the constraint of
their first meeting on board had passed away, he
had shown her a direct and open friendliness which
now and then even gave rise to a vague and un-
easy suspicion in her own mind. This friendliness
had brought with it an easier exchange of confi-
dences, then a seeming intimacy and good-fellow-
ship which, at times, made it less difficult for Frank
to lose herself in her rôle.
Keenan, one starlit night under the shadow of a
lifeboat amidships, had even acknowledged to her
the dubiousness of the mission that had taken him
abroad. Later, he had outlined to her what his life
had been, telling her of his struggles when a penni-
less student of the City law school, of his early and ,
unsavory criminal-court efforts, and his unhappy
plunge into the morasses of Eighth-ward politics,
of his campaign against the “Dave Kelly” gang,
and the death of his political career which came
with that opposition, of his swinging round to the
tides of the times and taking up with bucket-shop
work, of his “shark” lawyer practices and his
police-court legal trickeries, of his gradual iden-
tification with the poolroom interests and his
first gleaning of gambling-house lore, of his drift-
ing deeper and deeper into this life of unearned
I68


THE TANGLED SKEIN
increment, of his fight with the Bar Association,
which was taken and lost before the Judiciary
Committee of Congress, and of his final offer
of retainer from Penfield, and private and expert
services after the second raid on that gambler's
Saratoga house. Frank could understand why he
said little of the purpose that took him to Europe.
Although she waited anxiously for any word he
might let fall on that subject, she respected his
natural reticence in the matter. He was a crimi-
nal, low and debased enough, it was true; but he
was a criminal of such apparent largeness of mind
and such openness of spirit that his very life of
crime, to the listening woman, seemed to take on
the dignity of a Nietzsche-like abrogation of all civic
and social ties.
Yet, in all his talk, he was open and frank
enough in his confession of attitude. He had seen
too much of criminal life to have many illusions or
to make many mistakes about it. He openly ad-
mitted that the end of all careers of crime was dis-
aster — if not open and objective, at least hidden
and subjective. He had no love for it all. But
when once, through accident or necessity, in the
game, he protested, there was but one line of pro-
cedure, and that was to bring to illicit activity that
continuous intelligence which marked the conduct
of those who stood ready to combat it. Society,
he declared, owed its safety to the fact that the
I69


PHANTOM WIRES
criminal class, as a rule, was made up of its least in-
telligent members. When criminality went allied
with a shrewd mind and a sound judgment — and
a smile curled about Keenan's melancholy Celtic
mouth as he spoke — it became transplanted, prac-
tically, to the sphere and calling of high finance.
But if the defier of the Establish Rule preferred
the simpler order of things, he continued, his one
hope lay in the power of making use of his fellow-
criminals, by applying to the unorganized smaller
fry of his profession some particular far-seeing pol-
icy and some deliberate purpose, and through doing
so standing remote and immune, as all centres of
generalship should stand.
This, he went on to explain, was precisely what
Penfield had done, with his art palaces and his Eu-
ropean jaunts and his doling out of political patron-
age and his prolonged defiance of all the police
powers of a great and active city. He had organ-
ized and executed with Napoleonic comprehensive-
ness; he had fattened on the daily tribute of less
imaginative subordinates in sin. And now he was
fortified behind his own gold. He was being
harassed and hounded for the moment — but the
emotional wave of reform that was calling for his
downfall would break and pass, and leave him as
secure as ever.
“Now, my belief is,” Keenan told the listening
woman, “that if you find you cannot possibly be the
17o


THE TANGLED SKEIN
Napoleon of the campaign, it is well worth while
to be the Ney. I mean that it has paid me to at-
tach myself to a man who is bigger than I am, in-
stead of going through all the dangers and mean-
nesses and hardships of a petty independent op-
erator. It pays me in two ways. I get the money,
and I get the security.”
“Then you believe this man Penfield will never
be punished?”
He thought over the question for a moment or
tWO.
“No, I don’t think he ever will. He stands for
something that is as active and enduring in our
American life as are the powers arrayed against
him. You see, the district-attorney's office repre-
sents the centripetal force of society. Penfield
stands for the centrifugal force. They fight and
battle against one another, and first one seems to
gain, and then the other, and all the while the fight
between the two, the struggle between the legal and
the illegal, makes up the balance of everyday life.”
“You mean that we're all gamblers, at heart?”
“I mean that every Broadway must have its
Bowery, that the world can only be so good — if
you try to make it better, it breaks out in a new
place — and the master criminal is a man who
takes advantage of this nervous leakage. We call
him the Occasional Offender — and he's the most
dangerous man in all society. In other words, the
I7I


PHANTOM WIRES
abject and isolated figure, and yet she was the one,
she knew, who had been most unworthy.
“And do you understand what it would imply —
what it would mean?” he asked slowly and with
significant emphasis.
She could not repress her primal woman's in-
stinct of revolt from the thoughts which his quiet
interrogation sent at her, like an arrow. But she
struggled to keep down the little shudder which
woke and stirred within her. He had done noth-
ing more than respond to her tacit challenge. But
she feared him, more and more. Until then she
had advanced discreetly and guardedly, and as she
had advanced and taken her new position he had
as guardedly fallen back and held his own. It
had been a strange and silent campaign, and all
along it had filled Frank with a sense of stalking
and counter-stalking. Now they were plunging
into the naked and primordial conflict of man
against woman, without reservations and without
indirections — and it left her with a vague fear of
some impending helplessness and isolation. She
had a sudden prompting to delay or evade that final
step, to temporize and wait for some yet undefined
reinforcements.
“And you realize what it means?” he repeated.
“Yes,” she said in her soft contralto. A feeling
of revulsion that was almost nausea was consum-
ing her. This, then, she told herself, was the bit-
I74


THE TANGLED SKEIN
ter and humiliating price she must pay for her
tainted triumph.
“And would you accept and agree to the condi-
tions — the only conditions?” he demanded, in a
voice now hatefully tremulous with some rising and
controlling emotion. She had the feeling, as she
listened, that she was a naked slave girl, being
jested over and bidden for on the auction block
of some barbaric king. She felt that it was time
to end the mockery; she no longer even pitied him.
“Listen!” she suddenly cried, “they are be-
ginning to send the wireless!”
They listened side by side, to the brisk kick and
spurt and crackle of the fluid spark leaping between
the two brass knobs in the little operating-room just
above where they sat. They could hear it distinctly,
above the drone of the wind and the throb of the
engines and the quiet evening noises of the orderly
ship — spitting and cluttering out into space. To
the impatient man it was nothing more than the
ripple of unintelligent and unrelated sounds.
To the wide-eyed and listening woman it was a
decorous and coherent march of dots and dashes,
carrying with it thought and meaning and system.
And as each word fluttered off on its restless Hertz-
ian wings, like a flock of hurrying carrier-pigeons
through the night, the woman listened and trans-
lated and read, word by word.
“Then we go it together — you and I — for all
I75


PHANTOM WIRES
it's worth !” Keenan was saying, with his face near
hers and his hand on her motionless arm.
“Listen,” she said sharply. “It — it sounds like
a bag of lightning getting loose, doesn't it?”
For the message which was leaping from the
lonely and dipping ship to the receiving wires at
the Highland Heights Station was one that she in-
tended to read, word by word.
It was a simple enough message, but as it trans-
lated itself into intelligible coherence it sent a creep-
ing thrill of conflicting fear and triumph through
her. For the words which sped across space from
key to installation-pole read:
“Woman — named — Allen — will — bring —
papers — to — P — Field's — downtown — house
— I — will — wait — word — from — you — at
— Philadelphia — advise — me — of — situation
— there — and — wire — D — in — time — Ker-
rigan.”
It was only then that she was conscious of the
theatricalities from which she had emerged, of the
man so close beside her, still waiting for her play-
acting word of decision. It was only then, too,
that she fully understood the adroitness, the smooth
and supple alertness, of her ever-wary and watch-
ful companion.
But she rose to the situation without a visible
sign of flinching. Taking one deep breath, as
though it were a final and comprehensive gulp of
176


THE TANGLED SKEIN
unmenaced life, she turned to him, and gazed quietly
and steadily into his questioning eyes.
“Yes, if you say it, I'm with you now, whether
it's for good or bad!”
“And this is finall” he demanded. “If you be-
gin, you'll stick to it!”
“To the bitter end ' " she answered grimly. And
there was something so unemotionally decisive in
her tone that he no longer hesitated, no longer
doubted her.
I2 177


CHAPTER XVIII
THE SEVERED KNOT
It was in the gray of the early morning, as the
Slavonia steamed from the Upper Bay into the
North River and the serrated skyline of Manhattan
bit into the thin rind of sunrise to the east, that
Durkin and Frank came suddenly together in a
deserted companionway. She had been praying
for one hour more, and then all would be set right.
“I want to see you!” he said sharply.
She looked about to make sure they were unob-
served.
“I know it — but I daren't run the risk —
now !”
“Why not now? What has changed?” he de-
manded.
“I tell you we can't, Jim! We might be seen
here, any minute!”
“What difference should that make?”
“It makes every difference!”
“By heaven, I've got to see you!” For the first
time she realized the force of the dull rage that
burned within him. “I want to know what's be-
fore us, and how we're going to act!”
“I tell you, Jim, I can't talk to you here!”
I78


THE SEVERED KNOT
“You mean you don't care to!” he flashed out.
“Can't you trust me?” she pleaded.
“Trust you? What has trust to do in a busi-
ness like ours?”
“It is your business — until you put an end to
it!” And her voice shook with the repressed bit-
terness of her spirit. “I tried to see you quietly,
last night, but you had gone to your cabin. I have
a feeling that we're under the eye of every steward
on this ship — I know we are being watched, all the
time. And if you were seen here with me, it would
only drag you in, and make it harder to straighten
out, in the end. Can't you see what's going on?”
“Yes, I have been seeing what's going on — and
I’m sick of it!”
“Oh, not that, Jim!'” she cried, in a little muffled
wail. “You know it would never be that!”
His one dominating feeling was that which grew
out of the stinging consciousness that she wanted to
escape him, that the moment had come when she
could make an effort to evade him. But he was
only paying the penalty! He had sowed, he told
himself, and it was only natural that in time he
should reap! Already he was losing her! Al-
ready, it might be, he had lost her!
“Won't you be reasonable?” she was saying, and
her voice sounded faint and far away. “I’ve got
to see this through now, and one little false move
would spoil everything! I must land by myself.
179


PHANTOM WIRES
I'll write you, at the Bartholdi, when and where
to meet me!”
The noise of approaching footsteps sounded down
the carpeted passageway. He had caught her by
the arm, but now he released his grip and turned
away.
“Quick,” she whispered, “here's somebody com-
ing!” -
She was struggling with the ends of her veil,
and Durkin was aimlessly pacing away from her,
when the hurrying steward brushed by them. A
moment later he returned, followed by a second
steward, but by this time Durkin had made his way
to the upper deck, and was looking with quiescent
rage at the quays and walls and skyscrapers of New
York.
Before the steamer wore into the wharf Frank
had seen Keenan and a last few words had passed
between them. She sternly schooled herself to
calmness, for she felt her great moment had come.
At his request that her first mission be to deliver
a sealed packet at the office of Richard Penfield,
in the lower West Side, she evinced neither sur-
prise nor displeasure. It was all in the day's work,
she protested, as Keenan talked on, giving her more
definite instructions and still again impressing on
her the need for secrecy.
She took the sealed package without emotion —
the little package for which she had worked so hard
I8O


FHANTOM WIRES
“Hello, there, Frank! — I’ve been looking out
for you!” said the intruder, with a taunt of mock-
ery in his easy laugh.
It was MacNutt. She gaped at him stupidly.
with an inarticulate throaty gasp, half of protest,
half of bewilderment.
“You see, I know you, Frank, and Keenan
doesn't!” And again she felt the sting of his
scoffing laughter.
She looked at the subdolous, pale-green eyes, with
their predatory restlessness, at the square-blocked,
flaccid jaw, and the beefy, animal-like massive-
ness of the strong neck, at the huge form odor-
ous of gin and cigar smoke, and the great,
hairy hands marked with their purplish veinings.
It seemed like a ghost out of some long-past and
only half-remembered life. It came back to her
with all the hideousness of a momentarily forgotten
nightmare, made newly hideous by the sanities of
ordered design and open daylight in which it in-
truded. And her heart sank and hope burned out
of her.
“You! How dare you come here?” she de-
manded, with a show of hot defiance.
He looked at her collectedly and studiously, with
an approving little side-shake of the bull-dog, pug-
nacious-looking head.
“You’re the same fine looker!” was all he said,
with an appreciative clucking of the throat. Oh,
182


THE SEVERED KNOT
how she hated him, and everything for which he
stood
By this time they had threaded their way out of
the tangled traffic of West street, and were rumbling
cityward through the narrower streets of Green-
wich village.
Frank's first intelligible feeling was one of grati-
tude at the thought that Durkin had escaped the
trap into which she herself had fallen. That did
not leave the situation quite so hopeless. Her sec-
ond feeling was one of fear that he might be fol-
lowing her, then one that he might not, that he
would not be near her in the coming moment of
need — for she knew that now of all times MacNutt
held her in the hollow of his hand — that now, as
never before, he would frustrate and crush and ob-
literate her. There were old transgressions to be
paid for; there were old scores to be wiped out.
Keenan and his Penfield wealth were nothing to her
now — she was no longer plotting for the future,
but shrinking away from her dark and toppling
present, that seemed about to buckle like a falling
wall and crush her as it fell. Month after month,
in Europe, she had known visions of some such
meeting as this, through nightmare and troubled
sleep. And now it was upon her.
MacNutt seemed to follow her line of flashing
thought, for he emitted a short bark of a laugh and
said: “It’s pretty small, this world, isn't it? I
183


PHANTOM WIRES
guessed that we'd be meetin' again before I'd swung
round the circle!”
“Where are we going?” she demanded, trying to
lash her disordered and straggling thoughts into co-
herence.
“We’re goin' to the neatest and completest pool-
room in all Manhattan!”
“Poolroom?” she cried.
“Yes, my dear; I mean that we're drivin' to
Penfield's brand-new downtown house, where, as
somewhat of a hiker in the past, you'll see things
done in a mighty whole-souled and princely fash-
ion | *
“But why should I go there? And why with
you?”
“Oh, I'm on Penfield's list, just at present, kind
o' helpin' to soothe some of the city police out o'
their reform tantrums. And you've got about a
quarter of a million of Penfield's securities on you
— so I thought I'd kind o' keep an eye on you —
this time!”
Her first impulse was to throw herself headlong
from the cab door. But this, she warned herself,
would be both useless and dangerous. Through
the curtained window she could see that they were
now in the more populous districts of the city, and
that the speed at which they were careering down
the empty car-tracks was causing early morning
foot-passengers to stop and turn and gaze after
184


THE SEVERED KNOT
them in wonder. It was now, or never, she told
herself, with a sudden deeper breath of determina-
tion.
With a quick motion of her hand she flung open
the door, and leaning out, called shrilly for the
driver to stop. He went on unheeding, as though
he had not heard her cry.
She felt MacNutt's fierce pull at her leaning
shoulder, but she struggled away from him, and re-
peated her cry. A street boy or two ran after the
carriage, adding to the din. She was tearing and
fighting in MacNutt's futile grasp by this time, call-
ing desperately as she fought him back. As the
cab swerved about an obstructing delivery-wagon
a patrolman sprang at the horses' heads, was jerked
from his feet, and was carried along with the
careering horse. But in the end he brought them
to a stop. Before he could reach the cab door a
crowd had collected.
A hansom dashed up as the now infuriated of-
ficer brushed and elbowed the crowd aside. Above
the surging heads, in that hansom, Frank could see
the familiar figure, as it leaped to the ground and
dove through the closing gap of humanity, after
the officer.
It was Durkin; and now, in a sudden passion of
blind fear for him she sprang from the cab-step and
tried to beat him back with her naked hands, fool-
ishly, uselessly, for she knew that if once together
185


THE SEVERED KNOT
velope. He flashed the unbroken red seal at the
officer, with a little laugh of triumph. That laugh
seemed to madden MacNutt, as he made a second
ineffectual effort to break into that tense and rapid
cross-fire of talk.
“And you don't want to lay a charge?” the po-
liceman demanded, as he angrily elbowed back the
ever intruding circle.
“Let 'em go!” said Durkin, backing toward his
cab.
“But what's the papers, and what t'ell does she
want with 'em 2 ” interrogated the officer.
“Correspondence!” said Durkin easily, almost
lightheartedly. “Kind of personal stuff. They're
— he's drunk, anyway!” For stumbling angrily
out of the cab, MacNutt was crying that it was all
a pack of lies, that they were a quarter of a million
in money and that the officer should arrest Durkin
on the spot, or he'd have him “broke.”
“And then you'll chew me up an’ spit me out,
won't you, you blue-gilled Irish bull-dog?” jeered
the irate officer, already out of temper with the
unruly crowd jostling about him.
“I say arrest that man!” screamed the claret-
faced MacNutt.
“And I say I'll run you in, and run you in mighty
quick, if you don’t get rid o' them jim-jams pretty
Soon!”
“By God, I’ll take it out of you for this, when
187


PHANTOM WIRES
my turn comes!” raved MacNutt, turning, purplish
gray of face, on the deprecating Durkin. “I’ll take
it out of you, by God!”
“There — there! He's simply drunk, officer;
and the woman has squared herself. I don't want
to press any charge. But you'd better take his
name!”
“Drunk, am I? You'll be drunk when I fin-
ish with you. You won't have a name, you'll have
a number, when I'm through with you!” repeated
the infuriated MacNutt.
“Look here, the two o' you!” suddenly ex-
claimed the outraged arm of the law, “you climb
into that hack and clear out o' here, as quick as
you can, or I'll run you both in l’”
MacNutt still expostulated, still begged for a pri-
vate audience in the street-corner saloon, still threat-
ened and pleaded and protested.
The exasperated officer turned to the cab-driver,
as he slung the street loafers from him to right and
left.
“Here, you get these fares o' yours out o' this —
get them away mighty quick, or I'll have you soaked
for breakin' the speed ord'nance!”
Then he turned quickly, for the frightened woman
had emitted a sharp scream, as her bull-necked com-
panion, with the vigor of a new and desperate reso-
lution, bodily caught her up and thrust her into the
gloom of the half-curtained carriage.
I88


THE SEVERED KNOT
“Oh, Jim, Jim, don't let him take me!” she
cried mysteriously to the man she had just robbed.
But the man she had just robbed looked at her
with what seemed indifferent eyes, and said nothing.
“Don’t you know where he's taking me? Can't
you see? It's to Penfield's' " she cried, through
her weakening struggles.
A new and strange paralysis of all his emotions
seemed to have crept over Durkin, as he watched
the cab door slammed shut and the horses go
plunging and curveting out through the crowd.
“You’d better get away as quiet as you can!”
said the policeman, in an undertone, for Durkin had
slipped a ten-dollar bill into his unprotesting fin-
gers. “You’d better slide, for if the colonel hap-
pens along I can't do much to help you out!”
Then, with his hand on Durkin's cab door he
said, with unfeigned bewilderment: “Say, what's
the game of your actress friend, anyway?”
Durkin turned away in disgust, without answer-
ing. She was no longer his friend; she was his
enemy, his betrayer! He had lived by the sword,
and by the sword he should die! He had triumphed
through crime, and through crime he was being un-
done! He had led her into the paths of duplicity;
he had taught her wrong-doing and dishonor; and
with the very tools he had put in her hand she had
cut her way out to liberty, and turned and defeated
him!
189


PHANTOM WIRES
Then he remembered the scene on the Slavonia,
and her passionate cry for him, for his love. In
the wake of this came the memory of still earlier
scenes and still more passionate cries for what he
had so scantily given her.
Then suddenly he smote his knees with his
clenched fists, and said aloud:
“It can’t be true! It can’t be true!”
190


CHAPTER XIX
THE ULTIMATE OUTCAST
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 hap-
pened with him, manifold gray ash-heaps of regret
for past misdeeds. It also brought with it the cus-
tomary revulsion of feeling, and a prowling hunger
for some amendatory activity. Yet with that hun-
ger 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 ap-
peal there passed through his mind the dangers and
the chances that lay before him. The situation had
I9I


PHANTOM WIRES
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 bat-
tle, 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 with-
out 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
I92


THE ULTIMATE OUTCAST
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 lit-
tle 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 counte-
nance no profligate waste of time. So he plunged
straight into the heart of his subject.
“This office is at present carrying on a cam-
paign against Richard Penfield, the poolroom oper-
ator and gambler.”
The district-attorney put down his paper.
“This office is carrying on a campaign against
every lawbreaker brought to its attention,” he cor-
rected, 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.
I3 I93


PHANTOM WIRES
“I suppose not — but how much were your
losses?”
“I’ve lost nothing!” Durkin was growing im-
patient of this curtly condescending tone. It was
the ponderosity of officialdom, he felt, grown play-
ful, in the face of a passing triviality.
The district-attorney turned over the card which
had been brought in to him, with a deprecating up-
lift 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 Pen-
field'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 P’’
“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!”
I94


THE ULTIMATE OUTCAST
“Then I can only refer you to the decision of the
Court of Appeals in the McCord case, and the Ap-
pellate Division's reversal of the ‘green-goods’ con-
viction 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 save her.”
“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, to-
day, before any harm comes to her.”
“What sort of harm?”
Durkin found it hard to put his fears and feel-
ings into satisfactory words. He was on danger-
ous seas, but he made his way doggedly on, be-
tween the Charybdis of reticence and the Scylla of
plain-spoken suggestion.
I95


BHANTOM WIRES
“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 informa-
tion 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 l’”
“But will you?”
“Yes, on the condition I have implied l’”
“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 ex-
pectation of an adequate bribel This office, sir,
accepts no bribes!”
“I would not call it bribery!”
“Then how would you describe it?” .
196 f


THE ULTIMATE OUTCAST
“Oh, I might be tempted to call it — well, co-
ôperation!” -
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 Pen-
field'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 Cap-
tain Kuttrell's head!”
“Ah, I see! You regard Penfield as immune!”
“Penfield is not immune!” said the public prose-
cutor. The oldish-young face was very flushed
and angry by this time. “Don’t misunderstand
me. As a recognized and respected citizen, you al-
ways 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,
197


PHANTOM WIRES
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 im-
patiently.
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 door-
way.
“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 com-
press 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 noth-
198


THE ULTIMATE OUTCAST
ing 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 scoff-
ingly. Two plain-clothes men to capture a steel-
bound fortress!
“Don’t trouble them. They might make Pen-
field 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 l’’
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
I99


PHANTOM WIRES
fight, not only alone, but in the face of this unjust
coalition brought with it a desperate and almost in-
toxicating 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 blind-
ly, there remained no reason why he himself, how-
ever recklessly he went his way, should not in the
end disregard its engines and evade its ever-im-
pending 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 re-
sentment 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.
2OO


CHAPTER XX
THE SPIDER AND THE FLY
“And here's where we two hang out!” It was
MacNutt who spoke. w
Frances Durkin was neither protesting nor strug-
gling 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 decor-
ous 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 cigar-
store; 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
2OI


PHANTOM WIRES
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 Mac-
Nutt 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 an-
other 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 chuck-
led a little, gutturally, deep in his pendent and flaccid
throat.
2O2


THE SPIDER AND THE FLY
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 Sani-
tarium 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 omi-
nously 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 in-
vention,” he said, as his finger played on the elec-
205


PHANTOM WIRES
tric 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’s the 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 Ex-
change!”
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 shoul-
2O6 -


THE SPIDER AND THE FLY
der. “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 him-
self, 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. We don't need any look-
out, 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 l’”
Frank said nothing, but her still roving eyes took
in each detail, bit by bit, as she warned and schooled
2O7


PHANTOM WIRES
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 lit-
tle 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 sec-
ond 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?” de-
manded Frank.
208


THE SPIDER AND THE FLY
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' hus-
band o' yours an’ myself!” -
“What has he ever done to you? Why, should
you want to punish him?” argued Frank, help-
lessly.
“I’m not goin’ to punish him!” declared Mac-
Nutt, with a little laugh. “That's just where the
damned fine poetic justice of the thing comes in.
He’s goin’ to punish himself!”
I4 209


PHANTOM WIRES
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 l’”
“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 tempt-
ingly 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
2I2


THE PIT OF DESPAIR
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 en-
gine. -
“You don't notice anything strikin’?” he inter-
rogated wickedly.
She did not. r
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 sur-
face 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 re-
fracted light.
“Are you on?” reiterated the watching man.
The wave of pallor that swept over her face
213


PHANTOM WIRES
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 shim-
mering 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 ver-
tically 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 guard-
rail as well.
The very sound of that blow, as it descended,
was swallowed up in the sudden, blinding, light-
2I4


THE PIT OF DESPAIR
ning-like flash, in the hiss and roar of the pale-green
flame, as the sheet of steel, tortured into sudden in-
candescence, bridged and writhed and twisted, warp-
ing 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 dun-
geon. -
“Don't! That's enough l’” 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 incan-
descence 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 haunt-
ing 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
2I5


CHAPTER XXII
THE ENTERING WEDGE
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 tele-
graph official up to his roof, he might, that after-
noon, have witnessed both a delicate and an interest-
ing electrical operation.
For once up on the second roof, and sure that
2I9


THE ENTERING WEDGE
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 gal-
vanized 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 god-
dess 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 be-
fore him more lucid and direct.
He worked for an hour, connecting and discon-
necting, 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
22I


PHANTOM WIRES
he was reading an operator whose bluff, heavy,
staccato “send * was as familiar to his long-prac-
ticed 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 Pen-
field 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 re-
solved 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 a sabreur about 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, “things will happen tonight.”
222


CHAPTER XXIII
THE WAKING CIRCUIT
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 Broad-
way 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 re-
fracting-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
223


THE WAKING CIRCUIT
passage before him he paused to take out the re-
volver which he carried in his hip pocket, to un-
limber 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 un-
locked, and for the first time some sense of betrayal,
some intimidation of being trapped, some latent sus-
picion of artfully concealed duplicity, flashed
through his questioning mind.
He listened, and was greeted by nothing but si-
lence. -
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 sud-
denly smote on his ears the sharp clang and tinkle
of metal.
I5 225


THE WAKING CIRCUIT
gling to defy. But for the second time he stood
stockstill, weighed down by the feeling of some
presence, oppressed by the sense of something vague-
ly 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 sugges-
tions to which it could never give open and un-
equivocal 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 disre-
garding 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 bur-
nished 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
227


PHANTOM WIRES
him, as a blind man might, and took one shuffling
step forward.
Then a thought came to him, with the sudden-
ness and the shock of an electric current, as a radi-
ating tingle of nerves, followed by a strangely sick-
ening 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 mes-
sage 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 “wire-
less,” 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-
228


CHAPTER XXIV
THE GHosts of THought
In the ensuing silence, as the unbroken seconds
dragged themselves on, Durkin called himself a fool,
and, struggling bitterly with that indeterminate un-
easiness which possessed him, pulled himself to-
gether for some immediate and decisive action.
He could waste no more time, he told himself,
in foolish spiritualistic séances with his own shadow.
He had too much before him, and too short a time
in which to do it. His troubles, when he came to
face them, would be realities, and not a train of
vapid and morbid self-vaporings.
He advanced further into the darkness of the
room, slowly, with his hands outstretched before
him. He would feel for the friendly support and
guidance of the metal railing, and then grope his
way onward. For as yet he had only carried the
enemy's outposts. Then, for a second time, and
for no outward reason, he came to a dead halt. He
felt as if some elusive influence, some unnamable
force, was holding and barring him back. Again
he struck a match, recklessly, and again he saw noth-
23O


THE GHOSTS OF THOUGHT
ing but the burnished metal railing and the dark
mass of the vault.
It was with almost a touch of exasperation that
he stood there in his tracks, and slowly, method-
ically, thoroughly, surveyed the four quarters of
the lightless room in which he found himself. He
scrutinized the heavy, enmuffling gloom with strain-
ing eyes, first in one direction and then in another.
There was nothing to be seen, and not a sound
reached his ears. He had been in the room per-
haps not three minutes, yet it seemed to him as
many hours. Then he peered about him still again,
wondering, for the first time, by what psychological
accident his eyes turned in one particular direction,
slightly above and before him, to the right of the
direction in which he was advancing.
To rid himself of this new idea, and to decen-
tralize the illusion, he shifted his position. But still
his gaze, almost against his will, turned back toward
the former point, as though the blanketing black-
ness held some core, some discernible central point,
toward which he was compelled to look, as the mag-
netic needle is compelled to swing toward the North.
Surrendering to this impulse, he gaped through the
darkness at it, with a little oath of impatience.
As he did so he began to feel stir at the base of
his spine a tiny tremor of apprehension. This
tremor seemed suddenly to explode into a mounting
shudder of fear, flashing and leaping through his
23.I


PHANTOM WIRES
body until the very hair of his head was stirred and
moved with it.
The next moment the startled body responded to
clamoring volition, and he turned and fled blindly
back into the outer passageway, with a ludicrous
and half-articulate little howl of terror.
For growing out of the utter blackness he had
seen two vague points of light, two luminous spots,
side by side, taking on, as he faced them, all the
mysteries of all the primeval night which man ever
faced. He felt like a hunter, in some jungled mid-
night, a midnight breathless and soundless, who
looks before him, and slowly discerns two glowing
and motionless balls of fire — who can see nothing
else, in all his world — but from those two phos-
phorescent points of light knows that he is being
watched and stalked and hunted by some padded
Hunger lurking behind them.
In the unbroken and absolute silence which
seemed to mock at his foolish and stampeding fears,
an immediate reaction of spirit set it. He felt al-
most glad for this material target against which
to fling his terrors, for this precipitation of appre-
hension into something tangible.
He groped through his bag, hurriedly yet cau-
tiously, for his little sperm-oil lantern. Then he
took up the revolver that lay loosely in his coat
pocket. A moment later a thin little shaft of light
danced and fingered about the inner room.
232


THE GHOSTS OF THOUGHT
He could, at first, see nothing but the line of
burnished copper stretching across his path and
flashing the light back in his eyes. Behind this, a
moment later, he made out the dark and gloomy
mass of the black safe. Then he looked deeper,
with what was still again a flutter of enigmatical
fear about his heart, for that twin and ghostlike
glow which had filled him with such precipitate
terror.
But there was no longer anything to be seen.
He played his interrogative finger of light up and
down, and it was a full minute before his slowly-
adjusting sight penetrated to the remoter and higher
area of the surrounding walls.
It was then, and not till then, that he discovered
the fact that the wall on his right opened and re-
ceded, some five feet above the floor-level, into a
dimly-outlined alcove. As he looked closer he
made out that this alcove had, obviously, been filled
by the upper portion of a heavy iron staircase, lead-
ing to the floor above. The entire lower half of
this stairway, where once it must have obtruded
into the vault chamber, had been cut away. It was
on the remaining upper portion of this dismantled
stairway that his pencil of light played nervously
and his gaze was closely riveted.
For there, above his natural line of vision, half-
hidden back in the heavy shadows, his startled eyes
made out a huddled and shadowy figure. It was
233


PHANTOM WIRES
a woman's figure, in black, and motionless. It was
bound hand and foot to the iron stair-stanchions.
He did not notice, in that first frenzied glance,
the white band that cut across the lower part of her
face, so colorless was her skin. But as he looked
for the second time, he emitted a sudden cry, half-
pity, half-anger, for slowly and thinly it filtered
into his consciousness just what and who that
watching figure was.
And then, and then only, did he speak. And
when he did so he repeated his earlier cry.
“My God, Frank, what is it?”
There was no response, no answering movement
or gesture. He called to her again, but still abso-
lute silence confronted him.
As he crept closer to her, step by step, he saw
and understood.
The two luminous eyes, burning through the
dark, had been his wife's. She had been impris-
oned and tied there; but bound and muffled as she
was, the strength of her desire, the supremacy of
will, had created its new and mysterious wire of
communication. Some passion of want, some sheer
intensity of feeling, had found and used its warning
semaphore. She had spoken to him, without sound
or movement. Yet for what?
Yet for what? That was the thought that
seemed to dance back and forth across the fore-
ground of his busy brain. That was what he won-
234


THE GHOSTS OF THOUGHT
dered and demanded of himself as he clambered
and struggled and panted up the wall into the nar-
row and dusty alcove, and cut away the Sodden gag
between her aching jaws. The tender flesh was
indented and livid, where the tightened band had
pressed in under the cheek-bones. The salivated
throat was swollen, and speechless. The tongue
protruded pitifully, helpless in its momentary paral-
ysis.
“Oh, he’ll smart for this! By heaven, he'll smart
for this!” declared Durkin, as he stooped and cut
away the straps that bound her ankles to the ob-
durate iron, and severed the bands that bruised and
held her white wrists. Even then she could not
speak, though she smiled a little, faintly and for-
lornly and gratefully. She struggled to say one
word, but it resolved itself into a cacophonous and
inarticulate mumble, half-infantile, half-imbecile.
“Oh, he’ll pay for this!” repeated the raging man,
as he lowered her, limp and inert, to the floor below
and leaped down beside her. She sank back with a
happy but husky gasp of weakness, for the be-
numbed muscles refused to obey, and the cramped
and stiffened limbs were unable to support her.
All she could do was to hold her husband's hand
in her own, in a grateful yet passionate grip. She
must have been imprisoned there, he surmised, at
least an hour, perhaps two hours, perhaps even
longer.
235


PHANTOM WIRES
He started up, in search for water. It might be,
he felt, that a lead water-pipe ran somewhere about
them. He would cut it without compunction.
He took two steps across the room, when an au-
dible and terrified note of warning broke from her
swollen lips. He darted back to her, in wonder,
searching her straining face with his little shaft of
lantern light.
She did not speak; but he followed her eyes.
They were on the burnished copper railing refract-
ing the thin light that danced back and forth across
that dungeon-like chamber. He questioned her
fixed gaze, but still he did not understand her. She
caught his hand, and retained it fiercely. He
thought, from her pallor, that she was on the point
of fainting, and he would have placed her full
length on the hard cement, but she struggled against
it, and still kept her hold on his hand.
Then she took the tiny lantern from his fingers,
and bending low, tapped with it on the cement.
Durkin, listening closely, knew she was sounding
the telegrapher's double “I”— the call for atten-
tion, implying a message over the wire.
Slowly he spelt out the words as she gave them
to him in Morse, irregular and wavering, but still
decipherable.
“The - railing — is — charged
“Charged?” he repeated, as the last word shaped
itself in his questioning brain.
| ??
236


THE GHOSTS OF THOUGHT
He took the lantern from her hand, and swung
the shaft of light on the glimmering copper. From
there he looked back at her face once more.
Then, in one illuminating flash of comprehension,
it was all clear to him. With a stare of blank won-
der he saw and understood, and fell back appalled
at the demoniacal ingenuity of it all.
“I see! I see!” he repeated, vacuously, almost.
Then, to make sure of what he had been told, he
crossed the room and picked up the bar of steel that
had fallen at his feet as he first entered the door.
This bar he let fall so that one end would rest on
the metal vault-covering and the other on the rail of
copper.
There was a report, a sudden leap of flame, and
the continued hissing fury of the short-circuited
current, until the bar, heated to incandescence,
twisted and writhed where it lay like a thing of
life. He drew a deep breath, and watched it.
That was the danger he had so closely skirted
That was the fate which he had escaped
He stood gazing at the insidious yet implacable
agent of death, spluttering its tongue of flame at
him like an angry snake; and, as he looked, his
face was beaded with sweat, and seemed ashen in
color.
Then a sense of the dangers still surrounding
them returned to his mind. He shook himself to-
gether, and, making a circuit of the room, found
237


PHANTOM WIRES
the switch and turned off the current. As he did
so he gave a little muffled cry of gratitude, for
across the rear corner of the room ran two leaden
water-pipes. Into one of these he cut and drilled
with his pocket-knife, ruthlessly, without a moment's
hesitation. He was suddenly rewarded by a thin
jet of water spraying him in the face. He caught
his hat full of it, and carried it to Frank, who drank
from it, feverishly and deeply. It not only brought
her strength back to her; but, after it, she could
speak a little, though huskily, and with considerable
pain.
“Can you walk?”
She signalled, yes.
“We’ve got to get out of here, at once!”
He could see that she understood.
“Can you come now?” he asked.
She nodded her head, and he helped her to her
feet. Together, the one leaning heavily on the
other's arm, they paced up and down the already
flooded floor, until power came back to her aching
limbs, and steadiness to her tired nerves.
“It would be better not to go together. I’ll help
you out and give you fifty yards' start. If anything
should happen, remember that I'm behind you, and
that, after this, I’m ready to shoot, and shoot with-
out a quaver.”
Again she nodded her head.
“But listen. When you get up through the side-
238


THE GHOSTS OF THOUGHT
walk grating, keep steadily on for two blocks,
toward the west. Then turn north for half a block,
and go into the family entrance at Kieffer's. If
nothing happens, I'll join you there. If anything
does occur to keep me back, give them to under-
stand that you've missed the last train for your
home in East Orange; put this five-dollar bill down
and ask for a front room on the second floor.
From there you must watch for me. If it's any-
thing dangerous I’ll signal you in passing.
By this time he had led her down the narrow,
tunnel-like passageway and was helping her up into
the rain-swept street.
“Whatever happens, remember that I’m behind
you!” he repeated.
Their struggles, as he assisted her up through the
narrow opening, were ungainly and ludicrous; yet,
incongruously enough, there came to him a fleet-
ing sense of joy in even that accidental and imper-
sonal contact of her hand with his.
Then he braced himself against the narrow brick
walls where he stood, appearing a strange and gro-
tesque and bodiless head above the level of the
Street.
Thus peering out, he watched her as she beat her
way down the wind-swept sidewalk. Already,
through the drifting midnight rain, the outline of
her figure was losing its distinctness. He was
reaching down for his wet and sodden hat, to fol-
239


THE RULING PASSION
the corner into the blinking and serried lights of
Eighth avenue. “It’s that damned groundhog I'm
goin' to dig out yet!”
“Well, you can't go back there after him!” pro-
tested Keenan.
“Can't I? Well, I’m goin' back, and I’m goin'
to get that man, and I’m goin' to fry him in his own
juices!”
He pushed the woman's inert weight away from
him, and leaned out from under the cape, with a
sharp word or two to Penfield's chauffeur. Then
he suddenly whistled and waved his arm.
“What are you doing that for?” Keenan de-
manded of him.
Keenan had caught the drooping figure, and was
making an effort to support it. His face, for some
unknown reason, was almost as colorless as the
face that lay so passively against his rain-soaked
shoulder.
“I’m goin' back!” declared MacNutt.
“Is it worth while — now?” demurred the
other.
“I’m goin' to get my hooks on Durkin, even if
I have to wade through every raidin' gang in the
precinct!”
“And then what?” deprecated Keenan.
“Then I'll meet you at Penfield's house, uptown,
and the show will come to a finish l’”
“And what am I expected to do?” demanded
243


PHANTOM WIRES
Keenan, impatiently. For the approaching four-
wheeler had come to a standstill beside them, and
MacNutt was already out in the rain.
“You take care o' that!” he pointed a contemp-
tuous finger toward the motionless woman, “and
mighty good care!”
“But how's all this going to help us out?”
“I’ll show you, when the time comes. Here's
the key for Penfield's house. You'll find it nice
and quiet and secluded there, and if I do bring
Durkin back with me, by heaven, you'll have the
privilege o' seein’ a lurid end to this uncommonly
lurid game!”
He tossed the key into the tonneau. Keenan
picked it up in silence.
They heard the clatter of the horses' hoofs on
the wet asphalt, the sharp closing of the cab door,
the rattle of the wheel-tires across the steel car-
tracks, and he was gone. A moment later they
were dipping up the avenue between two long rows
of undulating lights, with the rain drifting in on
their faces.
Then Keenan turned and looked down at the
woman beside him. During several minutes of un-
broken silence Frank nursed the dim consciousness
of his keen and scrutinizing glance. But her mind
seemed encaged in a body that was already dead;
she had neither the will nor the power to look up
at him.
244


PHANTOM WIRES
what was she, trading thus, even in thought, on her
bruised and wearied body? What had she fallen
to, what was it that had deadened all that was softer
and better and purer within her, that she could thus
see slip away from her the last solace and dignity of
her womanhood?
There, she told herself bitterly, lay the degrada-
tion and the ultimate danger of the life she had
led. It was there that the grimmer tragedy came
into her career. The surrender of ever greater and
greater hostages to expediency, the retreat to ever
meaner and meaner instruments of activity, the
gradual induration of heart and soul, the desperate
and ever more desperate search for self-deceiving
extenuations, for self-blinding condonement, for
pitiful and distorting self-propitiation — in these
lay the inward corruption, more implacably and
more terribly tragic than any outward blow ! She
had once deluded herself with the thought that a life
of crime might lose at least half of its evil by los-
ing all of its grossness. She had even consoled her-
self with the thought that it was the offender against
life who saw deepest into life. It was but natural,
she had always argued with herself, that the
thwarted consciousness, that the erring and suffer-
ing heart, should yield deeper insight into the dark
and complicated ranges of spiritual truth than
could the soul forever untried and unshaken. The
tempted and troubled heart, from its lonely towers
246


THE RULING PASSION
of unhappiness, must ever see further into the mean-
ing of things than could those comfortably normal
and healthy souls who suffered little because they
ventured little. She had ventured much, and she
had lost much. She had thought to hold some in-
most self aloof and immune. She had dreamed
that some inward irreproachability of thought, some
light-hearted tact of open conduct, might leave still
untainted that deeper core of thought and feeling
which she had long thought of as conscience, while
some deceiving and sophistical transmutation of val-
ues whispered to her adroitly that in some way all
good might be bad, and that all bad might in some
way be good.
But that, she now knew, was a mockery. She
was the sum of all that she had thought and acted.
She was a disillusioned and degraded and unscrupu-
lous woman, steeped in enormities so dark that
it appalled and sickened her even to recall them.
She was only the empty and corroded shell of a
woman, all that once aspired and lived and
hoped in her eaten away by the acid currents
of that underground world into which she had
fallen.
Yet rather than it should end in that slow and
mean and sordid inner tragedy of the spirit, she
told herself fiercely, she would fling open her last
arsenal of passion and come to her end in some
ironic blaze of glory that would at least lend sinister
247


PHANTOM WIRES
radiance to a timelessly base and sorry eclipse. So
she lay back in Keenan's clasp quiescently, unresist-
ingly, but watchfully. For she knew that the end,
whatever it might be, was not far away.
248


CHAPTER XXVI
THE CROWN OF IRON
Durkin's first feeling, as he scrambled to his feet
and half-stumbled, half-groped his way along the
narrow, tunnel-like passage, was an untimely and
impotent and almost delirious passion to get out
into the open and fight — fight to the last, if need
be, for all that narrowing life still held for him.
This feeling was followed by a quick sense of frus-
tration as he realized his momentary helplessness
and how comprehensive and relentless seemed the
machinery of intrigue opposing him.
Yet, he told himself with that lightning-like ra-
pidity of thought which came to him at such mo-
ments of peril, however intricate and vast the ma-
chinery, however carefully planned the line of
impending campaign, the human element would be
an essential part of it. And his last forlorn hope,
his final fighting chance, lay in the fact that where-
ever the human element entered there also entered
weakness and passion and the possibility of accident.
What now remained to him, he warned himself as
he hurriedly locked and barred the two steel doors
which shut off the first and second passageway, was
249


PHANTOM WIRES
to think quickly and act decisively. Somewhere, at
some unforeseen moment, his chance might still
come to him.
As for himself, he felt that he was safe enough,
for the time being. The officer who had detected
him in the manhole would be sure to follow up a
case so temptingly suspicious. The police, in turn,
could take open advantage of an intrusion so ob-
viously unauthorized and ominous as his own, and
find in it ample excuse for investigating a quarter
which for many months must have been under sus-
picion. But, under any circumstances, well guarded
as that poolroom fortress stood, its resistance could
be only a matter of time, and of strictly limited
time, once the reserves were on the scene.
Durkin's first thought, accordingly, was of the
roof, for, so far as he knew, all escape from the
ground floor was even then cut off. Yet the first
door leading from the vault chamber he found to
be steel-bound and securely locked. He surmised,
with a gasp of consternation, that the doors above
him would be equally well secured. He remem-
bered that Penfield never did things by halves, and
he felt that his only escape lay in that upward flight.
So he saw that it was to be a grim race in demoli-
tion; that while he was to gnaw and eat his way
upward through steel and brick, like a starving rat
boring its passage up through the chambers of a
huge granary, his pursuers would be pounding and
250


THE CROWN OF IRON
battering at the lower doors in just as frenzied
pursuit. -
He no longer hesitated, but moved with that
clear-thoughted rapidity of action which often came
to him in his moments of half-delirium. Turning
to his tool-bag and scooping out his bar of soap,
he kneaded together enough of the nitroglycerine
from one of the stout rubber bags to make a mix-
ture of the consistency of liquid honey. This he
quickly but carefully worked into the crack of the
obstructing door. Then he attached his detonator,
and shortened and lighted his fuse, scuttling back to
the momentary shelter of the outer passage, making
sure to be beyond the deadly “feathered radius” of
the nitro.
There he waited behind the steel-bound door for
the coming detonation. The sound of it smote him
like a blow on the chest, followed by a rush of air
and a sudden feeling of nausea.
But he did not wait. He groped his way in, re-
locked the passage door and crawled on all fours
through the smoke and heavy, malodorous gases.
The remnants of the blasted door hung, like a
tattered pennon, on one twisted hinge, and his way
now lay clear to the ladder of grilled ironwork lead-
ing to the floor above. But here the steel trapdoor
again barred his progress. One sharp twist and
wrench with his steel lever, however, tore the bolt-
head from its setting, and in another half-minute
25I


PHANTOM WIRES
he was standing on the closed door above, shutting
out the noxious smoke from the basement.
Between him and the stairway stood still another
fortified door, heavier than the others. He did not
stop to knead his paste, for already he could hear
the crash of glass and the sound of sledges on the
door at the rear of the cigar-shop. Catching up
a strand of what he knew to be the most explosive
of all guncottons — it was cellulose-hexanitrate —
he worked it gently into the open keyhole and again
scuttled back to safety as the fuse burnt down.
He could feel the building shake with the tremor
of the detonation, shake and quiver like a ship
pounded by strong head seas. A remote window
splintered and crashed to the floor, sucked in by the
atmospheric inrush following the explosion-vacuum.
He noticed, too, as he mounted the narrow stairs
before him, that he was bleeding at the nose. But
this, he told himself, was no time for resting. For
at the head of the second stairway still another
sheet of armored steel blocked his passage, and still
again the hurried, hollow detonation shook the
building. The ache in his head, behind and above
the eyes, became almost unbearable; his stomach
revolted at the poisonous gases through which he
was groping. But he did not stop.
As he twisted and pried with his steel lever at the
lock of the trapdoor that stood between him and
the open air of the housetop, he could already hear
252


THE CROWN OF IRON
the telltale splintering of wood and sharp orders and
muffled cries and the approaching, quick tramping
of feet. He fought at the lock like a madman, for
by this time the trampling feet were mounting the
upper stairs, and doors were being battered and
wrenched from their hinges. He had at least made
their work easy for them; he had torn open the
heart of Penfield's stronghold; he had blazed a path
for those officers of the law who had bowed before
the inaccessibility of the building he had disrupted
single-handed !
“Good!” he cried, in his frenzied delight.
“Give it to them good! Wreck 'em, once for all;
put 'em out of business!”
Then he gave a sudden relieving “Ah!”— for
the sullen wood had surrendered its bolts, and the
door swung open to his upward push. The night
wind, cold and damp and clean, swept his hot and
grimy face as he pulled himself up through the
opening.
Even as he did so he heard the gathering sounds
below him growing clearer and clearer. He
squatted low in the darkness, and with a furtive
eye ever on the dismantled trapdoor, groped his
way, gorilla-like, closer and closer to the wall
against which he knew the janitor's ladder to be
still leaning.
Then he dropped flat on his face, and wormed
his way toward the nearest chimney, not twelve feet
253


THE CROWN OF IRON
problem or the possible consequences in his mind;
he only remembered that that afternoon he had
noticed five crowded lines of washing swinging in
multi-colored disarray at the back of that many-
familied hive of life. He hesitated only once, at
the sheer edge of the roof, to make sure, in the
uncertain half-light, that he was above those
crowded lines.
“Let him have it — there he goes!” cried a
voice above, and at that too warning note his hesi-
tation took wing.
Durkin leaped out into space, straddling the first
line of sodden clothes as he fell. Even in that
brief flight the thought came to his mind that it
would have been infinitely better for him if the
falling rain had not weighted and flattened those
sagging lines of washing. Then he remembered,
more gratefully, that it was probably only because
of the rain that they still swung there.
As his weight came on the first line it snapped
under the blow, as did the second, which he clutched
with his hands, and the third, which he doubled
over, limply, and the fourth, which cut up under
his arm-pit. But as he went downward he carried
that ever-growing avalanche of cotton and woolen
and linen with him, so that when his sprawling
figure smote the stone court it fell muffled and
hidden in a web of tangled garments.
255


CHAPTER XXVII
THE STRAITS OF CHANCE
How his flight ended Durkin never clearly re-
membered. He had a dim and uneasy memory of
the lapse of time, either great or little, the confused
recollection of waking to his senses and fighting
his way free from a smothering weight of wet and
clinging clothes. As he struggled to his feet a
stab of pain shot through his left hand, and up
through his forearm. It was so keen and penetrat-
ing that he surmised, in his blank and unreasoning
haste, that he must have torn a chord or broken a
bone in his wrist. But on a matter like that, he
felt, he could now waste no time.
If he had, indeed, been unconscious, he con-
cluded, it had been but momentary. For as he
groped about in search of his hat, dazed and bruised,
he found himself still alone and unmolested. Creep-
ing through the apartment-house cellar, and out
past the door of the snoring and still undisturbed
janitor, he crouched for a waiting moment or two
behind an overloaded garbage-can, in the area.
Hearing nothing, he staggered up the narrow
stairs to the level of the sidewalk, wet and ragged
256


PHANTOM WIRES
The driver pulled up, thirty long and dreary feet
past him.
“What in hell d'you want?” he demanded
irately, raising his whip to start his team once
more, as he caught a clearer view of the seemingly
drunken figure.
“I’ll give you a fiver,” said Durkin thickly, “if
you'll gi’ me a lift!”
He held the money in his hand, as he stumbled
and panted to the wagon-step. That put an end
to all argument.
“Climb in, then — quick!” cried the big driver,
as he caught his passenger by a tattered coat sleeve
and helped him up into the high-perched seat.
“But for the love o' God, who's been doin'
things to you?” he went on, in amazement, as he
saw the bruised and bleeding and ash-colored face.
“They threw me out o' their damned dope
shop!” cried Durkin, with an only half-simulated
thickness of utterance, as he jerked a shaking
thumb toward the lights of the Chinese laundry.
“And I guess — I’m — I’m a bit knocked out!”
For he felt very weak and faint and weary,
though the cold rain and the open night air beat
on his upturned face with a sting that was grate-
fully refreshing.
“They certainly did make a mess o' you!”
chortled the unmoved driver, as they rumbled west-
ward and took the corner with a skid of the great
258


THE STRAITS OF CHANCE
forward and caught up the relaxed and still un-
conscious figure.
“Where'd you get a license for buttin' in on
this?” expostulated the surprised driver.
“Buttin' in P” cried the man in the raincoat, as
he lifted the limp figure in his great, gorilla-like
arms. “This isn't buttin' in — this is takin' care
o' my own friends!” -
“Friend o' yours, then, is he?” queried the weak-
ening driver.
“A friend o' mine!” cried the other angrily, for
his man was already safely in the cab. “You
damned can-slinger, d'you suppose I’m wastin' cab-
fare doin' church rescue work? Of course he's a
friend o' mine.
“And not only that,” he added, under his breath,
as he swung up into the cab and gave the driver
the number of Penfield’s uptown house, “and not
only that—he's a friend o' mine who's worth just
a little over a quarter of a million to me!”
261


CHAPTER XXVIII
THE HUMAN ELEMENT
It was slowly, almost reluctantly, that Durkin
returned to full and clear-thoughted consciousness.
Even before he had opened his eyes he realized that
he was in a hurrying carriage, for he could feel
every sway and jolt of the thinly cushioned seat.
He could also hear the beat of the falling rain on
the hood-leather, and on the glass of the door be-
side him, as he lay back in the damp odors of wet
and sodden upholstery.
Then he half-opened his eyes, slowly, and saw
that it was MacNutt beside him.
The discovery neither moved nor startled him;
he merely let the heavy lids fall over his tired eyes
once more, and lay there, without a movement or a
sign.
Tatter by tatter he pieced together the history of
the past few hours, and as memory came tardily
back to him he knew, in a dim and shadowy way,
that he would soon need every alertness of mind
and body which he could summon to his help. But
still he waited, passive and unbetraying, fighting
against a weakness born of great pain and fatigue.
262


PHANTOM WIRES
after listening for a cautious moment or two, as
softly entered the room into which this door led.
And still again a key was turned and withdrawn
from the lock.
Even with his eyes closed Durkin, as he lay there
husbanding his strength, was conscious of the Sud-
den light that flooded the room. Covertly opening
that eye which remained in the heavy shadow, sepa-
rating the lashes by little more than the width of
a hair, he could make out a large room, upholstered
and carpeted in green, with green-shaded electroliers
above two billiard tables that stood ghastly, and bier-
like beneath their blanketing covers of white cotton.
Against the walls stood massive, elephantine club
chairs of green fumed oak, and it was into one of
these that MacNutt had dropped the inert and un-
responding Durkin. At the far end of the room
the stealthy observer could make out what was as-
suredly the entrance to an electric elevator. In
fact, as he looked closer he could see the two mother-
of-pearl buttons which controlled the apparatus; for
it was plain that this elevator was one of those au-
tomatic lifts not uncommon in city residences of the
more palatial order.
Then, as he quietly but busily speculated on the
significance of this discovery, Durkin suddenly
caught sight of a triple crescent carved on the arm
of the chair against which he leaned. And as he
made out that familiar device he knew that he
264


PHANTOM WIRES
stiffened body, he knew that any test of strength
in the muscular and ape-like arms of MacNutt was
out of the question. So he lay back, weak and un-
resisting, every now and then emitting from his
half-opened lips a little moan of pain.
But behind the torn and battered ramparts of
the seemingly comatose body his vigilant mind paced
and watched and kept keenly awake. As he felt
the great hands pad and feel about his body, and
the searching fingers go through his clothes, pocket
after pocket, some sentinel intelligence seemed to
watch and burn and glow like a coal deep within
the ashes of all his outer fatigue. He waited quies-
cent, as he felt the heated, animal-like breath on
his face, as the ruthlessly exploring hands tore open
his vest, as they ripped away the inner pocket which
had been so carefully sewn together at the top, as
they drew out the tied and carefully sealed packet
of papers for which he had been searching.
More than once Durkin thought that if ever
those documents, for which he had endured and
suffered and lost so much, were again wrested from
him, it would be only after some moment of tran-
scendent conflict, after some momentous battle of
life's forlornest last reserves. Yet now, impas-
sively and ignominiously, he was surrendering them
to the conqueror, supinely, meanly, without even
the solace of some supreme if vain resistance! He
listened to MacNutt's gloating little “Ah!” of
266


THE HUMAN ELEMENT
A gloating and half-demoniacal chuckle broke
from the newcomer's lips. In one hand he carried
a decanter of brandy, in the other a seltzer siphon.
Durkin could hear the gurgle and ripple of the
liquid into the glass; a moment later he knew that
MacNutt was bending over him.
“Here, you, wake up out o' that!” he said, with
still another chuckle of ominous glee.
He shook the relaxed figure roughly.
“Get awake, there! This is too good — this is
something you can't afford to miss, you damned
Welcher!”
He poured the scalding liquor down the other's
throat. Some of it spilled and ran into the hollow
of his neck; some of it dribbled on his limp collar
and his coat lapels. But Durkin took what he
could, and was glad of it. The pain of his wounded
arm was very acute.
“Kind o' recalls our first meetin', eh?” de-
manded MacNutt, as he watched the other slowly
open his wondering eyes. “Kind o' remind you
of the day I loosened you up with brandy and
Seltzer, that first time I had to drag and coax you
into this dirty business?”
And again his captor laughed, wickedly, mirth-
lessly.
“Go on, take some more! I'm goin’ to give you
enough to light you all to glory!” he gloated. And
269


PHANTOM WIRES
still he poured the liquor down the unresisting man's
throat.
He dragged the other to his feet.
“Come on now, quick! There's a little scene
waitin' for you upstairs — something that'll kind
o’ soothe and console you for gettin' so done up!”
They were in the elevator by this time, mounting
noiselessly upward. Durkin could feel the fire of
the brandy soar up to his brain and sing through
his veins. MacNutt supported him as they stepped
from the elevator cage into a darkened room. On
the far side of this room, from between two heavy
portières, a gash of light cut into the otherwise un-
broken gloom.
A sound of voices floated out to them and Mac-
Nutt tightened his grip on the other's arm, as
they stood and listened, for it was Frances Durkin
and Keenan talking together, hurriedly, impetu-
ously, earnestly.
“But does it make any difference what I have
been, or who I am?” the woman's voice was ask-
ing. “I did my part; I did my work for you.
Now you ought to give me a chance!”
Still holding the other back, MacNutt circled side-
wise, until they came into the line of vision with
the unsuspecting pair in the other room. Keenan,
they could see, held one heavy hand on the woman's
shoulder, intimately; and she, in turn, looked up
into his face, in an attitude as open and intimate.
270


PHANTOM WIRES
opened and closed spasmodically; his flaccid lips fell
apart, vacuously, insanely.
“I’ll kill her!” he ejaculated under his breath.
MacNutt knew that his moment had come.
Without a spoken word he caught his revolver up
from his coat pocket. Then he thrust it, craftily,
into the other man's hand.
The insane fingers closed on the handle of it, the
glaring and expressionless eye peered along the
steadying barrel. MacNutt held his breath, and
waited. It must be soon, he knew, before the mo-
ment of madness had burnt itself out.
The woman under the white light of the electro-
lier drew back from Keenan, with her eyes still on
his face, so that her head and shoulders stood out,
a target of black against the white fore-ground.
Then she drew one hand quickly across her fore-
head, and, wheeling slowly, let her puzzled glance
sweep the entire circle of the room, until once more
her eyes rested upon the expectant eyes of Keenan.
Durkin, through all his rage, shut his teeth on
a sudden sob. It was all over. It was the end.
A change suddenly swept across the woman's
face, a light of exaltation leaped into her dilated
pupils, and her hand went up to her heart.
Was it some small sound or movement that she
had heard, or was it some minute vibration of
floor that she had felt?
“Jim, it's you!” she shrilled out suddenly, into
272 -





THE LAST DITCH
Keenan laughed, scoffingly.
“Take his revolver from him!” commanded
Durkin.
A momentary hesitation held her back.
“Take it, I say! And, by God, if he so much as
moves a finger, I’ll blow the top of his head off!”
The woman confronted Keenan once more, but
he fell back a step or two.
“There's no need of that,” he broke in angrily.
“If you want the gun, I'll give it to you!”
And as he spoke his arm swung down and back
to his hip pocket.
“Stop that!” cried Durkin sharply, as he saw
the movement. “Keep those hands up, or, by
heaven, I’ll let you have it!”
His arm, by this time, was tense and rigidly out-
stretched, and his steady pistol-barrel pointed just
between the other man's ludicrously blinking eyes.
In the silence that followed the woman reached
back, and without further hesitation drew the re-
volver from the motionless man's pocket.
It was a formidable, long-barreled “Colt,” which,
with one sharp motion of the fingers, she promptly
unlimbered, exposing the breech. In each cylinder
chamber, she saw, lay a loaded cartridge. Once
assured of this, she snapped shut the breech and
balanced the gun in the purposeful embrace of her
fingers.
“Now what?” she asked, with her eyes turned
275


THE LAST DITCH
ment. You'll find the motor operating the eleva-
tor. What you must do is to get to the switch, and
shut of the power before this car can get past us!
Quick!”
He still faced Keenan, but his eye followed her
to the door.
“If he does come, kill him; shoot him down, I
say, like a dog — or he'll kill you!”
He could hear, through those silent hallways, the
muffled rustling of her skirts and the sound of her
flying feet on the waxed and polished wood. Then
the silence suddenly became oppressive.
It was the unseen foe that he was afraid of, the
undiscerned force that he feared. His uneasy and
alert mind struggled to grasp the problem of how
and where MacNutt would strike, if strike he did,
out of the darkness of that silent and deserted
house. -
Durkin decided that above all things he must ren-
der impossible the descent of the elevator cage.
But for a moment he could think of no bar that
might be flung across the path of that complex and
almost irresistible machinery, once awakened into
its full power. Then the solution of the riddle
came to him.
Still menacing the silent Keenan with his re-
volver, he flung over, with one quick and reckless
push of his foot, the heavy mahogany table that
stood in the centre of the room.
277


PHANTOM WIRES
Then he turned to Keenan.
“Push that table out into the elevator shaft!”
he ordered. The other man did not move. And
time was precious; every second was precious!
Durkin repeated his command.
“Furniture-moving is not my vocation!” an-
swered Keenan, folding his arms.
As Durkin sprang forward, there was no mis-
taking his meaning.
“I’ll count ten,” he said, white-lipped. “Unless
the table goes out, you go out !” And he began
counting, silently, numeral by numeral.
“Well, if you insist!” said Keenan, with a shrug.
Even as Keenan, at the menace of his reiterated
command to hurry, threw open the guard door,
Durkin was wondering, in his feverish activity of
mind, just how soon MacNutt's next move would
come, and just how and where he would strike.
The answer to that question came more quickly
than he had expected. And it came grimly, and in
a manner most unlooked for.
For even as the reluctant Keenan stooped over
the heavy table, not ten feet from the shaft, the
elevator cage descended. It flashed by the open
door without stopping on its hurried course. But
as it winged past that square of open light a re-
volver shot rang out and reéchoed through the
TOOIT1.
Durkin, peering across the curling smoke, saw
278


PHANTOM WIRES
For a moment or two, like a defeated prize-
fighter, he panted and struggled, ludicrously yet
pathetically, to rise to his feet, but the effort was
futile.
It was as he found himself ebbing down through
some soft and feathery emptiness that he seemed
to hear a pitiful and imploring voice call thinly out,
“Mack 1 * Still fainter he seemed to hear it,
“Mack! Come up! I’m dying!” He remem-
bered, lazily, that it sounded like the distant voice
of Keenan—but where was Keenan’
Then he seemed to hear the purr and murmur
of distant machinery, followed by a gentle puff of
sound and what he hazily dreamed was the smell of
powder smoke. Then he remembered no more.
Just how or at what juncture he lost conscious-
ness he could never clearly remember. But his first
tangible impression was the knowledge that his
wife was once more pouring brandy down his throat
and imploring him to hurry. Then the sound of
muffled blows echoed from above.
“Quick, Jim, oh, quick, or it will be too late.
No, not that way. We can't go by the front—
that's cut off. By the back—this way — I've got
everything open l’”
“But what's the noise?” asked Durkin weakly.
“That's the police, with a fireman's axe, breaking
in the front door. But, see, it's not too late!
282


THE LAST DITCH
These steps take us up to the back court, and this
iron gate opens on a lane that runs from the supply
department of the hotel there, right through to the
open street!”
He shambled after her, white and tottering.
“Quick, Jim, quick!” she reiterated, as she sup-
ported him through the low gate, and kept her arm
in his as they passed down the dark lane, with its
homely smells of early cookery and baking bread.
Only one passion possessed them — the blind and
persistent and unreasoning passion for escape, for
freedom.
“But MacNutt — where's MacNutt?” demanded
Durkin, coming to a stop.
“No — no – quick!” gasped Frank, tugging at
his arm.
“I tell you I've got to have it out with that
man!” protested the pitiably dazed but dogged com-
batant at her side.
“You can't, Jim!”
“But I've got tol’”
“You can't — you can't,” she moaned, “for he's
dead!”
A sudden sickening fear crept through his aching
bones, seeming to leave them fluid, like wax.
“You — you did it?” he asked unsteadily. The
face he gazed into looked aged and worn and pallid
in the dim half-light of the breaking morning. A
Sudden great pity for her tore at his heart.
283


THE LAST DITCH
irony of that end, of how that uncomprehending yet
ineluctable power with which this man had toyed
and played and sinned had, at the ultimate moment,
established its authority and exacted its right.
He pulled himself up with a fluttering gasp, weak,
sick, overcome, and was wordlessly grateful for the
sustaining arm at his side.
For, once in the open, they were walking east-
ward, without a sense, momentarily, of either di-
rection or destination.
Above the valley of the mist-hung street a thin
and yellow light showed where morning was com-
ing on, tardily, thickly. The boy whistling “Tam-
many ” passed out of hearing.
“Thank God! oh, thank God!” Frank suddenly
sobbed out, tossed and exalted on a wave of blind
gratitude.
“God?” moaned the defeated and unhappy man
at her side, dragging painfully on with his bruised
and bitter body. “What has God to do with all
this — or with us?”
She could not answer. She saw only a wide and
gloomy vista of tangled crime and offense, stretch-
ing back into the past, as the tumbled and huddled
waves of a sea run out to its crowding skyline.
But it was the sea that had delivered them.
Broken, frustrated and defeated, hunted and
homeless, without consolation for her Yesterday or
respect for her Today, she looked up at the slowly
285


PHANTOM WIRES
wakening morning with a feeling that seemed to
fuse and blend into the fiercest of joy.
Then the momentary exaltation died out of her
weary body. They had life — but life was not
enough! A sense of something within her falling
and crumbling away, a silence of dark questioning
and indecision, took possession of her.
Then out of her misery she cried still again, pas-
sionately, persistently, as she clutched and clung to
him, her mate for whom and with him she was once
destined to be a wanderer over the face of the
earth:
“There must be a God! I tell you, there must
be a God. He has let us escape!”
The man looked at her, questioningly.
“Don’t you understand? This is the last?”
“The last?”
“Yes — yes, the last! You said it would be
never again, if once you escaped from this!”
He had forgotten. But the woman at his side,
holding him up, had remembered.
“Come!” she said. And they went on again.
286


CHAPTER XXX
ONE YEAR LATER — AN EPILOGUE-
Frances waited for her husband, walking slowly
up and down under the row of pallid city maples.
She preferred the open light of the Square to the
gloom of the street that cut like a canyon between
the towering office-buildings on either side of it.
There was a touch of autumn in the air, and a black
frost of the night before had left the sidewalks car-
peted with the mottled roans and yellows and russets
of the fallen leaves.
Summer was over and gone. And all life, in
some way, seemed to have aged with the ageing of
the year. There was something mournful, to the
ears of the waiting woman, in the very rustle of
the dry leaves under her feet, as she paced the
Square. The sight of the half-stripped tree-
branches, here and there, depressed her idle mind
with the thought of skeletons. The smell of the
dying leaves made her heart heavy. They seemed
to be whispering of Death, crying out to her at
the mutability of all things that lived and breathed.
And she had so wanted always to live and exult in
living; she had so trembled at the thought of these
287


PHANTOM WIRES
creeping changes and the insidious passing away
of youth and all it meant to her! “I hate autumn,
most awfully,” she had confessed to her husband
that morning, dolefully.
She went on, passing from under the shadow
of the trees, grateful for the reassuring thin sun-
shine of the late afternoon, that touched the roofs
and the tree-tops with gilt, and bathed the more
towering office-buildings in a brazen glory of light,
and left the street-dust swimming in a vapor of
pale gold. The city noises seemed muffled and
quiescent. A sense of fulfillment, of pensive ma—
turity, of tranquillity after tumult, lay over even
the urban world before her. She scarcely knew
why or how it was, but it left her melancholy,
lonely, homesick for things she could not name.
The waiting woman looked up, and saw her hus-
band. Suddenly, with one deep breath, all the emp-
tiness of life was a thing, if not of the past, at least
of the background of consciousness.
He was quite close to her by this time, and as she
stood there, waiting, she swept him with her quick
and searching gaze. He appeared before her, in
that fleeting moment of impersonal vision, strangely
objective, as completely and acutely visualized as
though she had looked upon him for the first time.
Something in his face wrung her heart, foolishly,
something in the wordless, Rembrandt-like poig-
nancy with which it stood out, through the cold
288


ONE YEAR LATER — AN EPILOGUE
“I tell you, Frank,” her husband was saying,
“the more I know of electricity the more I bow
down before it, in wonder, the prouder I am to be
mixed up in its mysteries! Just think of what
it’s come to be, this thing we call Electricity, since
the day primitive man first rubbed a piece of amber
and beheld the puny miracle of magnetic attrac-
tion! Why, today it harnesses tides and waterfalls,
and tames and orders force, and leaves power docile
and patient, swinging meek and ready from a bit
of metal thread! It lightens cities, at a turn of the
wrist; it hurls your voice half way round the world,
it guides sailors and measures and weighs the stars;
it threads empires together with its humming wires;
it's the shuttle that's woven all civilization into one
compact fabric' It's the light of our night-time,
and the civilizer of our world. It explodes mines,
and heals sickness. It creeps as silent as death
through a thousand miles of sea, and yet it's
the very tongue of our world ! It prints and
carves and beautifies; it rises to the most stupen-
dous tasks, and then it stoops to the most delicate
work | *
“And it lets me ring you up, my beloved own,
and hear your voice, your living voice!” Even
beyond her laughter he could catch the rapt note
as she spoke. He responded to that note by catch-
ing at her gloved hand, and keeping it in his grate-
fully.
29I


“Shon's Mr. Oppenheim at his Best”
THE MALEFACTOR
By E. PHILLIPS OPPENHEIM
Author of “A Maker of History,” etc. Illustrated by
F. H. Townsend. 12mo. Cloth, $1.50
A new Monte Cristo. Every page fascinates.—Brook-
lyn Citizen. -
Spirited, vigorous, mysterious, and, best of all, well-told.
— Boston Transcript.
Possesses literary merit far above what is usually
associated with this kind of fiction. — Philadelphia Press.
One of those fascinating stories which grips tightly the
deepest interest of the reader and holds on until the
strange tale is complete. — Syracuse Herald.
Nothing that he has yet produced compares with “The
Malefactor” in point of sheer, absorbing interest.—St.
Paul Pioneer Press.
Constructed with the skill in development of plot and
exciting interest of which the author is an acknowledged
master. — The Outlook, New York.
A story of the strange revenge of Sir Wingrave Seton,
who suffered imprisonment for a crime he did winot com-
mit rather than defend himself at a woman's expense.
— Toledo Blade.
LITTLE, BROWN, & CO., PUBLISHERs
254 WASHINGTON STREET, Boston


A Capital and Ingenious Mystery Tale
THE SLAVE OF SILENOE
By FRED M. WHITE
Author of “The Crimson Blind,” “The Corner House,” etc.
Illustrated. 12mo. Cloth, $1.50
A combination of detective story, mystery, and romance
that will interest even the most blasé of novel readers.
— Springfield (Mass.) Union.
May be recommended to anyone who enjoys a swift,
dramatic, and ingenious mystery story, with the interest
of the reader gripped at the outset.— Buffalo Express.
Bubbles with intense interest from beginning to end.
Fully as good a story as “The Crimson Blind.”— Brooklyn
Eagle.
The mysterious events which took place at the Royal
Palace Hotel, London, and at the strange house in Audley
Place, are unfolded in this absorbing story. —Washington
Star.
There are times when a novel of the “shilling shocker”
type is more to be desired than much fine writing. This
is especially true if it is forcibly written and is well
printed. “The Slave of Silence” is such a novel. . . .
For genuine entertainment one cannot do better than to
read this book. — New York Times.
LITTLE, BROWN, & CO., PublishERs
254 WASHINGToN STREET, Boston