Читать книгу The Wire Tappers - Stringer Arthur - Страница 6

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For all the calm precision with which Frances Candler had planned and mapped out a line of prompt action with Durkin, she was shaken and nervous and unstrung, as she leaned over the sounder, breathlessly waiting for the rest of the day’s returns to come through on Penfield’s wire.

Durkin, with two thousand dollars of his own and an additional eight hundred from her, had already plunged his limit at Penfield’s lower house, on the strength of her tip over the ’phone. There was still to be one final hazard, with all he held; and at five o’clock they were to meet at Hartley’s restaurant, and from there escape to a new world of freedom and contentment. But the fear of MacNutt still hung over her, as she waited—fear for certain other things besides their secret revolt on the very eve of their chief’s gigantic coup. For she knew what MacNutt could be when he was crossed. So she leaned and waited and watched, listening with parted lips, wishing it was all over with, torn by a thousand indefinite fears.

Then, to her sudden terror, Mackenzie called her up sharply.

“Is that you, Frank?” he cried.

“Yes; what is it, Mack?” she asked back, calmly enough, but with quaking knees.

“Doogan’s men are watching me here—they’ve got on to something or other. Cut this wire loose from outside, and get your ’phone out of sight. And, for heaven’s sake, don’t cut in on Penfield’s wire. I’ve just tipped off MacNutt—he’s off his dip, about it all. Look out for yourself, old girl!” he added, in a different tone of voice.

She rang off, feverishly, and vowed passionately that she would look out for herself. Catching up a pair of pliers, she cut the telephone wire from the open window, leaving two hundred feet of it to dangle forlornly over the little back house-courts. Then she ran to the door and locked and bolted it, listening all the while for the wire to speak out to her.

A minute later MacNutt himself rang up, and asked for Durkin. She made a movement as though to drop the receiver, and leave her presence unbetrayed; but the other had already heard her mellow “Hello?” of inquiry.

“What are you doing there?” he demanded, with a startled unsavory oath.

She tried to stammer out an adequate excuse, but he repeated his challenge. There was a moment’s pregnant pause. Then he hissed one ugly word over the wire to the listening woman. Mackenzie had been hinting to him of certain things; now, he knew.

He did not wait even to replace the receiver. While she still stood there, in the little sewing-room, white and dazed, he was in a swaying taxi, rattling and pounding nearer her, block by block.

He let himself in with his own pass-key, and raced up the long stairs, his face drawn, and a dull claret tinge. He found the door closed and bolted; he could hear nothing from within but the muffled clicking of the sounder as it ticked out the later New Orleans returns.

He paused for a moment, panting, but no answer came to his pound on the panels. He could spell out, in the dead silence, the names of the horses going over the wire.

“Open this door, by God, or I’ll kill you!” he cried, in a frenzy, throwing the weight of his huge body against it in vain.

He seized an old-fashioned walnut arm-chair from the next room, and forced it, battering-ram fashion, with all his strength, against the oak panels. They splintered and broke, and under the second blow fell in, leaving only the heavier cross-pieces intact.

Quite motionless, waiting over the sounder, bent the woman, as though she had neither seen nor heard. “White Legs————Yukon Girl————Lord Selwyn”————those alone were the words which the clicking brass seemed to brand on her very brain. In three seconds she stood before the telephone, at the other end of which she knew Durkin to be waiting, alert for the first sound and movement. But she saw the flash of something in the hand of the man who leaned in through the broken panel, and she paused, motionless, with a little inarticulate cry.

“Touch that ’phone, you welcher, and I’ll plug you!” the man was screaming at her. His lip was hanging loose on one side, and his face, now almost a bluish purple, was horrible to look at.

“I’ve got to do it, Mack!” she pleaded, raising one hand to her face. He flung out a volley of foul names at her, and deliberately trained his revolver on her breast. She pondered, in a flash of thought, just what chance she would have at that distance.

“Mack, you wouldn’t shoot me, after—after everything? Oh, Mack, I’ve got to send this through! I’ve got to!” she wailed.

“Stop!” he gasped; and she knew there was no hope.

“You wouldn’t shoot me, Mack?” she hurried on, wheedlingly, with the cunning of the cornered animal; for, even as she spoke, the hand that hovered about her face shot out and caught up the receiver. Her eyes were on MacNutt; she saw the finger compress on the trigger, even as her hand first went up.

“Jim!” she called sharply, with an agony of despair in that one quick cry. She repeated the call, with her head huddled down in her shoulders, as though expecting to receive a blow from above. But a reverberation that shook shreds of plaster from the ceiling drowned her voice.

The receiver fell, and swung at full length. The smoke lifted slowly, curling softly toward the open window.

MacNutt gazed, stupefied, at the huddled figure on the floor. How long he looked he scarcely knew, but he was startled from his stupor by the sound of blows on the street door. Flinging his revolver into the room, he stumbled down the heavily carpeted stairs, slunk out of a back door, and, sprawling over the court-fence, fell into a yard strewn with heavy boxes. Seeing a nearby door, he opened it, audaciously, and found himself in a noisy auction-room filled with bidders. Pushing hurriedly through them, he stepped out into the street, unnoticed.

When the wounded woman had made sure that she was alone—she had been afraid to move where she lay, fearing a second shot—with a little groan or two she tried to rise to her knees. She felt that there might still be time, if she could only crawl to the ’phone. But this, she found was beyond her strength. The left sleeve of her waist, she also saw, was wet and sodden with blood. She looked at it languidly, wondering if the wound would leave a scar. Already she could hear footsteps below, and again and still again she struggled to shake off her languor, and told herself that she must be ready when Durkin came, that he, at least, must not be trapped. She, as a mere pool-room stenographer, had little to fear from the law. But as she tried, with her teeth and her free arm, to tear a strip from her skirt, the movement, for all her tight-lipped determination, was too much for her. She had a faint memory of hearing footsteps swarming about her, and then of ebbing and pulsing down through endless depths of what seemed to her like eider-downed emptiness.

When she came to, one of Doogan’s men was leaning over her, with a glass of water in his hand. She could feel some of it still wet on her chin and waist-collar. She looked up at him, bewildered, and then from him to the other four men who stood about her. Then the events of the afternoon came back to her.

She closed her eyes again, vaguely wondering if some teasing, indeterminate mishap, which she could not quite remember, had yet come about. At first, she could not grasp it, as she lay there moaning with pain, the breeze from the open window blowing on her face. Then the truth came to her in a flash.

It was Durkin. He was coming back; and they were watching there, waiting to trap him. Again she told herself that she must keep her head, and be cool.

Without moving her head, she let her roving eyes take in the five men about her in the room; three of them, she knew, were plain-clothes men from the Central Office, the other two were Doogan’s agents. If Durkin came while they were still there—and now he could not be long!—they would let him in, and of course say nothing, and there they would have him, like a rat in a trap.

She grew hysterical, and cried out to them that she was dying, yet waiting all the time for the sound of Durkin’s step, trying to think how she might save him. At last, to her sudden joy, she remembered that he was to bring from her rooms her own handbag, filled with a few things she had gathered up to take away with her. He would surely carry that bag in with him when he came; that was her salvation.

She fell to shrieking again that she was dying, demanding shrilly why her doctor had not come. Through her cries, her alert ears heard the sound of voices at the street-door. It was Durkin, at last; he had spoken a word or two with the two plain-clothes men, who, she knew, would readily enough let him pass.

“Doctor!” she screamed, as she heard his steps on the stair. “Doctor! I’m dying, doctor! Are you never coming!”

She wondered, in her agony of mind and body, if he would be fool enough not to understand. Would he be fool enough?

Doogan’s agents and the three plain-clothes men gathered about her silently, as they saw the intruder hurry in and drop on his knee beside the woman. “Is it you, doctor?” she wailed, with chattering teeth, shaking with an on-coming chill.

Durkin, in his dilemma, did not dare to look away from her face. He was blindly trying to grope his way toward what it all meant. The others stood above him, listening, waiting for the least word. One of them moved to the open window, and closed it.

He bent lower, trying to read the dumb agony in the woman’s face. Then another of the men went to the door, to guard it. Durkin could see the shoes and trousers-legs of the others, up to the knee. Each pair of boots, he noticed inconsequently, had a character and outline of their own. But still his frantic brain could not find the key to the enigma.

Then, out of the chaos and the disorder of the chattering of her teeth, seemed to come a hint, a whisper. She was sounding the double “i” of the operator about to “send”—she was trying to catch his attention, to tell him something, in Morse. He bent still closer, and fumbled artfully with the sleeve, wet and sodden with her warm blood.

He read the signal, as she lay there with chattering teeth: “All up—Get away quick—these are police—meet you in London—hotel Cecil—in two months—hurry.”

“Where—write?” he implored her, by word of mouth, covering the question by shifting his busily exploring fingers from the wounded left shoulder to the right.

She closed her eyes. “C-N,” she answered. She repeated it, in the strange Morse, weakly, and then fainted dead away.

Durkin dropped the sleeve he was carefully turning up. He looked at the men about him with a sudden towering, almost drunken madness of relief, a madness which they took for sudden rage.

“You fools, you,” he called at them. “You fools, couldn’t you see it—this woman’s dying! Here, you, quick—compress this artery with your thumb—hard, so! You, you—oh, I don’t care who you are—telephone for my instruments—Doctor Hodgson, No. 29 West Thirtieth!”—luckily he remembered a throat doctor Frank had once consulted there—“and get me a sheet off one of the beds, quick!”

He tossed his hat into the hall, jerked up his cuffs, almost believing, himself, in the part he was acting.

“Water—where’ll I get a water-tap?” he demanded, feverishly, running to the door. Outside the room, he suddenly kicked his hat to the foot of the back-stairs. He caught it as it rebounded from the second step, and bolted noiselessly up the stairway, never turning or looking back until he had gained the roof. There he crept, cat-like, across half-a-dozen houses, and slipped down the first fire-escape that offered.

At the third window, which was open, a stalwart Irish house-maid barred his progress. He told her, hurriedly, he was a fire-escape inspector for the City Department. Seeing that she doubted his word, he thrust a five dollar bill in her hand. She looked at it, laughed cynically—and time, he felt, was worth so much to him!—looked out at him again dubiously, and then in silence led him through the passage and down to the street-door.

As he turned hurriedly into Madison Avenue, toward the Grand Central station, he heard the clang of a bell, and saw an ambulance clatter down the street. Then, to make sure of it, he repeated her message to himself: “Hotel Cecil—two months—C-N.”

For a moment or two the “C-N” puzzled him. Then he remembered that only the day before he had been telling her the episode of the Charleston earthquake, how every wire was “lost” after the final shock, and how every operator for hundreds of miles about, during the next day of line-repairing, kept calling “C-N” until an answer finally came from the debris of the dead city.

Through some trick of memory, he then knew, she had recalled the Morse signal for that southern city, in her emergency. There had been no time for thought, no chance for even momentary deliberation. “Charleston!” From that day the very name took on a newer and stranger meaning. He knew that during weeks of loneliness and wandering it would be the one city toward which his eyes and his heart would turn.