Transcriber’s Notes can be found at the end of this eBook.
OTHER BOOKS BY MR. STRINGER
THE DOOR OF DREAD
THE MAN WHO COULDN’T SLEEP
THE HOUSE OF INTRIGUE
TWIN TALES
THE PRAIRIE WIFE
THE PRAIRIE MOTHER
THE PRAIRIE CHILD
[Illustration: Quite motionless, waiting over the sounder, bent the
woman]
THE
WIRE TAPPERS
_By_
ARTHUR STRINGER
INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1906, 1922
BY THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
_Printed in the United States of America_
PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO
BOOK MANUFACTURERS
BROOKLYN, N. Y.
THE WIRE TAPPERS
CHAPTER I
The discharged prisoner hung back, blinking out at the strong sunlight
with preoccupied and unhappy eyes. When the way at last seemed clear he
thrust his hands deep in his pockets, and with an assumption of bravado
that seemed incongruous to the stern and thoughtful face, sauntered
toward Sixth Avenue.
At the corner, a crowd of idlers watched two workmen on a scaffolding,
cleaning the stone of Jefferson Market with a sand-blast. It was not
until he had forced his way in on one side of this crowd, and edged
circuitously out on the other, that he felt at ease with the world. It
was like dipping into a stream: it seemed to wash away something scarlet
and flaming. A more resolute touch of self-respect came back to him. The
square shoulders took on some old-time line of natural dignity. He was
of the world again.
He crossed Sixth Avenue with quicker steps, and then, smitten with the
pangs of sudden hunger, pushed his way into an oyster-bar on the next
street corner. With his reawakening to actualities came the question as
to what the next turn of the grim wheels of destiny would bring to him.
For, at heart, he was still sick and shaken and weak. It was his first
offense; and he felt the need of some obliterating stimulation. So, even
though the heavy odors of that transformed bar-room were as nauseating
as the mouldy gaol-smell he had left behind him, he calmly called for
coffee and a dozen raw. He ate the oysters as they were opened, between
gulps of the hot but rancid coffee. He next directed his attention to a
bowl of crackers, moistening them with catchup as he adroitly made away
with them.
It was not until then that he noticed the stranger beside him, looking
at him pointedly. This stranger was corpulent, and friendly enough of
face, but for the blocked squareness of the flaccid jaw and the
indefinite pale green glint of the deep-set, predatory eyes that shifted
from side to side under the fringe of grayish eyebrow, as though the
great neck were too vast a thing to be lightly troubled. He was floridly
dressed, the younger man noticed, with a heavy, chased-gold band on one
fat finger, and a claw-mounted diamond in the stud on his shirt-front.
There was, too, something beefily animal-like in the confident, massive
neck that refused readily to move, and in the square upthrust of the
great shoulder.
The discharged prisoner returned the other’s half-quizzical gaze of
inspection. He did so with a look that was unmistakably belligerent.
For, although they stood side by side, they were of two worlds, and the
prisoner was no longer a prisoner.
The stranger, unabashed, merely smiled, and leaned amiably against the
stool-lined counter.
“What’ll you have, Durkin?” he asked, easily.
The other man still glared at him, in silence. Thereupon the stranger
with the diamond stud thrust his hands deep down in his pockets, and
rocking on his heels, laughed confidently.
“Climb down, my boy, climb down!”
Durkin buttoned up his coat: the gesture was as significant as the
slamming of a door.
“Oh, smoke up, and have something with me!”
“Who _are_ you, anyway?” demanded Durkin, wheeling on him, jealous of
his momentary isolation.
“Me?—Oh, I was just keepin’ an eye on you, over yonder!” The stout man
jerked a thumb vaguely toward Jefferson Market, then turned to the
attendant.
“Slip us a nip o’ that London Dry o’ yours, Terry, with a plate o’ hot
beans and sandwiches. Yes, I was kind o’ lookin’ on, over there. You’re
up against it, aren’t you?”
“What do you mean by that?” asked the other, hungrily watching a leg of
boiled ham, from which the attendant was shaving dolefully thin slices.
“Here, brace up on a swig o’ Terry’s watered bootleg; then we can talk
easier. Hold on, though—it won’t cost us any more to get comfortable, I
guess!”
He ordered the luncheon over to a little round table in a corner of the
room. Durkin could already feel the illicit London Dry singing through
his veins; he was asking himself, wolfishly, if he could not snatch that
proffered meal before taking to flight.
“Now, this isn’t monkey-work with me, it’s business,” announced the
newcomer.
“Indeed?” said Durkin, hesitating, and then taking up a fork.
“Now, first thing, I want to tell you something. That song and dance you
threw up to the Old Boy over on the bench, about your bein’ an electric
inventor in hard luck, caught my eye, first thing. Look here,—straight
off the bat, d’ you want to get a cinch on a good job?”
“I do!” declared Durkin, through a mouthful of beans. “But doing what?”
“Same old thing!” answered the other, offhandedly.
Durkin put down his fork, indignantly.
“What same old thing?” he demanded.
“Operatin’, of course!”
Durkin, in a sudden tremor of alarm, felt that the break would come
before even that steaming plate of beans was eaten. So he fought back
his affronted dignity, and giving no sign of either surprise or wonder,
parried for time.
“I’m tired of operating,” he said, washing a mouthful of his lunch down
with a second glass of Terry’s London Dry. “My arm has been giving out.”
“Well, I want a man, and I want him quick. You’re—er—not very well
fixed just now, are you?”
“I haven’t a penny!” cried the other, passionately, surrendering to some
clutching tide of alcoholic recklessness.
“Well, _my_ hours wouldn’t kill you!” began the older man, fraternally.
“I’m sick of the sight of a key and sounder!”
“You’d rather do the Edison act in a Third Avenue garret, I
s’pose—broodin’ round inventin’ electrical gimcrackery nobody wants and
nobody’s goin’ to buy!”
“But I tell you somebody _will_ want what I’m going to do—and somebody
is going to pay money for it, and a heap of money, too!”
“What’ve you got?” inquired the older man, with the slightest curl of
the lip. The younger man seemed nettled by the touch of contempt in the
other’s voice.
“I’ve got an amplifier and I’ve got a transmitting camera—you needn’t
laugh, for when I get a relay so sensitive that I can sit in a St. Louis
office and send a message to London or Paris, or when I can send a
drawing of a train wreck somewhere outside of San Francisco right
through to New York, or telegraph a photo or a map or a sketch—why,
I’ve got something that men are going to pay for, and pay well!”
“I’ve heard of ’em all before—in the dope page o’ the Sunday papers!”
“But I tell you I’ve got this transmitting camera! All I want is time
and money to work it out, on the business side. Wait a minute, now, and
let me explain. If you’ve operated a key you’ll understand it easily
enough. You know what we call the Tesla currents, and you know what
selenium is. Well, when I first tackled this thing, my problem was to
get some special apparatus for reproducing the shadows and high-lights
on, say, a photograph. I had to have a different flow of current for
light and dark, to carry the impression from the transmitter to the
receiver. Well, I found that selenium did the trick, for a peculiarity
of that mighty peculiar metal is that it offers less resistance to a
current when in the light than in the dark. My next problem was to
control the light in the receiving camera. That’s where the Tesla
currents came in, inducing the rays of vacuum pipes under the high
tension. Do you follow me?”
“Yes, go on!” said the other man, impatiently. But his tone was lost on
the young inventor, who, under the stress of his excitement, was leaning
forward across the little table, gesticulating now and then with long
and slender and strangely expressive fingers.
“Now, if I was telegraphing a photograph of you to Chicago, it would
have to be in the form of a film, wrapped about a glass cylinder in the
transmitter. Light would be thrown on it by means of a convex lens. Now,
I cover the glass pipe with vulcanized rubber, or, say, with sealing
wax, so that no rays get out, except through the one little window where
they’ll fall on the film or the paper moving in front of it. Inside my
cylinder is a lens containing selenium, where the rays fall after
passing through the glass. But, pshaw, what’s all this to you?”
“Go ahead—I’m listenin’!”
“Well, as I was going to tell you, just so much light, or illumination,
I ought to say, is given to the selenium cell as you’d see in the light
and dark spots of the photograph. That, in turn, means a greater or less
resistance offered to the electric current. Its energy is controlled
automatically, of course, passing over the wire from the transmitter to
the receiver, so that while the transmitting film is passing in front of
the selenium at my end of the wire, the sealed tube of Tesla rays at the
Chicago office is being moved before a receptive film at the far end of
the wire. So the transmitted light escapes through the one little
window, and records its impression on the film—and there you are!”
The other man put down his glass, unperturbed.
“Yes, here we are—but if there’s so many millions in this apparatus for
you, what’s the use o’ hollerin’ it out to all Sixth Avenue? It’s fine!
It sounds big! It’s as good as perpetual motion! But coming down to
earth again, how’re you goin’ to get your funds to put all this
pipe-dream through?”
“I’ll get them yet, some way, by hook or crook!” protested the younger
man, in the enthusiasm of his fourth glass of bootlegger’s gin.
“Well, my friend, I’ll tell you one thing, straight out. Stick to me and
you’ll wear diamonds! And until you’re gettin’ the diamonds, what’s
more, you’ll be gettin’ your three square a day!”
It was the lip of the indignant Durkin that curled a little, as he
looked at the glittering stud on the expansive shirt-front and the fat,
bejewelled hand toying with the gin glass. Then he remembered, and
became more humble.
“I’ve got to live!” he confessed, mirthlessly.
“Of course you have! And you’re a fool to go broke in the teeth of a
cinch like this. First thing, though, how’d you ever come to get pinched
by Doogan? Here, take another drink—hot stuff, eh! Now, how’d you ever
come to get you’self pulled that fool way?”
“I had been living like a street cat, for a week. An Eighth Avenue
manufacturing electrician I went to for work, took me up and showed me a
wire on his back roof. He advanced me five dollars to short-circuit it
for him. Doogan’s men caught me at it, and Doogan tried to make me out
an ordinary overhead guerrilla.”
“Lightnin’-slinger, eh?”
“Yes, a lightning-slinger.”
“But I s’pose you notice that he didn’t appear against you?”
“Yes, I saw that! And _that’s_ a part of the business I can’t
understand,” he answered, puzzled by the stranger’s quiet smile.
“Say, Durkin, you didn’t think it was your good looks and your Fifth
Avenue talkin’ got you off, did you?”
The younger man turned on him with half-angry eyes. But the stranger
only continued to chuckle contentedly down in his throat.
“You remind me of a hen who’s just laid an egg!” cried Durkin, in a
sudden flash of anger. The other brushed the insult carelessly aside,
with one deprecatory sweep of his fat hand.
“Why, _I_ had Doogan fixed for you, you lobster!” he went on, as easily
and as familiarly as before. “You’re the sort o’ man I wanted—I saw
that, first crack out o’ the box. And a friend o’ mine named Cottrell
happens to stand pat with Muschenheim. And Muschenheim is Doogan’s
right-hand man, so he put a bee in the Boss’s ear, and everything
was—well, kind o’ dropped!”
The younger man gazed at him in dreamy wonder, trying to grope through
the veil of unreality that seemed falling and draping about him. He was
marvelling, inwardly, how jolting and unlooked for came the sudden ups
and downs of life, when once the traveller is caught up out of the
ordinary grooves of existence,—how sudden and moving the drama, when
once the feral process is under way.
Then he listened, with alert and quickly changing eyes, as the
stranger—to make sure of his man, the discharged prisoner
surmised—tapped with his knife on the edge of his chinaware plate.
Durkin read the Morse easily—“Don’t talk so loud!” it warned him. And
he nodded and wagged his now swimming head, almost childishly, over the
little message. Yet all the time he felt, vaguely, that he was under the
keen eyes of the stranger across the table from him.
“Where’d you work, before you went to the Postal-Union?”
“Up in the woods,” laughed the other carelessly, yet still clear-headed
enough to feel inwardly ashamed of his laughter.
“What woods?”
“Up in Ontario. I was despatcher, and station-agent, and ticket-seller,
and snow-shoveller, and lamp-cleaner, and everything else, for the Grand
Trunk at Komoka, where the Tunnel trains cut off from the main line west
for Chicago,—and where they still keep their heel on the Union, and
work their men like dogs. They paid me forty-two dollars a month—which
was small enough!—but out of that salary they deducted any bad money
taken in through the ticket-window, when my returns were made up. I was
two weeks behind in my board bill when a Port Huron drummer bought a
ticket through to Hamilton with a twenty-dollar counterfeit. It came
back to me, with my next month’s twenty-two dollars, with ‘Counterfeit’
stencilled out in big letters across the face of it. The loss of that
money kind of got on my nerves. I fumed and worried over it until I
spoilt my ‘send,’ and couldn’t sleep, and in some way or other threw an
Oddfellows’ excursion train into a string of gravel empties! My God,
what I went through that night! I knew it, I foresaw it, twenty minutes
before they touched. I pounded the brass between the Junction and Sarnia
until they thought I was crazy, but we had no way of getting at them,
any more than we could get at two comets rushing together. I wired in my
resign. I didn’t even wait to get my clothes. I struck out and walked
across country to St. Thomas, and boarded a Michigan Central for the
Bridge!”
The older man watched the nervous hands go up to the moist forehead and
wipe away the sweat, but the gesture left him unmoved.
“Then how’d you come to leave the Postal-Union?” he asked.
A look of momentary resentment leaped into Durkin’s eyes.
“They blacklisted me!” he confessed. “And just for playing their own
game!”
The other held up a warning finger.
“Not so loud,” he interrupted. “But go on!”
“Of course, when I first came down to New York I went into the P. U.
‘carrying a fly.’ So I was treated fairly enough, in a way. But I had
telegrapher’s paralysis coming on, and I knew I was losing time on my
amplifier, and I _had_ to have money for my new transmitter experiments.
I tried to make it up doing over-time, and used to shoot weird codes
along Continental Press Association’s leased wires until I got so
neurasthenic that the hay-tossers up state would break and ask me to
fill in, and then I used to lose my temper and wonder why I didn’t stab
myself with a flimsy-hook. I knew I had to give it up, but I _did_ want
enough money to carry along my work with!”
He hesitated for a moment, still gazing down at his plate, until his
companion looked at his watch with a brusque “Go on!”
“So I tried another way. When some of the Aqueduct races were going
through, on a repeater next to my key, up to Reedy’s pool-rooms, I just
reached over and held up one side of the repeater. Then, say third horse
won, I strolled to the window and took out my handkerchief three times.
My confederate ’phoned to our man, and when he’d had time to get his
money up I let the result go through. But they discovered the trick, and
called me up on the carpet. And all the rest, you know!”
He shook his head lugubriously; then he laughed aloud with a shrug of
the insouciant shoulder; then he added, regretfully, “I’d have made a
clear five hundred, if they’d only given me another day’s chance!”
“Well, I guess maybe you can even up, with us!” And the stranger shook
his own head, knowingly, and returned the gaze of the younger man, who
was peering at him narrowly, unsteady of eye, but still alertly
suspicious. Even in that shadowy substratum to which he had been
temporarily driven, good grafts, he knew, had to be sought for long and
arduously. And he had no love for that ever-furtive underworld and its
follies. It was a life that rested on cynicism, and no man could be a
cynic and live. That he knew. He nursed no illusions as to the eventual
triumph of evil, in the ever-shifting order of things earthly; and he
remembered, with a sting of apprehension, the joy with which he had
plunged into the thick of that street-corner group of untainted
fellow-men.
“I think I’d rather get at something decent again,” he grumbled, pushing
away his bean-plate, but still waiting, with a teasing sense of anxiety,
for the other to explain more fully.
“I guess we’d all like to shy around the dirty work,—but a dead sure
thing’s good enough now and then.”
“But where’s all the money, in this cinch?” demanded Durkin, a little
impatiently.
“I can’t cackle about that here, but I tell you right now, I’m no piker!
Get into a taxi with me, and then I’ll lay everything out to you as we
drive up to the house. But here, have a smoke,” he added as he got up
and hurried to the door that opened on the side street. Durkin had never
dreamed that tobacco—even pure Havana tobacco—could be so suave and
mellow and fragrant as that cigar.
“Now, you asked me about the money in this deal,” the older man began,
when he had slammed the taxi door and they went scurrying toward Fifth
Avenue. “Well, it’s right here, see!”—and as he spoke he drew a roll of
bills from his capacious trousers-pocket. From an inner coat-pocket that
buttoned with a flap he next took out a pig-skin wallet, and flicked the
ends of his paper wealth before Durkin’s widening eyes. The latter could
see that it was made up of one hundreds, and fifties, and twenties, all
neatly arranged according to denomination. He wondered, dazedly, just
how many thousands it held. It seemed, of a sudden, to put a new and
sobering complexion on things.
“Money talks!” was the older man’s sententious remark, as he restored
the wallet to its pocket.
“Undoubtedly!” said Durkin, leaning back in the cushioned seat.
“Now, if you want to swing in with us, here’s what you get a week.”
The stranger took the smaller roll from his trousers-pocket again, and
drew out four crisp fifty dollar bills. These he placed on the palm of
the other man’s hand, and watched the hesitating fingers slowly close on
them. “And if our _coup_ goes through, you get your ten per cent.
rake-off,—and that ought to run you up from five to seven thousand
dollars, easy!”
Durkin’s fingers closed more tightly on his bills, and he drew in his
gin-laden breath, sharply.
“Who _are_ you, anyway?” he asked, slowly.
“Me? Oh, I’m kind of an outside operator, same as yourself!”
He looked at Durkin steadily, for a moment, and then, seemingly
satisfied, went on in a different tone.
“Did you ever hear of Penfield, the big pool-room man, the gay art
connoisseur, who hob-nobs with a bunch of our Wall Street magnates and
saunters over to Europe a couple o’ times a season? Well, I’ve been a
plunger at Penfield’s now for two months—just long enough to make sure
that he’s as crooked as they make ’em. I’m going to give him a dose of
his own medicine, and hit that gilt-edged gambler for a slice of his
genteel bank-roll—and an uncommon good, generous slice, too!”
“But what’s—er—your special line of business? How are you going to get
at this man Penfield, I mean?”
“Ever hear of the Miami outfit?” asked the other.
“That cut in and hit the Montreal pool-rooms for eighty thousand?—well,
I guess I have, a little!”
Durkin glanced at his companion, in wonder. Then the truth seemed to
dawn on him, in one illuminating, almost bewildering, flash.
“You—you’re not MacNutt?” he cried, reading his answer even while he
asked the question. Half a year before, the Postal-Union offices had
been full of talk of the Miami outfit and MacNutt, buzzing with meagre
news of the cool insolence and audacity of Miami’s lightning-slingers,
who, when they saw they had worked their game to a finish, cut in with
their: “We’ve got your dough, now you can go to——” as they made for
cover and ultimate liberty ten minutes before their hillside cave was
raided, and nothing more than a packing-case, holding three dozen
Brumley dry batteries, a bunch of “KK,” and a couple of Crosby
long-distance telephones, was found.
Durkin looked at the other man once more, almost admiringly,
indeterminately tempted, swayed against his will, in some way, by the
splendor of a vast and unknown hazard. He found a not altogether
miserable consolation, too, in the thought that this possible second dip
into illegitimate activities would be a movement not directed against
organized society, but against one already an enemy of that society. Yet
even this draught of sophistry left its after-taste of disgust.
“You’re pretty confidential,” he said, slowly, looking the other up and
down. “What’s to stop me going to one of Doogan’s men and squealing on
the whole gang of you?”
MacNutt smiled, gently and placidly, and stroked his short beard,
touched here and there with gray. “And what good would all that do you?”
he asked.
“You _are_ a cool specimen!” ejaculated the other.
“Oh, I guess I know men; and I sized you up, first thing, in the
court-room. You’re the sort o’ man I want. You’re not a funker, and
you’ve got brains, and—well, if you don’t come out of this quite a few
thousand to the good, it’s all your own fault!”
Durkin whistled softly. Then he looked meditatively out at the flashing
motor-cars as they threaded their way up the crowded avenue.
“Well, I guess I’m game enough,” he said, hesitatingly, still trying to
sweep from his brain the clouding mental cobweb that it was all nothing
more than a vivid nightmare.
“I guess I’m your man,” he repeated, as they turned off the Avenue, and
drew up in front of a house of staid and respectable brownstone facing,
like so many of the other private houses of New York’s upper Forties. In
fact, the long line of brownstone edifices before him seemed so alike
that one gigantic hand, he thought, might have carved the whole block
from a single slab of that dull and lifeless-looking brownstone rock.
Then, following MacNutt, he jumped out and went quickly up the broad
stone steps.
“So you’re with us, all right?” the older man asked, as his finger
played oddly on the electric button beside the door. Durkin looked at
the blank glass and panels that seemed to bar in so much mystery, and
his last quaver of indecision died away. Yet even then he had a sense of
standing upon some Vesuvian-like lava-crust, beneath which smouldered
unseen volcanic fires and uncounted volcanic dangers.
“Yes, I’m with you, anyway,” he asserted, stoutly. “I’m with you, to the
finish!”