At twenty minutes to eleven, slipping off his shoes, Durkin climbed
cautiously through the transom opening out on the roof. Creeping as
carefully from chimney tier to chimney tier, he found himself face to
face with a roof-fence of sharpened iron rods. He counted down this
fence to the eighteenth rod, then carefully lifted on it. The lead that
sealed it in the lower cross-piece, and into the stone beneath that
again, had been strangely fused away, and the loosened rod slid up
through the top horizontal bar very much like a miniature portcullis.
Squeezing through this narrow opening, he carefully replaced the rod
behind him. With a flattened piece of steel, once used for a furnace
poker, and looking very much like a gigantic tack-drawer, he slowly and
gently forced the bolt that held shut the transom on the Ottenheimer
building. This he replaced, after passing through, paying out with him
as he went, two coils of rubber-coated wire, in appearance not unlike a
large size of incandescent lamp cord.
From the photographer’s studio in which he found himself, nothing but a
draw-bolt kept him from an outside hallway. Making sure that the
building was deserted, and everything safe, he worked his way slowly
down, like a diver, stair by stair, to the basement. Here he made a
careful study of the little tunnel of electric wires at the back of the
lower hall, probing, testing, measuring, and finally, with cool
deliberation, “bridging” the necessary portion of the burglar-alarm
connection, which he knew to be operated on a closed circuit. This
circuit he diverted as a miner diverts a troublesome stream. Then,
holding before him his little two-candle incandescent lamp, scarcely
bigger than his thumb nail, he groped toward the iron covered door that
divided one-half of the building from the other.
Here he directed his thin shaft of light into the crack between the
heavy door and its studding, and his squinting eyes made out the iron
lock-bar that held him out. From his vest pocket, where they stood in a
row like glimmering pencils, he took out one of the slim steel drills,
adjusted it noiselessly in the drill-flange, and snapped shut his
switch. There was the quick spit of a blue spark, and of a sudden, the
inanimate thing of steel throbbed and sang and quivered with mysterious
life. As he glanced down at it, in its fierce revolutions, he realized
that once more he had for an accomplice that old-time silent, and
ever-ready assistant which for years had been a well-tested and faithful
friend. The mere companionship with so familiar a force brought back to
him his waning confidence.
He forced the whirling drill through the door-crack and in against the
bar. It ate through the soft iron as though it had been a bar of cheese.
Eight carefully placed perforations, side by side, had severed the end
of the lockshaft. He shut off the current, confidently, and swung open
the heavy door. The falling piece of iron made a little tinkle of sound
on the cement flooring, then all was silence again. He had at least, he
told himself, captured the enemy’s outposts.
Cautiously he felt his way across the warm cellar, up the steps, and at
last faced his one definite barrier, the door of solid steel, abutted by
even more solid masonry. The builders of that door had done their best
to make it forbidding to men of his turn of mind, Durkin ruminated, as
he felt and sounded and tested despondently over its taciturn painted
surface.
He studied the hinges carefully, through his tiny lamp. They were
impregnable. As he had surmised, his only way was to cut out, inch by
inch, the three heavy steel shafts, or bolt-bars, which slipped and
fitted into steel casings also, apparently, embedded in solid masonry.
Adjusting his drill, he closed the switch once more, and, bracing the
instrument’s head against his breast-bone, watched the slender, humming,
spinning shaft bite and grind and burrow its way into the slowly
yielding bar. From a little pocket-can, every minute or two, he squirted
kerosene in on the drill-tip. The pungent smell of the scorching oil, as
it spread on the heated steel, rose almost suffocatingly to his nostrils
in the furnace-heated warmth of the cellar and for weeks afterwards
remained an indistinct and odious memory to him.
When his first hole was bored, and his little drill raced wildly through
into space, like the screw of a liner on the crest of a wave, he started
a second, close beside the first; then a third, and a fourth, and a
fifth, slowly honeycombing the thick steel with his minute excavations.
Sometimes a drill would snap off short, and he would have to draw a
fresh one from his stock. Sometimes it did not bite sharply, and he
tried another. And still he stood drilling, directing the power of his
silent, insidious, untiring accomplice, whose spirit crooned and burned
and sighed itself out through the wire at his feet.
As he worked, he lost all track of time; after he had started what he
knew to be the last hole, he stopped and looked at his watch, as
casually as he had done often enough after a night of operating the key
in a despatcher’s office. To his horror, he saw that it had stopped,
stunned with a natural enough electrolytic paralysis. It might not yet
be twelve, or it might be four in the morning; time, from the moment he
had taken off his shoes in Frances Candler’s little back room, had been
annihilated to him. He wondered, in sudden alarm, if she were still
maintaining her patrol outside, up and down the block. He wondered, too,
as he drove the little drill home for the last time, and cautiously
pried open the great, heavy door, if she had sent any signal in from the
street front, and he had missed it. He even wondered, quakingly, if
daylight would not overtake them at their work—when his startled eyes,
chancing to fall on a nearby clock-dial, saw that the hour was only
twenty-five minutes to twelve.
Step by step he crept back to the inner offices, followed by the
murmurous ticking of a dozen noisy clocks, declaiming his presence. From
the door in front of where the safe stood, gloomy, ominous,
impregnable-looking, he lifted a seemingly innocent rubber mat. As he
thought, it had been attached to a burglar-alarm apparatus. Dropping on
one knee, he repeated his formula, number by number, each time listening
for the telltale click of the falling ward. Then, turning the nickel
lock-knob, he heard the many-barred lock chuck back into place.
The next moment the ponderous doors were open, and Durkin’s little
thumb-nail electric lamp was exploring the tiers of inner compartments.
He still carried his drill with him; and, once he had found the private
drawer he wanted, the softer iron of the inner fittings offered little
resistance to a brutally impatient one-eighth bit. After two minutes of
feverish work, he was able to insert the point of his furnace poker into
the drawer, and firmly but gently pry it open.
The next moment his blackened and oily fingers were rummaging carelessly
through a fortune or two of unset stones—through little trays of
different tinted diamonds, through crowded little cases of Ceylon pearls
and Uralian emeralds. At last, in a smaller compartment, marked “I.
Ottenheimer,” he found a gun-metal case sealed up in an envelope. The
case itself, however, was securely locked. Durkin hesitated for one half
second; then he forced the lid open with his steel screw-driver.
One look was enough. It held the Blue Pear.
He stooped and carefully brushed up the steel cuttings under his
shoeless feet. As carefully he closed the inner drawers of the safe. His
hand was on the nickel lock-knob once more, to swing the ponderous outer
doors shut, when a sound fell on his ears, a sound that made his very
blood chill and tingle and chill again through all his tense body.
It was Frank’s voice, outside the same building in which he stood, not a
hundred feet away from him, her voice shrilly screaming for help.
His first mad impulse was to rush out to her, blindly. A second
precautionary flash of thought kept him rooted to the spot, where he
stood listening. He could hear confused, sharp voices, and the scuffling
of feet. He heard the quick scream again; then guttural, angry protests.
Some subliminal prompting told Durkin that that scream was not one of
terror, but of warning.
Snapping out his incandescent lamp, he stole cautiously forward through
the row of partitioned, heavily-carpeted little offices, and, without
showing himself, peered toward the shop-front. As he did so, a second
involuntary thrill of apprehension sped up and down his backbone. The
street-door itself was open. Already half way in through that door was a
dark, stoutly-built man. He stood struggling in the arms of a determined
young woman. That woman, Durkin could see, was Frances Candler. And all
the while that she was clinging to him and holding him she was crying
lustily for help.
The next moment Durkin made out the man. It was Ottenheimer, himself.
For some unknown reason, he hastily surmised, the diamond merchant had
intended to drop into his own office. But why, he still asked, was Frank
taking such risks?
Durkin did not try to work the thing out in its minute details. Like a
flash, he darted back to the open safe. He swung the big doors to,
locked them, caught up his drill, and the loose strands of wire, and
then backed quickly out through the steel door, securing it with a deft
twist or two of a piece of his number twelve. The outer cellar door he
as quickly closed after him.
Then he flew upstairs, two steps at a time, rebolted the photographers’
hall door, replaced the transom as he swung up through it, and as
hurriedly refitted the loose iron bar in the roof-fencing.
Three minutes later, a well-dressed gentleman, wearing a black hat and
carrying a large leather suit-case, stopped, with a not unnatural
curiosity, on his way up Fifth Avenue, to inquire the meaning of an
excited little crowd that clustered about two policemen and a woman in
the doorway of Ottenheimer & Company.
He drew up, casually enough, and listened while a short, stout, and very
indignant man spluttered and gesticulated and angrily demanded how any
one should dare to stop him from going into his own store. He was the
owner of the place—there was his own watchman to identify him,—and
somebody would be “broke” for this tomfoolery, he declared, with a shake
of the fist toward the silent sergeant beside him.
The young woman, who chanced to be veiled, explained in her
well-modulated, rich contralto voice that the hour had seemed so
unusual, the store had looked so dark inside, even the burglar-alarm,
she stubbornly insisted, had rung so loudly, that, naturally, it had
made her suspicious. She was sorry if it was a mistake. But now the
officers were there; they could attend to it—if some one would kindly
call a taxi for her.
The sergeant between her and Ottenheimer agreed with her, and stepping
out and stopping an empty motor-cab on its way up the Avenue, turned
back to the still enraged owner of the store and solicitously advised
him to go home and cool down.
“You hold that woman!” demanded Ottenheimer, husky with rage. “You hold
that woman, until I examine these premises!”
The young woman, obviously, and also quite naturally, objected to being
held. There was a moment of puzzled silence, and then a murmur of
disapproval from the crowd, for about the carefully gloved girl in the
black street-gown and plumed hat clung that nameless touch of birth and
bearing which marked her as a person who would be more at home in a
limousine than in a wind-swept doorway.
“The lady, of course, will wait!” quietly but deliberately suggested the
black-hatted man with the suit-case, looking casually in over the
circling crowd of heads.
The sergeant turned, sharply, glaring out his sudden irritability.
“Now, who asked you to butt in on this?” he demanded, as he impatiently
elbowed the pressing crowd further out into a wider circle.
“I merely suggested that the lady wait,” repeated the man in the black
hat, as unperturbed as before.
“Of course, officer, I shall wait, willingly,” said the girl, hurriedly,
in her equally confident, low-noted rich contralto. She drew her skirts
about her, femininely, merely asking that the shop-owner might make his
search as quickly as possible.
Ottenheimer and the doubtful-minded sergeant disappeared into the gloom
of the midnight store. As the whole floor flowered into sudden electric
luminousness, Durkin thanked his stars that he had had sense enough to
leave the lighting wires intact.
“Everything’s all right; you may go, miss,” said the sergeant, two
minutes later. “I guess old Isaac’s had an early nightmare!” And the
dispersing crowd laughed sympathetically.
The woman stepped into the motor-cab, and turned toward Broadway.
Safely round the corner, she picked up the waiting Durkin.
“That was a close one—but we win!” he murmured jubilantly.
“You’ve got it?”
“I’ve got it,” he exulted.
The woman at his side, for some vague reason, could not share in his
joy. Intuitively, in that moment of exhaustion, she felt that their
triumph, at the most, was a mere conspiracy of indifference on the part
of a timeless and relentless destiny. And in the darkness of the
carriage she put her ineffectual arms about Durkin, passionately, as
though such momentary guardianship might shield him for all time to
come.
She shook her abstractedness from her, with a long and fluttering sigh.
“Jim,” she asked him, unexpectedly, “how much money have you?”
He told her, as nearly as he could. “It’s hanged little, you see!” he
added, not understanding the new anxiety that was eating at her
heart,—“but I’ve been thinking of a plan!”
“Oh, what now?” she asked miserably, out of her weariness.
She knew, well enough, the necessity of keeping up, of maintaining both
activity and appearances. She knew that wrong-doing such as theirs, when
without even its mockery of respectability and its ironical touch of
dignity, was loathsome to both the eye and the soul. But she found that
there were moods and times, occurring now more and more frequently, when
she dreaded each return to that subterranean and fear-haunted world. She
dreaded it now, not so much for herself, as for Durkin; and as he
briefly told her of his plan, this feeling grew stronger within her.
“Then if it must be done,” she cried, “let _me_ do the worst part of
it!”
He looked at her, puzzled, not comprehending the source of her
passionate cry, blindly wondering if her over-adventurous life was not
getting a deeper and deeper hold on her. But her next question put him
to shame.
“Jim, if I help you in this, if I do all that has to be done, will you
promise me that you will make it bring you closer to your work on your
amplifier, and your transmitting camera? Can’t you promise to get back
to that decent work once more?”
“I’ll promise, if you’ll make me one promise in return,” said Durkin,
after a moment of silent thought.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Will you let me hold over this Singford stone, for a few weeks?”
“But why?” she asked, aghast.
“To oil the curtain that has to go up on our next act!” he answered,
grimly. “I mean a few hundred, now, would make things so simple again.”
“No,” she protested fiercely, “it must not, it shall not, be done. The
Blue Pear must go back to London tomorrow!”
“It will mean some hard work for us both, then.”
“I can’t help that, Jim. We’ll have to face it together. But this stone
is a thing we can’t trifle with, or equivocate over. I should hate
myself, I should even hate _you_, if I thought it wasn’t to go back to
London, by express, tomorrow morning!”
“Then back it goes!” said the man at her side. He could see, even in the
dim light of the taxi, the rebellious and wounded look that had crept
into her face.
“Whatever it brought me, I couldn’t endure your hate!” he said, taking
her hand in his.