As a result of her midnight conference with Durkin, Frances Candler
learned many things. One of these was the fact that the life into which
she had flung herself was proving a captor that already threatened to
extort a cruelly impossible ransom. Another was the discovery that
Durkin stood even deeper than she did in those conspiratorial quicksands
from which she tore one limb only to be engulfed by another. For all
along, she saw, he had been a quiet observant _intrigant_, conspiring
against a new field of activity toward which she had not even thought to
glance.
For after that hurried midnight talk she knew that the Secretary of
Agriculture, at Washington, from time to time received sealed mail
reports from the South as to the condition of the cotton crop. She also
learned that there had been a series of startling and disastrous “leaks”
from these confidential government reports, and that a private wire now
connected the office of the Department with Savannah and New Orleans.
Durkin had already ascertained that over this wire, on the last day, or
the last “market” day, of each month, until the leakage had been
stopped, would pass those despatches and figures on which the Department
of Agriculture would verify and base its monthly report of the cotton
outlook.
“That system is going to be kept up,” Durkin had explained to her,
“until the Secretary finds out who is stealing the figures and doing the
manipulating on them in the New York Cotton Exchange. At any rate, I
know he’s going to keep this wire in use until the decent brokers stop
bombarding him and the Census Bureau with their telegrams about
collusion and fraud. But here’s the point that interests us. If this
present wire report turns out to be favorable, the feverish way the
market stands now, it means, of course that there’s going to be a pretty
serious break in Cotton Exchange trading. But, on the other hand, if
this short-cut official report carries the news of a shortage, it’s as
plain as day that Curry and all the other New York bears will have a
lever to pry up the price of cotton with, high as it stands already.”
“And what is it we want to know?” she had asked.
“We’ve got to find out which way that report goes—whether it’s good or
bad. I’ll be here in New York, waiting to get your cipher message over a
Postal-Union wire. Whichever way it goes, I’ll govern myself
accordingly, jump into the market with every penny I have, and do
precisely what three hundred highly respectable brokers have been doing
for the last two months. The only thing that makes me hot is that I
haven’t a few thousand, instead of a paltry few hundred, to fling into
it!”
Her instructions were brief, but explicit. While he waited in New York,
ready to act on word from her, she was to hurry to Washington, and from
Washington go on to the somnolent little Virginia town of Leeksville.
This town, Durkin had already made sure, lay on the route of the
Department of Agriculture’s New Orleans wire.
On the main street of the little town through which this wire ran stood
a ramshackle, three-storied wooden hotel. From the top floor of this
hotel every wire that went humming like a harp of haste through that
avenue of quietness was easily accessible. Any person enlightened and
audacious enough to pick it out from among its companions and attach to
it a few feet of “No. 12” and a properly graduated relay would find the
rest of his task astoundingly easy. As Durkin had pointed out, already
knowing what they did, the one great problem lay in getting unsuspected
into the third-floor room of that wooden Leeksville hotel.
With a jointed split-bamboo fishing-pole, neatly done up in a parasol
cover, and with her complete wire-tapping outfit as neatly packed away
in a dress-suit case, Frances Candler ten hours later registered at that
ancient and unsavory-looking hostelry. A weary and bedraggled theatrical
company, which had just made the late “jump” from Fredericksburg,
preceded her, and she made it a point to approach the desk at the heels
of a half-a-dozen noisy chorus girls.
There she asked for a top-floor room.
The over-gallant clerk insisted that she should go anywhere but on the
top floor. There would be no difference in the cost of the rooms, to
her. He would make that, indeed, a personal matter.
“But I prefer the top floor,” she maintained, biting her lip and giving
no other sign of her indignation.
The clerk insisted that the climb would be too much for her; and most of
the floor, he explained, was given over to the servants.
She began to despair.
“But I sleep lightly—and I _must_ have seclusion!”
The perturbed clerk protested that in Leeksville noises were unknown by
day, much less by night. A circle of rotunda idlers now stood behind
her, taking in the scene. A flash of inspiration came to her.
“I’ve _got_ to go up to the top, I tell you!” she cried, impatiently.
“Can’t you see I’ve got asthma!”
And the angry asthmatic woman in the heavy veil was finally surrendered
to the loneliness and discomfort of her southwest corner room on the
barren and carpetless third floor.
There she quietly unpacked her suit-case, jointed her pole of split
bamboo, attached and graduated her relay, and fingered noiselessly
through the tangle of wires beneath her window for that one and
essential thread of metal along which was to flash the departmental
cotton reports, between New Orleans and Washington.
There, hour after hour, she sat and waited and watched; and it was late
in the next morning that, white and worn-out, she detached the
unobserved wire, hurried off her brief despatch in cipher, ordered
breakfast up to her room, and even before undressing fell into a long
and restless slumber.
That day, in her narrow little corn-husk bed, she dreamed that she and
Durkin had tunnelled under the Potomac River and had carried away the
last ounce of gold from the United States Treasury. How many millions
they had taken it was beyond them even to count. But she knew they were
escaping in submarines and were being breathlessly pursued by the entire
North Atlantic fleet. And her one great fear, during all that agonized
and endless pursuit, seemed not that she was destined either to final
capture, or to final suffocation, but that, in some way, she might
become separated from Durkin.