Durkin was both puzzled and apprehensive. That a taxi should follow his
own at eleven o’clock at night, for some twenty-odd blocks, was a
singular enough coincidence. That it should stop when he stopped, that
it should wait, not a square away, for him to come out of his _café_,
and then shadow him home for another thirteen circuitous blocks, was
more than a coincidence. It was a signal for the utmost discretion.
It was not that Durkin, at this stage of the kaleidoscopic game, was
given to wasting tissue in unnecessary worry. But there had been that
mysterious cigar-light in the hallway. When he had glanced cautiously
down through the darkness, leaning well out over the bannister, he had
distinctly seen the little glow of light. Yet, with the exception of his
own top-floor rooms, the building was given over to business offices,
and by night he had invariably found the corridors empty and unused. No
Holmes watchman, no patrolman, not even a Central Office man, he knew,
indulged in fragrant Carolina Perfectos when covering his beat.
But when he descended quietly to reconnoitre, he saw that no one went
down to the street door. And no one, he could see equally well, remained
on the stairs or in the halls, for he turned on the light, floor by
floor, as he went back to his rooms.
Yet nobody, again, intelligently trying to secrete himself, would thus
flaunt a lighted cigar in the darkness. From the suave and mellow odor
of that cigar, too, Durkin knew that the intruder was something more
than the ordinary house-thief and night-hawk.
As he thought the matter over, comfortably lounging back in a big
arm-chair up in his rooms, he tried to force himself to the pacifying
conclusion that the whole affair was fortuitous. He would keep a
weather-eye open for such casual occurrences, in the future; but he now
had no time to bother with the drifting shadows of uncertainty. He had
already that day faced more material dangers; there were more
substantial perils, he knew, rising up about him.
He flung himself back, with a sigh, after looking at his watch, and
through the upward-threading drifts of his cigar smoke he wondered,
half-reprovingly, what was taking place in the house not two hundred
yards away from him, where Frances was so wakefully watching and
working, while he sat there, idly waiting—since waiting, for once, was
to be part of the game.
He afterward decided that in his sheer weariness of body and mind he
must have dozed off into a light sleep.
It was past midnight when he awoke with a start, a vague sense of
impending evil heavy upon him.
His first thought, on awakening, was that some one had knocked. He
glanced at his watch, as he sprang to open the door. It was on the point
of one.
Frank should have been back an hour ago. Then he _had_ fallen asleep, of
a certainty, he decided, with electric rapidity of thought.
But this was she, come at last, he conjectured. Yet, with that sense of
impending danger still over him, he stepped back and turned off the
lights. Then he quietly and cautiously opened the door.
No one was there. He peered quickly down through the gloom of the
hallways, but still neither sound nor movement greeted him.
His now distraught mind quickly ran the gamut of possibilities. A
baffling, indeterminate impression seized him that somebody, somewhere,
was reaching out to him through the midnight silence, trying to come in
touch with him and speak to him.
He looked at the motionless clapper of his transmitter signal-bell,
where he had discreetly muffled the little gong with a linen
handkerchief. It could not have been the telephone.
Yet he caught up the receiver with a gesture of half-angered impatience.
“. . . in this house—send an officer at once!” were the words that sped
along the wire to his listening ear. An officer at once! Six quick
strokes of conjecture seemed to form the missing link to his chain of
thought.
“My God!” he exclaimed in terror, “that means Frank!”
There had been a hitch somewhere, and in some way. And that was the Van
Schaicks telephoning for the police—yes, decided Durkin, struggling to
keep his clearness of head, it would be first to the Sixty-Seventh
Street station that they would send for help.
He had already learned, or striven to learn, at such work, not only to
think and to act, but to essay his second step of thinking while he
accomplished his first in action.
He rummaged through a suit-case filled with lineman’s tools, and
snatched up a nickel badge similar to that worn by inspectors of the
Consolidated Gas Company. It was taking odds, in one way, such as he had
never before in his career dared to take. But the case, he felt, was
desperate.
Once off the Avenue he ran the greater part of the way round the block,
for he knew that in five minutes, at the outside, the police themselves
would be on the scene. And as he ran he let his alert imagination play
along the difficulties that walled him in, feeling, in ever-shifting
fancy, for the line of least resistance.
He mounted the brownstone steps three at a time, and tore at the
old-fashioned bell. He pushed his way authoritatively up through a
cluster of servants, shivering and chattering and whispering along the
hall.
At a young woman in a crimson quilted dressing-gown, faced with
baby-blue silk, he flashed his foolish little metal shield. She was a
resolute-browed, well-poised girl, looking strangely boyish with her
tumbled hair thrown loosely to one side.
“I’m the plain-clothes man, the detective from the police station!”
He looked at her abstractedly, and curtly shifted his revolver from his
hip-pocket to his side-pocket. This caused a stir among the servants.
“Get those people out of here!” he ordered.
The resolute-browed young woman in the dressing-gown scattered them with
a movement of the hand, and slipped a key into his fingers. Then she
pointed to a doorway.
“This thing was half expected, ma’m, at Headquarters,” said Durkin
hurriedly, as he fitted the key. “It’s a woman, isn’t it?”
The girl with the resolute brow and the tumbled hair could not say.
“But I think I understand,” she went on hurriedly. “I had quite a large
sum of money, several thousand dollars, in my room here!”
Durkin, who had stooped to unlock the door, turned on her quickly.
“And it’s still in this room?” he demanded.
“No; it worried me too much. I was going to keep it, but I took it down
to the bank, this afternoon.”
Then the girl said “Sir!” wonderingly; for Durkin had emitted a quick
mutter of anger. They were doubly defeated. By this time the bedroom
door was open.
“Ah, I thought it would be a woman,” he went on coolly, as he glanced at
Frank’s staring and wide eyes. “And, if I mistake not, Miss Van Schaick,
this is Number 17358, at the Central Office.”
Frances knew his chortle was one of hysteria, but still she looked and
wondered. Once more Durkin flashed his badge as he took her firmly by
one shaking wrist.
“Come with me,” he said, with quiet authority, and step by step he led
her out into the hallway.
“Not a word!” he mumbled, under his breath, as he saw her parted lips
essay to speak.
“It’s really too bad!” broke in the girl in the dressing-gown,
half-relentingly, with an effort to see the prisoner’s now discreetly
downcast face.
“You won’t say so, later,” retorted Durkin, toying to the full with the
ironic situation. “An old offender!” Even the bibulous butler, in the
doorway, shook his head knowingly at this, thereby intimating, as he
later explained, with certain reservations, to the second maid, that he
all along knew as much.
Durkin pushed the gaping servants authoritatively aside.
“Have these people watch the back of the house—every window and door,
till the Inspector and his men come up. I’ll rap for the patrol from the
front.”
Durkin waited for neither reply nor questions, but hurried his charge
down the stairway, across the wide hall, and out through the heavy front
doors.
The audacity, the keen irony, the absurdity of it all, seemed to make
him light-headed, for he broke into a raucous laugh as he stood with her
in the cool and free night air.
But once down on the sidewalk he caught her shaking hand in his, and ran
with her, ran desperately and madly, until the rattle and clatter of a
bell broke on his ear. It was a patrol-wagon rumbling round from the
Avenue on the east. He would have turned back, but at the curb in front
of the Van Schaick mansion already a patrolman stood, rapping for
assistance.
In his dilemma Durkin dropped breathlessly down an area stairs, feeling
the limp weight of the woman on his body as he fell. To Frances herself
it seemed like the effortless fall in a nightmare; she could remember
neither how nor when it ended, only she had the sensation of being
pulled sharply across cold flagstones. Durkin had dragged her in under
the shadow of the heavy brownstone steps, behind a galvanized iron
garbage can, hoping against hope that he had not been noticed, and
silently praying that if indeed the end was to come it might not come in
a setting so sordid and mean and small.
A street cat, lean and gaunt and hungry-looking, slunk like a shadow
down the area-steps. The eyes of the two fugitives watched it intently.
As it slunk and crept from shadow to shadow it suddenly became, to the
worn and depressed Durkin, a symbol of his own career, a homeless and
migratory Hunger, outlawed, pursued, unresting, a ravenous and
unappeased purloiner of a great city’s scraps and tatters.
The soft pressure of Frank’s arm on his own drove the passing thought
from his mind. And they sat together on the stone slabs, silently, hand
in hand, till the patrol-wagon rattled past once more, and the street
noises died down, and hastily opened windows were closed, and footsteps
no longer passed along the street above them.
Then they ventured cautiously out, and, waiting their chance, sauntered
decorously toward the corner. There they boarded a passing car, bound
southward and crowded to the doors with the members of a German musical
club, who sang loudly and boisterously as they went.
It seemed the most celestial of music to Durkin, as he hung on a strap
in their midst, with Frank’s warm body hemmed in close to him, and the
precious weight of it clinging and swaying there from his arm.
Suddenly he looked down at her.
“Where are you going tonight?” he asked.
Their eyes met. The tide of abandonment that had threatened to engulf
him slowly subsided, as he read the quiet pain in her gaze.
“I am going back to the Ralston,” she said, with resolute simplicity.
“But, good heaven, think of the risk!” he still half-heartedly pleaded.
“It’s dangerous, now!”
“My beloved own,” she said, with her habitual slow little head shake,
and with a quietness of tone that carried a tacit reproof with it, “life
has far worse dangers than the Ralston!”
She had felt unconditionally, completely drawn toward him a moment
before, while still warm with her unuttered gratitude. As she thought of
the indignity and the danger from which he had carried her she had
almost burned with the passion for some fit compensation, without any
consideration of self. Now, in her weariness of body and nerve, he had
unconsciously unmasked her own potential weakness to herself, and she
felt repelled from him, besieged and menaced by him, the kindest and yet
the most cruel of all her enemies.