“Helen can not possibly sail tomorrow.”
This was the cipher message which flashed from Samuel Curry to his New
Orleans partner, giving him hurried warning that the final movement in
their cotton coup had been again postponed for at least another
twenty-four hours. Frances Candler, keeping watch on the up-town wires,
had caught the first inkling of this relieving news. After a passionate
hour of talk and pleading from Durkin, and after twelve long hours of
unbroken sleep, much of her spirit of rebelliousness had passed away,
and she had unwillingly and listlessly taken up the threads of what
seemed to her a sadly tangled duty once more.
But with the advent of Curry’s climactic message her old, more intimate
interest in the game gradually awoke. By daylight she had sent word down
to Durkin, who, about that time, was having quite trouble enough of his
own.
For his underground guerrilla work, as it was called, had its risks in
even the remoter parts of the city. But here, in the Wall Street
district, by day the most carefully guarded area of all New York, just
as by night the Tenderloin is the most watched—here, with hundreds
hourly passing to and fro and Central Office men buzzing back and forth,
Durkin knew there were unusual perils, and need for unusual care.
Yet early that morning, under the very eyes of a patrolman, he had
casually and hummingly entered the Postal-Union conduit, by way of the
manhole not sixty yards from Broadway itself. In his hands he carried
his instruments and a bag of tools, and he nodded with businesslike
geniality as the patrolman stepped over toward him.
“Got a guard to stand over this manhole?” demanded the officer.
“Nope!” said Durkin. “Three minutes down here ought to do me!”
“You people are gettin’ too dam’ careless about these things,” rebuked
the officer. “It’s _me_ gets the blame, o’ course, when a horse sticks
his foot in there!”
“Oh, cover the hole, then!” retorted Durkin genially, as he let himself
down.
Once safely in the covered gloom of the conduit, he turned on his light
and studied a hurriedly made chart of the subway wire-disposition. The
leased Curry wires, he very well knew, were already in active service;
and the task before him was not unlike the difficult and dangerous
operation of a surgeon. Having located and cut open his cables, and in
so doing exposed the busy arteries of most of Wall Street’s brokerage
business, he carefully adjusted his rheostat, throwing the resistant
coils into circuit one by one as he turned the graduated pointer. It was
essential that he should remain on a higher resistance than the circuit
into which he was cutting; in other words, he must not bleed his patient
too much, for either a heavy leakage or an accidental short-circuiting,
he knew, would lead to suspicion and an examination, if not a prompt
“throwing it into the quad,” or the reversal to the protection of some
distant and indirect wire.
When his current had been nicely adjusted and his sensitive little
polarized relay had broken into a fit of busy and animated chattering,
he turned his attention to the unused and rusted end of gas-pipe which
careless workmen, months, or even years, before, had hurriedly capped
and left protruding a good quarter-inch into the conduit. On this cap he
adjusted a pair of pocket pipe-tongs. It took all his weight to start
the rusted pipe-head, but once loosened, it was only a minute’s work to
unscrew the bit of metal and expose the waiting ends of the wires which
he had already worked through from the basement end of the pipe. He then
proceeded with great deliberation and caution to make his final
connections, taking infinite care to cover his footsteps as he went,
concealing his wire where possible, and leaving, wherever available, no
slightest trace of interference.
When everything was completed, it was nothing more than an incision made
by a skilled and artful surgeon, a surgeon who had as artfully dressed
the wound, and had left only a slender drainage tube to show how deep
the cutting had been.
Durkin then repacked his tools in his spacious double-handled club bag
of black sea-lion, put out his light, emerged whistling and dirt-soiled
from his manhole, and having rounded the block, slipped into his
basement printing-office and changed his clothes.
What most impressed and amazed Durkin, when once his quadruplex had been
adjusted and pressed into service, was the absolute precision and
thoroughness with which the Curry line of action had been prearranged.
It was as diffusedly spectacular as some great international campaign.
This Machiavellian operator’s private wires were humming with messages,
deputies throughout the country were standing at his beck and call,
emissaries and underlings were waiting to snatch up the crumbs which
fell from his overloaded board, his corps of clerks were toiling away as
feverishly as ever, Chicago and St. Louis and Memphis and New Orleans
were being thrown into a fever of excitement and foreboding, fortunes
were being wrested away in Liverpool, the Lancaster mills were shutting
down, and still cotton was going up, up, point by point; timid clerks
and messenger boys and widows, even, were pouring their pennies and
dollars into the narrowing trench which separated them from twenty cent
cotton and fortune.
Yet only two men knew and understood just how this Napoleon of commerce
was to abandon and leave to its own blind fate this great,
uncomprehending, maddened army of followers. Speculators who had made
their first money in following at his heels were putting not only their
winnings, but all their original capital, and often that of others, on
the “long” side of the great bull movement, waiting, always waiting, for
that ever alluring Fata Morgana of twenty cent cotton. Even warier
spirits, suburban toilers, sober-minded mechanics, humble store-traders,
who had long regarded ’Change as a very Golgotha of extortion and
disaster, had been tainted with the mysterious psychologic infection,
which had raced from city to town and from town to hamlet. Men bowed
before a new faith and a new creed, and that faith and creed lay
compactly in three pregnant words: Twenty Cent Cotton.
Yet this magnetic and spectacular bull leader, Durkin felt, was
infinitely wiser and craftier than any of those he led. Curry, at heart,
knew and saw the utter hopelessness of his cause; he realized that he
was only toying and trifling with a great current that in the end, when
its moment came, would sweep him and his followers away like so many
chips. He faced and foresaw this calamity, and out of the calamity which
no touch of romanticism in his nature veiled to his eyes, he quietly
prepared to reap his harvest.
As these thoughts ran through Durkin’s busy mind, some vague idea of the
power which reposed in his own knowledge of how great the current was to
become, and just what turn it was to take, once more awakened in him. He
had none of that romantic taint, he prided himself, which somewhere or
at some time invariably confused the judgment of the gambler and the
habitual criminal—for they, after all, he often felt, were in one way
essentially poets in spirit, though dreamers grown sour through
stagnation. Yet he could see, in the present case, how gigantic his
opportunities were. Properly equipped, with a very meagre sum, millions
lay before him, inevitably. But the stain of illegitimacy clung to his
methods, and as it was, his returns at best could be only a paltry few
thousands—fifty or sixty or even a hundred thousand at most. With Curry
it would be millions.
Durkin remembered his frugal train-despatching days at the barren little
wooden station at Komoka Junction, where forty dollars a month had
seemed a fortune to him. He lighted a Carolina Perfecto, and inhaled it
slowly and deliberately, demanding to know why he ought not to be
satisfied with himself. In those earlier days he used to eat his dinner
out of a tin pail, carried each morning from his bald and squalid
boarding-house. Today, he remembered, he was to take luncheon with
Frances at the Casa Napoleon, with its exquisite Franco-Spanish cookery,
its tubbed palms, and its general air of exotic well-being.
His luncheon with Frances, however, was not what he had looked for. He
met her in front of the West Ninth Street restaurant as she was stepping
out of her taxi-cab. She seemed unusually pale and worried, though an
honestly happy smile flitted across her lightly veiled face as she
caught sight of him.
In a moment again her manner changed.
“We are being watched,” she said, in a low voice.
“Watched! By whom?”
Their eyes met and he could see the alarm that had taken possession of
her.
“By MacNutt!”
Durkin grew a little paler as he looked down at her.
“He has shadowed us for two days,” she went on in her tense, low, quick
tones. “He followed me out of our own building, and I got away from him
only by leaving my taxi and slipping through a department store.”
“Did he speak to you?”
“No, not a word. I don’t even think he dreams I have seen him. But it is
hard to say how much he has found out. Oh, Jim, he’s slow and sly and
cunning, and he won’t strike until the last minute. But when he does, he
will try to—to smash us both!”
“I’ll kill that man as sure as I’m standing on this curbstone, if he
ever butts in on this game of ours! This isn’t pool-room piking we’re at
now, Frank—this is big and dangerous business!”
He had remembered the cigar-light in the dark passageway, and the
mysterious disappearance, then later the taxi-cab that had strangely
followed his own.
“No, no, Jim; you mustn’t say that!” she was murmuring to him, with a
little shiver. “I’m afraid of him!”
“Well, _I’m_ not,” said Durkin, and he swore softly and wickedly, as he
repeated his threat. “What does _he_ want to come into our lives for,
now? He’s over and done with, long ago!”
“We are never over and done with anything we have been,” she almost
sobbed, half tragically.
Durkin looked at her, a little impatient, and also a little puzzled.
“Frank, what is this man MacNutt to you?”
She was silent.
“What has he ever been to you, then?”
“He is a cruel and cunning and bitterly vindictive man,” she said,
evading the question. “And if he determined to crush a person, he would
do it, although it took him twenty years.”
“Then I certainly _will_ kill him!” declared Durkin, shaken with a
sudden unreasoning sweep of white passion.
It was not until he had half finished his luncheon that his steadiness
of nerve came back to him. Here he had been shadowing the shadower, step
by step and move by move, and all along, even in those moments when he
had taken such delight in covertly and unsuspectingly watching his
quarry, a second shadow had been secretly and cunningly stalking his own
steps!
“It will be a fight to the finish, whatever happens!” he declared
belligerently, still harping on the string of his new unhappiness.