Frances Durkin knew the man she had to face. She knew the pagan and
primordial malevolence of the being, the almost demoniacal passions that
could sweep through him. More than once she had seen his obsessions
tremble on the verge of utter madness. She had come to know the rat-like
pertinacity, the morbid, dementating narrowness of mind, that made him
what he was. In his artful and ruthless campaign against Penfield, in
his relentless crushing of old-time confederates, in each and all of his
earlier underground adventures, she had seen the sullen, bulldog, brutal
contumacy of the man.
She expected nothing from him, neither mercy nor quarter. And yet, she
told herself, she was in no way afraid of him. As she had felt before,
time and time again, in moments of great danger, a vague sense of
duality of being took possession of her, as if mind stood detached from
body, to flutter and dodge through the darkness before her, freed from
its sheath of flesh.
She felt that she might kill him now, if the chance came, quite easily
and calmly. Yet she still diffidently half-hoped that the chance would
be denied her. It was not that she would be cowardly about it, but it
seemed to her the darker and more dubious way out of it all.
No; it was _he_ who must do the killing, she told herself, with a sudden
pang of half-delirious abnegation.
That was the utter and ultimate solution of the tangled problem; it
would be over and done with in a minute. She had lived by the sword and
she could die by the sword; from that moment, too, would be counted the
days of MacNutt’s own doom, the release and the deliverance of Durkin!
She seemed to hug this new self-illumination to her, and a smile of
scorn trembled on her lips as he stood over her, in his white and
shaking wrath.
“Oh, I know you, you she-devil!” he suddenly cried out, with an
animal-like snarl from the depths of his flabby throat. “I know what
you’re after! You think you’ll do the cheap-heroine act; you think
you’ll end it by comin’ between him and me this way! You think you’ll
save his puny piker’s heart a last pang or two, don’t you! You think
you’ll cheat me out of that, do you? You think that it’s just between
you and me now, eh, and that you can do your martyr’s act here while
he’s off somewhere else moonin’ about your eyebrows and takin’ it easy!”
And he laughed horribly, quietly. “No!” he cried, with a volley of the
foulest oaths; “no! If I’m goin’ to get the name I’m goin’ to have the
game! I mean to get my money’s worth out o’ this! I’m goin’ to kill you,
you cat, but I’m goin’ to do it in my own way!”
The room, which rang with his hoarse voice, seemed to grow small and
dark and cell-like. The great, gorilla-like figure, in the gray light,
seemed to draw back and go a long way off, and then tower over her once
more.
“You’re going to kill me?” she gasped, as though the thought of it had
come home to her for the first time.
Her more ecstatic moment of recklessness had passed strangely away, and
had left her helpless and craven.
Nothing but terror was written on her face as she cowered back from him
and sidled along the wall, with her fingers groping crazily over its
blind surface, as though some unlooked-for door of release might open to
their touch.
“You cat! You damned cat!” he cried hoarsely, as he leaped toward her
and tried to catch her by the throat. She writhed away from him and
twisted and dodged and fought until she had gained the door between the
front and the back room. Through this, cat-like, she shot sidewise, and
swung to the door with all her strength.
It had been her intention to bolt and lock it, if possible. But he had
been too quick for her. He thrust out a maddened hand to hold it back
from the jamb, and she could hear his little howl of pain as the meeting
timbers bit and locked on the fingers of the huge, fat hand.
As she stood there, panting, with her full weight against the door, she
could see the discoloring finger-tips, and the blood beginning to drip
slowly from the bruised hand. Yet she knew she could not long withstand
the shock of the weight he was flinging against her. So she looked about
the darkening room quickly, desperately. Her first thought was of the
windows. She could fling herself from one of them, and it would all be
over with her in a minute.
Then she caught sight of the nurse’s uniform of striped blue and white
linen flung across the bed, and in a sudden inspirational flash she
remembered the hypodermic. That, at least, would be painless—painless
and sure.
She slipped away from the door, and at the next lunge of his great body
MacNutt fell sprawling into the room. By the time he was on his feet she
had the little hollow-needled instrument in her hand.
But he fell on her, like a terrier on a rat, caught her up, shook and
crushed her in his great ape-like arms.
“Oh, I’ll show you!” he panted and wheezed. “I’ll show you!”
He dragged her writhing and twisting body through the door into the back
room. She fought and struggled and resisted as best she could, catching
at the door-posts and the furniture with her one free hand as she
passed. She would have used her hypodermic and ended it all then and
there, only his great grip pinned her right arm down to her side, and
the needle lay useless between her fingers.
The room was almost in darkness by this time, and a chair was knocked
over in their struggles. But still MacNutt bore her, fighting and
panting, toward the little table between the two windows, where the
telephone transmitter stood.
He pinned and held her down on the edge of the table with his knees and
his bleeding right hand, while with his left hand he caught up the
receiver of the telephone.
“Central, give me the Chelsea, quick—the Chelsea, the Chelsea!”
It was then and then only that the exhausted woman clearly understood
what he meant to do. She started up, with a great cry of horror in her
throat; but he muffled it with his shaking hand, and, biting out an
oath, squeezed the very breath out of her body.
“I want to speak to Durkin,” panted MacNutt into the transmitter, a
moment later. “Durkin, James Durkin—a man with his arm in a sling. He
just took rooms with you today. Yes, Durkin.”
There was another long wait, through which Frances lay there, neither
struggling nor moving, saving her strength for one last effort.
“Yes, yes; Duggan; I guess that’s it!” MacNutt was saying over the wire
to the switchboard operator at the hotel. “Yes, Duggan, with a lame
arm!”
Then he let the receiver swing at the end of its cord and with his freed
hand drew his revolver from his pocket.
The gasping woman felt the crushing pressure released for a moment, and
fought to free her right hand. It came away from his hold with a jerk,
and as her finger slipped into the little metal piston-ring she flung
the freed arm up about his shoulder and clung to him. For a sudden last
thought had come to her, a rotten thread of hope, on which swayed and
hung her last chance of life.
It was through the coat and clothing of the struggling MacNutt that the
little needle was forced, through the skin, and deep into the flesh of
the great, beefy shoulder. She held it there until the barrel was empty,
then it fell on the floor.
“You’d try to stab me, would you!” he cried, madly, uncomprehendingly,
as he struggled in vain to throttle the writhing body, and then raised
his revolver, to beat her on the head. The signal-bell rang sharply, and
he caught up the receiver instead.
“Now!” he gloated insanely, deep in his wheezing throat. “Now! Is that
Durkin speaking? Is that Durkin? Oh, it is! Well, this is MacNutt—I say
your old friend MacNutt!” and he laughed horribly, dementedly.
“You’ve done a good deal of business over the wires, Durkin, in your
day, haven’t you? Well, you listen now, and you’ll hear something doin’!
I say listen now, and you’ll hear something doin’!”
“Jim!” screamed the woman, pinned down on the edge of the table. “Jim!”
she screamed insanely. “_Oh, Jim, save me!_”
She could hear the sharp phonographic burr of her husband’s voice
through the receiver.
“Oh, Jim, he’s killing me!” she wailed.
For MacNutt had taken up the revolver in his trembling left hand and was
forcing the head with all its wealth of tumbled hair closer and closer
up before the transmitter.
It had been too late! She closed her eyes, and in one vivid,
kaleidoscopic picture all her discordant and huddled life stood out
before her.
She felt a momentary shiver speed through the body that pinned her so
close to it, as she waited, and it seemed to her that the gripping knees
relaxed a little. He was speaking now, but brokenly and mumblingly.
“Listen, you welcher, while I—”
She felt the little steel barrel waver and then muzzle down through her
hair until it pressed on her skull. At the touch of it she straightened
her limp body, galvanically, desperately. He staggered back under the
sudden weight.
Then she caught his hand in hers, and with all her strength twisted the
menacing barrel upward. The finger trembling on the trigger suddenly
compressed as she did so. The bullet plowed into the ceiling and brought
down a shower of loosened plaster.
Then he fell, prone on his face, and she stood swaying drunkenly back
and forth, watching him through the drifting smoke. Twice he tried to
raise himself on his hands, and twice he fell back moaning, flat on his
face.
“It’s a lie, Jim, it’s a lie!” she exulted insanely, turning and
springing to the transmitter, and catching up the still swaying
receiver. “Do you hear me, Jim? It’s a lie—I’m here, waiting for you!
_Jim, can’t you hear?_”
But Durkin had fainted away at the other end of the wire, and no
response came to her cries.
She flung herself down upon the collapsed MacNutt, and tore open his
coat and vest. As she did so the polished pig-skin wallet fell out on
the floor.
His heart was still beating, but it would be murder, she felt, to leave
him there without attention. His life was his own. She wanted and would
take only what the written law would allow. She wanted only her own.
She came to a sudden pause, as she looked from the paper wealth between
her fingers to the huge and huddled figure beside her. Some inner and
sentinel voice, from the calmer depths of her nature, was demanding of
her how much of what had thus come into her hand _was_ her own? After
all, how much of that terrible and tainted wealth could truly be called
their own?—was the untimely question this better part of her was crying
out.
She knew that in the end most usurious toll would be exacted for what
she took. Her life had taught her that no lasting foundation of good, no
enduring walls of aspiration, could be built on the engulfing sloughs of
evil. And as she looked at her prostrate enemy once more, and breathed
out a fervent and grateful: “Oh, God, I thank Thee for this
deliverance!” a sudden chastening and abnegative passion prompted her to
thrust back every dollar she had drawn from that capacious wallet.
Then she thought of the future, of the exigent needs of life, of the
necessities of her immediate flight; and her heart sank within her. To
begin life again with a clean slate—that had been her constant wish.
Yet much as she hungered to do so, she dare not leave it all. As with
many another aspiring soul in quieter walks of life, she found herself
grimly but sorrowfully compelled to leave the pure idea sacrificed on
the altar of compromise. All life, she told herself, was made up of
concessions. She could only choose the lesser evil, and through it still
strive to grope a little onward and upward.
So she slowly detached one Treasury note—it was for one thousand
dollars—from the bulky roll, and the rest she restored to its wallet.
It was a contribution to conscience. As she replaced that wallet in the
inner pocket of the prostrate man, her feelings were akin to those of
some primordial worshipper before his primordial Baal or his exacting
Juggernaut. She felt that with that sacrifice she was appeasing her
gods. She consoled herself with the thought that the Master of Destiny
would know and understand—that she had given up the great thing that
she might not sorrow in the little. As yet, He would not expect too much
of her! That minute fraction of what she might have taken, she argued
with herself, appeasingly,—surely that little moiety of what they had
fought and worked for might be theirs.
* * * * *
It was fifteen minutes later that a frightened and pale-faced woman left
word at the corner drugstore that an old gentleman was ill of morphine
poisoning, and asked if the ambulance might be sent for. All that the
clerk could remember, when he was later questioned by the somewhat
bewildered police, was that she had seemed weak and sick, and had asked
for some aromatic spirits of ammonia, and that the side of her face was
swollen and bruised where she lifted her veil. He was of the opinion,
too, that she had been under the drug herself, or had been drinking
heavily, for she walked unsteadily, and he had had to call a taxi for
her and help her into it. What made him believe this, on second
thoughts, was the fact that she had flung herself back in her seat and
said, “Thank God, oh, thank God!” half a dozen times to herself.