THE PIT OF DESPAIR
Frances Durkin looked at the jeering man before her, studiously,
belligerently.
"What do you mean by saying he'll punish himself?" she demanded.
She seemed like a woman who had just awakened. Her earlier comatose
expression had altogether passed away. There was life, now, in every
line of her body.
"I mean that Durkin's got his quarter of a million in securities, all
right, all right, but, by God, I've got _you_! And I mean that he's
goin' to, that he's _got_ to, make a choice between them and you. So
we'll just wait and find out which he loves best, his beau or his
dough!" And he laughed harshly at the feeble witticism, as he added,
in his guttural undertone: "And I guess we get the worth of our money,
whichever way it goes!"
Frank's impression was that he was half drunk, that he was mumbling
vaguely of revenges which grew up and died in their utterance. Her
look of open scorn stung him into a sudden tremor of anger.
"Oh, don't think I'm spoutin' wind! If Durkin's the man you think he
is, and I hope he is, _he'll be tryin' to nose his way into this place
before midnight tonight_!"
"And he will," cried Frank, exultantly, "and with the whole precinct
police force behind him!"
"He daren't!" retorted MacNutt. "He daren't get within a hundred yards
of the Central Office, and he daren't show his nose inside a precinct
station-house! And that's not all, either. There's no captain on this
side of New York who's goin' to buck against the whole Tammany machine
an' poke into this Penfield business. If that young man with the
butterfly necktie over on Centre street thinks he can keep us movin',
he's got to do a heap less talkin' and a heap more convictin' before he
can put _our_ lights out! That air is good enough for politics--but
it's never goin' to break this here Penfield combination! Oh, no,
Jimmie Durkin knows how the land lays. He's one o' your bold and
brainy kind, who likes to shut himself up in a garret for a week, and
make maps of what he's goin' to do, an' how he's goin' to do it, and
then trip off by his lonely and do his huntin' in the dark! And he's
goin' to try to get in here, before midnight, tonight, and what's more,
_he's goin' to find it uncommonly easy to do_!"
"You mean you'll entice him and trap him here?"
"No, I won't lay a finger on him. You'll do the enticin', and he'll do
the trappin'! I won't even be round to see--till afterward!"
"What do you mean by that?"
"I mean we're holdin' open house tonight," mocked MacNutt, "and that
Durkin will maybe drop in!"
"And then what will it be?"
"Come this way, my beauty, and I'll show you. First thing, though,
just notice this fact. We're not goin' to make it too hard and
discouragin' for Durkin. This trap-door will be left unlocked. Also,
that front manhole will be left kind of temptingly open, with a few
chunks o' loose coal lyin' round it, so that even a Mercer street
roundsman couldn't help fallin' into it! Oh, yes, he'll find it easy
enough!"
Frank followed him without a word, as he made his way through the low
and narrow steel-lined tunnel leading to the vault-room.
"Now, my dear, I guess this is the only way he'll be able to get at
you, unless he comes in a flyin' machine, and the first place he'll
nose through will be this room. So, bein' old at the business, he's
sure to try a crack at our safe. At least, he'll go gropin' around for
a while. Not an invitin'-lookin' piece o' furniture, I grant you, but
that's neither here nor there. It's not the safe that'll be detainin'
Durkin, or any other housebreaker who tries to get gay on these
premises. If you look hard, maybe you'll be able to see what's a
damned sight more interestin'!"
Frank looked, but she saw nothing beyond the great vault and the
burnished copper guard-rail that surrounded it, like the fender about a
marine engine.
"You don't notice anything strikin'?" he interrogated wickedly.
She did not.
He emitted a guttural little growl of a laugh, and stepped over to a
half-hidden switchboard, high up on the wall. He threw the lever out
and down, and the kiss of the meeting metals sounded in a short and
malevolent spit of greenish light.
"Are you on?" taunted MacNutt.
Frank's slowly comprehending eyes were riveted on the burnished copper
railing, on which, only a moment before, her careless fingers had
rested. There was no sign, no alteration in the shining surface of
that polished metal. But she knew that a change, terrible and
malignant, had taken place. It was no longer a mild and innocent
guard-rail. It was now an instrument of destruction, an unbuoyed
channel of death. She stood staring at it, with fixed and horrified
eyes, until it wavered before her, a glimmering and meandering rivulet
of refracted light.
"Are you on?" reiterated the watching man.
The wave of pallor that swept over her face seemed to change her eyes
from violet to black, although, for a moment, their gaze remained as
veiled and abstracted as a sleep-walker's. Then a movement from her
companion lashed and restored her to lucidity of thought. For, from
where it leaned against the wall, MacNutt had caught up a heavy
door-sheathing of pressed steel. It was painted a Burgundy red, to
match the upholstery of the upper room where it had once done service,
and on the higher of the two panels was embossed the Penfield triple
crescent.
This great sheet of painted steel MacNutt held above his head, as a
hesitating waiter might hold a gigantic tray. Then he stepped toward
the shimmering guard-rail, and stood in front of it.
"Now, this luxurious-lookin' rear-admiral's rail-fence is at present
connected with a tapped power circuit, or a light circuit, I don't know
which. All I know is that it's carryin' about a twenty-eight-hundred
alternatin' current. And just to show that it's good and ready to eat
up anything that tries monkeyin' round it, watch this!"
He raised the Burgundy-red door-sheathing vertically above his head,
and stepping quickly back, let it descend, so that as it fell it would
strike the metal of the sunken vault-top and the copper guardrail as
well.
The very sound of that blow, as it descended, was swallowed up in the
sudden, blinding, lightning-like flash, in the hiss and roar of the
pale-green flame, as the sheet of steel, tortured into sudden
incandescence, bridged and writhed and twisted, warping and collapsing
like a leaf of writing-paper on the coals of an open fire. A sickening
smell of burning paint, mingling with the subtler gaseous odors of the
corroding metal, filled the little dungeon.
"Don't! That's enough!" gasped the woman, groping back toward the
support of the wall.
MacNutt shut off the current, and kicked the charred door-sheathing,
already fading from incandescence into ashen ruin, with his foot. The
smell of burning leather filled the room, and he laughed a little,
turning on the woman a face crowned with a look of Belial-like triumph,
with dark and sunken circles about the vindictive, deep-set eyes.
Once, in an evening paper, she had pored over the picture of an
electrocution at Sing Sing, a haunting and horrible scene, with the
dangling wires reaching down to the prisoner, strapped and bound in his
chair, the applied sponges at the base of the spine, the buckled thongs
about the helpless ankles, the grim and waiting gaol officials, the
boyish-looking reporters, with watches in their hands, the bald and
ugly chamber, and in the background the dim figure of Retributive
Justice, with uplifted arm, where an implacable finger was about to
touch the fatal button. Time and time again that vision had brought
terror to her midnight dreams, and had left her weak and panting,
catching at her startled husband with feverish and passionate hands and
holding him and drawing him close to her, as though that momentary
guardianship could protect him from some far and undefined danger.
"Oh, Mack," she burst out hysterically, over-wrought by the scene
before her, "for the love of God, don't make him die this way! Give
him a fighting chance! Give him a show! Do what you like with _me_,
but don't blot him out, like a dog, without a word of warning!"
"It's not my doin'!" broke in her tormentor.
"It's inhuman--it's fiendish!" she went on. "I can't stand the thought
of it!"
MacNutt laughed his mirthless laugh once more.
"Oh, I guess you'll stand it!"
"But I can't!" she moaned.
"Oh, yes; you'll stand it, and you'll see it, too! You'll be right
here, where you can take the whole show in, this time! It won't be a
case o' foolin' the old man, like it was last time!"
"I will be here?" she gasped.
"You'll be right on the spot--and you'll see the whole performance!"
She drew her hands down, shudderingly, over her averted face, as though
to shut something even from her imagination.
"And do you know what'll be the end of it all?" MacNutt went on, in his
frenzied mockery. "It'll all end in a little paragraph or two in the
_Morning Journal_, to the effect that some unknown safecracksman or
other accidentally came in contact with a live wire, and was shocked to
death in the very act of breaking into a pious and unoffendin'
cigar-store vault! And you'll be the only one who'll know anything
different, and I guess you won't do much squealin' about it!"
She wheeled, as though about to spring on him.
"I will! I will, although I wither between gaol walls for it--although
I die for it! I'm no weak and foolish woman! I've known life bald to
the bone; I've fought and schemed and plotted and twisted all my days
almost, and I can die doing it! And if you kill this man, if you
murder him--for it is murder!--if you bring this dog's death on him, I
will make you pay for it, in one way or another--I'll make you mourn
it, David MacNutt, as you've made me mourn the first day I ever saw
your face!"
She was in a blind and unreasoning passion of vituperative malevolence
by this time, her face drawn and withered with fear, her eyes luminous,
in the dungeon-like half-lights, with the inner fire of her hate.
"Keep cool, my dear, keep cool!" mocked MacNutt, without a trace of
trepidation at all her vague threats. "Durkin's not dead yet!"
She caught madly at the slender thread of hope which swung from his
mockery.
"No! No, he's _not_ dead yet, and he'll die hard! He's no
fool--you've found that out in the past! He will give you a fight
before he goes, in some way, for he's fought you and beaten you from
the first--and he'll beat you again--I know he'll beat you again!"
Her voice broke and merged into a paroxysm of sobbing, and MacNutt
looked at her bent and shaken figure with meditative coldness.
"He may have beaten me, once, long ago--but he'll never do it again.
He won't even go out fightin'! He'll go with his head hangin' and his
nose down, like a sneak! And you'll see him go, for you'll be tied
there, with a gag in your pretty red mouth, and you'll neither move nor
speak. And there'll be no light, unless he gets so reckless as to
strike a match. But when the light does come, my dear, it'll be a
flash o' blue flame, with a smell o' something burnin'!"
The woman covered her face with her hands, and swayed back and forth
where she stood.
Then MacNutt held back his guttural laugh, suddenly, for she had fallen
forward on her face, in a dead faint.