THE ENTERING WEDGE
It was at least four o'clock in the afternoon--as the janitor of the
building later reported to the police--when a Postal-Union lineman,
carrying a well-worn case of tools, made his way up through the halls
and stairways of one of those many Italian apartment houses just south
of Washington Square and west of Broadway.
This lineman worked on the roof, apparently, for some twenty minutes.
Then he came down again, chatted for a while with the janitor in the
basement, and giving him a cigar, borrowed an eight-foot step-ladder,
for the purpose of scaling some twelve feet of brick wall, where the
adjoining office building towered its additional story above the
apartment-house roof.
If the janitor had been less averse to mounting his five flights of
stairway, or less indifferent as to the nature of the work which took
the busy telegraph official up to his roof, he might, that afternoon,
have witnessed both a delicate and an interesting electrical operation.
For once up on the second roof, and sure that he was under no immediate
observation, the lineman in question carefully unpacked his bag of
tools. His first efforts were directed toward the steel transom which
covered the trapdoor opening out on the roof. This, he discovered with
a grunt of disappointment, resisted even his short, curved steel lever,
pointed at one end, like a gigantic tack-drawer. Restoring this lever
to the bottom of his leather tool-bag, he made his way to the southeast
corner of the building, where a tangle of insulated wires, issuing from
the roof beneath his feet, merged into one compact cable, which, in
turn, entered and was protected by a heavy lead pipe, leading,
obviously, to the street below, and thence to the cable galleries of
Broadway itself.
It took him but a minute or two to cut away a section of this
protecting pipe. In doing so, he exposed to view the many wires making
up an astonishingly substantial cable, for so meager an office
building. He then turned back to his tool-case and lifted therefrom,
first a Bunnell sounder, and then a Wheatstone bridge, of the
post-office pattern, a coil of KK wire, a pair of lineman's pliers, and
a handful or two of other tools. Still remaining in the bottom of his
bag might have been found two small rubber bags filled with
nitroglycerine, a cake of yellow soap, a brace and bit, a half-dozen
diamond-pointed drills, a box of timers, and a coil fuse, three
tempered-steel chisels, a tiny sperm-oil lantern and the steel "jimmy"
which had already been tested against the obdurate transom.
Then, skilfully relaxing the metallic cable strands, he as carefully
graduated his current and attached his sounder, first to one wire and
then to another. Each time that the little Bunnell sounder was
galvanized into articulate life he bent his ear and listened to the
busy cluttering of the dots and dashes, as the reports of races, as the
weights and names of jockeys, and lists of entries and statements of
odds and conditions went speeding into the busy keys of the big
poolroom below, where men and women waited with white and straining
faces, and sorrowed and rejoiced as the ever-fluctuant goddess of
chance brought them ill luck or success.
But Durkin paid little attention to these flying messages winging
cityward from race-tracks so many miles away. What he was in search of
was the private wire leading from Penfield's own office, whereon
instructions and information were secretly hurried about the city to
his dozen and one fellow-operators. It was from this wire that Durkin
hoped, without "bleeding" the circuit, to catch some thread of fact
which might make the task before him more lucid and direct.
He worked for an hour, connecting and disconnecting, testing and
listening and testing still again, before the right wire fell under his
thumb. Then he listened intently, with a little start, for he knew he
was reading an operator whose bluff, heavy, staccato "send" was as
familiar to his long-practiced ear as a well-known face would be to his
watching eyes.
It was MacNutt himself who was "sending." His first intercepted
message was an order, to some confederate unknown, to have a carriage
call for him at eight. That, Durkin told himself, was worth knowing.
His second despatch was a warning to a certain "Al" Mackenzie not to
fail to meet Penfield in Albany, Sunday, at midnight. The third
message was brief, and seemed to be an answer to a question which had
escaped the interloper.
"Yes, got her here, and here she stays. Things will happen tonight."
"Ah!" ejaculated Durkin, as he wiped his moist forehead, while the
running dots and dashes resolved themselves into the two intelligible
sentences.
Then he looked about him, at the leaden sky, at the roofs and walls and
windows of the crowded and careless city, as a _sabreur_ about to enter
the arena might look about him on life for perhaps the last time.
"Yes," he said, with a meditative stare at the transom before him,
"things _will_ happen tonight."