Trotter kept guarded watch on "J. Heeney's" plumbing
establishment. He watched it like a hungry cat watching a rat
hole. And it was three hours later that he had the satisfaction
of seeing the plumber ascend to the street and walk hurriedly
westward. Trotter could see that he carried a kit of tools under
his arm. But to follow him in open daylight was too great a risk.
Instead of that, he went down the narrow steps, and through the
dusty glass examined the doorlock.
Fifteen minutes later he went down another flight of basement
steps, this time to the cellar of a Sixth Avenue locksmith.
"I've got a closet door locked shut on me," he explained. "And I
want a key to get it open."
The locksmith looked him up and dow.n He seemed respectable
enough, this mild-eyed youth with the locked closet.
But the locksmith knew the tricks of his trade.
"Then I'll take a bunch of `blanks' over with me and open her up
for you."
"I'd rather get her open by myself."
"It will cost you a dollar," was the locksmith's ultimatum.
"It's worth a dollar," agreed Trotter. "But how'll we do it?"
"I'll dip a skeleton blank in hot wax and lampblack. Then you put
the key in the lock and turn it as far as you can. That'll show
the ward marks, where they bite the wax. Then bring me the key
and I'll cut it. Maybe it'll take two cuttings. That'll be two
dollars!"
Trotter paid a quarter deposit and took the key, made a
circuitous way to the plumber's cellar, descended the steps,
knocked, got no answer, and quietly inserted the key in the lock,
turning it as far as it would go.
Instead of going back to the locksmith, he bought a ten-cent
file, and with his own hand cut away the blank according to the
ward marks. Once more he made his way to the door of the empty
shop and fitted his key. It turned part way round in the lock,
but did not throw back the bar. He recoated the key flange with
the black wax by holding it to a lighted match and letting it
cool again.
He at once saw where his cutting had been imperfect. A few
strokes of his file remedied this. He once more fitted the key to
the lock, and found that he was free to pass in and out of the
door.
Yet he deferred forcing an entrance, at the moment, hungrily as
he studied the inner partition door through the iron-grated
glass. He knew what such a movement meant. He could not count on
Heeney's continued absence. Above all, at this, the beginning of
things, he wanted to avoid any untimely mis-step. So he made his
way to the street, shuttling cautiously back and forth across the
avenue, aimless of demeanor, diffident of step, yet ever and
always on the lookout. From half a block away he saw Heeney
return to his cellar. From an even remoter stand, two hours
later, he perceived the plumber emerge, like a rabbit out of its
warren. He also perceived that the rapidly disappearing man
carried a large paper parcel under his arm.
As before, this parcel was carried for three blocks and then
adroitly deposited on the top of an ash barrel.
Trotter, once Heeney had skulked about the next corner, quietly
crossed the street and sauntered past the parcel-crowned barrel,
with his open pocketknife in his hand. One sweep of the knife
blade slit the paper wrapper, and without so much as stopping on
his way Trotter was able to catch up a handful of the litter it
held. This litter, as before, was made up of ground mortar and
plaster and stone chips. But this time, amid the lime and dust,
he could detect the glitter of minute particles of steel.
He tested the larger fragments of these with his knife point.
They were very hard, harder even than his tempered blade steel,
diamond-like in their durity. He concluded, as he sat on the edge
of his bed that night, rubbing them between his fingers, that
they could be nothing but particles of keenly-tempered chromium
steel. And chromium steel, he knew, was not used in gas pipes. It
was foolish to think of it as a subject for lathe work. It was
equally absurd to accept it as an everyday element in any
plumber's everyday work. Trotter was not ignorant of the fact
that steel of this character was used almost exclusively in the
construction of high grade safes and bank vaults.
He stood up, suddenly, and crossed the room to his little
bookshelf. From this shelf he took down a much-thumbed "World
Almanac," a paper-bound volume which for months past had been
serving as his only guide to New York. He turned to the pages
headed "Banks in Manhattan and Bronx." It took but a minute's
search to secure the names of the president and cashier of the
First National Trust Company. But when he further read that its
capital was three million five hundred thousand, and that its
total resources amounted to forty-seven million three hundred
thousand dollars, his breath came in shorter gasps of excitement.
He began to realize the colossal wealth which lay guarded behind
the great porphyritic granite pillars. He also began to realize
some new and as yet undefined responsibility. The mere thought of
the magnitude of the movement in which he was being made a
deliberate and yet disinterested factor brought him once more to
his feet, pacing his little den of a room with thoughtful and
preoccupied steps.
V
Early the next morning Trotter was back at the bank corner, like
a guard at his sentry-box. He kept watch there, with that
pertinacious alertness peculiar to the idler, until he had the
satisfaction of witnessing Heeney's early departure from the
cellar, with a tool kit under his arm.
Five minutes later Trotter was descending the stairs that led to
the plumber's shop. Once there, he took out his key, fitted it to
the lock, opened the door, stepped quietly inside, and locked the
outer door after him. Before venturing to open the inner door he
pressed an ear flat against the wooden partition and stood there
listening. The silence was unbroken.
He stepped to the side of the shop and caught up a plumber's
thick-bodied tallow candle. Then he softly opened the second
door, stepped inside, and as softly closed the door after him.
He found himself in perfect darkness. But he stood there,
waiting, before venturing to move forward, before daring to
strike a light. He knew, as he peered about the blackness that
engulfed him, that he was now facing more than an indeterminate
responsibility. He was confronting actual and immediate danger.
Even as he stood there, sniffing at the air, so heavy with its
smell of damp lime and its undecipherable underground gases, a
sudden fuller consciousness of undefined and yet colossal peril
sent a telegraphing tingle of nerves up and down his body.
The only thing that broke the silence was the faint sound of
footsteps on the laundry floor above him, together with the
steady thump of irons on the ironing table. There was something
fortifying, something consoling, in those neighborly and
sedentary little noises.
Trotter struck a match and lighted his candle. He waited without
moving for the flame to grow. Then he thrust the candle up before
him. As he did so, his hand came in contact with the rough
surface of what at first he took to be a stone wall. But as he
looked closer he saw that it was not masonry. It was nothing more
nor less than a carefully piled mass of stone and brick. Each
fragment had been carefully placed on top of its fellow, each
interstice had been carefully filled with rubble.
The pile extended from floor to ceiling. It filled the entire
cellar. It left only space enough for a man to pass inward from
the opened door. It was nothing more than the dump of a mine, the
rock and brick from a tunnel, not flung loosely about, but
scrupulously stowed away.
Holding the candle in front of him, Trotter bent low and groped
his way in through the narrow passage. Everything was as orderly
and hidden as the approach to a wild animal's lair. Everything
was eloquent of a keen secretiveness. No betraying litter met his
eye. Each move had been calmly and cautiously made. Each step of
a complicated campaign had been quietly engineered. Trotter could
even decipher a series of electric wires festooned from the
little tunnel's top. He could see where the passage had gone
around obstacles, where it had curled about a dishearteningly
heavy buttress base, where it had dipped lower to underrun a
cement vault bed, where it had sheered off from the tin-foiled
surface of a "closed-curcuit" protective system, and where it had
dipped and twisted about to advance squarely into a second blind
wall at right angles to the first.
A portion of this wall had been torn away. With equal care an
inner coating of cement had been chiseled off, exposing to view
an unbroken dark surface.
As Trotter held the candle closer, he could see this dark surface
marked off with chalk lines, sometimes with crosses, sometimes
with figures he could not decipher. On it, too, he could see a
solitary depression, as round and bright as a silver coin, as
though a diamond drill had been testing the barrier.
He knew, even before he touched the chill surface with his hand,
that it was a wall of solid steel, that it was the steel of the
bank vault itself, the one deep-hidden and masonry-embedded area
which stood without its ever-vigilant closed-circuit sentry. And
he knew that Heeney had grubbed and eaten and burrowed his way,
like a woodchuck, to the very heart of the First National Trust's
wealth.
It was only then that the stupendousness of the whole thing came
home to Trotter. It was only then that he realized the almost
superhuman cunning and pertinacity in this guileless-eyed cellar
plotter called Heeney. He could see the hours of patient labor it
had involved, the days and days of mole-like tunneling, the weeks
and weeks of gnome-like burrowing and carrying and twisting and
loosening and piling, the months of ant-like industry which one
blow of the Law's heel would make as nothing.
It rather bewildered Trotter. It filled him with an
ever-increasing passion to get away from the place, to escape
while he still had a chance. It turned the gaseous underground
tunnel into a stifling pit, making his breath come in short and
wheezing gasps. It brought a tiny-beaded sweat out on his chilled
body.
Then he stopped breathing altogether. He wheeled about and
suddenly brought his thumb and forefinger together on the candle
flame, pinching it out as one might pinch the life out of a moth.
For on his straining ears fell the sound of a door slammed shut.
There was no mistake, no illusion about it. Some one had entered
the shop. Then came the sound of a second door. This time it was
being opened. And it was the door leading into the tunnel.
Trotter could see the momentary efflorescence of pale light at
the bend in the passage before him. And he realized that he was
unarmed. He had not even a crowbar, not even a chisel or wrench,
with which to defend himself. He knew he stood there trapped and
helpless.
He shrank back, instinctively, without being conscious of the
movement. He heard the sound of steps, shuffling and short. Then
came an audible grunt, a grunt of relief. This was followed by
the thump of a heavy weight dropped to the brick floor. Then came
the sound of steps again, still shuffling and short.
Trotter leaned forward, listening, waiting, with every nerve
strained. He concentrated every sense on the blur of light along
the tunnel wall before him.
As he peered forward, scarcely daring to breathe, he was
conscious of the fact that the light had suddenly withered. It
vanished from the refracting tunnel sides, as though wiped away
by an obliterating black sponge. Even before the truth of the
thing had come home to him, he heard the sound of a quietly
closed door.
Heeney had gone. He had merely crept into his tunnel mouth,
dropped some tools, and then quietly crept out again.
It was not until he heard the slam of the outer door, a moment or
two later, that Trotter felt sure of his deliverance. It was not
until he knew his enemy was up the steps that he let his aching
lungs gulp in the fetid tunnel air.
Then he crept forward cautiously, obsessed by one impulse, the
impulse of escape, the passion to reach the open, to find air and
light and space once more about him. He did nothing more than
feel hurriedly over the bundle that lay in his path. It seemed an
instrument of steel tied up in a cloth. He could feel strand
after strand of wires, ductile and cloth-covered wires. He could
also decipher a disk through which ran a piece of metal, like a
blade through a sword guard. He felt sure it was an electrode of
some sort, a tool to convert stolen electricity into a weapon of
offense and assault. But he neither waited to strike a light nor
stooped to puzzle over the bundle.
He paused for a minute to listen at the closed partition door.
The only sound that came to his ears was the shuffle of feet and
the thump from the ironing board above him. Yet when he opened
this partition door he did so noiselessly, cautiously, slowly,
inch by inch. Still screened in shadow, he studied the shop, the
steps, the wire-blurred window, the street above him. Then he
took a deep breath, crossed to the shop door, unlocked it,
stepped outside, relocked it after him, and, pocketing the key,
climbed the steps to the sidewalk.
His face, as he came out to the light, was almost colorless. His
eyes were wide and staring with wonder. He kept telling himself
that he must walk slowly, that he must in no way betray himself,
that he must appear indifferent and offhand and inconspicuous to
every one he chanced to pass. He felt the necessity of guarding
himself, for he was now a person of importance. He was an
emissary of destiny, an agent entrusted with a vast issue.
The streets through which he passed no longer frowned down at him
from their inhospitable skylines. He was no longer an unattached
and meaningless unit in the life that throbbed and roared all
about him. He meant something to it. He was part of it. He was
its guardian. And it would acknowledge him, in the end, or he
would know the reason why.